Category: Life

Due to popular request. All other visitors, have fun with the muppets
Curious animals, those chickens.

Watch the story video!

It all starts with one interested chicken, looking for something nice to eat. As soon as it notices you’ve got something worthwile, more chickens show interest.

“Gimme gimme” - roughly translated: pôk poak pôk.
So I try to be a smartass and run around the corner to watch them go at the back of the shed.
Guess what happens, once a chicken has shown even some interest in you or your “stuff”, they are virtually unstoppable.

“Ha!” I think, watching those primitive animals behind the glass of the garden shed door.
One of the chickens is smart enough to fly against the glass to draw my attention. *bang*. *bang*.
So I open the door. The unstoppable chickens win some territory by immediately entering the shed.
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The famed hotel-restaurant “Scholteshof“, located in Kermt (near Hasselt), Belgium, has been abandoned for a few years. The domain is very large and used to contain a tennis court, multiple ponds and multiple surrounding gardens, two restaurants and the main hotel itself. Not much of these things are left nowadays, except the gardens, who are becoming one big wood. It is funny to research the place on for example google, and find pictures and videos from the past. It looked amazing back then. Many famous people used to visit and stay here, and some even came by helicopter. Take for example this link. It contains nice a looking video of how the hotel used to be, and some information about the food:

Roger Souvereyns, a collector and a man of sense converts an old farm dating back to 1742, an ancient dwelling of the Bailiff of Steevoort, into a peace haven where gastronomy and lifestyle inter-relate quite harmoniously. In the eleven-hectare estate with kitchen gardens, vineyards and herbariums, all of which provide directly the cooking with the first-quality products, the Scholteshof surrounds you, at any time, of superb art objects, which intermingle with the valuable precious antique furniture, the goal of which is to offer a varied and cosy setting. Let’s discover his cooking all quality-based on specific products so as to find out the authentic tastes, while preserving the natural flavours and aromas, all this thanks to simple preparations, such as these fillets sautés, truffles and goose-liver in carpaccio, or these roe-buck undercuts, pear in red wine and beetroots.

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Yesterday I stumbled upon a really interesting website, urbex.nl. The website is dedicated to ‘urban exploring’, something I honestly never heard of before. Urbex activists explore abandoned places all over the globe: old castles, to-be-demolished industry zones, abandoned train stations and much more. This “hobby” raised my attention especially after looking at some pictures on that website (especially the residential ones, like the ‘ghost’ castles in Namur). Wouldn’t it be great to explore such a huge place, without anybody interrupting your adventure?

So I had to try it myself. There is a little abandoned farm just over the bridge where I live, approx. 1km from my home. I used to cycle in that area when I went to high school, and the building always got my attention when passing by. I decided to grab some quick pictures, hopefully without disturbing any temporary inhabitants. The result? The photo on the left.

As you can see, there are fences in front of the building, recently added, I suspect to keep falling parts off the road. A lot of rich people (meaning huge penthouses) live in that area, they wouldn’t like to have a little scratch on their big Mercedes SUV, wouldn’t they. This farm was built near (but now you can say in) the woods, not in the residential area. Problem: entering the building without damaging anything. The fences are closed, climbing would raise suspicion (and might tear my clothes, heh). Luckily I found a way through the trees at the back of the house.

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