I ARRIVED IN ROTTERDAM (some weeks ago now), unfresh and unrested and slightly ill at ease with the drunks and skinheads who seemed to fill the main railway station at 6am- i was there to dump my backpack and had to wait til 7.

Actually the only reason i was in the town at all was to meet up with my friend Gigi from Peru (who i met there in 2001) for a samba festival that was on that day, and i had plenty of time to kill before they got there. I think i`d seen all i wanted to see by 8am, fell asleep briefly next to a bridge, brushed my teeth over the river and went to find an internet place and get out of the grey wet air.

The festival was fun, but i was mainly there to see Gigi, her mum Gloria visiting from Peru and Gigi's boyfriend, and catch up over a few Dutch beers and some blaring samba music. I was pretty tired and didn`t hang around late though- as i was going off to stay with Paulien in little Doetinchem, in Holland and somewhere near Germany.

Doetinchem is pretty small (though it still has a 'Coffeeshop', which i thought was a place only really found in Amsterdam) but a nice little place with a surprsingly busy town square on saturday night. I spent a nice couple of days there canoeing, walking her dog and paying a visit to Varsseveld aka 'Hiddinktown' and the local sports field where Guus grew up and plays, and still visits when he's around. On my last night there we hung out with the workers at an arts camp that she would also be working on the following week, before i went to see Gigi and Gloria again in Maastricht.

Maastricht is a very pretty town with a big wide river, an old centre, a local council that occasionally goes through your rubbish to make sure you have been recycling properly (and fines you if you haven't), and is one of the few parts of Holland that actually has hills. Just outside it is a network of cool limestone mines/quarries (started in the middle ages and occasionally used to hide from invaders) that we visited one day. I spent a few days here and included a little day trip to Aachen in Germany- Gigi is runs a pretty rigorous touring schedule! ha

So my whirlwind your of Holland ended here, and Gigi, Gloria and i got on the train (they were bound for Paris) and i continued on to Leuven, in BELGIUM.

I was staying here with Harmke, whom i had met in Granada in 2004. She has a nice little house outside the main part of town, but only a walk away- Leuven isn't all that big. On my first afternoon, on a walking tour with Harmke and her friend Laurence we saw pretty much all of it- an amazing town hall, a university the Americans had bombed during the war thinking they were already over Germany, and a Beguinage. The Beguinage (or Begijnhof) is a sort of women's shelter dating from the 13th century- women who did not want to be attached to men (and therefore be controlled by them) came to live in these little walled towns within towns and i think spend a lot of time praying- they were church-associated, but the women didnt become nuns. I also had my first (of quite a few) samplings of Belgian beer in Belgium.

Leuven is only about 30mins from Brussels, but i skipped over that for the time being and went to Antwerp, which was a pretty buzzing sort of place with a large population of Hasidic Jews and a blooming diamond cutting business. This was a pretty cool city, and like most of Europe had an attractive and bustling old town centre, though i was staying outside that in a new hostel which nevertheless had a faint odour of sewerage about it. Antwerp may or may not have been named after a dude who chopped off a giant's hand and threw it into the river (Antwerpen = Hand werpen = Hand throwing) and there are images and sculptures of hands all over the place. I have no interest in diamonds but went to the museum/workshop because it was free (the traveller's main interest is free things and beer and preferably free beer) and came out with a pretty healthy appreciation for them. My favourite place however was the 600m long ped-tunnel going under the river, which makes me sound like a bit of a barbarian given that i also visited Peter Paul Rubens' house. A fun and drunken night out was had with fellow stinky hostel guests before going on to Ghent.

Ghent was the nicest place yet in Belgium, with the biggest old town i'd seen which was pretty fun to navigate around (or stumble blindly around). There was a pretty cool castle near my hostel which had had some creative reconstruction during the romantic revivalist period of the 19th century or so, and lots of little bridges crossing the rivers which twined around the old town.

I spent a couple of days here with a day trip to Brugge also, which was also a beautiful town with an extensive old part and possibly even more tourists, mainly from Italy.

I went back to Leuven from here, and spent half a day checking Brussels out (if going there, unless you can read Dutch, don't bother witht he comic museum..) before being delivered to the airport by Harmke and Laurence to fly to my next destination...