Brussels Stories

We had 13 days without rain until Thursday. It has rained everyday since..... But the temperature has also been warmer than +10C since it began raining. I still prefer sun.

This weekend was daylight savings time and our flowers are sprouting:

It was a busy end to a busy week. But it was a dry week, with a couple days of sun, so it was a good week.
I did get the opportunity to go for another ride Saturday morning. Again I hit the Forest, this time with a much larger group or 8. We did a fair bit of the usual, 35-40km, which is fine with me, and we kept the pace going much better than usual.

Our visitors from London had already arrived when I got back from the ride. The Horgans were in town visiting friends for the weekend and they were able to meet up with us for lunch. We took advantage of the sunny day and went to the MIM - Musical Instrument Museum for lunch at their rooftop cafe which has a great view of the whole city.

I did not bring my camera with me on that ride so I had to do something Sunday so I could take some pictures and have an excuse to post something today. So we went for a walk at Woluwe Park. Here I got to take pictures of ducks and swans, hot air balloons, scouts and trees.

It was the financial manager's birthday last week. Some people in the office decorated her office with streamers and flowers before she had arrived. Later that day when she was serving us cake that she had brought in she thanked us (I really had nothing to do with this, but I was there, so I got thanked) and said how the office made her feel like family which was very nice since everyone in the office is here from abroad. None of the 20 people here are from Belgium. And Happy Birthday was sung by everyone in their native language (all a the same time). That means 8 languages were used.

Pics of the park:












......PS. Hasn't rained in 9 days!

For work I had to research some facts for my boss. He is dedicating the first Belgium National Park this week. Here is some of what I found;

• In 1872, Yellowstone National Park was established as the world's first truly national park. Second National Park was in Australia, the Royal National Park established just south of Sydney in 1879. Third; in Canada, Banff National Park (then known as Rocky Mountain National Park) became Canada’s first national park in 1887. Fourth was New Zealand in 1887.
• In Europe the first national parks were a set of nine parks in Sweden in 1910.
• After World War II, national parks were founded all over the world.
• At the end of 2005:
• Number of Protected sites (of all protection categories) in the world - 114,112
• Terrestrial area 136,327,524 km2
• Territorial Sea area 19,373,907 km2
• Total Territorial area 155,701,431 km2
• Australia has 3 of the top 10 largest parks
• Saudia Arabia has 2 in the top 10
• China also has 2 of the largest in the top 10
• Canada doesn't even have an entery in the top 20
  
• First International Park; 1932, Waterton National Park in Alberta Canada was joined with Montana's Glacier National Park to form the Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park.
• World’s largest National Park; Tusarliivik, Greenland, 1985;
• World’s largest Marine Park; the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park in Australia at 350,000 sq km.
• Smallest National Park; St. Lawrence Islands National Park, Ontario, Canada, 1914, 8.7 sq km
• Hottest, Driest and Lowest National Park; Death Valley National Park. 86 meters below sea level, it is the driest place in North America with an average rainfall of only 5cm a year.
• Northernmost National Park, Quttinirpaaq National Park of Canada (Nunavut), Established 1985, also the northernmost point in Canada
• Southernmost National Park; Tierra del Fuego. 1960; 63,000 ha. The interior is overrun by North American beavers, Arctic reindeer, and European rabbits, European introduction.
• Most famous musical album named after a national park; Joshua Tree National Park (sorry, had to)

Any additions or coments, please reply in the comments, it would be nice to see this list increase (or get corrected!)

	Today's ride was great. Cold enough to keep the ground frozen for most of the ride, and completely sunny. Did allot of the same trails I have done in the past around the Forest de Soignes, but in a small group meaning less stopping. I rode with two people in the group I had not met before. One is a lobbyist for oil to the EU. He used to work in Washington, but did not say what he did there. The other rider works at the royal observatory as a solar physicist (stares at the sun). Our ride ended at the royal conservatory where we went in to wash our bikes . After last weeks ride I was unable to spin my tires this morning when I headed out. So this was very useful.
	'Cause the sun ain't bright enough.... the telescope to look at the sun. Also on the ground is the royal meteorological society and something, I can't remember.	0.002
	And if you are curious, this is my bike cave. It is truly a cave.

I want to go fishing and catch a fishstick, that would be convenient, - Hedberg

Whoops, sorry if you received an extra update email earlier this week. I was just tinkering around with the website and the notification program noticed. Also, I am trying to add a search option so you can go back to the time I mentioned monkey soup or whatever. Note: Vaughan has been updating his website from Sydney Nova Scotia and mentions cross-dressing.

Today's plan to go riding has been washed out. Have a plan to try again tomorrow. I do not know when the last day was that it did not rain. And it isn't just light rain. So I was wondering if this is the rainiest place on Earth, or at least close to holding that title. Brussels has 136 rain days a year. Quibido, Colombia has over 300. Youch. (Cherrapunji, India is the city with the largest volume per year of rain and Mount Waiale'ale in Hawaii has the largest volume of rain anywhere). Oddly enough I feel no better about the amount of rain we receive here. There was 12 hours of sunlight from 1 to 23 of February.

So I decided to finally get a gym pass. There is a very nice gym at the University (VUB), which happens to be a 10 min walk from my new office. I should have just bought the pass when we arrived but I didn't know I would end up working so close to the school making it the most convenient gym. The down side is the shortest membership available is for a year making it hard to justify when we only know we will be here to September when school and my internship are both finished. Also it opens at 9am weekdays and for only 4 hours on Sunday.

This weekend we will be planting grass on the balcony and terrace. Seems like a decently generic and robust species that we will be successful. I won't list here what we have been able to kill so far... but we do have a nice collection of pots now. This is a "before" picture. Maybe this will be an "after" picture?


PS. That ficus is dead. Froze to death.

Saturday's ride to me to Overijse (o·ver·ice) on a cold but sunny March Saturday morning. About 10 km south of Brussels through the deepest darkest Vlaams Brabant to the other side of the Forest de Soignes. From there we continued outside into Dutch.... I mean Flemish.... farm country.
The going to start with was pretty good, the sunshine was somewhat hazy, the ground slightly frozen and some snow was still lying around in places. We followed the blue trial until the signage ran out somewhere in the vicinity of Tombeek. With the help of maps and general guess work (not from me) we pushed on, not necessarily in the correct direction but onwards until we got too Wavrestestenweeg (sp). We hadn't veered to far off course and rejoined the trial.

By now the ground was thawing out somewhat, so instead of the firm semi frozen ground from the start we now had plenty of slippery mud to contend with. The mud was also giving problems with gear shifting and chain-suck on the climbs leading to several outbursts. With some temporary chain cleaning we managed to alleviate the problems to an extent.


Of note also we passed some interesting farm life in the form of a very fat contented sheep, a horse smaller than a bike and a very noisy donkey that managed to make some jump out of their shoes, but not me.

We made it back through Begjinhoff (sp?) covered head to toe in mud.

One of the main reasons we went to Belgrade was to visit 6 month old baby Jana. So to put some cuteness into my website, I am going to post a couple baby pictures. :)

"Whoa, who are these people?"

















"Booooooring."


















"My Giraffe, My Giraffe, My Giraffe."