amorousodious

Laura’s friend Steve met us at the airport in Charleroix and Melinda, Tom and Laura went with him to see the Atomium in Brussels. Rachel and I waited for a little bit until John and Carole got there to pick us up and we headed out to Waterloo to see the Lion statue at the top of the hill where Napolean fought his final battle. We climbed up the whole hill and saw the Lion up close. The statue is made of iron and it has a cannon ball under one of its paws and it’s a lot bigger than it looks from the ground. It was windy up there so we didn’t stay up there too long. We joked on the way back down that we had really gone there just to get the workout of climbing up and back down the hill. Like the lion, the stairs are much longer than they seem looking at them. We also had a strange urge to roll down the side of the hill, but since we would probably hit the metal poles around the bottom we decided it was better to walk.

Rae-Rae and I were hungry so we all stopped at a restaurant by the hill and had something to eat. I got some toast with some sort of sour cream and salad thing on top of it that’s apparently a Belgian dish. It was actually pretty good, though very different. Carole and John just had a coffee but in Belgium you always get either a cookie or a piece of chocolate with your coffee, so they got a cookie as well. After lunch we went over to the second part of the Lion museum with was a panorama of the battle inside of an old building. It was really interesting; it’s a circular building with a mural of the battle on all sides and then in between where you were standing and the walls there were life-sized figures made of papier-mâché that went along with the diorama. I’m not sure come to think of it whether you call that a diorama or a panorama. I think the mural is a panorama and then the figure part of it makes it a diorama. I’ll have to check that out in a dictionary.

After Waterloo we went to see the Atomium where Laura, Melinda, and Tom had been earlier. The Atomium is a leftover exhibit from a world fair that is an enormous model of an iron atom. According to John it was redone a few years ago so it looks a lot nicer now than it used to. You can also go up into it and climb around but Rachel and I decided that we had climbed enough for the day and so we just looked around at it from the ground. It had to have taken a lot of mathematics to design something like that because I’m sure that the “electrons” of the atom weigh a lot and the adjoining parts to me don’t look strong enough to support them, but regardless it has stayed up for a long time and it didn’t fall on us while we were there so I’m assuming that it’s well-built.

At that point both Rae-Rae and I needed showers so we went back to Carole’s and John’s house and I met the dogs there for the first time. There are six of them, yes, six dogs living with them, all different breeds and all rescued. Luna is a type of dog that looks like a greyhound and is normally used for hunting in Spain. She was rescued from Madrid and is the oldest dog in the house. I spoke to her in Spanish a lot, and I know dogs can’t really understand words but I think she got the point. The alpha dog there is Emma, she’s a Lassie-type dog (smaller, but I don’t know if she’s a mix or what) and she has A LOT of fur. I don’t know if she can even feel it when you pet her back because it’s so padded by all of her fur. Sadie is a medium-sized black dog whose owners gave her up because they moved into a place where dogs weren’t allowed. Caramel has a similar story, her owner Denise is a friend of Carole’s who moved into an assisted living home and she could only take one of her dogs with her so Caramel went to live with John and Carole. Feinje is a yorkie who had a tumor on her head and her owners didn’t want to pay to get it removed so Carole and John paid for it and took her in. She looks normal now, but I saw a picture of her with the tumor and it looks so sad, the poor thing. Lastly there is Dupe, a tiny little dog who is mostly black with a little brown here and there and has curly hair like a poodle. He was abused, and is now missing most of his lower jaw and only has three teeth. He looks so cute though because his tongue is always sticking out of his mouth. You do have to be careful however because he tends to drool.

After we washed up we went into a nearby town called Lier and had dinner at a restaurant near a flock of metal sheep statues. I had pasta with fresh vegetables, and of course a Kriek, which is a Belgian beer made with cherries, and tastes like cherries. It is delicious. The town is really cute, and we walked around for a little bit afterward and saw the bell tower and a big circle where the solar system is painted on the ground. Pluto is there as well, though as we all know, it’s no longer a planet. It was kind of a test to see if we could remember the names and order of all the planets, but we managed to with the help of the old elementary school saying “my very eager mother just served us nine pizzas” for “Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto.” I hope that I spelled all of those correctly. Anyway, it’s a neat little town and it was fun to explore. After that we went home to get some sleep since we were really tired from our lack of sleep the night before in Barcelona.