Weekend in Brussels!

What a long few days it has been…First of all, Brussels, Belgium is a beautiful place! I loved the city and am so happy I got to see it. We stayed in a hostel on a road off of the Grand Place, which was great for us to be able to walk to so many places so fast. The Grand Place was gorgeous! When you first walk into the expanse, it is breathtaking. The buildings have great architecture and it seemed like we couldn’t take enough pictures of each building! Walking here was much more pleasant than Amsterdam though. I didn’t always feel like I was about to be run over by something!

Saturday was actually Belgium’s National Day (whatever that is.. basically "Yay for Belgium" Day), which added to the crowds a little and closed a few of the stores. But we got to see a lot of Belgium pride and spirit and there was even a huge festival Saturday night. We walked to it in hopes of seeing fireworks, but were sad to realize the fireworks were set off in the park and were mostly blocked from our view by a building. The festival was very similar to one we would have with overpriced concessions and face painting, but they did have a lot of the army tanks and soldiers there to see. There were so many people there though!

This city is all about chocolate and Belgium waffles. Everywhere you go chocolate stores, including Godiva, and waffles with all sorts of toppings, and candy and ice cream! It was awesome!

When it came time to leave though, me and another girl who stayed in the hostel, Tori, checked out and had a great day talking and finally enjoying some sunshine. We had stayed there with 3 other girls, but traveled by train with 4 other people who stayed in different hostels. We got to the train station about 2 hours early, studied some for our Finance exam on Monday and only left once to get my friend’s last minute chocolate fill! We found the gate early and waited on our group, only for them to never show up. We were unable to board the train, because we were not the ones who had the group ticket. Come to find out Brussels has 2+ train stations and we were at the wrong one. There was actually a train leaving for the same location at the exact same time and platform, but not the right station. Little did we know this train would go to the station we should have been at on the way out. This was the start of a terrible evening for me and my friend. It is was to long to describe the whole scenario, but in short we finally arrived back to our hotel in Bremen at 6:30 am while our group arrived around 11 because somehow they had found out there were more than one station. (Not all of us having cell phones over here is starting to be a problem.) My friend and I thought someone was playing a cruel joke on us. It was definitely one of the top 5 worst nights of my life. We caught so many unlucky breaks we couldn’t even believe it. We were very frustrated, scared, lonely and lost. Thank goodness we had each other and my cell phone. One of our teachers was in touch and cared a lot, which made us feel much better. I won’t say we missed all of our trains, because several times we were there ahead of time and weren’t allowed onto the train for various reasons. All in all, it made us never want to ride a train again. We had planned on traveling to Berlin this weekend, and we most likely still will. We are just very nervous to travel with a group rate again, and about having to deal with unhelpful train station employees again. Also, people in train stations at night are not anything I EVER want to see again (especially in Koln). We hate for this to taint our view, because it is nice that people don’t have to drive everywhere, but the system has some serious flaws we have noticed. There are even more, smaller unfortunate things included in the night, but we complained enough about them on Sunday! It is over and we are out of there! To say the least... it was an experience.

But I am back in Bremen, happy to have made it back alive and in one piece! I took my exam this morning and feel okay about it. Luckily our teacher has a policy for situations like this so that if you miss or do poorly on this exam the final can replace it. After going about 32 hours on about 1 hour of sleep I was finally able to nap, wake up to get ready for bed and class and go back to sleep. (So much for getting over jet lag.) Unfortunately the internet at the hotel is very come and go, so I was unable to post this blog until now.