Oh, and how did I forget Ampleman?!

Ampleman, the beloved crosswalk signal of East Berlin. There was apparently huge opposition to getting rid of him when the wall came down, so the communist worker man stayed.

Ampleman says go.
Ampleman says stop.

Communist History and an 11 Euro Haircut in Berlin

Yikes!! I know I got back from Berlin almost three weeks ago, but the blog's finally here.

We spent our first day in Berlin doing a fantastic free walking tour, which took us to pretty well all of the highlights of the city. Luckily we all agreed we were most interested Cold War era East and West Berlin, so we returned on our own to the Berlin Wall's East Side Gallery, the DDR Museum, and the Checkpoint Charlie Museum. The Checkpoint Charlie Museum was huge! We thought it was only a few rooms, but it just kept going and going. So many stories of escape attempts, people got really creative.

One of my favourite parts of Berlin was Kastanienallee in Prenzlauer Berg, an area which reminded me a bit of Commercial Drive in Vancouver. We spent some time shopping there and found a cafe serving pay-what-you-can vegan food! We had delicious soup and cake, and payed full price because even that wasn't much.

Nearing the end of our stay in Berlin, we of course heard about the Icelandic volcano. Luckily Angie and I had already booked our train tickets to Koln and then Brussels, but Gab and Sanne were in a bit of a scramble to find an alternate way to their destinations. After Sanne and Gab were on their way by train, Angie and I had a leisurely day in Berlin, visiting the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church (it was destroyed by bombs but left standing as a reminder), seeing what we could of the Berlin Zoo from outside the fence (actually quite a lot), playing on a very adult friendly playground (it had a cool see-saw, and zip-line type thing!), and getting 11 euro haircuts at a place just down the road from our hostel (and they were great haircuts too!). It was then time to grab our bags and catch our midnight train to Koln.
Our two days visiting Koln and Bonn were great too. We discovered that the Koln U-bahn has a line all the way to Bonn (1 hour), so getting there was really easy. We had fantastic weather, and it was lovely to walk along the Rhine, or sit on a plaza and eat ice cream. We saw Beethoven's house in Bonn, and the Kolner Dom (the giant, blackened cathedral in the centre of town that has never been cleaned).

Best Moments in Kiev

Since it worked well for Krakow, I'll do this one in a list too.

10 best moments, in no particular order:

1. Having a personal walking tour drawn on our map for us. --When we asked the guy running the desk at our hostel if there were any free walking tours of Kiev he said "Ah, walking tours, yes!" and proceeded to draw a line through the city of where we should go, giving a running commentary and circling important things. It turned out to be a great little tour, I think we completed the whole thing in pieces during the time we were there.

2. Kievo Pecharsky Lavra --The Cave Monastery. It was amazingly beautiful, and gave us a great view of the city too. We walked through the catacombs where there were some bodies from the 11th century that didn't decompose. That part was really creepy.

3. Seeing the Ukrainian President drive by, twice --Okay so maybe it wasn't the president, but when we were walking from the Presidential palace to a nearby park there were police directing traffic and then a black car drove by with a police escort. We kept walking and on the next road it drove by again, pulling up to the parliament building a few blocks from us. So perhaps the president was being escorted to parliament? It was the middle of the day.

4. Puzata Hata --The buffet-style restaurant that became our regular lunch (and sometimes dinner) spot. So delicious and so cheap. Perogies with cherries, cottage cheese or poppyseed stuffed crepes, apple-filled things that were somewhere between a pastry and crepe, and these great little pancakes called "oladke." I always left there in a great mood.

5. Being able to read menus in cyrillic! --Okay, this is just my moment to be proud because the little bit of Russian I've learned came in handy. Luckily, Ukrainian names for different types of food aren't too different. And for words I didn't know, I could just read them out to Gab who speaks fluent Slovak and she could translate if they were similar words. It was a pretty good system!

6. Taking the metro --We didn't do it very often, we walked most of Kiev, but it was an experience! Everything moved really really fast, from the escalator that whisked us away to the platform, to the metro trains which produced massive gusts of wind as they blasted by, to the people running from one train to the next. I know metros are supposed to be fast, but everything about this one really was. I also loved how there were chandeliers in the metro stations, and almost no handles in the trains so every time it stopped and started I fell over.

7. Seeing a group of old men sitting by the water playing chess. --Well, this explains itself.

8. Randomly coming across a group of older Ukrainians doing some kind of circle dance in the entrance to the metro -- To get back to our hostel we had walk through a few underground passageways (instead of crosswalks) and a lot of them connected to the metro. One night we descended the stairs and found a little band set up and people dancing, directly under the street! An old man came up and asked me something in Ukrainian, I told him I didn't speak Ukrainian. He said "Deutsch?" and I said no, English or French. Then he said "Ah! Frantzuski!" and continued to speak in Ukrainian. I continued to speak in English, telling him I didn't know what he was saying, and the conversation continued on like this for quite some time. I think he might've be asking me to dance, and I tried to explain I don't know the dance. Of course I could be completely wrong, we were really having two entirely different conversations.

9. Andriivsky uzviz --This was a steep, winding street topped by the gorgeous turquoise St. Andrew's church. The streets were lined with the only tourist stands in Kiev, where Gab and I bought what seemed like the last two patches in all of Kiev, and there were also a lot of stands and stores for local artisans selling jewelry and paintings and things.

10. St. Sophia's --This was really cool because the church was set up like a bit of an archaeology museum. The outside showed some of what the church looked like when it was first built, and inside there were sections of the floor which showed uncovered mosaics.

Having enjoyed ourselves immensely in Kiev, we headed off to get our flight to Berlin via Riga, Latvia. So I can say I've had an aerial view of Latvia, and that the airport in Riga was really nice!

Highlights of Krakow

Alright, it's taking me a long time to get out these blog posts so I'm going to do this short form.

Things we did in Krakow:

Walking tour of the Jewish Quarter --A really good idea, most of the things we wouldn't have noticed on our own, or heard the story to go with them. Like this store that wanted to recreate how the area used to look by making several mock store fronts.

Auschwitz and Birkenau tour --What can I say here that you don't already know? It was depressing, frightening, and unnerving. I felt weird about taking pictures there so I have none.

Vodka tasting --Such a student touristy thing to do, but hey, I discovered vodka can actually taste nice (when it's good Polish vodka mixed with apple juice!). We also got free pickles. Mmmm.

Visited the 24 hour perogy joint, more than once --So many kinds of perogies to try and so little time!

Met tons of awesome people at our amazing hostel --Some joined us for the various tours, vodka tasting, and other wanderings about town.

Met up with some friends from Brussels who drove to Krakow --Again, they joined us for various wanderings.

Wawel castle --Fire-breathing dragon anyone?

So basically our time in Krakow was full of fun-filled adventures, the food was delicious and cheap, shopping was good, we had great weather for the most part, and our hostel was so friendly and served us a delicious breakfast every morning and pasta for dinner some nights. What could be better? So, of course, we were sad to leave. But the next destination on our list promised to be interesting too, Kiev!

The Adventures Begin: Oslo

My two week Easter break vacation started with a visit to a friend from home, Dena, who's doing her exchange in Aas, a town just to the south of Oslo. I stayed with Dena in her dorm while my three other travelling companions, Gab, Angie, and David, did the hostel thing.

We arrived from Brussels on Saturday morning and Dena hadn't yet returned from her vacation (theirs was the week before ours), so we went to the Munch museum and met up with Dena when she arrived (straight from the airport!) that afternoon. We took a little walk around the city and then went to the ice bar, where they gave us parkas and mittens to go inside and drink cocktails out of ice glasses! We all went a little crazy with the picture taking.

That night Dena and I ventured to take the second to last train to Aas (10:20pm) only to find out it wasn't running because it was Easter weekend! So we waited in the lobby of the Radisson hotel until the last train 2 hours later. Once in Aas, it was a half hour trek to Dena's dorm. It was actually quite beautiful, I could see the stars for the first time in awhile!

Day 2 had me waiting for another train (we just couldn't quite figure out the Easter schedule), but I got to enjoy a nice morning in Aas and see the little bit of snow that was left. Dena stayed home to work on a paper that day, so I met up with the others in Oslo and we took a boat ride from city hall to the opera house to Oslo's Museum Island. It was a really nice ride, we saw a bunch of little islands with cabins on them, and the scenery reminded me a lot of BC.
On Museum Island we visited the Kon-Tiki Museum, which was all about the adventures of a guy named Thor who built a raft and sailed across the Pacific Ocean to Polynesia, and then later took a reed boat across the Atlantic. I learned he was responsible for the whole Kon-Tiki craze, with Tiki hut bars and all.

In the afternoon we visited the sculpture park, where there are a whole bunch of statues of people doing different things, all by the same sculptor. One of the most famous ones is the stomping baby, who seems like he's too young to be throwing a tantrum standing up.

Monday morning I spent in Aas, since our flight was leaving that afternoon and I was already on the shuttle route to the airport. So I walked the other half of Aas to get to the bus station! I said goodbye to Dena and to Norway and met up with the others to catch our flight to Krakow, Poland.

Oslo was neat, but I'm really glad I got to stay in Aas because the small town outdoorsy-ness is what really appealed to me about Norway.

Tours, Versailles, and Paris in a Weekend

It's Sunday evening here and I just got back from Paris. I figured I should write about my weekend while everything's fresh in my mind!

I left bright and early Friday morning to catch my train to Tours to visit Darcy, and the voyage was pretty uneventful other than the fact that the train was delayed an hour due to signalling trouble (not quite sure what that means). I didn't find it a big deal, but I guess the TGV wants to preserve its reputation so they were giving out discount passes for future trips with them. Somehow I missed getting mine though; I think I was in a rush to switch trains to get my connection to Tours and didn't see the people handing them out.

Anyhow, I arrived in Tours in the early afternoon to find it beautifully warm. Darcy showed me the main areas of town (Hotel de Ville, main square, etc.) and then we wandered to try and find the Musée des Beaux Arts, discovering some neat little streets along the way. The museum was great because it was just the right size. Each of the rooms were fairly small so you weren't overwhelmed with fifty statues or paintings or something, and we managed to see the whole thing in a reasonable amount of time (i.e. not the two weeks it would take to see everything in the Louvre). The museum also had a lovely garden that reminded me of the red queen's garden in Alice in Wonderland, maybe only because I just watched that movie. On our wanderings after the museum we found a fancy clothing store where Darcy wound up buying a fancy fancy dress, and then we headed out for a Mexican food dinner and to a different place for dessert.








So it was a short visit to Tours, but I really liked it! One of the things I loved most was all of the old buildings with the wooden beams. I also loved how the river had natural banks, not cement walls like they put along most city rivers.

Saturday morning we took the train to Paris, where we dropped our stuff at the hostel and took some more transit (metro and the crazy RER I mentioned in my previous post about Paris) out to Versailles. Since we had both already seen inside the main palace we decided to cover the gardens, the Grand Trianon, the Petite Trianon, and Marie-Antoinette's Hamlet (all smaller buildings on the other end of the grounds). It was a half hour walk from the palace just to get to the Grand Trianon! It's another --smaller-- palace where Louis XIV (or maybe XVI, I can never remember because they look almost the same when I'm reading captions) went to escape the main château if he ever felt it was too much. Of course this place was still way bigger than your average home and just as fancy as the main palace.


The Petite Trianon was Marie-Antionette's quarters which she apparantly had built for her because it was more quaint, like what she was used to in Vienna. So here we have two monarchs who sometimes found Versailles too big so they built more palaces...


The Hamlet was actually really neat. Again, Marie-Antoinette had it built so she could enjoy something "simple." It's an entire village of houses made to look like peasant dwellings with food gardens and farm animals, but I don't think too many other peasant dwellings had an architect! It felt quite a bit like Disneyland, a bunch of buildings carefully designed to give a certain image so everyone can play pretend.
After Versailles we lugged our tired selves back to Paris to meet up for a night time bike tour. While we waited for the whole group to show up we met a guy from Montreal who came to Paris to dance the robot under the Eiffel Tower. Apparently he also goes to New York frequently to do the same. So for all of you with any performing skills, there are some interesting career possiblities out there for you! And he's considering coming to Vancouver, so be on the lookout for a robot-mime in the near future.

As for the bike tour itself, so much fun! We went with a group called Fat Tire Bike Tours and our guide was great. It was a really great way to cover a lot of the city at night, and of course everything's beautiful and all lit up. I thought it would be way scarier to ride a bike in Paris, but we were a big enough group that cars had to notice us. The tour ended with a boat trip along the Seine, complete with free wine. However, it started monsoon-raining and we had to take shelter on the bottom deck, making it harder to see everything the boat guide was talking about.

Sunday was a much more relaxing day, as we leisurely strolled around the Latin Quarter and had coffee and crepes outside on the Place de la Sorbonne. We also had time to check out the Jardins de Luxembourg and the Pantheon, and even go inside the Pantheon. I thought it was really neat because there are so many famous people buried there including Voltaire, Victor Hugo, and Louis Braille, the guy who invented --you guessed it-- Braille. The main part of the Pantheon was interesting because it started as a church and now is filled with all kinds of statues commemorating the revolution and great thinkers.

In this picture religion meets secular. The paintings on the ceiling and the walls are part of the original decor of the church and the statue was added latter with a caption that reads: "Vivre libre ou mourir," Live free or die.

So this time around I saw a new side of Paris, one that was more leisurely and beautiful. Perhaps I like it better during a monsoon than during a hurricane.

Anvers-Antwerp-Antwerpen

What to call this city? It usually depends which language you're using, but I've found here that hardly anyone calls it Antwerp even when they're speaking English. So for the title of this blog I've settled on the combination of all three used by Express (the group that organizes exchange activities for us) to advertise the trip, and from now on I will refer to it as Antwerp because I think that's what it's best known as in Canada.


So the city itself. I thought it was a great place, and I could probably live there. It was super clean, near water, and had some neat looking buildings (starting with the train station that strikes you right upon arrival). The shopping was also fantastic. Indeed that's all I'd heard about Antwerp before I went, that it was great for fashion and shopping. I thought that would mean expensive, high end stores, but I found instead that there were tons of vintage stores to be found! I also found a store selling all kinds of natural and organic stuff, from shoes to dresses, and I wanted to buy almost all of it. Everything looked so cool! It was difficult to do, but I did manage to leave Antwerp with only two purchases: a jacket and a scarf. Both of which I'm extremely happy with now that I'm back in Brussels.


Antwerp wasn't entirely a shopping trip, however. We started the day in the Ruben's house museum where some of his paintings were on display. The museum was really about the house though, Ruben's was no starving artist!


We also did a walking tour, which started in the Antwerp's Grand Place (every good Belgian city has one), showed us the Notre Dame Cathedral (which I thought was cool with its one onion dome, see the photo), and took us to the Steen (a castle-like building that was the first building in Antwerp). The tour continued, but at this point a few of us decided we could stop for fries and catch up with the group. Of course the fries took longer than expected and we didn't wind up rejoining the tour. However, by calling friends who were still with the group, we managed to find the next stop of the tour after they had left and were on their way to the next. It was a little contemporary art gallery that was called something to do with a panther and offered free enterance. What's not to love about free art in a quaint little building with a courtyard?

After all the touring was done, we caught up with the group again at a restaurant/pub for hot chocolate and then started browsing vintage (and some non-vintage) shops. The evening flew by as there just continued to be places we wanted to go!

So Antwerp was a really nice place to visit, not over touristy and it just had a nice vibe.

A Good Old-Fashioned Puppet Show

Thursday night I did one of the most interesting things I've done in Brussels yet; I went to a marionette puppet-show!

The theatre was right near Grand Place, and has been there for ages. We had to walk down a narrow alley to get there and then climb a large amout of stairs to get to the theatre in what was pretty much the attic (downstairs was a pub, and the middle floor was a tiny museum which also had a bar). The theatre itself was small, and there were marionettes hanging all around the walls and from the ceiling. I was glad we went in a group because it was a little bit frightening! It really felt like we were in someone's attic to watch a little puppet show, it really wasn't big and over the top like we're used to shows being nowadays.

The show was Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, so also a little bit of a frightening story, but it was really entertaining! Even though the mouths of the marionettes didn't move, because of all the hand gestures they did it actually seemed like they were talking. I recommend you go (it's called the Toone theatre) if you're ever in Brussels. Oh yes, but the shows are in French. I think they do the occasional English one though.

Hurricane in Paris (Part 2)

The windiest part of the trip was the day we went to EuroDisney.

Leaving the hostel in the morning I almost got blown off the sidewalk a few times, and by the time we reached Disneyland Paris it was full on wind and rain. Most of the rides were closed due to extreme weather conditions, so we had 7 hours to pass in a half-closed theme park. It turned out there was still quite a bit to do, of course we probably spent more money on food and hot drinks than we would have had it been sunny. It was nice in a way to not have to rush from ride to ride just to wait in lineups, and we got to leisurely walk about and check out every single gift shop looking for a specific character from Up for Gabrielle. We never did find it, the only store that sold him was sold out.

Even without many rides we got to enjoy the Disney experience, with Sleeping Beauty's castle and tunnels under Adventure Isle. Disney just adds the perfect touch to everything, they pay attention to all the little details. So basically, though I wasn't convinced at first that I would enjoy Disneyland as an adult, I found it a really impressive and happy place even during an intense storm!

We did get to go on Pirates of the Caribbean and the Star Wars virtual reality ride (both indoors), and they were both really cool! It was weird to hear pirates and robots speaking French.

And the day just kept getting better, first the wind stopped, then the rain, so Space Mountain reopened and I got to go on it for the first time in my life! I remember being too little when Lisa and Dad went on it at Disneyworld. Needless to say it was the best ride of the day. Actually I think it was the last, too, because I didn't get on Big Thunder Mountain during the brief time it was open (the weather relapsed).

But it was great to see Disney come alive during the sunny break, and all the floats came out for the Princess Parade. We also got to watch some of the first Mickey Mouse cartoons in the indoor cinema, which was really cool.

So, overall, it was a fast-paced weekend full of dramatic weather changes and interesting things to see. We got to see both Paris and Disneyland in every type of weather except snow, and only when we got home to Brussels did we find out that hurricane-speed winds had been recorded in France!

Hurricane in Paris (Part 1)

So I had a whirlwind weekend in Paris and EuroDisney, complete with hurricane-speed winds!

Of course it was beautiful and sunny when we arrived Saturday morning, and I decided to leave my jacket at the hostel and go around for the day in only a sweatshirt. We tried to hit most of the highlights for Gab and Angie who had never been to Paris before, and along the way we discovered just how insane Paris' transit system is! Metro lines crossed each other everywhere but the stations never seemed to overlap. So trying to get to the Eiffel Tower we decided to walk from a station that didn't look too far on the map... So we had a nice stroll through an expensive looking district of Paris (or maybe it's all expensive), all the while trying to see the tower over the tops of buildings. For such a monstrous tower it hides itself pretty well! When we got to the tower I was extremely confused because I couldn't find the place I'd stood to take a picture only a few years ago! I would think a large, flat space of dirt would be easy to find...

We decided to try and find a metro stop closer to the tower so we could head back towards the Louvre, and we ended up at something called the RER. Not quite a metro or train, because Paris has separate lines for those, the RER was some other kind of underground rail transport that somehow needed to be called something different. And it drives on the left hand side, as we discovered while waiting on a platform expecting it to go the other way.

Just before going in to the Louvre, we stopped at Angelina's, a place my mom recommended we go for hot chocolate. It was a popular place! We waited in line on the sidewalk for ten minutes before going in, but it was worth it. Our waitress wasn't particularly friendly, but the chocolate was amazing! (And so were our desserts!)


At the Louvre we split up to go see the exhibits we were most interested in. I went through the section of works from Iran and Syria (Mesopotamian, Akkadian, Babylonian sculptures and things) which was cool for me after having touched on cuneiform and akkadian writing in a linguistics class at UVic. I also really liked this lion, because it's made from separate brick-shaped sections and it's formed so the lion is 3D coming out of the background. Hard to explain, but I thought it was really cool.

I'll stop there on my explanaition of what I saw at the Louvre because I don't want to bore you all if you're not interested in art. All in all I loved it and am looking forward to going back sometime later to see the other sections.


Just before returning to the hostel to get our room keys (and my jacket, as it was starting to get cold!) we hopped over to Notre Dame. It was a bit of an easier trip than getting to the Eiffel Tower. There was a service going on, so it felt really awkward being a tourist in there. I was surprised they let people in to look around during a service. And there was a souvenir shop inside! It was kind of disappointing.


By the evening it had started to rain, and we set out to Montmartre to see the Moulin Rouge and Sacre Coeur by night. We found a little cafe to go for dinner and realized it was 10:30! So we had a super later dinner, but it was delicious. Then it began to rain even harder as we puzzled our way through the metro to get back to our hostel, where we all slept like logs despite the creaky, shaky bunkbeds.


Since this is a pretty long post I'll split it in two and continue on to the real hurricane part of the trip.

Out and about in Brussels

Although the rest of my week may seem somewhat uneventful after the Binche experience, I actually did some pretty cool things in Brussels. Friday was a free concert, the Antwerp Gipsy-Ska Orkestra, which was quite something. They blended a gypsy sound with just about everything you could think of: ska, reggae, hip hop, punk, funk, and just about as many languages. Many of the songs were in English, but I was also told they sang in the gypsy language (maybe it's called Roma? I'm not sure). Either way, sometimes I understood, sometimes I didn't. The lead singer spoke to the crowd in what a friend told me was probably Dutch, and at other times he spoke a mix of French and English in the same sentence. Overall it was a great show, really lively, and as long as I didn't try too hard to understand I got the general idea of what was going on.

Saturday day I visited the Coudenberg museum with the exchange group. It's an archaeology site of the basement rooms/foundation of the old royal palace and cathedral that burnt down when they were making candy for a party. Oops. Not having enough money to rebuild it as it was, they built the new palace on top in a completely different architectural style. The museum was kind of neat because we got to go underground through all of the rooms that remained and had just been buried for awhile.

That night I went to see a film at an anime festival. I thought it was curious that I saw my first Japanese anime film in Brussels, but I guess that's the way things turn out sometimes! It was a compilation of five different short films, all by different artists and directors, and most of which didn't make sense. It was a great experience, and I saw some really cool animation, but I left really puzzled about what had just happened, since the last film especially had no sort of connecting chain of events or plot line to follow.

As for today, my friend Angie and I visited a weekend market where I bought some dried kiwi (never heard of it before, but they're actually really good), and then Angie, Gabrielle, and I started planning our Easter break adventures... it's looking like Oslo, Copenhagen, Berlin, Prague, and Vienna. Exciting!

I'm not sure when I'll get a chance to write next, as it took me a couple of days to get around to writing this post, but I'm wishing all the best to everyone at home and I miss you all and the Vancouver mountains and ocean so much!

Carnaval et "Mouvement Social"

After a rather tame weekend of going to a movie (suprisingly difficult to do if you're not familiar with the fact that this particular theatre is in two different buildings, one where you pay cash and one with credit) and the comic book museum, I spent today celebrating Carnaval. We had a school holiday today, specially for Carnaval, so we went to the (somewhat) nearby town of Binche for the festivities.


It started off with a bit of a journey, as trains were detoured because of yesterday's head-on collision between two trains a little outside of Brussels, and the regularly one hour trip became two and a half hours. That was well enough, we arrived with plenty of time to join in the various tiny parades around town where men in costumes and clogs marched around with a drummer and dropped off some of their likewise costumed friends at their houses (we guessed so they could have some lunch). We then lined up along the streets to wait for the bigger parade, where they all returned with large feathery hats and baskets of oranges. There was confetti everywhere, children with silly string, and a few interesting hats and costumes scattered through the crowd.



At first the paraders lightly tossed oranges to the crowd as they passed, but after awhile they full on chucked them into the air. All the houses lining the streets had cages over them just for this event, because, as a couple of my friends found out, oranges are rock hard when they hit you.

So the parade part was pretty neat, and I'm glad I got to experience a bit of Mardi Gras celebration, but the real adventure started on our way home.

At about 3:30 we decided to go back and catch a train home. We were prepared for it to be complicated and involve a couple of transfers at different stations, but that was fine. Of course we arrive at the station and there's absolutely no one there, just a sign saying that, due to the "mouvement social," there will be no more trains today. Great, strike.


Luckily we were with Bertrand, the main organizer for our exchange activities, and he had a plan B: take the bus to the next town. But first we went back to the parade area to alert other exchange students so they could come with us if they wanted. We managed to find about 50 of the 100 of us that had come. So we had a giant group waiting for the bus which, after an hour or so of waiting, just never came. No explanation, the schedule said it should be there.


Ok, plan C: flag down one of the shuttle busses which had been driving by almost empty. That didn't work, all the drivers just honked at us and kept going.


By this point many people left to hitchhike their way home, or at least to Charleroi, the nearest city with a likely connection to Brussels. So with a group of 30 or 40 we moved to plan D: call for some taxis. They said no.


Then we tried a more desperate plan E: walk the hour or so it takes to get to Charleroi. We only got about 10 minutes in and some people found busses which may or may not have gone to Charleroi. The rest of us, now closer to 20, tried calling taxis again. This time they said they'd come get us in 15-20 minutes! But after probably half an hour of waiting, none came. Now crowds of people were coming from the direction of Binche, presumably after discovering there were no trains, and we were getting worried they'd take our taxis.


Finally, Bertrand got a number for a private shuttle company that could send us 8-seater vans to take us directly to Brussels for 20 euro each. Not too bad for getting us to a main station in Brussels. After that the trip home from Gare Midi by metro and tram seemed short and simple, and I arrived home at the lovely hour of 9 pm. Only 5 and a half hours after we'd initially tried to leave Binche!


So today I learned I can't rely on any sort of transportation here, and I got an orange.

Adventures of my second week of classes

My big adventures this week included trying all different kinds of Belgian beer (most of which are delicious!) and wandering all over the city to get to know my way better. I think I have a pretty good map in my head now!

Of course I did also spend a ton of time trying to sort out classes and textbooks, but that's much less exciting. As far as I can tell, most of my professors haven't printed their coursepacks yet, or there's no coursepack or textbook at all. However, I tried to find textbooks I knew about for one class, and the lady at the campus bookstore told me they were out and not ordering any more in! Wouldn't the campus bookstore make more money if they sold the books professors assign to their classes? I could by a travel guide to just about anywhere in the world, and all kinds of books about Brussels, but nothing for my classes. Bizarre. But one thing I'm beginning to notice about Belgium, or at least Brussels, is that making money is much less important than having a two hour lunch break, or better, the whole afternoon off. As my friend Gabrielle noted in her blog, if you wan't to get something done here, do it before noon, and definately not on Sunday.

For this coming weekend I'm deciding between going to Ghent or Leuven. I'll keep you posted how that turns out.

Saturday in Bruges

Express, the international exchange student welcome group here at ULB, organized an extraordinarily cheap trip to Bruges for us today. It only took a one hour train ride to get there, but that was enough distance for the weather to rapidly change from sunny to dense fog. No matter, the farm fields passing by in the train windows and Bruges itself seemed much more mysterious that way.

Bruges is a lovely little medieval town, with canals and buildings in all kinds of styles from gothic to gilded renaissance buildings. I'm no expert in architecture, but it's pretty interesting to see when they're all lined up together.

We did a bike tour that took us to a very nearby town called Damme, which is a bit closer to the coast (I still haven't actually seen the Belgian coast yet though). It was really weird riding a bike on cobblestone! Especially while trying to fit down a narrow street that's croweded with a strange mix of cars, pedestrians, cyclists, horse-drawn carriages, and motorbikes. I didn't hit anyone though, and no one hit me! It seems drivers in Bruges are a bit more willing to wait for pedestrians and cyclists than those in Brussels.

On our bikes we passed windmills and farm fields with furry clydesdale-like horses, although I didn't take pictures because we were busy zooming by. Next time I visit Flanders or the Netherlands I will get my windmill pictures!

A few of us decided to end the trip with some Belgian fries, and an assortment of sauces from curry mayo to a tomato-based provençale sauce. Next time I might try the samurai sauce; I'm guessing wasabi mayo. I didn't know what language to order in, since Bruges is in Flanders (the Flemish part of Belgium) and I'd heard French isn't appreciated too much there. Not speaking a word of Flemish, I opted for English which usually makes me feel like an ignorant tourist. But when I asked the guy at the fry place he said he can serve you in about six different languages, as can most other tourist places, because very few tourists speak Flemish.

So now that I'm back in my room in Brussels, I'm sore and tired from so much biking, but looking forward to my next trip, although I don't know just yet where to.

Monday I start my French course, and I have a few other classes to try out in this coming week as well. I'll see how that goes, and I'll update you next time I've got a good story!

All the best to everyone at home!