When we initially arrived there, the site was completely lined with barbed wire. Despite of that, the place was still a mess. There were several buildings in the area that functioned as a gym, places to sleep, classes, a hangar for trucks and cars and two big office buildings. The only interesting building on this site was the first one, a long building with a kitchen, probably a weapon depot (or is it just my imagination..), a bar and a washing area.

Every building we’ve visited had used bullets (blanks) spread around the floor. Other interesting things we’ve found were some pamphlets containing procedures when finding a bomb and talking with terrorists. Glass was broken, doors were hit down on the ground, the ceiling began to rot.

In the first building, someone put some red paint on the wall, which resulted in a super composition for a picture.

What really made me feel bad, is the fact that these buildings itself were still in a pretty good state. It took a lot of money (tax money) for constructing these buildings, and the government is just letting them rot. All you hear on the news today is that they don’t have enough space to house illegals, well I can tell you, they probably could give space to 500 people there without doing much extra costs.

The three pictures below have been created using HDR. It’s not really realistic, but I like the result.

We decided to celebrate New Year’s Eve somewhere, so we went looking for a cottage near the Ardennes. It was a real burden to do so as we found out all cottages in and near the Ardennes were fully booked. We looked further and eventually found something in Klotten, near Cochem in Germany. It’s called Ferienhaus Börsch. It’s a great cottage, room for six people and everything in place to cook wonderfully. We’ve made the Peter Goossens Event Menu, it turned out to be a lot of work but everything worked out pretty well, it was delicious.

I like the idea of spending New Year’s Eve on a different location. It allows us to get away from all stress stuff, and nobody needs to sacrifice his home and get all the load for preparing the food and serving dinner.
Here are some pictures shot in Klotten at the Mosel river.

First we took the plane from Brussels to Seattle, via Atlanta. We booked our flight with Delta Airlines in the end of January via Joker. We departed at 10.30AM (local time) and landed in Atlanta at 2.20PM (EST). From there on, we had a connection to Seattle departing at 4.50PM and arriving at 7.20PM (PST). Ine and kris,

two friends of ours, live in Vancouver and our initial motivation for going to the USA, was to visit them, as they lived for a year there and we miss them of course . We arranged they’d pick us up in Seattle and drive us to Vancouver, where we would spend the weekend. Afterward I realized we should make this visit a little bit longer, as we had to recover from  the Jet Lag. The weekend was over before we realized it. Sunday evening they dropped us off across the USA border in a small town called Bellingham.

From there on, we’ve rent a car and drove to the airport in Seattle (SEATAC). Our flight brings us to Salt Lake City.

What I remember of this first experience with Canada – and Vancouver BC more in particular, is how the lifestyle is very European. You’re not looked after when walking through the city, you can eat/buy most of the things available here, so adapting to it is not that hard as I thought in my opinion. It’s a very nice city, I realize now why Ine and Kris love this city and live here now.

The picture on the left show Tanja, Kris and Grizzly. I normally don’t have any affection with animals, but this one I liked immediatelly!

It was a very nice start of our vacation in the West and we’ll meet Ine and Kris again later .

Everybody who loves taking pictures of abandoned places will have visited the http://www.abandoned-places.com/ site at least once.
One of these places described on that site is located in Aalst (Belgium), the abandoned factory of Bonneterie Bosteels – De Smeth.
This factory was very famous for its knitwear, better known as it’s product line ‘Du Parc’.

I’ve visited that location twice. The first time I took my flash with me, the second time I brought my tripod.
I’ve looked at the pictures on the abandoned-places site and compared them with my pictures. It seems that people stole and broke a lot of things, which makes this factory maybe not that exciting any more.
There was also a big fire in 2006, which burned down most of the offices on the first floor. Apart from that, taking pictures of objects and small corners turned out interesting.

You can enter the factory by crossing the gate, right of the main original entrance. If you want to access Du Parc from the city park, you can enter some small doors of the factory as well.
It’s best to stay out of the surrounding (abandoned) houses near the factory, as there are still people illegally occupying them.
The factory is really huge, it took us two times more than three hours to walk through it (of course including the necessary stops to take pictures).

In the center of the factory, there is a little garden with lots of bushes and trees. Through some of the windows, nature was already giving its best in infiltrating in the factory.
Most of the objects on the ground floor are stolen or gone, except for hundreds of cotton spindles, which are placed around the factory in a very weird way (you’ll notice it immediately when you’re there).
On the first floor, you can still see some knitwear, clothes, and the machines used for assembling and creating them. The first floor is much more interesting than the ground floor.

I’ve made a very small selection of the pictures taken in the factory, I hope you like them. If you have visited Du parc to take some pictures as well, I’m very interesting in seeing them, especially pictures taken before the fire in 2006.

The Palau itself had three different museums, of which I visited two:

• Museu de les arts decoratives: I’ll quote the description from a folder I received there: “A journey back through history using the arts of the object, mainly of a domestic nature, from Medieval times through to more contemporary expressions of industrial design. Chests, fans, chairs and other items serve to illustrate the trip”. As it’s located in the Palau itself, I could also see the official throne of the president and his bedroom (actually you weren’t allowed to go in there but some guy was renovating the place and left the door open, lucky me). The museum was also nice, you could see things on which we place the tag ‘retro’. Stuff from the ‘60 and ‘70 up to the ‘90. The picture displayed above has been taken in the Palau while visiting this museum.
• Museu de ceramica: I don’t care much about ceramic sculptures, one room was pretty nice where there was a lot of originality and creativity put in a sculpture, but the other things where just ceramic tiles.

You also have the Museu Textil i d’Indumentaria which showed art and techniques of fabric and clothing in western European culture. There was no time left for that museum because I needed to go back to the centre to have lunch with my girlfriend, plus I wanted to visit Camp Nou, which was about 500 meters from Palau Reial de Pedralbes.
The entrance fee for the two musea was 4.20 euros, which is totally worth the price.

I only passed Camp Nou and there were a lot of people waiting and running to a car when it came up from the underground parking lot. Apparantly a practive football match just ended and some guy from FC Barcelona was leaving. I don’t care about football so I went on with my trip

Even if you pay attention not buying food in some very commercial place, you still pay 15 euros for lunch for two persons, for two sandwiches and a pint. Spain is just not the place anymore where you can eat and drink a lot for not much money.

At 5PM I picked up my girlfriend and we went to Parc Guell. You can take the metro and stop on two different stations: Lesseps and Vallcarca. Google Maps (which also has the pedestrian feature now, not only route calculation for cars) showed that using Vallcarca is shorter and a nicer way to walk than Lesseps. It still approx. 1km but it’s the closest one near Parc Guell. Another reason for using this station is that the way up (there is a lot of climbing to do for visiting Parc Guell) has been made easy by placing automatic stairways, which comes in handy when it’s 30 degrees.
Entrance to Parc Guell is free, for the museum at Parc Guell you pay four euros. We didn’t go into the museum because the park closes at 7.45PM, so we only had two hours for walking in the park.
It’s chaos! I think half of the people in Barcelona was in that park. They all wanted to have a picture at the famous lizard of Gaudi (covered with trencadis-mosaic), instead of taking a picture of my girlfriend there, I took one of the crowd (below). Right of the lizard you’ll see a guy who was constantly whistling when a tourist was touching the sculpture too much.

In the evening, we went to the ‘Kanelen Creme’. It’s a small restaurant, advised by a collegue of my girlfriend, which serves delicious food. As some things need to stay in mistery, it’s up to you to find the real title of the restaurant here and look up the location of it If you do find the restaurant, I can surely advise you to eat there. It’s totally not expensive, and the food has been carefully prepared and served.

To end this day, we went to Placa Catalunya to see the fountain and the lights in the evening. Unfortunately, the fontains weren’t on. Oh well, still 4 days left…

I took this picture on a lousy sunday afternoon, in a small village near Aalter, Poeke. This castle is named after the village it’s located in: The Castle of Poeke .
It’s a castle which had many owners during the centuries. It’s originally built in the 16th century, but it’s shape as you see it on the picture dates from 1660. It has three entries, two at each side of the castle and one below the bridge, which you can see at the right side of this picture.

It’s built in the Barok styl, with it’s pink colour and it’s many white big windows, it’s one of the most beautiful castles in Belgium I’ve seen, and only a 30 minutes ride from my door The surrounding water gives a nice reflection on the castle. I took several other pictures that include this reflecting element, but I still have to find some time processing them.

Originally uploaded by plexie

And then the day came where my work is put to rest and I start to enjoy my ten days off!
The last days at my work were not the most productive ones. When a period of vacation comes closer, I want to finish as much tasks as possible. But then there was this beautiful sight from my window at work, which you can see on the picture. It turned out none of my tasks are finished at the end of the day

I love the winter, especially when it’s not a fag winter like we are used to in Belgium. That’s why my girlfriend, me and a couple booked a vacation to Kitzbühel, we’re going snowboarding! It’s the first time I’m doing this kind of vacations. But you can’t have an opinion unless you’ve tried it, so that’s what we’re going to do! Choosing snowboarding instead of skiing was an easy made choice because a friend of mine is snowboarding and I could lend her snowboard I’m pretty curious what this trip will bring, I’m looking forward to it and I’m pretty sure I’m going to enjoy it.

That’s it for today, and probably for this year ..

Merry Christmas and a fabulous beginning of 2008 !!