Klasse Reünie

 After the Wednesday Market I met up with some of my former class mates from my Dutch lessons, who come from Bulgaria, The Phillipines, Poland, Syria, and America.

Wathik, Sevinch, Kristine, Bahoz, Edward, Me, and Malgorzata

We went to Charlie Rockets  for 'a coffee' (which turned into a few beers) and a good old catch-up. We started off well speaking in the only common language, Dutch, but eventually English words and Charades slipped in.

 

 

De Mooi Meisjes

By Kerri

Rainy Wednesday Market

While Matt recovered from his night shift Kerri went to the weekly Wednesday morning market under the Belfry Tower in the Markt.

Usually it's very busy with tourists and locals buying fruit and veg, cheeses, meats, plants, bread, sweets, rotisserie chicken etc, but today it was very quiet probably because it rained all morning.

After buying a few things for Matt Kerri then met up with some of the other niveau 1 Nederlands students for coffee/beer. Then home to make the yummiest Crispy Cajun Chickpea Cakes.

Yes she's wearing a t-shirt

Sunday afternoon.

We seemed to find ourselves in some bizarre situations yesterday. After a late start to the morning, we walked down towards our local eetcafe De Verloren Hoek (http://www.eetcafedeverlorenhoek.be) on the corner of Carmerstraat. A dog started to bark at us further ahead and this seemed to freak out the lady owner of said dog who then proceeded to cry and run off leaving us with her diary and a dog tied to the bench and now jumping and barking at the passing cars. Her diary did not yield anything helpful apart from various detailed doodlings. Several passers by also noticed what was going on but left us to it. So, we looked for the owner but with no success so I walked home to look up the local police number while Kerri looked after the dog. Spoke to the police but my credit ran out so I walked to the shop to get more credit, again leaving Kerri with our new friend. All the time, thoughts of us now having two dogs running through my head. However, on the way back, the lady had returned and Kerri was walking towards me down the canal. She had returned and mumbled in broken English that sometimes her head does funny things! Kerri told me that she now seemed perfectly normal.

So we made it to De Verloren Hoek and were enjoying a couple of pint'jes of beer when we heard a band approaching us which consisted of seven or eight older men dressed in blue tunics, a farmer's hat and a red scarf all playing musical instruments, being led by a man in a military uniform and being followed by a Saab convertible and about ten people on foot all smartly dressed. They stopped next to us and from the car alighted another "older" couple with sashes around their body with some Flemish writing on.  We can only assume that they may have been the mayor and mayoress of Brugge. They promptly left and carried on down the road only to return five minutes later and stop again outside the pub but this time to go in for a drink.

All this going on while the road was closed off due to a small flea market which we browsed but didn't find anything useful. In England, what we may call a garage sale.

So we headed home and Kerri knocked up a fabulous tagine, we watched Eurotrip with a brief appearance from Matt Damon and went to bed at 9.30!

Here are a few photos from the last few days:

Near our house

Sophie

De Haan

Things are finally flowering in our garden!

Sing-Along at the Markt