So I just wanted to let everyone know what is happening right up to date even though the all important pictures are still to come on several past day entries.  We are enjoying hot dry weather here in Leuven, it is currently 1:30 AM Thursday and I am still feeling sweaty as I type this in our room.  There is a huge music festival going on in Leuven this weekend and I stood in a 1/2 hour line up this evening just to get to the cash register of a smallish convenience store.  It was fun because there were so many young people in the store buying supplies for the next day of partying and attending the festival.  I talked with several who were next to me in line who were from Ireland, just because of the festival.  They all said they were there because of the great line up (headliners) that the festival had booked.  They certainly did get the line up all right.  This morning (I mean yesterday morning, Wednesday) when I walked through the big underground tunnel that is under the train station there was a line up of hundreds of young people all with back packs and what not, apparently lined up for one of the main venues.  I could probably see a thousand kids in the line up and I couldn't even see where it went to as it went up and out of the underground area.

Our first night in Leuven was also a hoot as Belgium was playing Japan in the second round of the World Cup.  The main downtown area where there were large open market square type streets had large TV's set up every 20 or 30 meters and large crowds were gathering  for the game.  We headed to the hotel and I watched it on TV here.  The Belgium team won the game in the dying seconds of added time at the end of the game.

I have been making some repairs and maintenance on the bicycles and our electronics equipment, and I got the laundry done today as well.  Erika is enjoying the University class but she has a lot of reading to do every night.  A lot of other info will be forthcoming in the details of the blog that I am still working on.

I forgot to mention that on our second day in Leuven (Tuesday) we were invited to Rob and Vicki Hart's home for dinner.  We met them at our church services on Sunday and discovered they are from Victoria, we know their son and daughter in law quite well (because they are in our church congregation in Victoria) and their youngest daughter who is currently with them for the summer is a UVIC student who knows our daughter Emily quite well.  They were very good to us and came and picked us up from our hotel in Leuven to take us to their home in Brussels, fed us a great meal, and then after a good deal of visiting, returned us to our hotel.  Rob's work in the Canadian forces as well as their experiences in church leadership here in Belgium made for a lot of very interesting conversation.  In a matter of weeks they will be posted to Korea.  We hope to see them when they come to Victoria to visit their kids this fall.

Now today, Erika set off for another day of classes at the university and with a big dinner at the end of the day I don't know when I will see her this evening.  I spent the day getting all our stuff moved across the street from the hotel to the hostel that we are staying in tonight.  I also spent a lot of time on this journal.

I tried a trick that Steve (of the grampies) suggested and it worked really well.  Instead of uploading the pictures my camera takes at 4000 x 3000 pixels, I lower the resolution to 1000 x 750 before uploading them.

Thanks Steve!  I looked for and found a free utility for resizing a whole group of pictures at once, it is called Image Resizer for Windows and it is hosted on Github.  It works really well as a right click drop down choice in Explorer.  Anyway, for those who care, I just make a copy of my original pictures in a separate directory, resize them all at once which just takes a few seconds, then when it comes time to upload them they upload at the rate of one or two seconds each.

So hurrah hurrah! the bottom line is that I have added a lot of pictures and commentary starting with Globe trotters go to Haarlem and the next day when we head to Delft and camp.

Now I have to plan where we are going tomorrow after Erika's class is over...