Friday 23rd (day 7)
HAPPY BIRTHDAY SHERSTYN!
Today we awoke from our last full night in Ieper, Belgium. We continued to tour battlefields and cemeteries of the Great War. We saw the Hill 60 crater (from the movie) and German pill boxes and bunkers.
No more baguettes and chips with mayonnaise. Now we are eating Belgian bread with salad.
After checking out a private museum full of authentic WWI equipment and weapons we saw a German cemetery. This cemetery has about 40 000 personnel from the German Imperial Army. 25 000 of them are in a mass grave about twelve metres by twelve metres. That’s about four times the population of Collie in one 40m squared piece of land.
In this cemetery there are about 7000 school aged children who had signed up to the war. 900 have their own burials and the rest are in the mass grave. We then went onto the cemetery where John McRae wrote the poem “In Flanders Fields”.
Today was our last day with Colin Gillard the tour guide and “Jerome: Europe’s number one bus driver”. We took Sherstyn, Colin and Jerome to Poppy’s restaurant near the Menin Gate. Sherbo was awarded her birthday gift which was ‘stealthily’ purchased by Ms Miller. She also got balloons. Kaitlyn thanked Colin in French and Keegyn pronounced his love for Jerome (unknowingly) in French.
We went to bed to awake at 3am for our flight to Turkey.
From Jorje and Samuelle (Josh & Sam)
