A day off

A free ticket, first class for one day? Sounds good to me.

The NMBS (railwayservice here in belgium) had given all its customers, who had a subscription in a certain period this year, a first class free ticket for one day any trajectory. I was lucky enough to have had a 3 month subscription in that period, so I got one of them golden tickets. Most people will probably use it for a long trip to the sea and back. But I figured, lets exploit this as best as I can.. legaly.

So I planned a small trip through Belgium. Around 5:45 in the morning I took the bus to my first train station. Londerzeel. Lovely place, and very "classic" in the way of being a station. From there I took my first train, which went to the coast. "Zeebrugge strand". The beach was alright and the temperature soothing. But the town itself had, besides some fun architecture, nothing to offer. I only noticed one shop where you could buy something.

On the beach itself I saw a few people measuring, what I imagine to be the amount of sand available. They were really into it, placing little sticks inthe sand with markers on it. They even had a cool golfcart sorta car to drive them all over the place.

A bit further there was one lost shoe half covered in sand, waiting for a new master. Though I fear it might get lost under all the sand. Before I left the beach I grabbed a small sample of sand and put it in a plastic transparent "Hello Kitty" container. My next stop was the complete opposite side of the country, about 150 kilometers in land.

Or as we like to call it "d'ardennen". Though I only went as far as "Namen/Namur" Which on itself was a nice place, lovely station and an ok town. On this journey I tried to pick up two "geocachings" on the road. One was in Namen, but I didn't find it at first and a lack of time prevented me from searching thoroughly.


After that the next train brought me to Liège-guillemins. Let me tell you, that station was the best I have ever seen in my life and might as well be the best I'll ever see. It was so futuristich, modern, smooth, light, open and just plain amazing. If I could I'd take it home with me and place it in my garden I would.

In the background of the photo you might see two big constructions. Those are monuments for victims of war, probably the world wars. I didn't really check the history. But that was the location for my second geocach I was checking out today. Luckily I was able to find this one.

But the treasure itself wasn't the biggest fun, the real awesomenes came from the location itself. Right now they've started to renovatie the monument, but most of the area is still covered in weeds, plants and general "I look post apocalyptic". Going from a hypermodern trainstation to regular city, to postapocalyptic scenery made the entire trip worth while.

After forcing myself to leave this awesome place I continued my journey. I went to Hasselt, which wasn't that spectacular for me, continued to Leuven and then to Veltem where I crashed at Lieven and Carla's place. Which was togheter with some food, entertainment, a nice drink and company a nice ending of the day.

In the end I travelled all through the country in first class, saw an amazing bunch of cool locations and had a good time, all for free thanks to that special trainticket.

PS: If I had paid for all that it would have cost me 87,60 Euros or 123,81 US dollars

The cathedral

So yeah, its rather big.

The 3th of June I decided it was time to build a church in minecraft. I had found a few cool churches already on the internet from other people who had build some. Some of them being pretty amazing, others being normal and so on. But most of all they always felt too small for my taste. I wanted to find a church that was BIG. You know, the kind that makes you go, echooooo.

Besides, the smaller you build in minecraft the more abstract you have to make things. So I figured, "if you want something you gotta do it yourself". In Ms-paint I started to make a construction plan, one pixel for one block seemed ok to me. After the basic idea was put on paper I checked ingame how it would work out.
At first I had to find some mods, so that I could dig with ease and have an infinite amount of building material at my disposal. But once that was out of the way it was on to building, building, building.

The first 10 days of my quest were actually spent digging. I hadn't yet realised there was a mod that could help me dig out the entire place at the click of a mouse button. But after a hundred mega-dynamite-explosion I thought it was time to find something more efficient.

Thus the actual building proces started on the 13th of June. Which is by now 1 month ago. In that month I've spend on average 3 to 4 hours every evening. I'll probably need another month to finish it completly.

Maybe more, maybe less, depends on what time I'll have available. I do know that I've already used 64000 blocks of sandstone for the walls, 15000 noteblocks for the rooftiles and 3800 blocks of rail. I hid some rails inside the walls, to travel faster from one side to the other of the church.

For decorations I'm going with a game themed wall paper. I got a tetris one already on one floor, and I might go for a giant pacman at the center of the church. You might notice some pixelated images of games on the construction plan. But a lot of the images are to big to fit on the walls, so thats a bit sad. But i'll figure something out for that.

Right now the mid-floor is done and I'm going to begin work on the highest roof and the big tower in the middle. Including a big bell, maybe more if I have enough room. The biggest problem I have right now is height. If I take one wrong step and I fall down its death, and hopefully I didn't destroy the last spawnpoint. Though sometimes its usefull to just dropkill me and travel a big distence by just respawning at the right place.

Its little travel tricks like that which make life easy. I wonder what that would do to the world if we could travel like that in real life.

Flying

I can fly, but so can you.

Its not even very hard to fly. The only thing you have to do is jump. When you jump you actually go up into the air. All the way up to that point where gravity catches up with you and pulls you down again. A jump is two parts, the first "going up" or as I like to call it "flying" and the second "going down" or "falling".

To make sure that I have a bit of science in it I present you with the definition of flying and falling. For those that are to lazy to click the link.

Falling:
To drop or descend under the force of gravity, as to a lower place through loss or lack of support.
Flying:
1. Making flight or passing through the air.
2. floating, fluttering, waving, hanging, or moving freely in the air.