Saxa-ma-phooooone, saxa-ma-phoooone!

To fulfil a long time goal of mine, I've just recently started music and saxaphone lessons. I figured that Belgium, being the home of the sax is the best place to learn. The sax lessons just started last week and I've been taking the notes lessons for a couple of weeks now. It would appear there's quite a thriving community at the local music academy.

Sarah helped me sign up to all the courses and luckily for me, as I've never really studied music before, both my teachers speak English and Sarah promised me that she'd put me in the class with other oldies. So I head into my first sax lesson the other day only to be greeted by 2 rather proficient sax playing sub-10 year-olds. No adults lol, just me and the kids. The nice thing, it kinda takes away the competitive edge! Aaaand, it will help with my Flemish too!

Sun-day

It's such a beautiful morning here today. The sun is shining and I'm sitting out on the terras. I'm glad to say that this time I'm not the only one out enjoying the sun (but I am the only one under a parasol lol).

Some of the older neighbours are playing boules in the garden, a mother is sitting out feeding her young child and another has just returned from the bakery on her bike.

And to top it all off my girrel is coming back from Egypt - Yay!

L'étranger

I have to say that I'm no longer the stealth foreigner that I thought I was! Tonight I decided that I'd had enough of porridge and weetabix dinners -Sarah's absconded you see, she's off on her jollies to Egypt and has left me to fend for myself! So, meal cheques in hand along with recycled bag, I headed off to Delhaize.

Thankfully DH isn't as over bearing as the colossal Tescos back home which means that I secretly don't mind going half as much. Our local DH actually has a really nice community feel to it which makes up for the lack of range, kind of.

Anyways, Sarah normally takes great delight in me visiting DH because I normally forget to weigh the fruit and veg. Which, as you can imagine, is now wearing a bit thin with the till ladies. I always forget coins for the trollies - my goodness we get these free back home to do what we want with them, can even dump them in rivers if we want! In fact, I think it's compulsory to dump them in the nearest river or underpass - Cumbernauld is a case in point.

So, tonight I head to the bakery. In Belgium you can choose for a number of uncut loaves and then you pop them in the slicer. Sounds easy doesn't it? Apparently not! Tonight dear reader, I made the basic mistake of sticking the bread in the slicer the wrong way around. Not only that, I also blocked the machine, and, erm there was a queue forming around me lol. Oops! Cue beamer! Luckily there was a DH person near by who - against all normal British health n safety protocol - stuck her hand in the machine and released the offending pieces of bread. And she also gave me another loaf free of charge, now you wouldn't get that kind of service in Tescos lol!

It's starting to get a wee bit chilly here too. But tonight was a nice night so I figured, I'm a Scot living on the exotic continent, I'll have my dinner on the terras. You see, coming from Scotland, we don't normally have the joy of a terras so I want to exploit it as much as possible. When my neighbours were drawing their curtains, I was sipping some wine wrapped up with my scarf and coat...bliss! I have to say that I'm utterly content living in Belgium :)

Chocs away

I'm in over drive just now and have been all day. I've also just sampled some coffee from the new rocket juice machine that we've just received...*perhaps* not a good idea cos it took me ages to fall asleep last night. Well, I've got lots of stuff to catch up on so it's not a major problem.

Anyways, took this in Brussels airport last week - this is my kind of duty free shopping, if only lol!

Random pics

Bike park Pukkelpop Aug 08

Pink bike - Gent

Always have time - Rotterdam Mar 08

Museum of Modern Art - Glasgow June 08

Museum of Modern Art - Glasgow June 08

Rather childish, I know.

Mmmm!

London - Jan 08

Take the high road

Some pics from the top of the category 3 climb in Benicasim - the descent was well worth the pain!

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Hmm, thanks hon for that exposure on that last post, what little credibility I had has now gone lol ;p

Just arrived on Sunday in Spain for work and got excited when I saw the mini bar, only to be greeted by this:

G-U-T-T-E-D!!

Tasty Take-Over

I'd like to appologize to my girlfriend, for I'm not generally one for making this kind of privacy infringement. But Jo's abroad for work and well, when the cat's away... the mouse comes out to play.

(It's Sarah speaking, in case you hadn't cottoned on by now).

Jo and I went to pukkelpop a few weeks ago, where I took control of Jo's camera, with some rather entertaining results. I just couldn't keep this one from you guys and well, I no longer have a blog to publish it on.

To place it in context, Jo's a regular britpopbopper, so when Alphabeat got headlined, Jo went ecstatic to put it mildly. While Alphabeat is a Danish band, they are totally tailored to the british market, and judging by this video, they seem to have hit their mark:

I also have footage of Jo being hit in the head by a cardboard cupholder, but I'm saving that one for Funniest Homevideos. I'll put the 100 euros to good use (i.e. buying Jo flowers to appologize for this tasty take-over).