I'm heading off for Spring Break in a few short hours and I didn't want to leave you all hanging for another 2 weeks. So I'm going to try to be more brief than usual as I purge my camera's memory card in preparation of the pictures to come in the next 2 weeks.
Before leaving, way back in December and even before then, I'd talked with my other friends who are currently abroad about how we were going to meet up in Europe and have adventures together. My friend from Creighton, Christine, and I had talked about Europe at lunch all through last semester. Naturally, I was excited when she suggested coming to visit as it would be the culmination of all our talks. I took her around Brussels and even to a brewery and we indulged in a couple of Belgian delicacies, i.e. gaufres and frites and beer at the brewery. The weather was even sunny. The next day was another ISA excursion which Christine joined. This time to Breendonk concentration camp and Antwerp. Breendonk was FREEZING and it just made me so glad to be able to live in safety and comfort, I thought about how people lived in those conditions every day in thin clothing, starving, exhausted, tortured. It was a good precursor for Auschwitz later. Fortunately, it was a sunny and relatively warm day in Antwerp. The day kinda focused on Rubens, first we saw his painting in the cathedral and then we saw his house and studio. After that we went on a "ghost walk" which I thought was going to involve gruesome Jack-the-Ripper-esque tales but ended up being completely suitable for even an 8 year old. It was pretty cute, actually. There were a lot of people in Antwerp and festivities for the first day of spring. I enjoyed it. After arriving back in Brussels Christine and I went out for a drink and not to the usual haunt but to a very different new place that I'd stumbled across the day before and I'd remembered it was in my tour book. We were the youngest people in the place by far, but that was ok. We had a good long talk and lost track of the time, those kinds of talks are the best kind.
As we had rented a van for the trip and would have it for the next week, Sabine decided to have a Sunday excursion to the abbey at Villers-La-Ville and Waterloo. Christine had to leave for France in the morning, but I was very happy she got to visit. The abbey at Villers-la-Ville is a mass of ruins from around the 1200s maybe. They were beautiful, especially the church. After that we headed to Waterloo to see the site of the famous building which is something I'd wanted to do for a while. Really, it's just a big man made hill with a statue of a lion on top and a few cheesy tourist trap exhibitions. None-the-less, it was enjoyable and interesting trying to picture fighting with horses and rifles and bayonets taking place in that exact place a couple hundred years ago. I'd never been to a battlefield before either.
I'm sorry I've been so bad at keeping you all up to date here, but all the pictures are up on facebook and photobucket. I have much more to report on Han-Sur-Lesse and Geneva but that will have to wait. Spring break is upon me and I'm really excited to see the places I'm going to, more so than I have been for my other travels. I'm really hoping everything goes smoothly over the next two weeks. I'm bringing a journal with me and I'll do my best to actually write in it so I don't forget any details and I can report back to you when I come home. Until then...
-Lauren :)
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