Welcome back to Belgium, it’s been a long time!

this time, Moritz (A good friend of mine) and I decided that it would be a good time to catch up with some good old Belgian friends. 😉
Thanks to Silke whom we got to know at ICC2015 in Zeist, we had a good host, good occomodation and an awesome time! But first things first…

We chose a weekend with an extra celebration day included, so we had two full days which we could spend with various activities.
Booking tickets and organizing our stay was – more or less – a piece of cake. We only needed to keep track on the discount offers and therefore had a little less expenses.
After lunch, we boarded the train to Frankfurt. Just like last time, I made sure we had more than enough time in Frankfurt, just in case. We asked the train station personel who picked us up to bring us to the DB lounge for some refreshing drinks free of charge, and WIFI, of course! 🙂
In Brussels Midi, there were a few communication difficulties, due to the fact that the guy who picked us up obviously was not capable of speaking English or German. Luckily though, he spoke Flemish, no French, so I was able to translate and sort things out. In the IC train to Bruges, he also directed us to the first class wagons. It turned out to be a good decision; there was plenty of room for our luggage and the seats felt more confterble, but you cannot compare Belgian or Dutch IC trains with the German ones. Whereas I was in touch with Silke, Moritz found a person who could give us some more detailed information concerning our arrival and the track, so we could tell Silke where to pick us up.

Finally in Bruges, Silke took us to her apartment to get rid of our luggage, before we went to a fry shop for some typical Dutch snacks for dinner.

The next day, we toured the city of Bruges a bit. Just as Marburg, Bruges has a tactile model of the market place and its surroundings with additional information in Braille (in four languages). Occasionally, we stopped at cafés or other safe places to get out of the rain, which was just insane! I can just say that I never experienced that hard rain at such a high level of nois! Still, however, this didn’t really take away the fun we had anyway…

After lunch at Heema, we met Julien at the train station. Silke did a hell of a good job guiding three crazy and blind people, although I can imagine that it could have been a little stressful sometimes. Back at home, she prepared a great dinner for us, after which we decided to visit an Irish pub for a couple of rounds before ending the day.

On Sunday, we departed to Leuven to meet some more people whom we know from past ICCs already. We spent some time at a café where we watched the soccer match Ireland against Belgium. It was a great game! We ended up at Downtown Jack for dinner. After a long talk about this and that, we splitted up at the train station and traveled back to Bruges together with Silke.

It was an awesome weekend, however, I haven’t had the feeling that it was too short this time. It was more than enough… we did everything we wanted to do. And therefore, it was a good decision (and also cheaper) to travel back to Marburg a little earlier already. The journey went well, and back in Marburg, Moritz and I splitted up to get back to our groups to rest from the weekend.

As awesome such a weekend can be, it sure takes a while to regenerate.