Week 32-33 November 16-29

We have gotten behind again in our blogging.  It is a busy time of year with preparing for our level 1 Dutch finals, Christmas parties, and the full release of all 10 seasons of  "Friends" on Belgian Netflix. The last weeks of November were a blur.  Molly gracefully and beautifully aged one year.  Not really in celebration of her birth, but with coincidental timing, we were invited by some friends to travel to Ghent to see the "Six Days of Ghent" track cycling finals.  Having never seen track racing in person, we were naturally intrigued.

The "Six Days of Ghent" is a long-standing event held in the Ghent velodrome each year. Professional cycling teams of two compete in various races over six days to accumulate the highest point totals.  We attended the sixth, final, and most exciting day of the competition.  We arrived on scene around 11am.  Naturally, your ticket entitled you to a free Belgian beer.  The racing had already started with the finals for the junior level.  Having never tried to understand the finer points of track cycling before, we were extremely confused.  However, after about 30 minutes we started to get a basic understanding.  About 10 teams of 2 were racing around the track for 60 laps.  At any given moment, a team of would have one active racer, and his teammate would be leisurely biking around the top/outside lanes of the velodrome.  When the active racer would get tired, he would somehow signal his partner.  The partner would swoop in, and the active racer would officially change places by grabbing hands and sling-shotting his partner forward into the race.  It is a pretty wild thing to see.  The juniors finished their race and crowned a champion.  Then the female riders held several events to close out their six days.  It was at this moment we began to understand what makes track cycling so exciting.  The race we had watched with the juniors, was only one format of racing.  Across the six days, the riders competed in various types of formats, each worth differing amounts of points.  The race we had witnessed was the hardest format to follow as all teams were competing and the leaders often lapped the back of the pack, making it difficult to tell who was winning.  Once the women started going, we starting seeing different formats of races, and we really started to understand the competition and really started to get into it.  After the women crowned a champ, the big boys came out.  The top 5-8 teams competing in the event were legitimate professionals, with many of them having won gold medals in their discipline.  We got to see these racers compete in about 8 different formats.  Our favorite races were the most simple, where the teams of two would ride the track alone for 3 laps to see which team could get the fastest time.  As they day wore one, 3 teams started to pull ahead of the rest, and the crowd at the velodrome reached capacity.  Two of the top three teams were Belgians, and the top team had a rider from Ghent.  Needless to say, the old barn started getting pretty noisy.  It all came down to the final race, which was in the crazy-all-teams-racing-at-the-same-time format.  Thankfully, our afternoon at the track had given us enough knowledge to follow what was happening, and we were right with the crowd on our feet when the local team crossed the finish line for the win!  

It was truly a great sporting and cultural experience.  These are the kind of random local experiences that we really treasure getting to be a part of.

Velodrome riders

The full velodrome

We tried a lap.  It was HARD.  Molly with 2 friends.

The next week, while those lazy Americans were off work AGAIN for another random holiday on the fourth Thursday in November, we were hard at work.  However, we were graciously invited by a fellow expat to a Thanksgiving celebration on Saturday.  We were really grateful to get to spend a pleasant evening with fellow Americans (and Belgians!) and to get a delicious taste of home (turkey is a hard thing to come by here).