Belgium By Day

In a cruel twist of fate, my girl was in an accident and left me with a spare ticket to ILoveTechno - one of the bigger parties in Europe with a line-up to make Melbourne dance-fans drool. Threatened with beatings, I was told I had to go and find someone to take her place. Enter a jovial South African friend, and off to Belgium we went.

'Hey we're at Antwerp.'
'Cool.'
'Wanna check it out?'
'Um... maybe we shouldnAaargh!'
*is dragged off train*


So we had a walk around Antwerp. Where the f*ck is Antwerp anyways? We werent sure ourselves, and proceeded to look for a Coffee Shop. After all, if the place is selling weed it has to be Netherlands. Our search took us to the dodgier end of town, where I walked into *the lowliest bar I've ever seen*. Seriously. Three local undersirables hung out the front.

'Where are we?'
'Earth'
(oh great, a comedian)
'No, I mean what country'
'Haha, you dont know what country you're in?'
'We're tourists!'
'This be Belgium mon'

Belgium! We had arrived, land of chocolate, beer, and bohemian funny-guys.

Calling their place of worship a bar at all is a huge overstatement. Take a danky little room, put a plain high wooden bench down the middle, put two drunks *completely unconscious* on said bar, a grey drunken Groundkeeper Willie look-a-like sipping whiskey, and an African barmaid who looked like she'd rather slit your throat than serve you a drink. All this at 10.00am. We were just glad to walk out of there in one piece.

The rest of Antwerp consisted of patrols of Jewish people in their traditional outfits (and they have some crazy hats let me tell you), diamond shops, homeless people and abadoned construction sites. Not exactly a joyous happy place filling visitors with warm rainbows. We quickly jumped on the next train.

I met a man in Brussels. He was, six foot four and full of muscles (sing it! I saiddoyouspeakamylanguage? Hejustsmiled andgaveme avegemitesandwhich!) Singing Downunder, we trekked across Brussels, had a cosmopolitan lunch, listened to Native American Indian street-performers and found some botanic gardens. Brussels has some great architecture, both traditional and modern, and we took some happy snaps for all our fans. Refreshed and re-energized by the wonders of gravity, we were ready to party.

Respect my balls