Belgian Chocolate

Though everywhere in Europe is starting to get really crowded because tourist season is upon us, we feel oddly more comfortable traveling about not being able to speak the native language. Even though we do live here, it is sometimes easier to pretend to be a genuine tourist, completely ignorant of all things European. And now that there are tourists everywhere you look, it's much easier to fit in. :-)

Last Saturday we visited Antwerp, Belgium. It is still amazing, especially being from Texas, that in a matter of an hour we can be in a different country and then be back home in time for dinner. If we were to drive an hour from home in Dallas, we might very well still be in Dallas! Antwerp was very nice. The weather there on Saturday was beautiful, warm and sunny. We got to eat some Italian food for lunch outside watching the tourists pass by. We also walked around the city discovering the quiet little courtyards and gardens that mysteriously hide among buildings right in the center of town. We witnessed two wedding parties and a funeral and, of course, indulged in some Belgian chocolate (some of which we are saving for our next visitors, Erin's parents - you're the lucky winners!). Apparently Antwerp is famous for chocolate hands. That's right - hands. According to local museums and chocolate shops, it's a symbol of friendship and kind of a motto for the city, so we now own a box of chocolate hands. (Although, some research has turned up that it might actually symbolize the hands of Congolese that King Leopold II of Belgium had cut off when Belgium ruled a colony in Congo. We can understand why, 100 years later, the town has decided to reinvent the symbolism. How often do we wish we could rewrite history?) In any case, chocolate hands are one of the weirdest things we've ever seen.

Erin's parents are coming this Saturday for a couple weeks. It's strange that when family comes to visit us here, it's like a vacation for us as well! We would never have taken time off work just because family was coming to visit us in the U.S. Come to think of it, no one would come visit us for two weeks in Dallas! But now that we're living in Europe, people come for much longer and it affords us a great reason to stop counseling and accounting for a week or two and travel around seeing and doing fun things. We're looking forward to it!