Week 13- Easter

Brussels

Spending time at the park behind the Atomium

What you may come across when you miss your subway stop!

I loved Easter. It was one of the greatest weekends because we did so much in so little time and I really felt that we made the most of it. We started off our trip in Brussels. That morning, Ethan and I met up with Kimberly at her house and had tea with her host mom. Then, we took a nice walk through a park by her house and headed towards the bus station. It was like twenty minutes late, but it was okay since Kyle was running kind of late anyways. On the bus ride, I finished an essay that was due the next day and then apparently I fell asleep for like an hour and a half. Brussels was seriously filled with so many surprises. Every time we turned the corner, something we didn't expect would appear and so much of what we did was not a part of an itinerary. When we went to see the Atomium, we ended up spending three hours in the park behind the giant atom. We jumped fences, climbed small mountains, worked on our balance, climbed monkey bars, used some work out equipment, and ate some waffles from a small food truck. It was not at all what I was expecting, but it was the perfect way to spend our first day in Belgium. Later that day, we visited the central area and saw the statues of the peeing boy and girl. I have no idea why those statues were so famous, but it was nice to see them in person. We heard of a light show that occurred every night at the very center of the city and decided to sit and wait for it to come on. We sat in the middle of the crowded courtyard and waited for the lights, but only a few of them came on. The next day, we split up into two groups because Kyle and I wanted to see the EU headquarters. On the way there, we missed our stop and ended up a half mile farther from where we were supposed to be. We ended up stumbling into a beautiful park with a an arch bigger than the Brandenburg gate in Berlin. We were amazed at how much more we got to see just because we missed our subway stop. After that, we only had thirty minutes to make it all the way to the EU and then back to the center to meet up with Kimberly and Ethan. We didn't make it on time because there was another garden next to the EU building and it had a piece of the Berlin wall sitting in it. I didn't get a chance to see it in Berlin, but it was nice to at least be able to see it in Brussels. All of us then went to Delirium, a bar that holds the world record for having the largest collection of alcohol on hand. The next morning, we caught a train to Brugge.

Brugge
Brugge felt like the ideal trip. We literally got to see everything that we wanted to see since it was so small. Our hostel felt like a summer camp and we were able to rent bikes there to explore the city in. The whole first day, we rode to all of the windmills. We had a bit of technical difficulties when Ethan's bike knocked mine and and Kimberly's and the chains fell off of the thing.  We couldn't figure out how to fix them, but luckily a very nice lady came by a couple of minutes later and offered to fix our bikes for free. She said "I'm a bit of an expert and know exactly how to fix this." Then we were able to finish seeing all of the windmills and the downtown area of the city. Everything was closed since it was Sunday and it was after 5 and it was Easter, but it was still nice to ride around in a seemingly empty city. The next morning, we drank hot chocolate at the world's best hot chocolate place and then came back to Bonn.

Tldr; we had really good hot chocolate