Aaaaaah. Again, it has been a long time since I posted.  I'll try to recap the last two weeks. Bufffff. This is going to be longgg....

Luxembourg!

         Last Friday started our winter vacation! A group of 7 girls from my program started the vacation with a 7 hour train ride leaving at 5 am to Luxemboug (hi, ancestors!), which went by surprisingly quickly with the help of a fully charged iPod and my fabulously hilarious travel companions (hi Alex and Michelle!)! The country was BEAUTIFUL.  Apparently Luxembourg City used to be under water not too long ago, so the city is on basically built on three separate levels.  Although it was pretty painful lugging around my 20 kilo backing backpack (thanks to Pretz for leaving her broken one behind in Chicago, and thanks REI for having an amazing return policy!) through the hilly terrain, it was definitely worth it.  We also stayed in a wonderful hostel with two Austrian girls who pleaded that we speak English with them instead of exhausting them with our French the moment we met them (pas de problème, nouvelles amis...). 

Just being touristy!

During our short 24 hour stay, we ate well, we visited a modern art museum, and we saw a natural history museum where we met a local architect who was able to explain the reason for the terrain as well as show me the best views of the city. Pas mal! On our way out of the country, we ended up losing one of our companions, freaked out minorly, started walking (then it started to hail for literally 25 seconds), then finally decided to sprint to the gare (where it turns out she had already been waiting for 10 minutes after a taxi dropped her off...), where we watched our train pull away without us.  After a minor scream fest on the platform about how much we now hated the country (sorry, ancestors), we realized we could take a train an hour later, and arrived safely to Brussels later that evening.

Best gaufres in Belgium! Trust me, I tried them ALL.

         Brussels was wonderful also!  Not as esthetically pleasing as Luxembourg, but still fun.  We did all the tourist-y things including (but not limited to) mange-ing plenty of gaufres and Belgian chocolate, visiting Mannequin Pis, seeing the Atomium, and briefly sampling the nightlife in their centre ville. As it turned out, there wasn't much more to do after that, so we took a day trip to Bruges the next day (aka my/Ke$ha/Justin Beiber's birthday!), where we mange-d more gaufres and chocolate (I decided that since it was my birthday I was allowed to buy 100g of truffles for myself and eat almost all of them except one dark-chocolate-liquor-poop mélange which I stupidly saved for last, then spat on the ground like a brat), visited the chocolate museum, shopped around, and then returned to our hostel in Brussels to cook (!) and spend the night. **Sidenote/fun story that will please my parents: besides the deceivingly alcoholic truffle, I did not taste a drop of alcohol on my 21st birthday. I'm so 'beyond my years' as Donn said.
        The next day back in Brussels, we got the chance to take a tour of the European Parliament building, which I found really interesting.  European politics is something I have been trying to learn more about and understand, and our little visit helped a lot (turns out there are many more political parties in Europe than in America!), and I also found the translator's jobs really interesting.

More tourist-isms!

               Afterwards, we hopped on a train to Amsterdam! Our hostel, The Flying Pig, was AMAZING, and very traveler/college friendly (quelque fois pendant le premier jour je me flippe when I heard people speaking English in an American accent...this sense of amazement quickly wore off after I realized about 60% of the people in the hostel were American, contrary to what I'm used to in Grenoble).  They even had peanut butter at the free breakfast to satisfy us poor deprived Americans.  I found most of the 'locals' in Amsterdam very nice and friendly, but soon after, I found out that real locals are hard to come by (being that the city is so international) and that these were just normal humans. Woof. During the day, we got to see the Anne Frank museum (such a sad but inspiring story), and sampled each and every 'specialty of the region' (including, but not limited to, stroopwafels in all shapes and sizes!) My real first night there, some friends and I mozied over to the red light district (still being touristy!), but I found it really sad.  Not sure if it was from all the traveling, the lights, or other influences, but seeing the 'spectacle' that is the red light district made me pretty emotional.  Even though someone told me that the laws in Amsterdam make the profession of prostitution very profitable for women, I couldn't help but think of how sad it was that the majority of the people going to see them (including myself) had degraded their profession to a spectacle to which they don't even get paid for. I'm sure there is much more to it than I am aware of, being the foreigner that I am, but it really made an impression on me.  **On an ironic sidenote, happy International Women's Day! 


The next day in Amsterdam we visited the Van Gogh museum with a guy from Prague who was staying in our room back at the hostel, and it was superb.  The museum had a lot of historical artifacts and had a lot of background information and stories on the artists life, which kept me (semi) interested throughout the 3 hours we spent there.  There was also an exhibit on Picasso.  Later that afternoon, as we were planning our evening in our hostel room we heard a group of guys playing 70's disco music from an retro cassette player, so naturally we invited them into our hostel room to amuse us.  The group turned out to be composed of a North Carolin-er, a German, and a Spaniard visiting a friend in Amsterdam and were amusing companions for the night. Later that night we all helped cook in our hostel again and made some new friends!

Lovely last night Eurotripping with friends!

Saturday we voyaged over to Rotterdam because it was closer to the airport we flew out of the next day and the hostel was cheaper. It was actually a really nice port city, and we happened to arrive on the only day in March with a city event planned (quelle chance!) which was a nuit-blanche for museums.  For 13.50€ we were granted access to every museum in Rotterdam (45 of them! In reality, we only saw like 4 though....) from 9pm to 2 am as well as the chance to see some dj's, bands, and dance parties.  Overall, a good time. Also in Rotterdam, we stopped for lunch at a bagel/sandwich place and it was BOMB. I am just now realizing how much I miss bagels.


In the end, I ate WAY too much sugar/belgian chocolate/gaufres and spent WAY more money than I should have, but it was well worth it. It was honestly probably the best time I have had in Europe thus far, and I know that we all learned a lot about ourselves and eachother. Now...where to go for spring vacation??


ming.