So now for the really important stuff: what sort of shoes are the women wearing?

I’ll get to the shoes in a minute; first, I ought to mention the time difference. Belgium is nine hours ahead of San Diego, so we devised a careful strategy to adjust as quickly as possible. Wednesday night, before our flight on Thursday, Travis and I got huge cups of coffee and stayed up to 1AM. Although we theoretically got four hours of sleep, when we stumbled out of bed at 5AM I felt like I had been up all night.

So by the time we got to Atlanta, GA at 3PM local time, I couldn’t figure out what time it was in San Diego or Europe, but I knew we were at the right gate for our international flight because everyone was speaking French. The next flight was eight and a half hours, with a dinner (pasta, not bad) and a breakfast (croissant and a piece of fruit), and a nice long bit in between where we could sleep. Travis and I ate our food, took a Tylenol PM, and settled in with our pillows and blankets for a good, long nap.

Was it the flight attendant who asked us if we wanted a drink just after we closed our eyes? Was it the two frat boys behind us who raided the drinks cart after lights out and got drunk and churlish? Travis’s breathing had already smoothed out into his sleep patterns, there I was, awake and bored. I spent most of the night reading, snatching an hour or so of sleep.

We touched down at 8:30AM local time on Friday, and started our day!

The driver met us with a sign that said “Mr & Mrs Wirdleharth” after we had gotten through immigration and retrieved our bags. The scenery between Brussels and Zwevegem is very green and lush compared to San Diego, and it was exciting to see the charming little farm houses, signs in Dutch reminding drivers that children smaller than 135 cm must be in a car seat, and all of the tiny little cars they drive here! I love little cars! I had heard of most of the makes before, like Citroen, Renault, and Peugeot, but “Opel” was new to me.

If you go to my Myspace, I have posted a video Travis took of our new place (Look for the link under the picture, it says "view my pics videos"). It was fun dragging in all of our bags, and then getting nosy and opening all of the cupboards. We have all of the necessary furniture, bedding and towels, a few pots and pans, dishes, glasses, silverware, an electric kettle, and, oddly enough, an egg cooker with instructions in 13 languages. Who could live without an egg cooker, right?

So on our first day in Belgium, Travis took me to the town next door, Kortrijk, and showed me around. Cobbled streets! Canals! Chocolatiers on every corner! Through the haze of sleep deprivation it was like having stepped into some sort of beautiful fantasy world. In this world, people can park their bikes in front of a shop without locking it up. There is a little store just for cheese, one for fruit, and one for fish. Others are filled with every kind of bread and pastry you can imagine, with an aroma wafting out that is completely beyond description. In the big central square, crowds of people sit in cafes sipping coffee out of fairy-sized cups and eating elf-sized cookies. At any moment I expected the natives to break out into song and start dancing in the streets.

With great interest, I looked around to see what sort of clothes and shoes the women were wearing. Without exception, I don’t think I saw a single woman wearing sneakers. High heeled shoes, high heeled sandals, and let me tell you, some seriously sexy high heeled boots, yes. Based on some scientific observation of the shop windows, most of those boots cost somewhere between 100 and 300 Euros (1 Euro = $1.30 American dollars). At that price, I would freaking SLEEP in those boots.

Tomorrow: Our trip to Gent.