Belgium may be small but she is a complex country. There is the great division between the Dutch speaking Flanders and the French speaking Wallonia. Then there are regional differences and dialects within those areas. And then there is Brussels which is different again. The one thing they seem to unite on is that they are not French and not Dutch!
Melde drove us quite a bit, and I for one was grateful. Belgium has an extensive network of motorways and we were told they can become quite congested during the week. Our first trip to Leuven was fairly straightforward but later drives to Gent and Ieper were much busier- lots of lane changing, vehicles travelling quite close to each other at pretty high speeds and what seemed like very complicated interchanges outside towns and cities.
Leuven is gorgeous. This is the city where Lachlan spent six months in 2014 and where he and Melde met. Melde went to the ancient university here and still works here and the hour and a half drive from Aalst to Leuven is her commute- so a fairly solid one. Leuven therefore has a special place in their lives.
The town is predominantly a university town- a bit like the Oxford of Belgium. Our first stop was the university library. This building was destroyed in the early months of world war 1, along with the town and many other parts of Belgium. Because it was a university library, this was seen as a particularly vile act of vandalism by the Germans and made them enemies of civilization.
After the war, strenuous fund raising was undertaken by American interests and the library was rebuilt and restocked. The library was again largely destroyed by fire in the Second World War and again rebuilt. In 1968 the university split into a French speaking uni and a Dutch speaking one. This also involved splitting the collection. This was done on the basis of alternate shelf marks!
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