Au revoir Belgium...guten tag Germany!

It's me again (Haley),

Yesterday we went to a small town in Belgium named Brugge which is often called 'little Venice.' It is different than Brussels in that the buildings are shorter but still share the same charm.

The streets are only one lane wide and if you stand on the street corner for a few minutes you will see countless bikes and horse drawn carriages pass by! Pinch us, we are seriously in a dream...or at least disneyland. We are not sure if Brugge is technically the chocolate capital of the world but we deemed it worthy of the title. Just about every other store in the town was a chocolate shop...imagine walking through a quaint village, watching the boats cruise under a canal, suddenly you walk by a shop and smell the sweet scent of freshly made chocolate. Mmmmm...to be on a diet in this town would be sheer torture!

There are two languages in Belgium, one being French and the other Dutch. The locals in this town speak Dutch, so our tour guides Tommy and his brother Gary were almost as clueless as we were. Our favorite parts were the little canals that ran through the town and the tiny alleyways that led us all over the city. Lindsay saw an alley between two buildings that led us down to a balcony leaning over the water. She yelled.."an alley!!!" And we both started running towards it like two kids on Christmas morning...the boys laughed for a while then Tommy said "it makes it easy for me...you are easily entertained!"

That night we headed back and went to Tommy's work, a restaurant called Le Piano. The food what wonderful. We had french wine and shared duck a l'orange and chicken brochette with fine champagne sauce. SO good!!! We had an awesome night meeting Tommy's friends and hanging out in a Belgian college town.

We are heading to Germany today and have had the most amazing time in Belgium! Tommy, his parents George and Maria, and his siblings Alexander, Sabrina, Gary and his Girlfriend Gaelle are wonderful people and have made us feel like royalty during our time here. Just to prove how spoiled we are, yesterday while Lindsay and I realized that neither of us knew where the silverware was! The family has barely let us lift a finger. We're not going to know what to do when we return to reality!

Last night was our last evening here and we decided to cook the family an American dinner…so we made Mexican food. We headed off to the neighborhood grocery store, where everything was written in French. A very interesting experience. Just a tip, next time you go to Belgium and want to make a traditional American dessert...bring your own pumpkin pie filling! The family loved the dinner and we had an awesome night. Tommy's younger brother and sister warmed up to us, despite the language barrier. Don't ask us how, but we even played a round of pictionary with them!

Although we are excited to move on to the next city and visit our other friends, we are going to miss our Belgian family. They are genuinely wonderful people with such open hearts and a welcome home. We will miss them. My favorite phrase that I learned while being here was, ’je suis contente,’ which means ‘I am happy…’ that definitely was the mantra of this trip!

Something that we have noticed so far is how quickly the trip is going...it seems as if we just started getting to know Tommy's family and we are already leaving. It is exciting though because we are just now starting to learn French phrases and how to pronounce things correctly (but, to be honest...we still sound like a bunch of frauds faking a Pepe le piu accent). Now we are off to learn German and see the ways that our friends Stefan and Julian live in Germany!

Thanks for reading...it is nice to be going along this journey with so many others.

-Haley