Ready to leave Belgium for Singapore

After 2 weeks in Belgium I'm ready to leave. The beer is wonderful, and the whole city parties every night, but I can't really join in as everyone speaks French and I just don't. Two weeks is not long enough to refresh and improve the awful french classes I had in high school. Still, I suppose I can manage to order a few beers here and there...The best part of Belgium so far is the festivals. Beer gardens and outdoor concerts everywhere! And no one gets in a fight, the beer is reasonable (2 euro) and there's almost no garbage generated. I'm not sure how they do it... It wouldn't work in Vancouver.

Compared to England, Belgium is cheap cheap cheap. We're planning on spending the last few nights in Bruges and Brussels just so we can say we've been right across Belgium (we're in Liege now).

Wednesday we fly to Singapore. A quick flight to London and then 4 hours until our flight to Singapore. It's a 13 hour flight! I hope it's not full...The flight to England was bad enough at almost 10 hours. We've booked into a shit hotel in Singapore (...it's an expensive city), but we're only staying 3 nights until we fly to Indonesia for a month of island hopping, sun tanning and Komodo dragon watching! Hopefully these blogs will get a bit more interesting from Asia.

From Egypt to Belgium with London in the middle

I'm very pleased to be out of Egypt and back in a European country. Many interesting sights in Egypt, but they're all spoiled by constantly being harassed by merchants and beggars. Mostly by merchants. You can't walk anywhere without having junk forced on you, and you can't actually buy the junk without a 20 minute argument. At the end of the "negotiation" you'd better have exact change too because there's no way you'll get change from anyone. If you're wallet is still in your pocket, then that's a bonus. Most of the temple guides are armed with machine guns and harass you for tips. It's awesome. Even the cruise ships are constantly harassed by vendors if they slow down. These guys pitch shirts in bags up 5 stories right into your arms before demanding a ridiculous price (e.g. 10 english pounds).

Despite the people, Egypt can be a beautiful place. And the ancient tombs and temples are really more amazing than you could imagine via photos.But I didn't mention that the temperature ranged from 47-51C during the day. Ridiculous. That's 136F.!!!