Hitchhiking and trains

It's almost 4 pm right now and so far I've only been busy with Malawi-things. My two friends and I had a meeting today at the office of the organisation Ex-change, in Hilversum. They keep contact with a christian organisation in Malawi, that will help us once we're there. Most time today was lost by traveling by train; we were at the office for an hour. We discussed about the assignment(s), financial aspects and we listened to the stories about Africa and Malawi. As far as I know right now we (Veerle, Leonie and I) will create an inventory of the current agricultural situation in Malawi. It'll contain a lot of traveling in the area surounding the capital, but also one or more weeks to the North and one or more to the South. That's an unexpected way to see a lot of the country! And Malawi has a length somewhere around 1000 km....
By the way, I went to Belgium last weekend with my bible study group, from the student association. We got to know eachother a lot better and we had a lot of fun! Five people went by car and four went hitchhiking. Henri and I went hitchhiking and started early afternoon with the sun shining down at us. It took a lot of time to get out of the busiest part of the Netherlands (de Randstad), but we arrived at 11 pm in Stavelot/Somagne after six lifts. And, against all odds, we found two guys that rented a house very close to ours, so they dropped us of at the door. The one we rented was one out of four, and that was the whole village! It was in the French speaking part of Belgium, in the Ardennes, with a hilly landscape filled with bush, agriculture and nice villages. We visited the highest natural waterfall in Belgium on Saturday (nine people in one poor car), we walked for some hours, played games, kept the fire burning (it was pretty cold and the very old house was isolated badly/not, and fire = fun), visited a Roman Catholic, French church on Sunday and played more games (it rained all day). Henri and I got sick of being inside and left for a too long walk, we didn't want to turn around, so we left the path and hiked through fields and bush till we found another trail. But it got dark and we ended up walking through a very dark night, without lights on the most slippery trails/bush you've ever seen! We lost the trail again in the dark, so we had to trust our feelings and went up hil straight through the bush. All of the sudden we heard a big 'snap', but the animal (or something like it, we weren't able to see a thing) didn't run away... After some seconds, we decided to go left, in case it was one of those wild pigs...
We went to bed pretty early on Sunday, to be able to start hitchhiking on Monday while everybody was driving to work etc. We were in Maastricht (the Netherlands) a bit after 11 am in three lifts, from where we were able to use the warm train for free, because we're students. Pictures will be there soon, now I'm first gonna do some studying, bible study tonight and more studying at night afterworths; I have to study sómetimes...