initial experiences

It's almost official- I have spent an entire week living in Europe. My travel experience thus far has been both challenging and entertaining, enlightening and full of surprises. I began my journey last Monday, flying into Belgium finally by Tuesday morning. When I arrived Tuesday morning, I apparently arrived during the worst storm that Brussels has seen in years. There was intense flooding on the roads and a general grayness (is that a word?) surrounding the city. I hope this is not indicative of what is to come on my Brussels adventure! My group soon met our wonderful trip coordinator, Keira Holland, who reminded Anna and I of a grown up, more spastic version of our dear friend Meagan Beyers. For those of you who know Meagan, this should give you a wonderful idea of what Keira is like! We soon moved into our apartment, which is beautiful and luckily the largest of all the Furman ones (score!) although the bunk beds definitely remind me of my Gwynn Valley summer days. The next day we attended orientation for Vesalius College, the place where we will be taking two classes a week. That was a long day of paperwork and quite exhausting. It was funny when the first place our tour guide (who was supposed to be showing us around campus) took us was the campus pub where we were apparently supposed to pop in for a beer at 11 AM! 11 AM is a little early for me, so needless to say I did not partake in my first opportunity for Belgian beer. It was funny to see the contrast with Furman, however. The next day we went and visited Parliament and the downtown Brussels area. It really is such a beautiful city. I am slowly but surely learning how to navigate (had a little bus mishap that morning but whatever). I'm just nervous about the commute to work as I haven't done it yet. I'll be interning with the European Network Against Racism, a human rights group, and I am so excited. You can find more information about it here: http://www.enar-eu.org/.  As of now I have my schedule set to work all day on Monday and Wednesday and class all day Tuesday. It will be a combo of both on Thursday and then hopefully traveling on Friday through the weekend. It makes me feel pretty grownup like traveling on the metro and such by myself (dumb I know) but I feel like some cliche movie scene or something (young 20something woman sits on the metro wearing euro chic clothing, reading her kindle, and generally just looking pensive). We had the student government organized "pub crawl" on Friday night(like I said, we aren't at Furman anymore!) and then a tour of Brussels the next morning. We also had our first exam for our Furman class (basically just on the readings we've already done) on Saturday afternoon. The food here is crazy- I don't know how they all aren't obese because they eat bread LIKE EVERY 5 SECONDS. I'm not a huge coffee drinker so I went down to the local "SAMS club" aka something called Colruyt and bought myself a 24 pack of "coca light". Colruyt is like a minute walk away which is super nice. Everything here is in French so that's kind of hard to navigate as far as buying groceries is concerned but some of it is coming back to me and I'm retaking French over here so hopefully it will get easier. Last night after the exam everyone went out for a nice dinner and then went and experienced downtown Brussels. I got to experience the real Belgian beer then, and I must say, it is pretty good! It's surprisingly fruity, which is nice because I typically don't like beer. Today was just a nice lazy Sunday. We slept in and I think we are slowly overcoming the inital jetlag. We have booked flights to Dublin next weekend and London in mid October to see some friends and I'm getting super excited to experience more European cities. That's about all for the first week! I still feel so blessed to be able to have this experience, and though I miss my family and friends and even Furman, I think I'm making memories here that will last a lifetime.