Spring Break; a Novella by Amy: Part 6- Brussels, Belgium (Last stop)

Last city to bore you all with and then spring break posts are DONE!  Haha let’s get started, shall we?

I really really wanted to go to Belgium while studying abroad, mainly because half of my heritage is from there. My dad is almost 100% Belgian, and so I felt a strong connection to at least see what it was like. 

We arrived in the Charleroi airport and immediately noticed that yes, things were in French, but they were also in Flemmish. If you have never seen Flemmish written out, at first it looks weird, but the more I looked at it, the more I realized it seemed similar to English, and some words were downright funny, Leah’s favorite was nonstop keuken.

Anyway…We eventually made it onto the bus/train combo that would get us to the city, and on the ride there I kept thinking; okay the weather isn’t great, but it looks like it has potential. Please please PLEASE don’t be another Cagliari experience. It wasn’t.

We had directions on how to get to our couchsurfers, but no actual map of the city, so we decided that from the station, it didn’t look far, and tried to walk there. Well, we ended up a little turned around, (lost) and were growing increasingly hungry. Coincidentally we ended up in front of a huge shopping mall, and decided to head inside to look for food. We found amazing Pita’s loaded with Veggies inside of them, and We returned to the same place in that mall on Saturday afternoon for one more falafel pita fix before heading out of Brussels. Yum.

After this, we hopped on a tram and found our couchsurfers place. She was very nice, but very spacey. She’s an artist of some sort, and her flat was very cute, but also was a dead give-away that her and her roommates were all artists. She was very helpful with telling us where to go and how to find things, and also giving us  a city map.

Our first night we spent completely wandering around, we would see something in the distance and go “ooohh that looks cool” so we’d walk to it. We ended up in the Grand Place, which is basically the big huge happenin’ center of Brussels. Oh and it’s gorgeous. We got waffles and did some more wandering around, went into too many chocolate shops, where all of the clerks gave us samples, and went into a few beer shops; one of which of course clumsy me broke a bottle all over the floor. The clerk said “it happens all the time, but smell that! Isn’t it weird yet good smelling!”…it was. Haha. He was super nice about it, and I ended up back in his shop on Saturday to purchase a blueberry beer. =) We ended our night by getting some frites (fries) and walking back to the couchsurfers. We passed a few sketchy places, but I never felt at all threatened in Brussels..which is sort of odd.

Day 2 was a bit more eventful…We headed back down to the grand place to get more pictures and a waffle for breakfast. (did I mention how much we ate in Belgium?!) We looked around a lot of chocolate shops trying to decide which ones to actually purchase from. I realized that I was supposed to hear from Arnaud ( a friend from high school, who is from Liege, Belgium) and when I checked my phone…yeah. I had missed a text..or two from him already. Oops. I called him and we quickly met up at the mannequin pis statue. I learned that French bis is 2 cheeks, and Belgian bis is 1. Haha odd. Whatever happened to good old fashioned hugging?!  I will list what we did after this just because the post if getting long, and my intentions are not to put you all to sleep. ;)  We spent the day with Arnaud, and a few of his friends would come and go as we went to different places. It was overall really nice to get to see him again, and he is supposed to come back to Michigan in August. I look forward to it. =)

Day 3: Our last day was spent buying chocolates , beer, and souvenirs for others and ourselves. We did a few more sightseeing-y things, but not much. We spent the better part of the day sitting in a park and just talking. We did manage to see a parade of sorts go by, and it was lead by a dude dressed in sparkly spandex, and doing sign language. We quickly realized it was some sort of sign language-y / deaf awareness thing….it was cool to see. Ah culture. ;)

Cantillon Brewery

So when we get to the train station to head to Paris we see that our train is being held until further notice, but minimum 45 minutes. Ugh, we had a connecting train to get to angers and if we left 45 minutes late…we’d be missing it. The conductor told us to get on the other train also heading to paris, and we did, when we got to paris, we had 20 minutes to get from paris-nord (station) to paris-montparnasse (station)…we ran through the metro, got on and sat impatiently on it for about 15 minutes. When we got to Montparnasse all three of us sprinted upstairs only to see we had missed our train by about 7 minutes. We were all frantic, and irritated, and after a few phone calls, and talking with a worker, we realized our only option was to find a place to stay and get the first train out in the morning. Sigh. We ended up getting a hotel room right next to the station but only had two twin beds…we shoved them together and spent one last close night together. Mon dieu.

Atomium

We made it back to Angers late morning on Sunday, and spent the day emailing parents, doing laundry, finishing up homework assignments, and wishing we could have a vacation from our vacation.

Memorable Things about Brussels:

-It’s beautiful; When we got there Leah even said “This is how I thought France was going to look”.

-Mannequin pis is a tiny statue of a boy peeing…idk why he’s so overly celebrated, but there are everything from songs, to remade chocolate statues of him. Oh and he has more outfits that I do; kept in the city museum, and brought out on their correlating holidays.

-You can eat cheaply in Brussels; not healthily, but cheap. Pitas, waffles, fries, beer and chocolate…what more could you want? ;)

-Arnaud doesn’t like being lost, he gets antsy and sort of paranoid, and has a phone glued to him trying to figure out where to go…but the three of us were beyond used to being lost and expecting the unexpected so we were just enjoying were we ended up. 

-We were "lost" trying to find the atomium..we weren't really, but Arnaud thought we were. We found it though, and it was quite impressive. but the eiffel tower still wins my favorite worlds fair piece of architecture. 

-When you have a local take you around (Arnaud’s friend) he will take you to everything and all while walking fast, it was nice, but very odd. I particularly like the roof of a parking structure..to better see the town.

-Touring the Cantillon brewery is a must see if you're ever in Brussels, for 5E you tour and sample. can't beat that =)

-When Arnaud and I were in hs together, I wasn’t at a high French level, and im 90% sure he thought that hadn’t changed. He spoke in English to us the whole time, but would speak French to his friends, or to people on the metro, and I couldn’t help but smile and laugh a few times cuz’ I understood every word they were saying, down to when his friend asked if we all spoke French and he said “euh..un peu” oh lord. I’d say it’s more than un peu, but that’s okay. It made for an interesting day.

-The 5th largest church is in Belgium, and we didn't go into it, but you betcha we took pictures of it from outside. You can see it in the distance almost everywhere in Brussels...crazy.

-My French cell phone can make calls to the u.s. and it doesn’t charge me all that much. I needed a venting moment during our Paris fiasco and called my mom for about 5 minutes. 5 minutes well worth it.

-In the states I would never wait til the day before a paper is due in one of my classes to start it, and in France…n’est pas grave. Finished that sucker and turned it in on time Monday morning; which is more than I can say for about 80% of the class.

And that, my lovelies, was my spring break in a nutshell. I will be home 4 weeks from tomorrow. Wow. Time flies when you’re having fun.