After being here for three days now (it's Wednesday the 14th), I'm surprisingly not that jetlagged. Our first night, 5 of us went out to a bar and I had my first Belgium beer. It was called Fromaige which is the good fruity beer. I was surprised to find out that Belgium doesn't have any laws against smoking in bars and restaurants. After going to the bar we came home and slept.
Tuesday we wandered around a little bit in the central area of Brussels and saw the Grand Palace and the Minnekin Pis. We just missed him dressed up as Elvis. If you thought Rochester had bad weather, you should come to Brussels. It rained the whole day and was freezing! Apparently it snowed all of last week (a rarity), but it feels cold enough to snow. We also went to a bar and had lunch. The food so far has been pretty good. I had a ham and cheese sandwich warmed up and it was delicious. We also went down this one alleyway (Rue des Bouchers) and it had cute fancy restaurants where all the hostesses would stand outside and try and get you to come inside. There were piles of seafood outside on ice on display. They all looked way too expensive for college students on a tight budget. What was nice though was their outside seating had heaters so it actually felt really good to walk by them because they were so warm.
We also saw our first chocolate shops in the Galeries St-Hubert which is a really expensive mall with a domed glass ceiling! The cholcolate shops all look like they should be right out of the movies! They all look warm and inviting and in one shop they even had their truffles on glass shelves. I haven't had any chocolate yet, but I'm sure there will be plenty to come.
Tuesday night we went to this Italian place that had very good pasta and pizza. The guy must have liked us because he brought us cups of vokda+ grapefruit juice or that's what we thought he gave us. The food was really good and we will probably go back tomorrow night.
Today (Wednesday) we had orientation at Vesalius College. Classes look like they will be pretty easy.I register Friday for my classes but I'm thinking I am going to take French 101 and the History of the Middle East.
Vesalius College is also part of a much larger university-VUB which is a Dutch university in the city. For those of you who don't know Brussels is split between French and Dutch speakers so while most of the city speaks French, some people speak Dutch( ver ver confusing). As for dealing with the language barrier I definitely hope to learn enough French to get me around. Some people know English, but a lot of people know very very little english if they know it at all which can be frustrating but there are 7 of us in a group so it's nice that we are all experiencing the same thing.
So far I really like the people in my program and we've had a lot of fun. I'm looking forward to the next weeks!
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