Two Fridays ago (18th of January), a friend from school named Mathieu invited me to a surprise birthday party for another school friend named Jeremie. Jeremie's mom got a private room in a nice bar for us.
For the first twenty minutes or so, everyone just stood around saying hi and waiting for Jeremie to arrive. He was told that he was being taken out to eat for his birthday until "surprise!", it turned out that all of his friends were waiting for him. We ate subs, drank beer, and ate cake. Great party!
Birthday boy in the middle
Oppa Gangnam Style!
One of the funnest parts of the night was the drinking game we played. You had to put a deck of cards on top of a glass and blow on the cards. You pass the glass around in a circle and the person who blows the last card has to drink. Somehow I started off amazingly. I would manage to blow off every card except for the last one, hence no one wanted to be to the left of me:) After having a few more drinks though, I began to blow off the entire deck so I had to be more careful.
The following Wednesday, my new friend Simon (remember: that's "see-MOHn") invited me to a pizzeria with him and some of his friends after school. It was really good, and it was just a few minutes from my house by foot. After that we went to a bar in Marche and did what I tend to do all day at school - play Danish.
Friday afternoon, I went to the bar again with some friends after school. We just talked and hung out for a few hours until about 6:30 when we left for dinner. Going to Bruges the next day and Disneyland the day after, I knew I would need all the sleep I could get so I called it a night pretty early and went to sleep.
Bruges was definitely one of the nicest cities I've seen in Belgium so far, sometimes referred to as the Venice of Belgium.
I woke up around 7:30 on Saturday to catch the train. I went with my friend Will, his host brother, and his host sister, who are both university students in Louvain-la-Neuve. We took the train to Brussels to meet up with Will's host sister's friend and then went to Starbucks while we waited for our train to Bruges. We must have been going to more of the touristy part of Belgium because we heard a lot of people on the train speaking English.
One of the first things we did when we got there was climb the well known Belfry of Bruges. It was 6€ to climb and there are 366 steps.
Afterwards, we got lunch at a friterie. Then we proceeded to check out more of Bruges, including many of the shops and two cathedrals.
We finished up our time in Bruges with a beer at the bar. It was fun, we attempted to tell each other jokes. Will and I spent about twenty minutes explaining, "Why did the blonde get fired from the m&m factory? She threw out all the w's", but they got it eventually. Afterwards we walked back to the train station. We had to transfer trains again in Brussels, so we got waffles and walked around the city for a while we waited.
After a great day in Bruges, I got home at about 10:30, just in time to get a few hours of sleep before waking up for Disneyland at 3 AM.
The trip to Disneyland Paris was organized by AFS, but you were allowed to bring guests so my host brother and his friend Charlotte came with me. We all road a double-decker bus to get there. Charlotte's parents picked us up and drove us to a small town outside of Charleroi to catch it. The bus ride was probably about 4 hours total, and it went by pretty fasting as I rotated back and forth from talking and sleeping.
It was weird for me because usually going to Disney means you'd get too sweaty if you wore pants, while here I was cold even with three layers.
This was the "Italian" restaurant we ate at for lunch
We found a stamp of the Belgian flag on the ground
A lot of the rides and roller coasters were kinda small, but Space Mountain was really good. Plus you have fun no matter what you're doing as long as you're with the right people:)
We left Disney around 8 PM. On the bus ride home, we played cards, told ghost stories, and slept. Charlotte's parents picked us up again in Charleroi and we got home around 2 AM. My host mom was nice enough to just let us stay home the next day.
My goal for the end of the year is to have made it to at least 10 countries in my life. So far I've been to the US, Canada, Mexico, Belgium, Germany, and France (I wouldn't count Switzerland since I never left the airport). I'm going on a class trip in April to Croatia and Italy, and then I could easily make it to Luxembourg or the Netherlands too.
I have a lot coming up the next couple weeks: this weekend we have our mid-stay orientation (this year is going by crazy fast), my birthday is a week from tomorrow, and then we have a weeklong vacation the following week for a European festival called Carnival (basically the same thing as Mardi Gras). I haven't actually been to the city of Paris other than going to Disneyland, so I might be going there for Carnival with some friends for a few nights and sleep at a youth hostel. Stay tuned for more!
Keaton
