Month: February 2014

End of Brussels and Maastricht

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The end of my time in Brussels was an interesting experience. Friday afternoon, Alex and I adventured to the outskirts of the city to go to the site of the 1958 World Fair and go to the Atomium. It was an interesting place but it was also pretty good to be able to see where the world fair was hosted on the site in Chicago doesn’t exist anymore. Or at least I don’t think it does. I may be wrong about that. Getting there was a little of a trek because it was on the other side of the city but thankfully there is enough public transit that the only thing was to wait on the train since it was literally the last stop. It took probably about 40 minutes to get there but the trip was worth it. The Atomium was relatively cheap and provided a great view of the city. The only bad part about this was the fact that it is Brussels in January so it was overcast and there was not a lot of visibility, just barely being able to make out Grand Platz in the distance which was not that far away. The rest of the Atomium was interesting since they had different exhibits on the progression of technology. Unfortunately, we figured it was going to take a lot longer than it actually did (it maybe took us an hour) so we still had all of the afternoon to figure out what to do.

The Atomium

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In Bruges

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Wednesday and Thursday were different sorts of days because the two were completely opposite. Alex knew that she would have to spend at least a day or two doing school work which worked perfectly with me because I procrastinated the blogs long enough that I had three more of them to do and they were due Wednesday night. Wednesday was spent that the University doing work and while Alex found herself incapable of focusing on more than a page at a time, I was pretty productive since I managed to finish my blogs, check the grammar and spellings (which was pretty horrendous since most of the posts were typed quickly on my phone), compile them into a word document, and e-mail them off to the professor. Granted I had an advantage because my time schedule was still 6 hours ahead of everyone else because they were all back in the states. I also had the extra bonus of not having classes… giving me more time than they had even with touring Brussels and watching Game of Thrones. That was pretty much all of our Wednesday since Alex did not have classes that day and neither of us felt like doing anything after a long day of questionable productivity. I think it was Wednesday night that we then walked to the grocery store, bought almond flour and other stuff so we could make gluten free pizza and watched another two episodes of Game of Thrones that we let buffer while using the school’s internet because it was considerably more reliable than Alex’s apartments internet. The Internet in Europe is not as good as we are used to, especially because her apartment had this weird thing about only two devices being allowed to connect at the same time. This really sucks when you have both laptops and smartphones. Now, this is a first world problem if I have ever come across one. Continue reading →

Brussels

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It was a sad day when everyone began to go their own way after the trip but an inevitable one that some people feared and some people were overjoyed. Regardless of how you were feeling about going home, one thing was for certain: no one wanted to leave the friends that they made on the trip. For me though, the trip was still a long way from being over because I headed to Brussels to visit a friend of mine who is in grad school now. She is my grade and went to undergrad at Delaware but is a smartypants and graduated a year early. The fact that my spring semester did not start until February 10th and the trip ended on the 19th of January meant that I had lots of time to kill before the semester started and was dying for something to keep me entertained, even for a few days. One of the big advantages of going to visit a friend who is in the first week of grad school means that I could finally have alone time. Not that I am anti-social or hate people or anything like that, but when spending nearly three weeks with your only alone time is in the bathroom, any and all quiet is welcome.

I didn’t arrive until late in the evening so I was ready to pass out as soon as I hit a soft surface. The airport is outside of the city so it took a good hour using public transit to get back to Alex’s apartment, which is downright adorable. The worst part is that it is on the 6th floor of the building which does not have an elevator. Having to lug my suitcase up six flights of stairs when I am packed for a month is not an easy experience and one I can live without in the near future. One advantage of her apartment is that is around the corner from her school and only about 20 minutes from the city center. This would have been easy to figure out if it did not take me five days to get a directional bearing because there are so many ways to get to a single place through the use of the underground, buses, and trams. Eventually, I managed to figure out how to get to Gare Central (Central Station) and from there the points of interest were easy to get to.

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