Mechelen

Saturday, 11 September 2010

What a pleasure to be woken up by the birds in the forest of “Landgoed Roesendael’. From our bed we look straight onto the trees and the greenery, almost tempting to take the day off and just relax. Instead we cycle the whole seven kilometers into the town of Mechelen to discover that today is the annual junk market day and we cruise around browsing the 99% junk and the 1% probably useful stuff, I even bought a cycling map of Brabant for fifty cents and later discover that it only covers a very small fraction of our route, oh well.

We head for the market and the tourist info, get a map of the town with a walkabout route, chain the bikes to a drainpipe and off we go, first stop the imposing cathedral:

It is quite baroque inside, richly decorated with lots of curls and twirls, not quite our taste, and happen to run into a Dutch tourist who has made it his hobby to explore cathedrals and is only too happy to find and audience to listen to his expertise.

We escape and follow the route along the many historic houses, very picturesque and find these decorations quite amusing, paradise lost

Along one of the canals we also find this poster with this poem, quite applicable to our journey we thought:

It says in a nice way that you have to get off your arse to see and achieve something.

We continue our stroll, I have to pose on a bridge across a canal with a barge in the background which is converted into a restaurant, did I say before that Belgium’s favourite pastime is eating and drinking?

When we get back to the hut it is still a beautiful evening and we go for a walk to explore the surroundings of Roosendael and have a look at the chateau:

Along the way through the forest we also see many mushrooms including this one which we didn’t think would be wise to eat:

Roosendael also has an education centre and lo and behold, there is wifi there so I manage to get online for a few minutes to check mail. Alas, I have been too lazy to blog so I have nothing to post.