Loving Leuven

                                                                            The town hall

Leuven sports one of the liveliest bar scenes in Belgium. Due to it being a real 'student city'.
It houses one of the oldest universities in all of Europe and is an extremely popular place to study. Besides boasting the "longest bar" in Belgium, the Old Market, dozens of bars and cafés crammed into a central square in Leuven, it's also the proud home city of Belgium's smallest bar, Onder den Toog in the Noormannenstraat.
 All conveniently located about 30 kilometres east of Brussels.

Looks a little different at night time!

The seats, currently pack away are set out across the road to cater for the masses.

 The students ride everywhere on town bikes (in the back ground of Jessie's photo), and just lock them up willy nilly, but the kids managed to find a favourite motor bike each.  Not bad choices guys!

One of our missions here was to get the kids some good, but cheap bikes. After touring around 10 different de kringwinkles...similar to the super shed in Christchurch, where other peoples junk is sold off extremely cheaply for treasure hunters like ourselves, we failed miserably in the bike hunt, but Tim managed to walk away with a few Belgium beer glasses for his fine collection...hmmm ulterior motive maybe? I guess the kids did get to see a lot of small towns around Belg and plenty of country side.

Get your angry face on Jack!

Really, you have these loose in a sports shop, who could resist picking up the over sized boxing gloves and throwing a swing or two.

Anyway we ended up getting some very nice bikes for the kids from this local sports shop. And thanks to the help of a pro track mechanic, Chris, getting back to his grass roots of bike building. The boys got the kids bikes up to scratch and road worthy.  (I will post a photo with the kids and their new wheels  on their debut outing in Annecy)

 Being Belgium there is often 4 seasons in one day....or for those who have experienced it, more like within the hour. We came across there two gorgeous ducks prepared for anything in there matching clear plastic hoods, coats and shoes. One of them must have miss read their text message/telegram on which colour bag to use today. Very cute.

On our last day here in Belgium we managed to catch up with good friends who have been involved with cyclists for years. Always hosting stray, poor out of towners trying to break into the big time cycling scene. The last we caught up was 6 years ago and as always it is so comforting seeing familiar faces when you are so far away from home.

Thanks Karien, Roland and Lien for a fabulous lunch and great company.

The town square in Oudenaarde where Tim has spent many hours drinking coffee, and maybe the odd beer or three as an athlete.

Naturally he had to show the kids the site of the infamous nuddie bike race.

For all those car geeks out there, the hottest thing in Europe right now is the matt paint finish on cars. Very stealth and very cool. Though we have had discussions on how easy they would be to clean. Clearly we are not going to find out either with our conservative Subaru being that of the old school gloss finish.

And finally...

Apparently it was fathers day here on Sunday and so the shops were full of interesting dad type things. The kids and I spotted this amazing creation while out window shopping....at the chocolate shop of course, and thought our guitar enthusiasts Jr and Matt could have a chuckle. Naturally we had to sample a few Belgium chocolates so we could compare with the Swiss. Both world renowned for their chocolate creations.