yum. another good weekend:
--Thursday we left for Brussels (we flew) and checked out the EU Commission (picture of me with Tanya) and two cabinet members of the commissioner from Sweden talked with us for a couple hours. That night was a medieval parade (second picture shown) complete with many guys on stilts who fought each other, trying to knock them over. What a long fall! Some of the stilts were really high. We bought some frites and waffles.
--Friday entailed an inspiring and warped talk at NATO (sorry, the pic below is the closest we could get- no cameras allowed inside!!) complete with free swag (pins, pens, keychains, brochures...) followed by a sleepy talk with Rolf Gustavsson, a journalist/correspondent who answered our questions way too thoroughly and somehow, at the same time, didn't answer them. A walking tour of Brussels, including stops outside the palace, musical instrument museum, "best chocolatier in Belgium" (Pierre Marcolini. The free sample: mini raspberry filled eclair topped with a flake of white chocolate and "sunflower-ginger crunch"-- it was delicious) and some religious sites, brought us back to the city center- Grand Place. The Education Abroad Program took us out to dinner at Chez Leon, where we had a 25 euro limit and beyond that we had to foot the bill. Alcohol not included. This is where one of our members had horse (pictured below and let me tell you, it was pretty good), the vegan in our group ate mussels and the girl who got pasta (very cheap) could fit three people's waffles on her bill. I had a trout specialty that came with fresh pea soup and chocolate mousse.
--Saturday we left for a bus trip to The Hague for wandering and a pretty interesting talk at the International Court Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. We got to debate a human rights problem in a fictional country, representing various nations. Surprise: the vote yielded no result. Then we got to go through the Mauritshuis art museum and see some Vermeers and some other really awesome Dutch and Flemish masters- including the girl with the pearl earring, laughing boy (with brown teeth) and some cool still lifes, especially floral arrangements. When we got back to Brussels we decided to include Homo Erectus into our pub plans-a very gay bar. Only five of us ended up going in (me and four boys).
--Sunday we got free time to troll around Brussels and make sure we saw the pissing boy statue and had one last waffle. There are tons of street performers in Europe, but especially in Brussels for some reason. The Grand Place had an old man (looked like Father Christmas) with an acoustic-electric guitar who was making quite a bit of money. During our stay we also saw a bunch of accordion players, a string quartet and a bassoon-oboe combo that was playing opera excerpts extremely well. I gave them the change I had at the time- two and half euro. It's tough to be an artist, probably.--After a long bus ride and flight and getting really hot on the plane and feeling ultra claustrophobic for the first time in my memory, this picture happened at the Copenhagen airport when we were waiting for the students to buy some food (Burger King, of all places)
It was good to come home/back to Lund.
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