Life is good.

Ok this is getting to be a very sorry disclaimer on my last few entries, but I truly do not like to just write on my blog for the sake of writting. Lately I have not found the time or the energy to write but I am ready again. I must thank my Grandma Harmelink (who's birthday it is today) for letting me know that it has almost been a week again since the last post.



Thursday we decided to visit the American Store and pick up some stuff. One thing that had sounded great to both my roommate and myself was some good ol' American Root Beer. Something that the Belgian grocery stores do not carry. My roommate is also a fan of BBQ sauce and so we were crushed to find out that the store was closed on that day. Determined we decided to return the next day. We went back and brought our little host brothers as well. The store is about the size of a small convient store, but has quite narrow asiles and when the two little ones are together they can create some commotion. I think we spent most of our time telling the two to stop running, to put stuff back and picking up bags of chips as the littlest one ran right into an endcap trying to avoid a kick from his brother. Oh well we got our Rootbeer and some other things. We were set to have mussles for dinner and we asked our host mother to pick up some vanilla icecream becuase we were going to introduce our family to Rootbeer floats. Dinner was great, Ingrid's sister and her husband joined us and afterwords Ryan and myself got dessert ready. But to our surprise it was not a big hit. They were not so keen on the taste of Rootbeer but did admit that they enjoyed it better as the icecream melted and mixed. I ended up eating double the dessert as to help finish Junior's as he only took one quick taste of Rootbeer and basically spit the stuff back out. I think we would have had more success of pouring a healthy dose of Stella over the ice cream. We played some board games out in the backyard after and had a enjoyable night.

Saturday was the big day as we had a full day planned. First it was to go watch some of the other teams play, then a BBQ at one of our teammates parents, and then my head coach's bachelor party. Everything went smooth. We saw a few innings of the game, had a wonderful time over at the BBQ and the Bachelor party was great. It was a small group of people and it really was not much different than most nights but it was a bit more organized and everything ran smoothly.

Sunday we went and watched more baseball and saw a game only last five innings but in those five innings the American throwing threw a perfect game and the score ended up being 20-0. My two older host brothers were away for the past week because of the Junior European Qualifier and they arrived home victorious as they swept the tournament and walking through every game except for the last in which they beat Great Britan 6-5.

Today was quite fun. My roommate and I got up and took a train down to the French part of the country to SHAPE airforce base. One of our teammates dad is in the U.S. Military and asked us to come see the base. We got to get a chance at some American food, products as well. I had Burger King for lunch. Went shopping in the grocery store on base and bought crunchy peanut butter, kool-aid, cream soda, sour cream and chedder chips, really all fattening things that you cannont find in the Belgian supermarkets. I also got 4 family packs of Pop Tarts, my host family loves them but cannot get them here so I stocked up for them. Oh yeah at all the stores there you can use the American Dollar and everything is so cheap, no tax! I got some stick deodorant and Crest toothpaste, two items that I have not found here yet. I actually was the happiest about the last items. It was cool to see the base.