Update 11/25

While riding last night I crashed on an icy railroad crossing and hit my hip pretty hard, so that's a bummer. I've been icing and hopefully it will be OK for cyclocross this weekend. I hurts less to ride than walk but I think dismounting/remounting could be bad.
I had lunch just now with my hosts parents who live down the road. It was fun because neither of them speak English so I got some real adventure travel sign language practice. Of course this is sign language lite, because half their words are like English with an odd accent: I is Ik, good sounds like houd, street is straat and so on. It's almost worse that I am familiar with German because the Dutch pronunciation is much closer to English. ST is pronounce the same as English, W and V is the same and the vowels all have pretty much the same shape in the mouth. The sentence order or structure is similar to German though, so I feel like if I can learn the accent and a few words and put into German structure I'll be speaking Dutch, easier said than done.
For Lunch we ate boiled potatoes, creamed cheesy leeks and hamburgers that come wrapped in bacon, pretty hearty fare. Like a good mother, Annamarie force fed me. It was great. I brought an apple pie that I whipped up. Apparently our taste buds are compatible, they liked it. The man of the house is very nice. He has a forklift garage in the back yard. The difference between an American guy with a forklift garage and a Belgian with same is that the American probably drives a forklift and the Belge drives a Mercedes, literally. The house and garage were very neat, and the mini forklift on a pole in the front yard was pretty cool.
I'm gonna go try out my new hip implant, heh, I should get some rehab tips grampa. Wish me luck.