This past Wednesday, my friends Maggie, Yvette and I had a great day antiquing. Throughout Belgium there are Salvation Army-type stores that sell both clothes and old (antique if you are lucky) furniture. Within the French-speaking area of Belgium (Brussels included) they are called Troc and within the Flemish-speaking area they are called De Kringwinkel or Kringloop. Thanks to Amy Chan, we discovered the joys and treasures at Kringloops all around Belgium. She and her friends used to go once a week to check out the new goods. It is amazing the beautiful things you can get for such a deal! I will definitely be shopping there a lot more when I have an exact date that we will be moving back.
The next day I went to an exhibit about how Herbert Hoover coordinated the effort for Americans and Brits to send food to Belgium after WWI. It is just amazing how small the world is. After receiving so much food, some of the children wrote thank you notes back to the States. The exhibit coordinators found some of these old letters and contacted the homes of the return addresses on the envelopes. It turns out that the (now adult) child of one of the children that received food still lives at the house his mother grew up in, and to top it all off, he married the (now adult) child of one of the other children in the picture. Click below to see the pictures and it will all make a lot more sense!
Thursday night Maggie made some great vegetarian Mexican food for our friend Elizabeth's 35th birthday. Between our Northern friends, our Southern friends and our Australian friends, we had a lot of interesting conversations trying to explain our crazy customs. I was in the kitchen, out of earshot, when the Australians were making fun of how Americans will dress up in costume for anything. I came back in on the tail end of the conversation just in time to add, "Oh yeah, I used to have a bag full of costumes in my trunk all through college because you never knew when you might be going to a '70s party, or a flapper party, or a country hoe down!" Apparently I didn't help to dispel their theory.
Click here for a few photos.
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