A weekend in Brussels

 

This weekend was as hectic as hectic can be. It started off with our Chinese classes early on Saturday. It was once again a very good class! We learned a lot we can now say that China is a big country and Holland is not, it is small…. We also got introduced with the Moon festival, and ate moon cakes in class. The moon festival is all about meeting up with your family and admire the beauty of the moon while eating moon cakes. The story goes that there once was an archer Hou Yi who stole the elixir of life from a Goddess. His very beautiful wife took it from him to spare the people the faith of the tyrannical ruler living forever. She drank the elixir and then floated away to the moon. Where she still remains.

We had some food in Chinatown and had to go back to Leiden again. We also had an appointment with a new traditional Chinese doctor who is from Hong Kong. He really wants to learn Dutch so we decided it would be fun to teach each other! There is nothing better than a native speaker; I think we all learned a lot. After that I had to rush home to pack a bag and set off to Rotterdam were my brother was going to pick up my mother and me to go to Brussels My twin brother had invited us to come down to see his and his girlfriend's new apartment and enjoy the concert that was given in the monastery nearby. His balcony is perfect we could see the stage from there and the great light show and of course clearly hear the music.

Wow what an amazing place, the apartment was really big and the view was just stunning! They lived in a tiny place before but this looks fantastic. It was so good to see that they were both so happy and doing well. We had some food together and ofcourse some drinks and listened to the music. It was the SolisteN concert at the Abdij ter Kameren. Sinead o'Conner, Jose van Dam a famous Belgium opera singer, Billy Paul (the writer and singer of the Me and Mrs. Jones song), Lu Yu Cheng also an opera singer, and Catherine Lara were all performing.





There was an amazing light show and fireworks at the end of the night. We finished eating quite late and when we were almost going to bed one of the neighbors dropped by. He is a musician called Mano and definitely not an average behaving person. He showed up again the next day wearing tiger pants…that was very funny. It was great to meet him, he was very good fun, very friendly, and we heard some beautiful songs. My brother told me that sometimes he shows up at their place to play some new songs for them. That was what really surprised me; everybody in the apartment building was so nice and friendly with eachother that is quite special. People in the Netherlands usually are a lot more distant.
The other neighbor a very friendly lady also dropped in to meet us and we all had coffee. In the afternoon we went for a small walk in a nearby park that was very big and quite beautiful but busy. Mano with the tigerpants also came along. We had some food when we got back and then it was really time to go. I was very glad that I did not had any classes yesterday pffffff I need a bit of time to recover from all that running around!