Protest in Antwerp

27 april 2010

Lots of excitement last night. After work we went for a couple of drinks to celebrate Fluers birthday but she had to go pretty early to catch her train. As we were walking out of the bar into the grote markt police cars rushed past us to join the 10 others already parked in the square. At this point it was just Bert, Vincent, Elise and myself there. Turns out there was a protest going on - people were upset that they had sound level restrictions placed on them which limited their... er... partying capacity. In any case, we rushed up to the office to get a video camera and microphone, then rushed straight back down to the scene of the action. The police had formed a line and everything, a few people got arrested, presumably for being drunk enough to actually attack the police. Oh yes, lets not forget the alcohol; I've never seen the streets so full of bottles. To the city's credit, the clean up began as soon as the protest ended. Which I can only guess is about the time when most of the protesters could no longer resist the tempting prospect of anything nice and greasy to eat frrom the conveniently placed local frituur (french fry place) or kebab outlet. It was really exciting - because the others had 'press cards', it meant we could get right up to the police without being ushered away all the time (although they didn't let anyone through the police line.) It was a really cool experience. Part of what made it so great was the fact that for us it was very spontaneous.

After the protest cleared we went back up to the office to begin editing and writing an article - they wanted to get it publicised as quickly as possible. As I couldn't really help too much with either of those things I appointed myself the food runner and went to grab food plus cigarettes etc. We were at the office until about 12 doing all that until Vincent, Bert and I made out way to Berts place.
And for your viewing pleasure, (for those of you who don't know Dutch, just look at the pretty video and listen to the music), this is what happened last night. Check it out, its pretty cool.

So that was my monday. Lets be honest, they don't usually come much better than that. The weekend consisted essentially of me being at the AFS mid-stay camp. Which was actually pretty good. Was nice to hang out with the other volunteers and get to know them better. Plus it gave us a good opportunity to plan some stuff for the next few weeks. We relived our youthful days of staying up late, wondering around in the dark, sacrificing demonspawn, that kinda thing. Speaking of demon spawn, at the place we were staying at (which had massive grounds), there was also a theatre group. Late at night as a dramatic exercise/just for fun, a few of them dressed up like cult members with dark capes and white masks and went around scaring the hell out of the rest of their group - which were wondering around in small groups in the dark. When we were wamling around we stumbled across three of these would-be-killers dancing around three lit candles on the ground. Now that was creepy. Anyway we survived.
During the day we played some stupid but fun games in between doing workshops on our community service projects and our host families etc. Which pretty much sums up my weekend.

Don't have time to write anything too crazy today as I only started this 25 mins before work finishes... Which was 10 mins ago. 

Planning on going to Maastricht (think thats how you spell it) with Monica, Julie and Lisa this weekend - probably just for the sunday though. Which meansme and Monica will have to travel to Julie's hometown on saturday night so we can all leave early in the morning.

Ok, well thats it for now people, I shall return... Probably.

Cheers