iki and her dreams

I started this blog as a means of telling people at home what I'm doing here, so that we could focus our chats on more important things, instead of me telling everyone the same things. But it has slowly become a personal diary rather than a travelling one. I appreciate this way of reflecting about life in general, although I often delete what I realise has become to personal.

The more I do here the less I write. Tonight I'm writing while cooking dinner, and it's 1.30 after a long day at work and I want to finish and go to bed. So I will mainly summarise some impressions from the weekend in Belgium... Eight people from eight different European countries on a trip, officially to celebrate the birthdays of M and AS, but mainly to have a weekend off together. I'm grateful to this funny gang who have literally adopted me, and what I mainly appreciated this weekend was to get to know them all better, and watch how they interact with each other. But it was also great to have a weekend off work.
We left London early Friday morning, using the most environmental-friendly way possible to get to Brussels. That's another reason to like these people, they care about things that are important to me too. Spent one day wandering around Brussels, drinking belgian beer of course and seeing the most important touristy things. And we even managed to find an almost-nonsmoking pub that night, with surprising interior. I'll have to ask M for the photos. A mix of skulls and south american masques, which may not sound as a very appealing combination, but I liked it. The pub was part of a street where you could bring drinks from one place to another, and this particular place was mainly renowned for having 500 different kinds of tequila. I didn't know there were that many.. but why did they have to put cow's milk in the one with belgian chocolate? I would have liked to try that :D Although the lack of tequila probably made my next day nicer.


Some mysteries still remains unsolved, though. Why was there still ice on quite a few canals in Bruges but nowhere in Ghent? Why was there so much more lace in Bruges compared to Ghent although they're only one hour away from each other? Why were three people taking a bath in a bath tube on a random street in Ghent? And what happened to the pirates in the incredible and long story we came up with on boring hours on the train? I hope a certain unemployed Dutch fellow writes down the story, it's long enough to be a book and at least creating it has been quite entertaining.

And why does one of the cats here in Brighton like tofu? It's a very random thing for a cat to like. I made a curry wok with apples and tofu for dinner and Kitkat kept stealing the tofu. He's normally very polite although curious about my food, but he's taken tofu from my plate on several occasions and last time I ate soya mince he licked the plate when I had finished eating. He seems to have the same tofu taste as I have; he clearly prefers Taifun's basil tofu compared to the marinated tofu from Clearspot.