Brussels

It was a sad day when everyone began to go their own way after the trip but an inevitable one that some people feared and some people were overjoyed. Regardless of how you were feeling about going home, one thing was for certain: no one wanted to leave the friends that they made on the trip. For me though, the trip was still a long way from being over because I headed to Brussels to visit a friend of mine who is in grad school now. She is my grade and went to undergrad at Delaware but is a smartypants and graduated a year early. The fact that my spring semester did not start until February 10th and the trip ended on the 19th of January meant that I had lots of time to kill before the semester started and was dying for something to keep me entertained, even for a few days. One of the big advantages of going to visit a friend who is in the first week of grad school means that I could finally have alone time. Not that I am anti-social or hate people or anything like that, but when spending nearly three weeks with your only alone time is in the bathroom, any and all quiet is welcome.

I didn't arrive until late in the evening so I was ready to pass out as soon as I hit a soft surface. The airport is outside of the city so it took a good hour using public transit to get back to Alex's apartment, which is downright adorable. The worst part is that it is on the 6th floor of the building which does not have an elevator. Having to lug my suitcase up six flights of stairs when I am packed for a month is not an easy experience and one I can live without in the near future. One advantage of her apartment is that is around the corner from her school and only about 20 minutes from the city center. This would have been easy to figure out if it did not take me five days to get a directional bearing because there are so many ways to get to a single place through the use of the underground, buses, and trams. Eventually, I managed to figure out how to get to Gare Central (Central Station) and from there the points of interest were easy to get to.

The first full day in Brussels was uneventful, which felt fantastic. Alex had class during the day and the first thing I needed to do was laundry. Over the course of my actual trip, I washed some underwear, socks, and basic t-shirts in the sink on our last night in Sarajevo before we went out to Cheers. Alex showed me where a laundromat was and a cafe that I could sit in that had free WiFi to kill time while my laundry was being cleaned. I was the kid that had no idea where he was going, did not speak the language, and was lugging around a giant bag of laundry through the city so I probably provided some pretty good entertainment to the people on the street. For the first time I actually had to use the international phone in order to get in contact with Alex when her class got out. Thankfully her classes are all once per week and usually no more than an hour so when I did not go to class with her, she was not gone for too long. I did go to her evening class that night which was about International Law. I can't say I paid too much attention between having decent internet and needed to finish the blogs for the academic portion of the class but the parts that I did listen to were very interesting. It also helped that the professor was a cute Japanese man who I had heard a lot about from Alex because she had him for a class the previous semester. One of Alex's friends invited us to her apartment to have dinner with her and her husband that night, making it my first home cooked meal since December 30th. It may have only been burritos with rice and beans but for all I cared it could have been a meal from a steak house. The super exciting day wrapped up playing Settlers of Catan, which always makes for an interesting time, especially when people get competitive. It was probably one of the first nights that I stayed in instead of going to a bar, which felt marvelous. I was also in bed before midnight which was something that had not happened in a long time. The only problem is I was awake by 6:30am, which did not do me a lot of favors.

A big church in Brussels whose name I forget

Stain-glass window in the big church

On Tuesday, I actually got to see the city of Brussels and not just the neighborhood where Alex lives with the university. We took a tram into the city center and got off near the European Parliament, making our way to Grand Platz, which has been called the most beautiful square in Europe: a title I can believe. Its very easy to find because the city hall is among the tallest buildings in the city with the spire easily being visible from across the city. Across from the city hall with bars on both sides, is the Belgian museum which has all the costumes from Manikin Piss as the highlight. Apparently it is a tradition for visiting diplomats to bring a costume from their home country, so there are lots of costumes ranging from a Samurai, Elvis, an Incan, and all the awesome traditional clothes of the African indigenous tribes. The whole situation with the statue is entertaining though because it is probably one of the most easily recognizable parts of Brussels and yet it was off in a corner a few blocks away from Grand Platz. Not really in a place that I would expect a prized symbol of the country to be. On the walk back to the train station, we ate lunch and I could say I had my first taste of Belgian Fries. The only problem being, I'm not a big fan of fries to begin with. The best part about them were there was a plethora of sauces, even though I can only say I tried maybe three or four of them. Every time I got something and was asked if I wanted sauce, I would always ask for samurai sauce, which was on the spicier side of things. For sauce selections, picture Buffalo Wild Wings in terms of variety but without helpful names or the thermometer graph to put things into perspective.

A bad panorama of Grand Platz

Manneken Pis

Costume from Japan for Manneken Pis 

Elvis costume for Manneken Pis

The rest of the day was simple since Alex had a two-hour class that she thought was super boring. Instead of going to class with her, I went to the gym because Alex managed to secure three day passes for me for free instead of the ridiculous $20 it would have cost me should I have had to pay. On the bright side, it was a really nice gym and it felt really good to be able to do something other than eat, drink, sleep and walk- because that had been the previous three and a half weeks for me. Seeing as I normally relieve stress by running, going to a gym that had treadmills where I did not feel like I was going to be kidnapped and the protagonist of a Stolen-esque film was pretty relieving. Some people didn't really understand this because when I got back and people were asking me if I ran throughout January, I always told them no because I was Eastern Europe and I was not going to go running there by myself at night. That's not on the list of ways in which I would like to meet my demise. I also just realized that demise is a very awkward looking word. Maybe it is just me but it looks funny and feels like it should be spelled a different way. Regardless, I obviously never met my demise and Alex and I watched the night away because she was just getting into Game of Thrones, which is one show I will always be happy to watch.

Arc de Triomphe 

Tower built by the Academy of the Arts to show the building power of a type of stone

WebRep

currentVote

noRating

noWeight