Channeling My Inner Belgian: What American Exchange Students Will Do for Food...

Sat. & Sun., September 3rd-4th, 2011

Oh ya... Really catching up here aren't I? ;) Seriously having a blog is actually a lot harder work than I ecer thought it would be, and I don't ever want to skip out on a day when I actually did something that is worth reporting, so hopefully whomever actually reads my blog doesn't mind that they are hearing about my adventures about a week later than they actually happened... But honestly, this weekend I am hoping that I can catch up on everything because I am really excited to tell everybody about my wild stories from school! But hey, that's a different day...

So on Saturday, Emmaline and I planned to hang out, just to have something to do and to see each other. It's really amazing how that on exchange, you get super clsoe to other exchange students super easily. I guess you are all jsut going through almost the exact same experiences, and you only have the other exchange students as people who TRULY understand exactly what you are going through and what it is like to be on exchange. Anyhow... So, I rode the bus to her town (it's called Louveigne) which is about a 25 minute bus ride, if you just go from the gare. I was really worried that somehow I would miss her stop, but luckily she walked out to the stop and met me there, so I knew exactly where to get off. The plan after that was to just walk around her town and discover what there was to see, because she hadn't really gotten a chance to do that yet. And, well, what we discovered is that there isn't really anything in her town. It's too small. And of course, we had walked about 30 minutes away from her house. Luckily, as we were heading back her host mom drove by and offered for us to come with her to the next town over for a walk. It was hard to communicate with her though since she doesn't understand a word of English. So we kinda just decided to get into the car, even though we didn't really know what was happening. Luckily, the place we ended up going was this really cool little walking trail. When we were on it, it actually reminded me quite a bit of home, the trail seriously almost looked familiar to me! But who knows, maybe there is a possibility that in some former life I was a Belgian... :)

About half way through our little walk, we went past a grocery store and decided to go and get lunch there. Emmaline, Eliza, Diego, (her two little twin host siblings that are 7... they were absolutely adorable!), and I all got sandwiches, and Emmaline and I also picked up a bag of chips because even though it's in the stores, no one here actually eats things like chips, and they never snack either. Angelica, Emmaline's host mum, was smart enough to not buy anything because even though both of the kids got a small sandwich, neither of them finished it and she basically ended up with a full meal! After lunch we finished our walk and since Emmaline and I didn't feel like going home quite yet, we had her host mum drop us off at a little town nearby so we could explore. Well, when we got there, we realized how small it was exactly and didn't end up staying there very long. Luckily, it was only like a 20 minute walk home, so it wasn't bad.

Pretty Church During our Walk!

La Petite Ville

The whole time that I have known Emmaline, I have known that her host family is pretty well off. Her host dad drives a Ferrari, and the mum's "junk" kid car is a really nice BMW with all the works. And when she mentioned that people have wedding receptions at her house, I knew that must be really nice too. But when we walked down this little path and into a giant field (which, of course, is all their property...) I couldn't believe how big their house really was. I can't even explain it, but there are at least like 4 different parts of the house and its so big that Emmaline can never find anybody inside because there are simply too many places to look. I don't know what her host dad does for a living, but I want to do whatever it is that he does... Even though they were obviously really rich, I really liked the whole fmaily because they were really down to earth and I really don't think that the kids were spoiled all that much. I mean, sure, the have a Wii and little Eliza has an Ipod touch, but other than that not really. And the kids were just adorable, we played Wii with them and listened to music (which was in English, even though they don't understand it...) and just danced around and had fun. I really do love the De Decker's as a host family, but after having so much fun with little kids I hope that one of my next host families has kids!

The next day Emmaline and I had planned to meet up with Lauren and go to Brussels together. We had planned to meet up at Liege Guillmens Gare aroundd 12 and then take the train to Brussles together. But Lauren has had some trouble with her host parents and them allowing her to go out and do things other than with the Rotary club, so at the last minute she called us and told us that she couldn't come... We felt really bad for her, but we weren't going to let her absence ruin our fun! The train ride took about an hour, and by the time we got to Brussels Emmaline and I were starving (we hadn't exactly had time to get breakfast... I had a banana at least, but Emmaline had nothing!) When we went to Brussels with the Rotary, I remember seeing a New York style pizza place near the Grand Place. Yes, I knew that a store like that was really there to trap the American tourists and make them pay TONS for a couple of slices of pizza, but Emmaline had seriously been craving it for forever, and a good normal slice of pizza sounded really good to me to. Boy, was that pizza worth the 7 Euro we paid for it... It was soooooooo good! After lunch we walked around for at least 2 hours in attempts to find the infamous peeing boy of Belgium. But, even though we seemed to have looked everywhere, asked at least 3 different groups of people for directions, and followed their directions exactly, we still never found it. It left me feeling very disappointed, but we still had one more plan to finish off our full American food day: going to Starbucks at the Brussels train station!!!!!! I hadn't realized how much I truly loved Starbucks and how much I had missed it over this past month until I was sipping on a grande caramel white chocolate mocha with whip. I made my drink last forever, just because it was so good and I didn't know the next time that I would go to Brussels. So needless to say, we bascially just went to Brussels to eat delicious American food and drinks and get lost in attempts to find a 2 foot statue of a little boy peeing. But at the end, both Emmaline and I agreed that it was totally worth it! :)