Belgium

I arrived in Belgium on Sept. 2nd. My friend Annelies picked me up at the train station. Annelies was a foreign exchange student I met in high school. She participated in about every activity there was in high school and we were in the school musical and on the mock trial team together. She has been so wonderful in the planning of this trip! I got a lot of emails from her saying, "Come whenever you want! Just let me know when you've made your final plans!"

So after she picked me up we went to her lovely home and had spaghetti with homemade vegetarian sauce! I'm so impressed with Annelies! She made the sauce with this stuff they only have in Europe called "Quorn." (Joy, wasn't it you who told me I had to try that?) It was delicious! Then we went to rugby practice. :-) Annelies is on the Belgian National Rugby Team. These girls are hard core! I put on athletic clothes just in case there was anything I could join in on. I was just standing around on the field when Annelies yells, "We are running!" Next thing you know I'm doing the whole warm up with them. We were doing up-downs and shuffling to the right and left, forward and backward, and I kept running into people because I don't speak Dutch (which is the language they speak in the north of Belgium.) So Annelies starts yelling "right" and "left" after the coach yells in Dutch and soon the whole team is yelling in English so I know which direction to go. It was really cute. I had a good time. But as soon as they started tackling each other I became a spectator. It's not worth risking a broken bone for the rest of my trip.

The next day we went to Brussels. Saw a lot of beautiful things and the most famous thing in Brussels is called Manneken Pis. It's a statue/fountain of a little boy peeing! Apparently there's some story about a little boy saving the whole town by peeing on a building that was on fire to put the fire out or something like that. Anyway, the Belgians love this statue and they send clothes to dress him up. He has some 300 outfits. It's pretty funny. We also went to the Grand Palace. It is only open the public one month out of every year and it happened to be when I was there! The royal family was away on holiday so we got to see where they work. It was really fun. We also went into a beautiful cathedral and went underneath it to see the remains of a cathedral from the 9th century. Very interesting!

I also had the most amazing waffle of my life! A Belgian Waffle of course! With whipped cream, bananas, chocolate, and powdered sugar. I saved a bunch for later on my face too.

Annelies, her boyfriend Steven, and I also went to the Atomium. It is a huge Atom that they made for the world's fair in 1958 and now it's a museum. You can go up inside the molecules and everything! It was really fun.

Annelies had to study for a test one day, so I went to a city called Brugge. It was absolutely beautiful! Very picturesque city with a lot to see. I bought a visitor's guide for one Euro and it was the best Euro I ever spent! I did all the walking tours of the town they suggested and followed along in the book to get a description of everything I was seeing. I really enjoyed it and walked about 12km or so. Probably the most famous thing I saw was the Madonna and Child by Michelangelo. But I saw a lot of other wonderful things as well and the weather was very nice.

Steven showed me around Leuven a bit and I really enjoyed being there. It's a nice small town, a university town, and it's very cute.

The next day we all went to Antwerp, which is a more metropolitan city. We had a Brussels Waffle with ice cream on it and chocolate sauce. We also did a little shopping and I got a bookmark made of lace, which is pretty traditional here in Belgium. It started to rain pretty hard, so we didn't do a whole lot. We saw an old castle/fortress kind of thing that looked very cool and we of course got some BELGIAN CHOCOLATES!!! The truffles were sooooooo good! :-)

I really enjoyed my time in Belgium with Annelies and Steven. I had a lot of fun with them and enjoyed the Belgian people. They all seemed to speak perfect English with no problems!