Belgium

Friday night and Saturday late afternoon Ellen had basketball games. They won vs. Patch on Friday night to finish 3rd in their conference. Saturday's game was a friendship game and Ellen had a great one! A nice way to end the regular season. After her game we drove to Karlsruhe to watch Brandon's team play (Bayer Giants vs. Karlsruhe). Thanks for the tickets Brandon! Here are a few pictures of these games before we get to Belgium.





This week we are celebrating Fashing here in Germany. The parade today was wild! I'll post pictures some other time. They were also celebrating at the Giant's game with colored streamers, noise-makers and they threw Berliners (jelly-filled donuts) to all the spectators! Daniel was in heaven! Joseph was pretty happy too!





On Sunday morning we got up early and headed to the Auberge de Poteaupre, a Trappist Monastery, just outside of Chimay, Belgium. To get there we started in Germany, drove through the southern end of Luxembourg, into Belgium, out of Belgium and into France for a bit then back into Belgium. The kids thought that was wild!

During our short drive through France we stopped to buy some French champagne at a small store along the road. I guess this should have been our first sign of things to come since we communicated with the man using the 5 French words we know and a series of hand gestures and a few words that are ubiquitous (like Visa/Mastercard).

The town was a beautiful French town with lots of old buildings built on cliffs and along a beautiful river.

We continued our drive through the Belgium countryside and loved it! Belgium (at least the southern part) is just as I had pictured it. Mostly flat with some rolling hills, lots of green pastures with sheep and quaint small towns. The buildings in the small towns were mostly constructed out of a gray stone that gave all the buildings (new or very old) an old, very European look.

Thanks to our navigation system we found the Auberge de Poteaupre Chimay. Without it we might still be driving aimlessly through the Belgium countryside. Stopping to ask for directions would have been mostly hopeless because we quickly discovered that neither our English or our German did us any good. We would have to get by for a day on gestures and the few words either German or English had somewhat in common with French. The monastery in Chimay is a Trappist monastery that is committed to sharing hospitality. The monks perform manual labor - growing crops, brewing their famous Chimay beers, or making their famous cheeses - commit time to study and prayer and meet together for prayer and worship seven times each day (starting at 4:30 AM and ending at 8:00 PM). Visitors are invited to join in these services. Since we arrived just before lunch time we checked into our room, drove around a bit to see how we might spend the afternoon and then went to the Auberge de Poteauper restaurant.

Here we managed to order (no small task given our limit of 5 French words!) and enjoyed a long, relaxing, excellent meal with lots of laughter and fun.

The food and drinks were excellent!

After lunch we went to the monastery itself and wandered around the peaceful grounds.

We joined the monks for a prayer/worship service (in French) in this chapel.

This is the brewery itself. They were not doing any tours in 2007 - bummer!

Next we drove into the small town of Chimay. We walked around this quaint town, found a couple of Belgium chocolate shops open and HAD to stop. We also bought some Belgium waffles - they were wonderful!

Jeff and the kids are standing in front of the Chateau of the Princes of Chimay.

The weather was just beautiful - flowers were starting to bloom, the grass was green... so the boys played outside our hotel at the monastery for a while and Ellen did homework.

We had a wonderful breakfast - lots of crossants, bread, etc. (And we got by on our 5 words of French plus hand gestures - like "the little Lord Jesus asleep on the hay" gesture for "did you sleep well?" :) ) Then we drove east to Luxembourg for some more adventures! Stay tuned for those!