That's what Belgium does! I hope everyone gets the "Wedding Crashers" reference from the title to this blog post (hint "crabcakes and football! THAT'S what Maryland does!") Apologies again for the delayed posting. I needed enough time to do the blog justice and that was not gonna happen yesterday until I had some time to sleep/decompress. I'm back in London now, though only for four and a half days before I'm off again to Barcelona. My tiny dorm room is covered in the explosion from my tiny suitcase, which doesn't seem to be worth the effort to unpack if I'm just going to have to pack it up again on Thursday night. Nothing major to report happening here in London, the semester is somehow managing to come to a close though it barely seems to have started. I continue to be slightly behind on all the readings but I've come to accept that is expected. I figure I'm probably fine since I don't exactly feel lost in class (except maybe my "Mental health law" class because she continues to assume that even if we aren't all law students we have some familiarity with either the UK health or legal systems that I lack). BUT I'll know more in a couple of weeks when I sit down to bang out my "formative assignments." LSE does some things differently, can't remember if I mentioned it before, but besides the required attendance we also have to complete an un-graded paper or assignment for each class. Since I'm taking both International Business Law I and II, both of mine for those two classes are due the same day. Which means two 1500 word essays due in two weeks. I just feel lucky English is my first language. What I'm not as clear on is the format, but I guess this is why we have these assignments in the first place. I also continue to train BJJ (Brazilian Jiu Jitsu) at least three times a week, but haven't yet figured out what to do about horseback riding.
Anyways this week was pretty great. The first part was quiet as usual. The I think I maybe even slightly improved on my social life/studying balance and my time management skills and did spend some of my free time actually doing school work (I also think I say that every week, but there is SO much room for improvement that it's also possible that it's true every week). The highlights of the week were: Monday, I arrived home to find a care package from USC law's Study Abroad office in my mailbox! I got cliff bars, some USC swag and a couple of the Daily Trojan newspapers. It made my day. Tuesday, I spent the evening with my flatmates and enjoyed the free pizza we earned for our hard work carving the Halloween pumpkin. I also finally finally finally painted my nails with the "crackle" nail polish, so underneath my nails were green and on top they had this special black nail polish that cracks into randomized designs as it dries. It's as cool, nay, cooler than it sounds. Wednesday I tried to make my parents (and Micah/Erica) proud of me at the Sidney Webb trivia night. I played on a team with my current flatmates, Marissa and Daniel, and former flatmate, Chris. We ruled the "London" category. Partially because I've spent the past two and a half months reading the book "London" which is quite obviously chock full of London trivia. Unfortunately we failed pretty miserably in the "General Knowledge" and "Sports Picture" categories, finishing up with slightly better than 50% correct answers. Thursday I stayed home and worked on my budget, deciding that it really is time to cut out any frivolous purchases if I want to make it through the next year and a half on my finite amounts of money. Then I went and spent 20 pounds on a mask for the masquerade ball (in preparation for Brussels). Thursday night I stayed home as well, "packing" for my trip. In truth I simply put one of EVERYTHING I owned into a very over-stuffed carry-on size rolling bag.
Friday - Friday was the day I traveled to Brussels! A little background on the trip, my LLM friend Jardena recommended that Valerie and I sign up for an European Center for Jewish Students trip. Apparently she has been to a number of them before and always had a great time. Since neither of us had ever been to Brussels we figured this was a great opportunity. The program is basically (as far as I can tell) about getting a bunch of young Jews together to hang out in a hotel in a European city over the weekend, get a chance to meet each other and spend Shabbat together.
I was so excited for my first trip to "the Continent" (UK doesn't count - hell, most people here would say they aren't even European), I even had trouble sleeping Friday night. Instead, I did that thing where you sleep but dream that you are awake. The Eurostar was at 7:30ish so Valerie and I got up around 6:00 and met at 6:30 to get to the train on time. We realized on the walk to the Tube that neither of us had any idea where we were going once we got to Brussels. No address. No name of any hotel. There wasn't any time to go back. We tried to find the information on our phones, but neither of us succeeded. We pressed on anyway. We got to the train station just in time, since we didn't realize there would be security to deal with or passport control. Luckily I had accidentally packed my passport into my wallet ages ago and remembered the wallet or the trip would have come to an abrupt end right there. We rushed to get onto the train, walking the length of it to get on at coach #16, only to find that we were actually seated in coach #1. From our tour of it the train seemed quite nice, and we finally settled into our correct seats right as the train left the station. As soon as it did we were on our phones frantically calling and emailing anyone we had contact with at ECJS, begging for an address. We got no response. The decision was made to arrive in Brussels and make our way to the ECJS office where hopefully someone could tell us where to go. The ride itself was fairly short, only two hours, and nothing interesting happened. I read for school and wished that when you were in the Tunnel under the Channel they at least decorated the walls with ocean scenes.
The train arrived in Brussels at 10:30 am, the extra hour due to the time difference. The train station was a bit confusing, but there was a helpful "tourist station" where Valerie was able to ask for directions to the ECJS office. The woman working there helpfully wrote out the directions on a map, for which she then charged us 50 euro-cents. I only had a 20 euro bill. She made change for me in 50 cent pieces. The cafe in the train station had the greatest piece of public artwork I've ever seen:
We took the Brussels metro to the ECJS office. It has super futuristic gates to get into the station (the South Korean like, large plastic panels that swish open when you enter) and extremely quaint looking trains.
We got off at the correct stop, walked the long way round a traffic circle and hunted down our quarry. The ECJS office was, as expected, disguised
as an abandoned apartment. The abandoned part was correct. We rang the doorbell and called repeatedly but to no avail. The door remained stubbornly locked and we remained SOL on finding our destination. I had not received any call back and I had no data connection with which to check if anyone responded to my emails for help. Once the ECJS office plan didn't work out our brains essentially shut down. We thought about trying to find a sim card so that we could make cheap phone calls, but couldn't find a store. We eventually settled on coffee and hot chocolate at a local cafe while we thought of what to do next. I got a cup of the richest, thickest, dark hot chocolate I've ever had in my life. With some warm drinks in our systems we finally hit upon the idea of trying to find a nearby hotel to ask if we could find someone who might know where the large contingent of Jews had booked a giant block of rooms. We struck gold at the Aloft by W hotel. They had free computers with internet in the lobby, and although it took a number of tries because the keyboard was vastly different than typical qwerty, we finally got to my gmail account, where we found a response with the address! And, even better, the hotel was only a couple of blocks away from where we were! Finally finding the hotel was thrilling
we checked in and found that once again (like when we traveled in Israel together) we had been placed in a room where the beds had been placed as close together as possible.
The schedule was to spend the afternoon as a group at Delirium cafe, a pub/cafe/etc renowned for having something over 2000 beers. Because we arrived so late (something the ECJS woman pointed out repeatedly) we had missed the bus but we were able to catch the Tube there without much of a problem.
A couple of notes about Brussels. First, the Tube is essentially run on an honor system. You buy a ticket and then are supposed to go to a little stand and have the ticket stamped, but nothing indicates that you are supposed to do this. And in most stations it's pretty easy to walk right past the station without even noticing it. Which is of course what we did for pretty much our entire stay. We had the ticket but no idea exactly how we were supposed to use it, and no one asked. Second, it's a really pretty little city. The streets are either wide, spacious avenues, or these tiny little European alleyways.
We got to Delirium to find that we were being treated to three rounds of free beer. We also got there right before everyone else decided to take a spontaneous walking tour. So it was just us, our friend from USC Law Gabriel, three of the ECJS people and a whole lot of beer.
We drank a lot of beer and took a lot of pictures.
Then we went on a walking tour of the old city centre and took more pictures.
The combination proved fatal. My camera took an open lens dive onto the flagstones you see in that last picture. The blog post will continue, but the pictures will be supplied by Valerie's camera.
After our impromptu walking tour I went back to the hotel to nap until dinner. I also managed to nap through parts of dinner because it took approximately four hours long. Literally, I went down for the first course, went back up to the room, came back down for the second, went back up to the room, came back down for dessert. I literally slept for two hours of dinner and managed to not miss a single dish. Unfortunately the main dinner dish was completely inedible, but there was enough challah and things to dip it in that no one starved. The rest of the night was dessert, a Shabbat oneg with lots of meeting people, talking and drinking. At 2:30 am I went up to bed. At 2:50 am Valerie came up and asked me if I wanted to go out with some people she had met. I got dressed again but no one had realized that nothing worth going to would be open at 3 am, so we wandered through the chilly night until we gave up and went back to the hotel around 4 am. Brussels 1, everyone else 0.
The next day we slept until the afternoon and then decided to walk back to the Comic Strip Museum. On the way we stopped by the Brussels park (which I think is probably really attractive when it isn't fall)
This statue was our first clue we were near the museum. It was also the second time we dropped a camera with the lens open (but luckily Valerie's survived)
we wandered through the museum for an hour or more (which was almost entirely in french, but the blue notebook I'm carrying with me in every picture was the English explanation to some of it) and once again took lots of pictures.
Random note, apparently the Belgians are obsessed with Tin Tin. Along with a lot of other people I've spoken to recently. I hadn't heard of Tin Tin until the most recent movie came out in the past month, so I felt a bit left out of this cultural obsession. After the museum we wandered back to the old city centre we had visited the day before, but this time we got to take pictures (sensing a theme?)
we found marzipan hedgehogs, learned how to say hedgehog in french "hérisson," ate chocolates
ate waffles covered in chocolate
admired the skills of the people making chocolates
and gazed longingly at the biggest lollipop I've ever seen
We also made some time for culture. We visited the main square, which is dominated by an insanely beautiful, intricately carved gothic-style church.
it's guarded by a lion, holding a shield depicting a lion
and every square inch of it is carved
my second favorite part of the square was across from the church. It's under construction, but the scaffolding is covered by a depiction of what you WOULD be looking at if the scaffolding wasn't there.
We also visited the most famous statue in Brussels, the Manneken Pis. It's exactly what it sounds like. It's also a let down, because it's not even really a statue. It's just a tiny little fountain. That everyone is completely obsessed with. There are replicas of it in every medium, in every shop. The Belgians are kind of weird.
After all our wandering we had a beer for refreshment and then made our way somewhat accidentally out of the old city centre to the Cathedral. The Cathedral is pretty stunning.
It's also really tall
We poked around inside as much as we were allowed and then finally made our way back to the hotel. After a long, chilly day spent outside we both could have used a hot shower. Too bad our room didn't have hot water! In fact, the room didn't have hot water for the entire time we stayed there. We reported it multiple times but were met with disbelief "we measured the hot water on Friday, it was hot." "Ok, I believe that every room in the hotel has hot water, except for mine" or "we will send someone up to check" "do you think that I can't tell if water is hot myself? Or do you think that I'm lying?" or sheer unhelpfulness "well there isn't a technician available on the weekend so no one can help you." We spoke to many, many people. None of them spoke to each other so Valerie and I had to repeat the story over and over again. My favorite part was when we had two women in the room, admitting the water wasn't hot, assuring us over and over again that had we reported it earlier (we had) something could have been done. Of course, since they were just hearing about it now (false) there were no rooms available. Unless we wanted to share a queen sized bed. Which, since we paid for both a double hotel room, AND hot water we weren't interested in. Also we could not, under any circumstances, just use the hot water in the empty room. Finally we gave up. We were assured however, that the manager would call us before 10 am the next morning to discuss compensation before we left.
Defeated, we took cold showers and got ready for dinner. Dinner was hot dogs and hamburgers. Apparently we missed a delightful lunch, but we took the time to pump people for information about that night's gala. Each person we talked to gave us the same answer. "So, have you been to the gala before, how was it?" "There were a LOT of people there!" "oh, so did you have a good time?" "TONS of people there!" "But, was it enjoyable?" "THERE WERE SO MANY PEOPLE THERE!" We got the same set of answers from probably five different people. I've never met so many people that considered "fun" synonymous with "crowded" or "popular."
After dinner there was an hour and a half to get dressed before the bus left to take us to the Expo Center where the gala was held. We wore fancy outfits and masks.
There were a fair number of people there. Haha, actually it was a pretty good time, we stayed until the last bus left the arena around 3:30 am to take us back to the hotel. Ten minutes before check out time I woke up and realized the hotel manager had never called and FREAKED OUT. I had played it fairly calmly considering we didn't have a working SHOWER for three days but not being called when promised and now being late on top of it seriously pissed me off. I called the manager and gave him a loud, descriptive piece of my mind. He invited me downstairs to chat with him and the man in charge of ECJS. I explained the situation and the ECJS director assured me I should have come to him sooner! I disagreed and continue to disagree, the hotel should be able to fix these things without intervention by someone who has any number of other things on their mind. Regardless, he has promised to see what he can do about a refund for our hotel room since I was so obviously "not faking being upset."
In the next hour we packed and got ready for the day. We had missed the bus to Antwerp but this didn't seem like that big a deal because every time we asked anyone why we should visit Antwerp we got the same response "It's a lovely city" "but what is there to do there" "it's really lovely" "I mean, is there anything that makes it more interesting than Brussels?" "Lovely." As a result we declined the offer of a ride in a rental car up to Antwerp and instead decided to spend more time in Brussels.
The concierge did his best to dissuade us. Although the previous concierges had been pretty helpful this one was decidedly not. He tried to tell us that everything was closed on Sundays. Everything. Don't even bother leaving the hotel. When asked how to get to the market he told us to take a taxi, then that the Tube/Metro was too hard for us to figure out, and then that it wasn't safe for us to go via public transportation. We persevered and safely and easily took the metro to the correct stop and found what looked like Sleeping Beauty's castle.
It was some sort of museum. It was also open (ahem, concierge!). We kept going until we came to the big antiques market/swap meet we were looking for.
There were used everythings! Furs! Binoculars! Ripped paintings! Anything your scavenger heart desires. It was also freezing. After an hour or so of making our way through the market we stopped for some much needed hot chocolate before planning our next move. Unfreezing our brains we settled on a bus tour! It was cold and we didn't want to walk, what could be better than seeing Brussels from a bus! Too bad the last one left five minutes after we called and we were more than five minutes away. We set off to walk and see the sights. We were only a few minutes from the Justice Palace.
It's a gorgeous building that also seemed to be completely abandoned. It's covered in some scaffolding, but mostly just bird poo, graffiti and dust. It was also a super awesome adult playground. I've never been to a tourist spot with fewer tourists!
After exploring the Justice Palace the most glorious thing happened. We FOUND THE HOP ON HOP OFF BUS. I bolted for it, pushing Valerie out of the way and sprinting towards it. We both made it on, and paid a discounted fair since it was the last bus so no "hopping off" was going to happen. We got to see all the sights of Brussels while sitting comfortably. The only thing that would have made it better was a heater.
Below are random pictures of things we saw, some sort of Palace, some sort of Victory Arch, and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.
What made me kind of uncomfortable about the Tomb was that it is crowned with a statue of King Leopold I. The crazy murdering empire building bastard who is responsible for everything terrible that has ever happened in the Congo. After the tour we had the bus drop us off nearish the city centre. We were absolutely freezing. We ducked into a friterie for fries and then braved the cold once more to hole up at a pub with a fireplace. I was so cold I seriously considered climbing in to warm up faster. Although the weather had said it would be close to 60 degrees and sunny they were off by about 20 degrees, possibly more and neither of us had dressed for it. The last stop we made was for waffles. We paid three times as much for the privilege of eating them indoors. Then it was back to the hotel to pick up our luggage, put on eight more layers of clothing and then on to the train station. The ride back was uneventful, the trains apparently run on time here, and we gained an hour from the time change. The only hurdle we encountered on the way back was that the Tube line we live on was closed. Completely. We muddled through, taking a different line to the bus, missing the bus because Valerie needed to top up her travel card and we had no cash and then finally finally finally stumbling home. At least London wasn't nearly as cold as Brussels.
My last few thoughts on the trip. One, the Belgians are an extremely attractive people. Two, it was probably worth going on the ECJS trip for convenience sake (even if we didn't get a working hotel room). Three, European Jews have a bit of a persecution complex - possibly a deserved one, but it's a noticeable difference from Americans. Fours, Europeans are more racist than the English, in a more obvious way than Americans. Five, I can fake understanding French if you ask me really simple things that make sense in context. Six, after a couple of days I even missed the Queen's English. Seven, I had no idea that Dutch was the other official language of Belgium. Eight, I'm going to need a new camera before I go to Barcelona this weekend. Nine, I'm SO SO SO SO EXCITED because Micah and Erica are going to be coming to visit with the rest of the family! Ten, I'm also excited this blog post is finished because it's late and it's taken so long to write and I have to get up early to do my reading for class.
Love you,
Anyways this week was pretty great. The first part was quiet as usual. The I think I maybe even slightly improved on my social life/studying balance and my time management skills and did spend some of my free time actually doing school work (I also think I say that every week, but there is SO much room for improvement that it's also possible that it's true every week). The highlights of the week were: Monday, I arrived home to find a care package from USC law's Study Abroad office in my mailbox! I got cliff bars, some USC swag and a couple of the Daily Trojan newspapers. It made my day. Tuesday, I spent the evening with my flatmates and enjoyed the free pizza we earned for our hard work carving the Halloween pumpkin. I also finally finally finally painted my nails with the "crackle" nail polish, so underneath my nails were green and on top they had this special black nail polish that cracks into randomized designs as it dries. It's as cool, nay, cooler than it sounds. Wednesday I tried to make my parents (and Micah/Erica) proud of me at the Sidney Webb trivia night. I played on a team with my current flatmates, Marissa and Daniel, and former flatmate, Chris. We ruled the "London" category. Partially because I've spent the past two and a half months reading the book "London" which is quite obviously chock full of London trivia. Unfortunately we failed pretty miserably in the "General Knowledge" and "Sports Picture" categories, finishing up with slightly better than 50% correct answers. Thursday I stayed home and worked on my budget, deciding that it really is time to cut out any frivolous purchases if I want to make it through the next year and a half on my finite amounts of money. Then I went and spent 20 pounds on a mask for the masquerade ball (in preparation for Brussels). Thursday night I stayed home as well, "packing" for my trip. In truth I simply put one of EVERYTHING I owned into a very over-stuffed carry-on size rolling bag.
Friday - Friday was the day I traveled to Brussels! A little background on the trip, my LLM friend Jardena recommended that Valerie and I sign up for an European Center for Jewish Students trip. Apparently she has been to a number of them before and always had a great time. Since neither of us had ever been to Brussels we figured this was a great opportunity. The program is basically (as far as I can tell) about getting a bunch of young Jews together to hang out in a hotel in a European city over the weekend, get a chance to meet each other and spend Shabbat together.
I was so excited for my first trip to "the Continent" (UK doesn't count - hell, most people here would say they aren't even European), I even had trouble sleeping Friday night. Instead, I did that thing where you sleep but dream that you are awake. The Eurostar was at 7:30ish so Valerie and I got up around 6:00 and met at 6:30 to get to the train on time. We realized on the walk to the Tube that neither of us had any idea where we were going once we got to Brussels. No address. No name of any hotel. There wasn't any time to go back. We tried to find the information on our phones, but neither of us succeeded. We pressed on anyway. We got to the train station just in time, since we didn't realize there would be security to deal with or passport control. Luckily I had accidentally packed my passport into my wallet ages ago and remembered the wallet or the trip would have come to an abrupt end right there. We rushed to get onto the train, walking the length of it to get on at coach #16, only to find that we were actually seated in coach #1. From our tour of it the train seemed quite nice, and we finally settled into our correct seats right as the train left the station. As soon as it did we were on our phones frantically calling and emailing anyone we had contact with at ECJS, begging for an address. We got no response. The decision was made to arrive in Brussels and make our way to the ECJS office where hopefully someone could tell us where to go. The ride itself was fairly short, only two hours, and nothing interesting happened. I read for school and wished that when you were in the Tunnel under the Channel they at least decorated the walls with ocean scenes.
The train arrived in Brussels at 10:30 am, the extra hour due to the time difference. The train station was a bit confusing, but there was a helpful "tourist station" where Valerie was able to ask for directions to the ECJS office. The woman working there helpfully wrote out the directions on a map, for which she then charged us 50 euro-cents. I only had a 20 euro bill. She made change for me in 50 cent pieces. The cafe in the train station had the greatest piece of public artwork I've ever seen:
We took the Brussels metro to the ECJS office. It has super futuristic gates to get into the station (the South Korean like, large plastic panels that swish open when you enter) and extremely quaint looking trains.
We got off at the correct stop, walked the long way round a traffic circle and hunted down our quarry. The ECJS office was, as expected, disguised
The schedule was to spend the afternoon as a group at Delirium cafe, a pub/cafe/etc renowned for having something over 2000 beers. Because we arrived so late (something the ECJS woman pointed out repeatedly) we had missed the bus but we were able to catch the Tube there without much of a problem.
A couple of notes about Brussels. First, the Tube is essentially run on an honor system. You buy a ticket and then are supposed to go to a little stand and have the ticket stamped, but nothing indicates that you are supposed to do this. And in most stations it's pretty easy to walk right past the station without even noticing it. Which is of course what we did for pretty much our entire stay. We had the ticket but no idea exactly how we were supposed to use it, and no one asked. Second, it's a really pretty little city. The streets are either wide, spacious avenues, or these tiny little European alleyways.
We drank a lot of beer and took a lot of pictures.
The combination proved fatal. My camera took an open lens dive onto the flagstones you see in that last picture. The blog post will continue, but the pictures will be supplied by Valerie's camera.
After our impromptu walking tour I went back to the hotel to nap until dinner. I also managed to nap through parts of dinner because it took approximately four hours long. Literally, I went down for the first course, went back up to the room, came back down for the second, went back up to the room, came back down for dessert. I literally slept for two hours of dinner and managed to not miss a single dish. Unfortunately the main dinner dish was completely inedible, but there was enough challah and things to dip it in that no one starved. The rest of the night was dessert, a Shabbat oneg with lots of meeting people, talking and drinking. At 2:30 am I went up to bed. At 2:50 am Valerie came up and asked me if I wanted to go out with some people she had met. I got dressed again but no one had realized that nothing worth going to would be open at 3 am, so we wandered through the chilly night until we gave up and went back to the hotel around 4 am. Brussels 1, everyone else 0.
The next day we slept until the afternoon and then decided to walk back to the Comic Strip Museum. On the way we stopped by the Brussels park (which I think is probably really attractive when it isn't fall)
Random note, apparently the Belgians are obsessed with Tin Tin. Along with a lot of other people I've spoken to recently. I hadn't heard of Tin Tin until the most recent movie came out in the past month, so I felt a bit left out of this cultural obsession. After the museum we wandered back to the old city centre we had visited the day before, but this time we got to take pictures (sensing a theme?)
admired the skills of the people making chocolates
We also visited the most famous statue in Brussels, the Manneken Pis. It's exactly what it sounds like. It's also a let down, because it's not even really a statue. It's just a tiny little fountain. That everyone is completely obsessed with. There are replicas of it in every medium, in every shop. The Belgians are kind of weird.
It's also really tall
Defeated, we took cold showers and got ready for dinner. Dinner was hot dogs and hamburgers. Apparently we missed a delightful lunch, but we took the time to pump people for information about that night's gala. Each person we talked to gave us the same answer. "So, have you been to the gala before, how was it?" "There were a LOT of people there!" "oh, so did you have a good time?" "TONS of people there!" "But, was it enjoyable?" "THERE WERE SO MANY PEOPLE THERE!" We got the same set of answers from probably five different people. I've never met so many people that considered "fun" synonymous with "crowded" or "popular."
After dinner there was an hour and a half to get dressed before the bus left to take us to the Expo Center where the gala was held. We wore fancy outfits and masks.
There were a fair number of people there. Haha, actually it was a pretty good time, we stayed until the last bus left the arena around 3:30 am to take us back to the hotel. Ten minutes before check out time I woke up and realized the hotel manager had never called and FREAKED OUT. I had played it fairly calmly considering we didn't have a working SHOWER for three days but not being called when promised and now being late on top of it seriously pissed me off. I called the manager and gave him a loud, descriptive piece of my mind. He invited me downstairs to chat with him and the man in charge of ECJS. I explained the situation and the ECJS director assured me I should have come to him sooner! I disagreed and continue to disagree, the hotel should be able to fix these things without intervention by someone who has any number of other things on their mind. Regardless, he has promised to see what he can do about a refund for our hotel room since I was so obviously "not faking being upset."
In the next hour we packed and got ready for the day. We had missed the bus to Antwerp but this didn't seem like that big a deal because every time we asked anyone why we should visit Antwerp we got the same response "It's a lovely city" "but what is there to do there" "it's really lovely" "I mean, is there anything that makes it more interesting than Brussels?" "Lovely." As a result we declined the offer of a ride in a rental car up to Antwerp and instead decided to spend more time in Brussels.
The concierge did his best to dissuade us. Although the previous concierges had been pretty helpful this one was decidedly not. He tried to tell us that everything was closed on Sundays. Everything. Don't even bother leaving the hotel. When asked how to get to the market he told us to take a taxi, then that the Tube/Metro was too hard for us to figure out, and then that it wasn't safe for us to go via public transportation. We persevered and safely and easily took the metro to the correct stop and found what looked like Sleeping Beauty's castle.
After exploring the Justice Palace the most glorious thing happened. We FOUND THE HOP ON HOP OFF BUS. I bolted for it, pushing Valerie out of the way and sprinting towards it. We both made it on, and paid a discounted fair since it was the last bus so no "hopping off" was going to happen. We got to see all the sights of Brussels while sitting comfortably. The only thing that would have made it better was a heater.
Below are random pictures of things we saw, some sort of Palace, some sort of Victory Arch, and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.
My last few thoughts on the trip. One, the Belgians are an extremely attractive people. Two, it was probably worth going on the ECJS trip for convenience sake (even if we didn't get a working hotel room). Three, European Jews have a bit of a persecution complex - possibly a deserved one, but it's a noticeable difference from Americans. Fours, Europeans are more racist than the English, in a more obvious way than Americans. Five, I can fake understanding French if you ask me really simple things that make sense in context. Six, after a couple of days I even missed the Queen's English. Seven, I had no idea that Dutch was the other official language of Belgium. Eight, I'm going to need a new camera before I go to Barcelona this weekend. Nine, I'm SO SO SO SO EXCITED because Micah and Erica are going to be coming to visit with the rest of the family! Ten, I'm also excited this blog post is finished because it's late and it's taken so long to write and I have to get up early to do my reading for class.
Love you,
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