Bruges!

These past (almost) two weeks seem to have flown by! The days following our arrival to MUDEC, the group of 130 some Miamians and I took part in a few days of orientation sessions. The sessions were long but very informative about living in Europe, traveling and living with host families. The school also took us on some field trips to military cemetaries (Luxembourgish and American), a WWII museum, a beautiful castle, a winery and Luxembourg’s famous fair: Shebefuer (spelling??). The fair was one of the coolest things. It was just like a carnival except bigger and more intense with rides resembling the Power Tower at Cedar Point and with an entire street of cool Lux merchant stuff. The fair is also over 660 years old! We then had a week of classes. Classes are going well and most of my professors are from Luxembourg so that’s a major plus! I’m pretty excited about my poly sci class right now as my professor used to be an ambassador to Russia for a long time and has some awesome stories. French is also going well, although my pronunciation is a little off. My professor told me I need to ignore what I learned in Spanish as the pronunciation could not be more different between the two languages…still working on that one!

Well, after an orientation weekend and a week of classes at the Chateau, a group of friends and I went to Bruges this weekend! Bruges was about 4 hours away by train and we got a pretty good price for the ticket/hostels there so I felt we were off to a good start. We left Friday pretty much right after our classes ended at noon. We got to Bruges right around dinner time, but had to check into our hostel before dinner (our backpacks were heavy!). This being my first hostel experience, I would say it was a pretty good one. Our rooms were huge, with about 8 people to a room, but very clean. We met several Australians in the hostel on Friday night and that was definitely a cool multicultural experience. That night we really experienced the whole European dining scene as our Irish dinner took about an hour and a half to come out after we ordered it! Other than that, it was a fun night just getting to know the city!

Saturday we got up pretty early and headed to the town’s square. The square was absolutely beautiful, with a church stretching across one side and buildings/shops on the others. We started with a canal ride that lasted about a half hour with a guide who told me he has a chocolate lab like Coco!! The canal ride was a really cool way to see the city from a different point of view. We then went to Church of our Lady to see Michelangelo’s Madonna & Child, which is one of the only Michelangelo’s works to be outside of Italy. The entire church was beautiful, but the Madonna & Child was really amazing. After a quick lunch of one Belgian waffle with chocolate sauce and whipped cream from a street vendor (don’t worry Mom, I did eat a pretty healthy breakfast earlier!), we went to this massive church in the square to climb to the Belfort. To get to the top of the church’s belltower, we had to climb about 360 steps! I definitely felt a little better about eating that waffle after climbing all those steps! The view from the top was seriously breathtaking and definitely worth climbing up to. We then had a day of shopping around the square, pretty much scoping out the best chocolate stands. Although we probably went in like 10-15 shops, each one was different from the other but all smelled delicious! I tried to resist buying some chocolate, but eventually gave in after sighting some amazing looking truffles. Yum! After shopping, we went to our second hostel which had smaller rooms and a very American-y restaurant attached. The restaurant had all kinds of posters from some U.S. cities and I was happy to see some signs from Chicago and Ohio! We ate a quick dinner in the square and spent the rest of the night wandering around the small city. Although we did reference our map several times, we discovered that Bruges is very small and pretty much all streets lead to the town’s square.

Sunday morning we had a breakfast of Belgian waffles (delicious again!) and left for the train station. I was pretty excited to get back to my comfort zone of Luxembourg, but was really sad to leave the city. Bruges was definitely an amazing and beautiful city and if you’re ever in Belgium, I highly recommend visiting! We got home around 7:30 (or 19:30 here), very tired and very eager for any food that wasn’t covered in chocolate!