Merry Christmas - Joyeux Noel - Vrolijke Kerst !!

Bonjour everyone and we hope this post finds you having Happy Holidays with all the joy you can handle!! We are actually spending the holiday weekend in Brussels. We have two other American couples who we will be having Christmas dinner with in Brussels - so we will have others to celebrate with! Otherwise we are just enjoying the down time and waiting for our next visitors! As of the Monday after Christmas we will be hosting several friends and our sister Jessie for 12 days at our place! We are so glad to have the company and are looking forward to showing more friends and family around some of Europe!

Last weekend we got the chance to experience Budapest, Hungary. One of Joe's GE work mates is living in Budapest for his 6-month rotation of the same program Joe is a part of here in Brussels. He was so generous to offer us to stay with him and he also showed us around. So it was great not to have the stress of being a tourist for once. Especially since the hungarian language was so different from anything we have experienced as of yet. We thought Dutch was strange, but I must say Hungarian was a huge challenge and was way beyond my capabilities!

We had a great time seeing the sights and enjoying the Christmas season in their festive markets. Pictures of our tour of Budapest are at the following link:

http://www.kodakgallery.com/ShareLandingSignin.jsp?Uc=d3mrqfc.10kth32g&Uy=yjpdji&Upost_signin=Slideshow.jsp%3Fmode%3Dfromshare&Ux=0&UV=595164734118_13729584608

We are wishing you a wonderful holiday season and a Happy and Healthy New Year!!!

Jackie and Joe

Hello there!

Wow - look at me getting all caught up with our photo travel log this week! I am sure everyone is too busy this week with the holidays and all, but I had to get caught up before it got out of control! Plus, Joe is super busy with work this week, which has left me with a lot of time on my hands.
Pretty much right after we returned from Barcelona, Uncle Scott and Aunt Mary arrived in Brussels for a visit. We spent one day in Brussels touring the Christmas Markets and getting caught up - which was so nice. Then, we rented a car and headed to the wine country of France. We checked out the Burgundy and Champagne regions. Needless to say we had great fun with amazing food, wine, and great company. Having known very little about wine, this was a great opportunity to learn from the French how it's done. The wine tours were similar to the beer tours we are accustomed to, living in Milwaukee and all, oh yeah... except some of them only spoke french! We made it through the barrier and had a great time getting such great hospitality from the wineries and managed to get a lot less intimidated by those french wine labels. We started our tour in the Burgundy wine region, which is southeast of Paris, and finished off the tour in the Champagne region. So, not only did we learn about wine, we learned about the champagne process as well. And I think the most amazing part of the whole week was that none of us ever got a headache or hangover! I think that is attributed to all the cheese and gourmet meals we devoured along the way! You can check out the photos at the following link:

http://www.kodakgallery.com/ShareLandingSignin.jsp?Uc=d3mrqfc.18gk2cmw&Uy=d0069t&Upost_signin=Slideshow.jsp%3Fmode%3Dfromshare&Ux=0

Well, with the holidays practically here, we are thinking of all of you a lot. We will have our first Christmas without our families, which will be strange, but we only have to make it until the day after, since Jessie arrives in Brussels on Monday and four other friends arrive on Tuesday to celebrate the New Years holiday with us in western Europe! We are really looking forward to it all!
We wish you all a wonderful holiday season full of health, happiness, and lots of love!
Jackie and Joe

Bonjour!!

Our apologies, as it has been way too long since we have updated our site. It was not due to a lack of interesting events that we haven't been posting. We have been having some technical difficulty getting our photo website to work, but finally got it running - whew!
The weekend following our Thanksgiving visit with the Dorband family we headed for a weekend in Barcelona, Spain. We had a great time and truly enjoyed our stay there. It was a nice change after the snowy and cold week we had in Belgium. The temperatures were at 60 for a high and in the 40's for a low - sooo nice. The weekend (as with all of our trips) flew by and we caught as much of the city on photo as possible. The most fascinating aspect of the city was with their most famous modernist architect, Antonio Gaudi. Not knowing the origin of the word "gaudy" we were convinced that the word originates from his name. As you will see, his architecture is in fact - gaudy! However, we did some research upon our return to find that this thinking is a common fallacy, as the word gaudy originated in the 16th century, well before Gaudi's time - 19th century.

You can view the photos at the following website.
http://www.kodakgallery.com/ShareLandingSignin.jsp?Uc=d3mrqfc.qy9r1yc&Uy=-bjfsrg&Upost_signin=Slideshow.jsp%3Fmode%3Dfromshare&Ux=0&UV=525537242719_68499583608

We hope this message finds everyone well and not too overwhelmed with the holidays quickly approaching!

Au revoir!
Jackie and Joe