Belgium

Today we began our awesome adventure through Europe! We began as two intrepid explorers determined to succeed against all odds (and parental worries/expectations that we are going to lose some important document passport, rail pass, etc.) and have the time of our lives. On the flight to Brussels through D.C. I initially had planned to get a full seven hours of sleep in so that I'd have tons of energy to kick of the trip, but as fate would have it sleeping on a plane is downright challenging especially when you've got a selection of five inflight movies to choose from. Needless to say me and Greg (Greg and I for all the grammar nuts) got a combined hour of sleep on the flight and ended up watching 3 movies each. Which brings us to Brussels, Belgium at 7:10 local time. We had promised our mothers we would call when we arrived so they could stop worrying, but as it turns out I am now quite convinced that calling cards don't work in Europe.



Another thing we quickly noticed is that Belgians seem to find a sick kind of pleasure in giving tourists as complicated and complex directions as they possibly can, and even if one were to follow there painstaking every move there is absolutely no guarantee that you will end up in the right place. We asked four different people how to get to the city tourism office, and we got four different directions with only the final ones actually leading us there. But it wasn't all bad, we had authentic Belgian waffles to eat while pondering our way to the tourism office to get a map (did you know that Belgian waffles are really a desert?! We had them for breakfast anyway).





The grand plaza was really cool and had some awesome statues all over the buildings.



We later met this great Australian bloke named nick who is touring Europe for 4 months. He helped us find our way to St. Micheal's Cathedral where we went to mass. It was beautiful cathedral, and the choir was awesome (though we didn't understand a word of it).



After mass we realized that we'd been in Brussels for 5 hours and we still hadn't called home yet and decided we better figure that out. So we ended up calling collect, which I think with all the hidden surcharges, connection fees, international connection fees and minute round ups amounted to somewhere near a thousand euros (ok, ok, maybe a hundred). We then saw the manikin pis statue, and then started hiking over to the train station to go to Stuttgart.



On the way down we met Neals from Buffalo New York who was also backpacking his way to the train station. We took a wrong turn somewhere and ended up in this crazy Sunday open market where once you enter you really can't leave because there is only one aisle surrounded by masses of vendors. It was pretty cool, though it slowed us down to a crawl to get through the masses of people. I've never heard someone sound so excited about selling his ananas (pineapple). We eventually emerged out the other end of the market right in front of the train station. We parted with our New York friend then hopped the train to Stuttgart, where 30 hours of no sleep started to catch up to us. We fell asleep real quick, but I guess German police assume that people sleeping in the last row of the last car of the train (us) are stowaways or something, so we were woken up and in a half awake stupor had to scramble to find our passports and give a detailed explanation of where we were coming from and where we were going. We then arrived at Stuttgart and met up with Greg's friend Andre. After coming to Andre's home and meeting his family (very friendly and welcoming people) we were able to each take a shower and get some grub. With that I am really tired and am about to hit the hay. If every day is as packed as this one I'm not sure how I'm going to keep writing all this.