My Day: Doctor's, Motorpacing, Coffee, Sangria, Voetbal

It started off with a trip to the doctor for an appointment at 8-friggin-a.m.. What a shock. I never wake up before 9am so needless to day it was a trying morning - trying to wake up was how i spent the first two hours after the alarm sounded. Luckily, Jonas was kind enough to drive me there so I at least was able to sleep in until a whopping 7am.

Thanks to Jonas, our hour of waiting time in the reception area was entertaining. As we sat there in a semiconscious state, Jonas asked me for a piece of gum. I handed him a cardboard gum packet then immediately went back sleep mode. Twenty seconds later, Jonas turned to me, looking quite perturbed, and said, "I think there is something wrong with this gum. I think it went bad." He opened his mouth and revealed not a piece of gum but a chewed vitamin C tablet - the huge 1000 mg size. Clearly he was still sleeping too. I totally forgot that i put some vitamin C in my gum packet for emergencies. Oops.

As he quickly ran to the toilet to spit out the partly digested tablet, I sat in the waiting room, doubled over, in absolute stitches. But since i was in a doctor's office, I sat there doing a poor rendition of silent film laughing while tears streamed down my face. When Jonas came back a minute later and declared that he just realized he could have simply swallowed the vitamin, I started silent laughing again. And once Jonas got over himself, he joined in. We must have looked so idiotic to the other patients as we howled in silence so hard our shirts were soaked with tears.

Once home, I had a strong cup of french press coffee with a homemade hummus tortilla wrap, switched into cycling clothes and headed back out for motorpacing. Usually i don't particularly enjoy these sessions but today was different. It was the first time where i actually felt comfortable riding at 55kph behind the scooter - yet another triumph in my slow recovery process.

At one of the recent races, I was told that i had won the "World's Whitest Legs in the Peloton" recognition so on the ride today i dared to do something about it - i left the house with bare legs. Yep, no SPF30 for me. And whaddya know...I got a slight tan line. Not sure if i will have the courage to do that a few more times but we'll see.

After elevating the legs, eating, and semi-napping, I headed back out for downtown Leuven to meet up with Johan for our usual Tuesday night out (moved to Wednesday this week to accomodate my motorpacing prep.) To get the evening started we had a coffee at Cafe Onan on Parijsstraat. It's the only place in all of Leuven that has really rich coffee. They serve it with dark chocolate which makes it a real treat.

Then we had dinner at a nondescript Italian restaurant on Muntstraat (Leuven's version of restaurant row.) To finish up the evening, we headed over to Grote Markt to sit outside and enjoy the great weather we've been having here. While we were sipping/eating Sangrias, we watched the European Championships soccer game on TV. Many of the cafes had extra large tv screens set up outside so the cafe-goers can enjoy the game. Great way to get people to choose your cafe over the twenty others on the square.

At the end of the evening, as Johan and I waited at the bus stop, we had our first flemish (Belgian version of Dutch language) conversation. I've known him for over five years and we've never spoken a single word in flemish to each other. (All in flemish) he said "hello christine," I said "hello Johan." He then said, "Have you had enough sangria?" My reply was, "Never." Although I only uttered two words in dutch to him, his impression was enormous. He said, "Once you can joke in a foreign language, you've mastered it." Nice compliment even though I knew it was far from the truth in this case. Heck, if only he knew how thrilled I was that he picked the one question I can understand.

p.s. You may notice that no exclamation points were used in the writing of this post. Chr15 and E.C. Chamberlain will be proud.