We are in Antwerp. It's a beautiful city with many nice buildings. Most of them seem to be from the 1600s. We're a little sick with colds or something so have been taking it slowly the past couple days. Yesterday we went to see the house where Reubens lived. He was famouse and wealthy in his day and built an impressive mansion filled with carved wooden furniture, paintings by his contemporaries, and Roman marble heads. It has a courtyard with fountains and trees too.

Sorry that the photo uploads did not coincide with our blog entries. It's sometimes hard to find a good internet connection.

Some updates from the past week:

Sunday, September 12: Spent the days in Edinburgh, Scotland. It was nice and sunny. I'll get those pictures up eventually. We walked around the National Gallery, where we saw many paintings by such artists as Reubens, Rafael, Monet, Degas, VanGogh, DaVinci, etc. We checked into a hostel, which was in a nice 100-year-old downtown stone building. Kayla thought it was dirty, but I liked it. As it so happened, we were just in time to see a parade down the Royal Mile, the main street in the town. They had a bunch of bagpipers come out first, follwed by lots of uniformed people on horseback. I don't know what the parade was about. Someone mentioned the 500th anniversary of some battle, I think. After that we went in St. Giles Cathedral, which was a priority in Kayla's list. It's a very nice church. Next, we ate at a pub. I ordered the pie of the day. It turned out to not actually be a pie, but a cup of beef with a flaky biscuit on top. I've never seen anything so light and flaky, except maybe a hornet's nest.

Monday, September 13th: We left very early and took the train to Inverness. The scenery out the window was great, like Ireland again. It was a 3 1/2 hour ride. When we got there, we ate some Cornish pasties. They're like biscuits filled with hash and are good. We bought some tickets for a Loch Ness boat tour. It was rainy most of the time were were on the Loch. We did not see the monster. I did see a log and a rock in the water though, so that might be close enough. We also saw the castle ruins on the loch, which are nice. From Inverness we took an 11-hour overnight train ride to London.

Tuesday, September 14th: We got to London at 7:45 am. We soon discovered it's way too large to see on foot; you either have to take a bus or the subway to get anywhere. Not knowing how to use either, we tried seeing it on foot anyway and kept getting lost. We both hated London-- just too big and crowded. We did, however, see parts of the British museum, including the Egyptian rooms, the Parthenon rooms, Islamic rooms, and some Roman rooms. We had planned on seeing Stonehenge, but couldn't find a way to get there. We did, howvever, want to leave London as soon as possible. We got on a train to Brussels, Belgium and spent the night there in a small, run-down hotel room.