Belgium - 3

With the car ready to go, and us not really willing to actually pay for the hotel room, we spent our last morning in Chamonix and decided to continue driving north.

This was my last chance to exploit the sales in the area, so after one last coffee I headed over to the Aigle shop to pick up a heavily discounted winter jacket that should come in handy in a few months' time.

Being invited to Cath & Max's wedding in Spain, Aline and I took it upon ourselves to take a little holiday. Living in Belgium, it seemed perfectly logical to go on a little road-trip — there and back.

Two years ago Scott and I embarked on a road-trip that had many ups and downs but taught me many things about how a road-trip can be conducted. Scott has fortunately maintained his website, Smile in Europe, which contains a few photos taken along that particular journey.

With my birthday coming up in a few days, I've been struggling to find some time for myself. I keep inventing projects for myself, but never actually have the time to dig into them and make any satisfying progress.

One example is that I still haven't made any progress on my appalling level of French, and there's no hope in hell that I'll be running in the 20km of Brussels half-marathon this year.

I suppose I need to keep in mind what Ferris Bueller once said, “Life goes by pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”

It's been quite a while since my last little Benespection post, and considering it recently snowed for the first time this year — surprisingly just as winter officially ended — I thought I might share some snow pictures with you all.

Being Australian, I tend to have a slight fascination with snow, but on this particular occasion some of us were actually trapped by it…

Rollercoaster Season has once again rolled around as marked by the opening of the Walibi season for 2008 this weekend. As with last year, an early glimpse into what's changed within the park — or what's not working yet — is somewhat necessary.

This season opener didn't highlight anything spectacular to report, except that the Vertigo was once again being tested and wasn't taking passengers. There was once unique aspect of this visit though: It was snowing!

I'm flying home today, surrendering the fantastically warm and sunny weather here in Melbourne and returning to the gloomy, miserable, cold weather in Brussels.

This also means psyching myself up to return to the office: Urgh.

Sadly I missed out on seeing a few of my friends, but maybe you lot can come over to Brussels at some stage!

So long Melbourne; I'll be back!

At the risk of seeming a bit like Seven Up!, I thought I'd have another crack at this day in the life stuff. After last year's effort, I was curious to see what had changed.

Apparently, not much!

I couldn't possibly have a Christmas without my Mother asking for pictures of Christmas lights in Brussels. Not much has changed since last year, although this year's lights on the Grand Place are even more tacky…

I’ve been trying to avoid using my holiday time from work so that I can use most of them for my eventual trip to the arse-end of the world at the end of this year, thus keeping as many holiday days for next year as possible. To this effect, I haven’t taken much in the way of time off this year at all.

So hectic was last month, I didn’t really get much time for myself to decompress, and the national holiday of November 1^st gave me the perfect excuse to was time to relinquish some holiday time to finally unwind a little.

Fortunately Aline was kind enough to offer an escape by way of her family’s chalet in Chiny, so on Thursday morning we trundled down towards the French border with John for some well-earned time away from everything and anything for four days.

…Or so we thought.

One week ago I was awoken earlier than usual by the sound of what I initially thought was a chainsaw. This being somewhat odd and inexplicable, I made the effort to get out of bed and take a peek. It seemed workers had arrived to shut down the fountain and, from what I could tell at the time, they were starting to encase it in wood.

Being a little too weird and therefore difficult to comprehend at the extremely unsociable hour of 7:30am, I went to vegetate under the shower and wake up. Once outside, I still failed to comprehend what exactly was going on here.