Tuesday, March 5, 2013

El Viaje a Bruselas


¡Hola! It’s me, Kelsey!

This weekend I traveled to Brussels and Amsterdam and, what a weekend it was! My adventure began Wednesday afternoon (el día de Andalucía fue Thursday=> no tenemos clases) at 6. I took a bus to Madrid with some friends who were also traveling to Brussels and a few other countries. After the 6 ish hour bus ride to Madrid, we took the metro to the airport where we began our very cold wait for our 6 am flight. When we landed in Brussels, the two friends I was travelling with went on their way to Bruges and I was left to explore the metro in Belgium so that I could get to the hostel where my other friends, had arrived the night before. Luck was on my side (this time) because I got to the hostel JUST as Taylor, Maddie, and Aaron were about to head out and grab breakfast.

We spent the day in Brussels going to visit the Cathedral St. Michel et Ste. Gudule, Manneken Pis, the Grand Place, Town Hall, Les Galeries Saint Hubert, and a brewery, Brasserie Cantillon. We also managed to share French fries, Belgium waffles, and chocolate. If you don’t know, Manneken Pis is a bronze sculpture that is a fountain of a little boy peeing. It was made in 1619. There are many legends behind the sculpture that are pretty funny and mostly focused on finding a little boy peeing on someone or something. At Brasserie Cantillon, we went on a tour of the brewery that brews traditional Lambic beers. A Lambic beer is brewed based off of spontaneous fermentation and has a distinct taste from any controlled fermentation beers. It was interesting to learn about the importance of each step in the beer and how they contribute to the unique tastes.

After lots of trouble trying to buy train tickets online, Taylor and I got tickets for the 6:00 AM train to Amsterdam on Friday. It is quite complicated to buy anything online here because most of the time our credit cards don’t work, and the remainder of the time, the websites don’t work (more on this later). Luckily though, we were able to find a train in the morning, even though our initially planned 7:50 train might have allowed for more than 4 hours of sleep. Weellllll, after only one train mistake—we rode one stop past Amsterdam Centraal—we arrived in AMSTERDAM!!! We met up with our 7 friends who are studying in Florence.  Since there were 9 of us, we stayed in a great hotel that overlooked Amsterdam and was quite cheap when split between us. Immediately, it was off to site see. 



HAY MÁS. Lo continuaré pronto.

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