One Day in Belgium

 

The video is supposed to be at the END of this blog entry, but I just can't get it there.  Save it until the end, please!  : )

So, we're not in the Philippines anymore.  We left there on June 15, as our mission ended.  Hopefully, there will still be more blog entries about our experiences in the Philippines in the future, but we are now in Germany, on our way home - - the long way home, visiting all our children along the way.  We are currently visiting with our daughter, Sarah, and her family in Badem.

Yesterday, Jed drove us to Belgium, about 2.5 hours away, to visit a museum there.  Along the way, we saw lots of beautiful countryside.  I've been charmed by the rolling hills here, farmlands and woodlands, with little villages tucked into the valleys here and there.

While, in Germany, we've mostly seen houses, churches, and shops built of brick or concrete, plastered over and painted, in Belgium we saw many built of rough stone.

An occassional half-timbered style house

Many of the cattle we saw were strangely pig-like in appearance.

Eventually, we arrived at the beautiful little city of Bastogne and found the war museum there.

This is a beautiful, modern museum with multi-media displays depicting World Wars I and II.  It gave a lot of background information regarding political and societal events leading up to these wars, and how they affected the area.  The experiences of four real individuals were featured throughout:  Emil, a 12-year-old Belgian boy from Bastogne; Matilde, his young school teacher, who joined the local resistance movement; Hans, a young German soldier; and Robert, a young American soldier from Georgia.  We spent about four hours in this museum, having little awareness of the passing of time, it was all so intriguing.  For me, it was always easy to think of these wars as being so very far away, but, being in the very locations of some of the fiercest warfare - - Bastogne was the site of the Battle of the Bulge - - and hearing of the personal experiences of these four people and others made it all much more real.

I didn't take many photos inside the museum but I knew some of my grandsons would like to see some tanks.

American Sherman Tank

German Panzer Tank

German "Kübelwagon"

Most of the displays and audio/video recordings were available in several languages, though some were only in French.  They weren't too hard to figure out, though.

The only one I had to look up was "vivres" - - food!

Women sewing parachutes of various colors, for various air-drop purposes.

Outside the museum is a large monument to the American effort in WWII.  It's a beautiful star-shaped structure with the names of all fifty of the United States.

This is half of one of ten such panels, which honored the contributions made by the American armed forces in the liberation of Bastogne in the Battle of the Bulge.  I wish I'd had time to read it all!  How wonderful to witness the deep gratitude of these people for the sacrifices of so many of our servicemen and women.

From the upper deck, you can see that the museum itself is also star-shaped.

Trying to imagine the horrible battle going on in this exact, very pastoral location.

 

Before we headed home, we stopped at a grocery store in Bastogne and bought bread, cheese, grapes, eclairs, and chocolate, which got us home quite nicely.  : )

Many thanks to our son-in-law, Jed, who gave us his whole day for this experience.  

NOW, you can go back to the top and watch the video!  Enjoy!

Oh, and we passed this along the way home.  : )