Belgium rocks!

Hey everyone!

When I last wrote I had just come back to England from my trip to Munich via Amsterdam and Paris. Since then I have been back to work in London, making money for further travelling adventures. It has been very hot in Europe generally, and unusually warm in England in particular. The authorities in London have issued a level 3 heat warning. To put this into perspective, level 4 would be a "national emergency"!

On the last weekend of June/1st weekend of July I headed on a group tour (consisting the usual combination of a few North Americans and the rest being Aussies and South Africans) to Belgium. The purpose of this tour was to go to Belgium's Rock Werchter music festival. We arrived in the small Belgian city of Leuven mid Friday afternoon, checked into the Novotel across the road from the Stella Artois brewery, and enjoyed the beautiful town square bars in the sunshine, sipping on Stella and Kriek (cherry beer) for hours on end.

On Saturday we went to the festival. The day kicked off with Australia's own Wolfmother. It was amazing seeing a band that I saw as a mere supporting act at a pub gig in Melbourne only a couple of years ago, now rocking out the main stage at a huge European festival. They were cheered on by plenty of Australians in the crowd, waving around Aussie flags and blow up kangaroos in the mosh pit.

The rest of the day was spent in the heat (about 30C in the shade, had there actually been any shade to hide in) watching bands including Raconteurs, Arctic Monkeys, Placebo, Franz Ferdinand and Kaiser Chiefs [awesome band, huge here in the UK]; and enjoying some more Stellas and Krieks. It was a great day, the Europeans really do know how to put on good summer rock fests!

On Sunday we checked out of our hotel in Leuven and drove to the beautiful city of Bruges (Brugge). I had heard from one or two people that Belgium wasn't that interesting, and immediately after entering Bruges this reputation was quickly dispelled. The city is built around numerous canals and criss-crossed by clean, narrow, cobble-stone streets, surrounded by fantastic looking old buildings in great condition. The city has a really medieval feel to it, which is accentuated by minimal car traffic and frequent horse drawn carriages clopping through the alleyways. I visited quaint Belgian chocolatiers, stocking up on boutique chocolates (the chocolate, especially the dark variety, smelled so good in the shops that there was no resistance possible) and then a beer shop to stock up on a variety of fruity beers. We had lunch in the picturesque main square and then rested, away from the heat, under the shade of a green leafy tree before getting back on the coach and driving all the way back to London (...thanks to the aid of a Sea France channel crossing to help us get over those hard to drive bits).

The next week was spent battling with the daily routine of getting into an incredibly hot stuffy tube trains to get to work and back, breaking that routine here and there for some obligatory beer or cider stops after work.

On Saturday morning I headed to Victoria coach station to meet up with some friends (some Hungarian girls I met on my Easter trip to Scotland and their friends) and endure a long hot bus-ride to Bournemouth, on England's South Coast. Bournemouth actually reminded me a bit of the Victorian coast, with a general look and feel of Cowes, Sorrento or St Kilda in Melbourne. The beach was a great sandy beach, even by Aussie standards, although a bit on the dirty side. That evening we had a BBQ on the beach and hit the town for a bit of clubbing. We stayed in a traditional English hotel which came with a traditional English breakfast (with fried bread [yuck] and all). After the rain stopped on Sunday we went to the beach and sunbathed in the sunshine. I wasn't brave enough to get into the water though, as it was really cold!

It was so nice on the beach that I forfeited my pre-paid bus ride back to stay on the beach a bit longer, and scabbed a lift back to London with an Englishman and a Kiwi from the group. This turned out to be great, because we stopped off on the way in New Forest, which is literally the nicest part of England I have seen to date! It is a fantastic, huge national park spanning many, many miles with lush green forests and meadows. It was a beautiful warm evening, so we took a bush walk. Amazingly, the forest is full of free roaming horses and ponies, of which we came across many groups. They were really tame and let us come right up to them and pat them. It was awesome being able to come up to seemingly wild animals in the forest, which were in fact friendly, inquisitive animals. We drove off back to London as the sun set over the park, arriving home just in time to go to bed and rest up for another week of work in the big city.

On the topic of work, I have been offered a 6 month contract to continue work as a paralegal at CMS Cameron McKenna so I think I'll see that out and come home in January. I have a flight booked that will get me home just in time for Australia day. Bring on the BBQs! For those of you working at law firms back home, feel free to start putting in a good word for me.

Unfortunately the work contract also means I will not have the opportunity to do quite as much travelling around Europe as I have been doing, so I'm going to cut down the group emails from the regular intervals I've been sending them at just to when something exciting happens (like the week or two I'm planning on spending in Croatia in September). This way I won't annoy you with "I went to the office again today" style emails. Of course I would still love to hear from you all on a regular basis, so feel free to drop me a line whenever and I'll let you know what I've been up to!

Hope to hear from you soon!

Dan