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Diana’s been here since the 27th of july, and we’ve been busy bees sofar ! Ofcourse the necessary amount of relaxing and just enjoying the time, too :)

We’ve replaced one of the closets with a new Ikea Billy closet, and are still looking to find a magnetic whiteboard that has been very elusive at best ;) every time the website says they have it, we go and it’s no longer there. Pout!

We also went to play catch-up with our movies: we’ve seen Pirates Of The Carribean: At World’s End (good), Harry Potter and The Order of the Phoenix (good), Ratatouille (hilarious), Shrek the Third (could have skipped it), The Simpsons Movie (good) and Transformers (good but definitely not for kids).
(thank you Kinepolis and your cheap 100-days card!)

Diana’s cooked loads of lovely meals and also vegan cupcakes (weird ones (pic, pic) but oh so gooooooood)

We also bought three lovely cacti, which are currently flowering!

We’ve also made a short trip to Germany, to visit friends.

Diana had to go back to Spain, unfortunately, though …

It seems that visiting Germany is becoming a habit of ours during summer ;) This time we went to visit Laura, Christian and Lumi (and Fina, the cat) in Germany, last (long) weekend.

Diana and I left for Germany friday 17th, and after a rather boring 2.5 we ended up in Ratingen. We had a room booked in the Relexa hotel Ratingen City, a nice non-expensive hotel.

(I just want to add here that I absolutely hate their parking entry/exit machines. I got a static zap from them nearly every time! *growl*)

After checkin, we went our way to Frimmersdorf, in Grevenbroich, to visit our friends. It’s a lovely town, very very green. Lumi’s a very adorable little baby, and the cat is also a fun creature :p Always hunting for flies, to the dismay of Laura and Christian ;)
We talked a lot, had some takeaway pizza and salad, and left around midnightish.

Next day we met up with Gundel, a knitty-friend of Diana, in Düsseldorf. We went to a cute yarnshop (called Woll - Duo, in Schamhorstraße 16), where Diana bought some lovely yarn: a skein of Opal Neon, two skeins of OnLine Supersock Silk, and a ball of mystery yarn.
After that we went for a walk through the city itself, grabbed a quick lunch there (great japanese stall in the basement of a mall), headed back to the hotel, and afterwards went with our friends to the Lantern Procession in Wevelingenhoven. Very cute, and very strange ;)

On sunday we first (ab)used the wellnesscentre in the hotel (which they were so nice as to open especially for us), and in the afternoon we went to the AquaZoo in Düsseldorf. Straaaange fish. Straaaaaaaaanger bugs. But educational, and fun too ;)
There’s a lovely park around the aquazoo too, in which we walked for quite a while before heading over to our friends’ place, and having some chinese takeaway for dinner.

Monday we had to leave again for Belgium, but we did a short sidestop in Die Wollfabrik, where Diana hoarded fiber for spinning and pretty rosewood sock knitting needles.

The pics of the trip can be found here.

After those lovely forty five days with Jan, I’m back home to take exams, do paperwork, and go back to uni for yet another year ™. What have we done this summer, you ask? Well, 45 days seems long, but it definitively wasn’t long enough for us.

We had joined a group trip to Scotland, but for several reasons, it didn’t work out. We traveled for about 30 hours over two days, slept some three hours during three days, and ended crashing back home. That was my first week there, and instead we just had a quiet time at home, since Jan had the days off anyway. We don’t think we’ll be doing any tour-like trip any more. We agreed that our next trip to Scotland will include nice hotels picked up by ours trully, a rented (stick, continental) car, a good guide and some maps, for the two of us to enjoy!

We fancied a boat trip, and so we went to Overmere Donk, rented a slow boat, and had fun around. We also walked in the park by the lake, so pretty. Pitty the triathlon was so noisy and taking most of the routes! I think we should go sometime again, hopefuly when there is no sports competition dirtying and trashing the park and taking half of the road.

We went to a friend’s wedding, that consisted of a civil ceremony with plenty of people I didn’t know and didn’t know me, and where I understood nothing, and a medieval party, which we had to skip (will link to pics whenever, if ever, they are up).

We went to Germany: Dusserldorf (and pics en route), where we met up with Susann and her husband, then from there to Greifswald (with more pics of the drive), where we met up with Laura, had lots of fun, went bowling and playing darts, and discovered the Spetzi (half cola, half orange fanta), and then we drove to Münster. And finally drove back home.

And we also went to Brugge, to buy chocolate at our favourite shop, The Chocolate Line, which you will know already if you read this blog often. I can’t praise this shop enough. All the chocolate is hand made in situ, and you can see the Meester Chocolatier at work through the window at the back of the shop. And visited the Sand Sculptures Exhibition. Lots of work involved in them, and all will be destroyed in a couple of weeks.

Other things accomplished during the summer: knitting (not much), spinning (two whole bobbins, still to be plied, next time I go to Belgium) - no pics of either, stash enhancement (four skeins, enough for a pair of socks and a skinny scarf, pics coming, sometime), cooking a few recipes from our database, visiting family, going out, going five(!) times to the movies (Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, Over the Hedge, Miami Vice, She’s the Man & Monster House), picking up and installing Jan’s new desktop (fancy machine, it is), general happy living together, adopting our two little critters, going out with a bunch of friends for bowling and dinner, discovering a couple new restaurants (‘t Gents Fonduehuisje in Ghent, and Pizza Milano in Aalst), happy couple living decorating furthermore our livingroom and much more. Oh yes, studying too.

And lets not forget, we went together with Jan’s mum to see Le Cirque du Soleil, in Brussels, near Tour & Taxis. We saw the Alegrí­a show. It was an amazing mix of handbalanzing, power track, manipulation, contortion, fire dance, aerial high bar, clowns, syncronized trapeze, flying man, russian bars, live music and singing. Well worth the price! We had a lovely evening.

Leaving was hard, again, very hard. And I so want to go back very soon. Plans right now are me spending my “winter break” in early December and New Years in Belgium. Meanwhile, Jan will be coming over some time in October and November!

For those of you who care about my flight back, it was okay, if it weren’t for the more than three hours of a detour. The story is, we left Brussels airport on time without problems, the flight was good and we got to Madrid at the scheduled time, but there was a huge storm with lighting that kept more than fifteen planes waiting to land. That meant we had to wait over fourty minutes to land, but we didn’t have enough fuel and detoured to Valencia to fuel there. Once the storm was over, all the detoured planes wanted to leave for Madrid at once, and we got a slot for 10pm (that’s 2.5 hours after we were supposed to land in Madrid). We finally made it to our destination at nearly 11pm, then wait for my suitcase, which luckily was one of the firsts to get out, and get a cab to go home. I got home at midnight, a whooping three hours and a half after I thought I’d be! Luckily for me, I bought the last sandwich on board, and that was all my dinner.

So I went to Belgium :-) And it was really fun. The flight to Brussels was a little pain in the ass. Since 2nd and 3rd of may were holidays in Madrid, seems all the people here wanted to fly outta here. So the airport was full and we had some delays first thanks to some people that didn’t pay attention to the arriving two hours prior to departure time, and they got stuck in the police check and then didn’t get on time to the gate. And then the control changed our take off lane, so we had to wait more, since they put us at the end of the queue. After the flight (I wanna kill kids, honest… well and parents that don’t teach them how to behave). That night we went to have dinner to a chinese restaurant. Very good food. But we came across some people we weren’t expecting to find there (or anywhere). But it was okay :-)

Saturday we woke up early-ish cause we were going to The Efteling! We spent the whole day there :-) taking a ride in (almost) every attraction: rollercoasters and bobsleight and even the boats. Really really fun :-) Then we headed to our hotel in Den Bosch (I’ll skip thewhole name of the town, too complicated for this little girl), Moevenpick Den Bosch. We had dinner in a very good vegetarian restaurant, called Samtosa. We had a mjummy crep with courgette and mushroom and cinammon oil! And then a thai fondue (cheese fondue with spices and veggies and bread to dip in), and tiramisu and tea. All verry good. And a looooong sleep night.

We actually didn’t hear the room service knocking on the door with our breakfast ready! So after a very hearty breakfast, we headed back home. It was too early, so we stopped by a kind of zoo, called Plankendael where we spend the whole afternoon. Luckily i had taken along my sunscreen, cause it was HOT and SUNNY! The poor animals were all taking a nap and ignoring most of the people. Very peaceful. The evening at home was nice. Played some with the computer and had icecream! They still have a guy that sells icecream cones door-to-door *sob* I wanna… We had dinner at home: left over cauliflour with cheese sauce, boiled potatoes, and quorn burguers (that omg I cooked). And watched Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, a very good movie :-) very fun.

Monday morning we spent the time looking for colours to paint a room. Djeezs, we’re doing normal couple things again :p *panic*. We decided for bourdeaux and a very light yellowish for the walls… And we chose another colour for the ceiling that didn’t turn out that well, so we have to change. I cooked lunch: quick pasta dish with orange, apple, tomato and carrot ;p sounds weird, but it’s tasty. We spent the evening playing a bit with the computer again, and deciding where we’d have dinner. Another chinese, called China Garden. We had china garden soup, mini chinese loumpias (*ahem* “mini”… they’re the size normal loumpias are in Spain). And duck in prunes sauce, icecream (we want traditional chinese desserts!) and Jasmine tea. We had rented Shark Tale to watch after dinner, but I fell asleep half through it (again…).

Tuesday was leaving day again… Waking up, packing, eating something, heading to the airport… It’s so hard to leave once more… The plane had technical problems… the light for the landing gear didn’t work, so we had to change planes, and that was another hour delay… and getting home…

Diana

Fenfen dragged us along to see some more nice viewpoints around Saarland, and old castle that was preserved more or less up a hill< insert name here >. From the tower you have a very lovely view of the surroundings :) During the walk down we did some impromptu-footballing with a rock, which unfortunately had to stay behind near the bottom of the walk.

After this we went to a < insert name here > old tower that’s the burial place of a few members of the Bochs family (which is way to rich), with a nice park around it. There was some strange ‘modern art’ thing there too that was supposed to depict nature or something. I didn’t really get it ;p

After this we went to < yet another place > with some vantage viewpoints where you can see the ‘loophole’ in the river Saar.

In the end we took off for Belgium once again, standing in some traffic jams, and having fun with a bus full of kiddies trying to catch the attention of the drivers, until one point Diana stuck out her tongue and they were mostly amazed ;p

For dinner we went to a little place called K-roes-L, where we had big buckwheat pancackes filled with goat cheese and tomatoes…. toooo goood and tooooo much ;)
After dinner we went to see Robots, which is a really funny movie to see ;p

This fine day we went with Fenfen to Saarlouis, his hometown, a small quiet town next to Saarbrücken. First we went to see the Teufelsburg, which translates to “The Devil’s Castle”. There are some midieval organisations that use this as a place for their campments or to perform acts, which can be found here. Afterwards we went into the city itself for a quick dinner, and moved on because Fenfen needed to get ready for his role in the Passionplay of Christ (pics), during which he was flogged (tho only with woolen floggers - booooooooooo! We want our money back! ;p) and then crucified, tho as you can see on the pics he didn’t really die of it ;p

A pity it was all in german, so I got only little of it, but it was fun ;)

Afterwards we went along with the crew for a drink and a piece of (coldish) pizza, and in the eve we (once again) opted for dinner at the Pizza Hut, a veggy salad this time tho.

Today we ran off to Germany, Saarbrücken to be more precise, which we reached in about 4,5 hours, driving in turns and taking a pitstop here and there to refuel / restock. We also had the honor of having some lovely traffic jams due to roadworks in the province of Luxembourg, but we got there in the end.

We were staying at the Mercure Hotel Kongress Saarbruecken, a very nice place which they’re currently busy refitting completely (adding new bathrooms, better windows, …. you know, the whole interior decoration crap. No, you don’t have to stay in a half-finished room ;p)
Afterwards we heard that it’s actually _the_ most posh and luxurious hotel around *g*

While waiting for a good friend of ours (Fenfen) we went to explore a bit of the smallish city, and stopped by a local snack-kiosk to get (do’h!!) a snack: a croissant with a certain chocolaty filling, really good… mjummyyy……

*ahem*

With Fenfen we explored the city further, going down the big shopping street (Bahnhofstraße), then over the river Saar until we reached the ruins of the old castle of Saarbrücken. We went for a quick visit to the local museum, and drove around a bit afterwards but finally decided on going back to the hotel.

For dinner we went to a local Pizza Hut and had mjummy veggie pizza :)