D is for...
Dame Blanche
The most amazing dessert after a meal out - ever! Take vanilla ice cream (that is somehow better than any other vanilla ice cream), some whipped cream (one restaurant in Hoeilaart even brings you a cold crock full of whip cream so you can add as much as you want!), some chocolate shavings, and a little pot (or two if you're Curt!) of just melted and still warm Belgian chocolate...
Pour that warm chocolate over the top and watch it all melt together and then prepare to feast! Truly amazing!
DelHaize
From the special to the mundane - DelHaize is one of the grocery store chains in Belgium and this one is the one we went to a couple of times every week. You can see it's hours - 8:30 am until 8 pm (and that's Monday-Thursday and Saturday) and on Friday (Vrijday) an extra hour until 9 pm. It is closed on Sunday but that is not there. The parking lot holds 206 cars and the deck on top of the store holds 101 more. And Di is a shop that sells mainly toiletries that is next door.
Not sure why we have so many pictures of DelHaize, but we did spend a lot of time there!
Dogs!!!
Dogs, dogs everywhere! What an honored species in Belgium. These dogs were helping their owners with some begging...
Walking down the street in Hoeilaart...
Waiting outside a shop for their owners....
Walking in the park...
And at the restaurant on the Grand Place. One of our original shocks was learning that the dogs are welcome in the restaurants - the first time we were at our table and a family came in to sit next to us with their dog we were a bit (well, more than a bit!) surprised, but it came to be the norm after a while.
Drempels
The kids liked this word - drempels. These drempels are just down Vlierbeekberg from our house and we passed over them a lot! They are on the way to school, so it was a path often taken. Simply, they are speed bumps. Another sign just a bit down from here says vertrogen strippen, which literally translates to slow down to strip, so we always told the kids to start taking their clothes off when we passed by here!