love

Had a perfect day. The sun was shining, I was in Bruges with great friends, ate a delicous picnic lunch, and I made a trip to the North Sea. Oh, AND my camera arrived. Have many pictures to share :)

Sorry for the recent lack of posts - After not updating my blog for about two weeks, the thought of relaying everything I had been doing in those weeks in one post seemed a daunting task. So I kept putting it off, and kept having more adventures, and as a result wasn't sure how to go about "re-starting" my blog.

Also, my camera broke. Writing posts without pictures really isn't as much fun. But new one is arriving today, so I will be able to take pictures of everything I do from now on to share with all of you!

Rather than trying to write a whole post about every thing I've done, here's a list of what I've been up to:
 - Had a successful Thanksgiving dinner. Everything turned out amazing in the end, despite the few setbacks I had at the outset.
 - Went to Amsterdam last weekend with Anais and Victoria. AMAZING city!
 - Dinant with Victoria a few weekends ago. Climbed up to the citadel, and up to some old ruins.
 - Antwerp for the day a few weeks ago. Did a lot of shopping, and walked around town. It's a really incredible place!
 - Went to a 24 hour party in Louvain-La-Neuve, a town just outside of Brussels (note I was not there the full 24 hours!). It is the biggest student party in Europe, with 40,000 students attending on average. It was crazy to say the least. Also quite disgusting, people pee everywhere, throw up where ever they feel like, and toss beer when they're done with it. Very fun though, definitely a memorable experience!
 - Celebrated Halloween in Brussels - apparently Halloween costumes here are actual "Halloween" costumes. A lot of blood on faces, pumpkins, witches, etc. Our group Rambo costumes were a bit hit however
 - Went to a puppet show in Brussels. It was one of the most bizarre, but wonderful experiences I have had yet. The theatre was in a tiny little house at the back of a small alley. The puppet room was a tiny wood-panelled room with wooden rafters on the top floor of the house. The walls were lined with puppets, and seats were long benches covered in multi-colored cushions. The puppet stage was about a metre and a half tall by two metres wide, and you could see the hands of the puppeteers as they were controlling the movements of the different characters in the play. We saw "Le Bossu", which is "The Hunchback" in English (apparently a classic tale..?), and although I had a very hard time understanding the french being spoken (I'm still not convinced that it was even in french most of the time!) it was very entertaining! Lots of sword fighting between the puppets, dramatic deaths, and puppet strings getting tangled with other puppets. Very wonderful experience!

I'm off to Berlin this week coming up. Very much looking forward to it. I promise I will write a proper post about my adventures there!

Bisous!
Sarah

Dinant

Ruins in Dinant

Victoria and I

Amsterdam

Amsterdam

Puppet stage

Puppet theatre benches

Thanksgiving in Europe

So far, Brussels is kicking Thanksgiving's ass. First of all, Turkeys do not exist here in any season other than Christmas. Great. I will be preparing two lovely (...but small) Thanksgiving chickens in lieu of the Turkey. Picked up the chickens at the meat market in the middle of Brussels. I walked through rows and rows of fruit and vegetable stands, listening to the many vendors yell at me to visit their booth, to find this 'meat market' I had heard about. Finally, I walked in to a buiding full of stalls with huge hunks of meat. Gross. Found the chickens, and asked the man for his biggest one - thinking that, like in Canada, it would be quite large. BOY was I wrong. The largest chicken available was smaller than the size of my head (3 kg). Wondering whether two of the mini-chickens would be enough to feed about 12 people, I decided to get the meat-man's opinion. After repeating myself many times, the meat-man finally grabbed my hands and said (in french) "I don't understand what you are saying to me!". How discouraging. Although in my defence, the meat market was like an auction house, with people screaming everywhere to get the best cuts of meat from the butchers - so you could barely hear in the first place. Luckily, his partner spoke english, and he was able to tell me that two mini-chickens were, in fact, plenty to feed 12 people.
Also, Cranberries don't seem to be sold here, in any form - sauce, the actual berry, or juice! Impossible to find.

So, off to a GREAT start. Need to make sure that the preparation of all this food goes well. I have promised my international friends the best Canadian Thanksgiving ever. Wish me luck!

Happy Thanksgiving to all!

Miss you!
Sarah
xoxoxo

I have discovered an untapped market in Brussels - Travel Mugs!
I swear, everytime I bring mine out with me, I get AT LEAST one person who asks me where I got it, because it is "such a good idea!".
Good thing I brought mine, and didn't decide it was something I could just "buy over here".

Also, since we are on a semi-environmental topic, I feel I should make note of the AMAZING residential 'waste' program they have here in Brussels. Here it is: NOTHING is waste!
We get three bags; a yellow one for paper and cardboard, a blue one for plastic and metals, and a white one for organics. So nothing really gets "thrown out", everything fits into one of the bags, and so all is recycled!

I love Brussels.

Went last night to the Musee de la Ville de Bruxelles in the old Maison du Roi in La Grande Place. Amazing. They had an entire section on urban planning and the growth of Brussels from the 15th to the 20th century. Was quite amazing to see pictures of the growth of the city, and the different urban planning techniques (or lack of..)  used as more and more people came to Brussels.
As wonderful as it was to learn a bit about the history of the city of Brussels, my favourite part of the museum was the collection of Mannequin Pis' outfits! He has a traditional outfit from almost every country accross the globe, an astronaut uniform, various police/army/navy uniforms, and just about every other thing you could imagine. But one in particular caught my eye. Here Canada:

Miss everyone!

A bientot.
Sarah
xoxoxoxo