The Netherlands, and Belgium

Hello all people!

Ok everyone, pity me, because I am once again stuck using a french keyboard. My brain now explodes whenever I see one of these. So bear with me, and forgive typos and bad punctuation.

Anyways, when I last left you; we were in Delft right? Staying in an apartment, very generously lent to us by Jess`s family. Well, from there we went on day trips to Amsterdam, and The Hague

Amsterdam was pretty, we went on a river cruise, walked through the red light district, the usual. Sorry boys, no pictures from the red light district, the girls apparently beat you down with bats if you try. I did however, get this nice shot of a canal!

One thing about the Netherlands people, there are kind of a lot of bikes around. Like every train station has a huge carpark full of them. The shot below is a pretty typical site outside any large train station, anywhere in the country we went.






And then onto The Hague. This is the home of the international court, so we thought we´d best try and get a photo of that one. Unfortunately you can´t get very close, but with my superior artistic abilities I snapped this very pretty shot, such that you cant see the giant fence in the way.















Also in the Hague is Madurodam, the Netherlands biggest tiny town, if that makes sense. Its a minature town, full of replicas of buildings from all over the Netherlands. As the photo demonstrates, my inner child was excited.






After a few days in Delft, we headed off to stay with Marita for one night, whilst she showed us the night life of Utrecht, a larger university town. We had a great night, john can attest to that. We were with a very dodgy bunch of people, as you can see by the photo, so that helps.














After Netherlands, we were into Belgium. First stop, Brussels. In quick summary, yes we had Belgian Waffles, yes we had Belgian Beer, no we didnt have Brussel Sprouts. Brussels had this pretty cool central square, good for eating chocolate sauce-covered waffles on.







They also had a mini town, but this one was like the European Union Sampler of mini towns. Anyways, Im not putting a picture up of it. Out the front though is this spiffy building, called atomica, or something vaguely similar to that.
I liked it, and yes you can go up it, but we didn´t because it was expensive.

















Ok, thats the end of the photos, so heres the summary of what else happened:
we took a day trip to Brugges, its a pretty little world heritage listed town, but not much to do in there.
we then went to antwerp, where we are now. The diamond capital of the world, predictably diamond stores are everywhere. Its a little crazy, they have a diamond centre, which is a shopping centre, full of nothing but jewellery stores. About 90% of these stores sell nothing but diamonds, and diamond jewellery. Go outside this centre, and theres more diamond stores lining the streets.

Tomorrow we are off to London, so no more crappy keyboards! YAY!

Take care people,
Bob