Palfrey's life

Urkness. I just got back earlier this morn from Belgium (after a few fuckups, more details later), promptly went to bed, and when I wake up I find I'm offline. The evil bastards that run the internet service around here have fucked something up. I can connect to the PPPoE server, but then traceroutes don't get any further out than that first-hop server, so any talking to the outside world is a no-go right now. I'm writing this now, but you won't see it until I'm back online (or until first thing tommorrow, when I'll just post it from work).

So, while I'm realising that this is the case, I'm staring at Trillian failing to login. One of the little details I notice while doing so is Mr. Sam H's last cached username which says "Samurite - Ed & Anna sitting in a tree". Now, I'm *hopefully* getting the completely wrong end of the stick here (being offline I can't bloody check, which is worse), but the presumed meaning is that Ed and a girl called Anna are now seeing each other (in some sense of the words), and given that I can't remember any other Anna's within the extended social group back in bris, there's an entirely likely possiblity that this is the one I used to have a bit of a crush on (see E2 daylog from New year's before last). Now, I'm being completly irrational right now (being offline will do that to me), but if this turns out to be the case, part of me wants to throttle Ed right now. Ok, yes I'm about 200 miles away, in a different country, and the chances of me with Anna are therefore so low as to allow quantum physicists to observe the chance popping in and out of existence, but I'm still going to be a bit pissed off. Not a good start to my day.

K, Belgium. Photos up as and when I can a) be arsed plugging in the cable and b) I have my fucking net connection back. Set off from Delft train station early Saturday morning, travelled to Antwerp(en). Walked to the Koninklijk (something to do with royalty?) museum, saw a whole bunch of art. Some pretty weird things there in among all the religious iconography. There was one with a figure of christ standing on a cloud, that appeared to be being supported just by some disembodied cherubic heads with wings. Very odd. Enjoyed looking for all the small details in paintings - the main scene is rarely the most interesting part of a painting - much more interesting to me is all the little details that the artist added. We spent some time seeing the rest of Antwerp - found out that one of the myths behind the name involves an evil giant having his hands cut off and thrown in the main river, and from "hand werpen" (sp?) - roughly "hand throwing" - we get Antwerpen. Or it just means "alluvial deposit". Whichever. Few delays here (of about an hour or so total), but we eventually got ourselves to Sint-Niklaas which is where the beer festival was :)

The beer festival was a lot of fun. Most places and countries this really wouldn't be my sort of thing, being not much of a beer fan, but I've grown to like the Belgian kriek's and various fruit beers, and so this was a lot of fun. There was about 50 different breweries there, and I tried 6 different beers from various ones. The only one of any real note was the first one I tried called "Newton" - which is kinda appropriate for an apple beer. Very nice. The others weren't quite as good, but was still a lot of fun wandering around and trying them. We managed to get all vaguely organised at the right time to go for dinner, but unfortunately by this point our main organiser (man with the map and everything) is a bit drunk (as well as the rest of us), so when we stop to wait for him to catch up, this wait expands out to about half an hour. By which time the muppet Spanish subgroup have managed to find some large roll of paper, and roll it across the road. Someone from the restaurant we're standing outside sees this, comes out and tries to roll it back, which seems to have the main effect of creating a tube of paper that's now sort of blocking traffic (ok, a car can go straight over it, but it's still not good). We eventually locate Allard and get ourselves going, but once we've got a bit up the road the Spanje get called back, as it turns out the restaurant has called the local polis. Now, this is basically a "sort out the crap you've done and they'll probably let you go" situation, but it still results in a whole bunch more delays and the group managing to spread out and split up a bit. Takes us another bloody hour to get to the place (what with getting very lost and the Belgian definition of 5 minutes appears to be different to everyone else's). It's a Belgian TGI Friday's (well, more or less. It's called Bell's, but it looks like a TGI).

Much spare ribs start to be consumed, but it's been worked out that those of us who wanted to go back to Delft tonight are running out of time, and we who were going on to Gent are also moving towards a problem. Taxi's are badly organised, and we end up at the station ten minutes after the last train to Gent has left. We're screwed. It's another 5 hours before the next train, and there's not a lot to do in Sint-Niklaas. So what do we do? Well, there's the last train to Antwerp in 20 mins, so we take that and because of various reasons (I'm shattered, can't be arsed any more) decide to go with the "travel back to Delft by the first train". Which is at 6:28, and it's now about half-past-midnight. So, time for some fun in Antwerp. We start off in this little bar (which has Strongbow on tap! Pity I'm not in a cider drinking mood, 'cause I really should have had a pint), and eventually end up in a series of places ending up with about 3 hours in one bar/small club thing (whose DJ can't mix to save his life, but it's not that bad for free entrance), and then some time in another one. We leave the last one at about 5 ('cause we're a) shattered b) the Gent travelling folk need to get a train at 5:28 and my bag is in the same locker as some of their stuff), crash out at the station for about an hour, get the train to Rotterdam, change to Delft and I ride back to collapse about 8:30am. Got about 8 hours sleep, still shattered, but should really wait for tonight (which will probably have very messed up sleeping schedules). Hell of a day.