joyride :)

literally, mikado afternoon :D red brick houses, garden gnomes, occassional chickens and turkeys and goats and cows, rolling green fields, hedges, flower gardens, large glass windows, donkeys!, green doors with knobs in the middle (bag end?), mailboxes by the road, cats sunbathing on windowsills..i could live here!

we spent an afternoon at the photonics innovation center in tollembeek, a quaint little town at the belgian countryside.

b-phot innovation center at Vollezelestraat 46, 1755 Gooik

to get to the b-phot center we would have needed to take the bus from the train station. unfortunately (and fortunately for me :D), the bus only comes once every hour so in order to save time the professor and his assistant picked us up from the station. it was a wonderful 10-minute ride through a beautiful residential area and i was so happy it wasn't cloudy at all the day we went there. sunny or not, though, i am a weakling for joyrides ^^,

prof. jurgen van erps behind the wheel

bunny suits!

the photonics center is right smack in the middle of a residential area and a popular go-to site for cyclists. you do get to wonder why they chose to install their equipment so far from the city and the answer is (1) real estate in brussels is terribly expensive. they needed to build the lab from the foundations itself because it needs to match the specifications of the instruments to be installed. (2) the need to minimize vibrations as the equipments, such as the diamond tooling machine, are sensitive to vibrations. so the laboratory needs to be far from any metro or train stations.

sundo #1

waiting for the train ride back to brussels

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