After a few requests, I decided to put up a few pictures taken during my stay at the Sunparks. When I look at those images today, they don't seem so horrible. Perhaps with time I got used to living in those conditions. Or perhaps I was in such denial that when I took the pictures I managed to make them look "pretty".

Let's start with an image of the beach near the campground. This was taken on my first morning in Oostende, on my way to work. Not too bad huh? Sadly I never returned there because every time I had time to go to the beach, the weather was just like in the picture.

Now let's take a look at my "villa".

And my backyard.

This is what it looked like downstairs. Yes I took the pictures on a sunny and unusually warm day... Notice the bags of towels and sheets on the floor next to the far wall. That is how they were delivered to us every week. Sometimes they just dropped them off at the front door. On cleaning day, we had to unmake our own beds and put all our sheets and towels in a pink plastic bag on the side of the street.

Another angle of the living room / kitchen / dining room:

If you take the stairs on the right (previous picture), you will end up upstairs where there are two bedrooms. Here's my dirty bedroom. Please excuse the mess, I was already in "moving mode" when I took the pictures and the general condition of the "villa" was not much of an encouragement to keep your own stuff tidy in the first place. Keep in mind that all the pictures inside the house were taken with a 17mm super wide angle lens.

Here's the reverse angle of the same room. Notice how the ceiling is sloped. Not much space in which you can actually stand up. Anything much further than the window and you will hit your head on the ceiling. Same thing when you get out of bed in the morning, gotta be careful! I became very familiar with this black beam above my bed...

On your way to the entrance of the property (the infamous quarter mile walk), here's what you would see. A gravel path, more houses like mine and some of those pink plastic laundry bags which they would sometimes take days to pick up. The garbage, they did not pick up at all. You had to take it yourself to the closest container.

When you took the tram or the shuttle bus to DeHaan village to go buy some groceries, this is what you would see. Nice huh? Too bad we didn't live there.

The tram station in DeHaan:

This is what Oostende looked like. We did not live there either.

This is where we were living:

In order to get to any of those nice places, you had to take the tram. And to get to the tram, you had to follow this charming little path through the forest. Isn't it pretty? You should try it at night...

The public area where the restaurants are located. Looks nice but most of the time, the place is crawling with poorly raised out of control european brats who are running all over the place making more noise than a bunch of wild animals. Not a pleasant place to be when all you want is to sit quietly and work on your computer or read your book... Funny that the parents of those wild kids were probably the ones making the noise complaints about Cirque at night.

Oh, did I mention that we did not have telephones in our "villas"? Well, here is the Sunparks' solution to communications. There are some of those spread out over the property. Isn't that great? Someone tried using a 5 Euro long distance phone card (which he purchased from the Sunparks front desk) to call his family in Canada and he was able to talk for two and a half minutes...

And this is Cirque's solution to the communication problem. Can't see anything? Look on the first table on the left. Three phones there to go with the three chairs. This also doubled as the "internet room" because although the "common room" is just beyond the door, there was almost no wi-fi reception in there so the only way to connect to the internet was to sit in this corridor. There was usually enough bandwidth for three or four people. More than that and it slowed down to a crawl...

M-Day. Remember that story? Well this is the day that the mattresses were delivered into the common room.

But as you may remember, I didn't care too much about the mattress. I was more worried about the condition of my house. It is difficult to take pictures of dirtiness. The best I could do was take a picture of my rotting shower curtain.

I also managed to take a picture of our local fauna... (yes it is a big one, the garbage can was at least a foot in diameter!)

...and our local flora (under the dining room table the day after they came to clean the house).

The ultimate solution to all this? Just move to Zurich...