The Great Adventure (Part 4)

It has now been a few weeks since the Great Adventure has come to a close, but deconstructing it has proven to take a long time. Since I want to be writing about things around here, as well as things like the recent Stockholm trip and the exchange rate and food and such, part 4 of the Great Adventure may be shorter and less descriptive than the first 3. Sorry, but I believe it's in my best interest as a traveloguer and as a lazy person. I had no idea what to expect from Brussels, as Belgium was the only country on our trip that I hadn't at least touched down in once in my life. First impressions were vaguely industrial, somewhat rich, and not exactly clean. These impressions were mostly borne out over the course of a couple days of sightseeing and eating waffles, fries, and chocolate. I'll start with the good stuff. I really like Belgian waffles. Like, a lot. This holds true even of the terrible knockoffs I've experienced in the States, and even though the waffles I had in Brussels were probably tailor-made for tourists, I was still quite happy to be eating them. I didn't know that fries were famous in Belgium, but apparently they're right up there with waffles as far as national pride goes. The only problem is I tried to eat way too many and almost had a heart attack. At least the sauce I had with them was good. And finally, the chocolate. The chocolate I had was good, but it was from a supermarket and probably manufactured by Nestle so I'm not sure if I can say I really had Belgian chocolate. We saw about 1300 chocolatiers scattered around the city, but a truffle there would have run me like 10 euros or something so the Nestle-manufactured variety was not a terrible choice. My favorite thing about Brussels not involving food was the musical instrument museum we visited. It had thousands of instruments, and their hook was that they had headphones you wore that automatically picked up where you were standing and then played you music by the instrument that you were looking at. This was kind of neat, very well-done, and extensive. We spent a couple hours there and then visited a comic book museum which was also cool, but more constricted by my inability to speak French. There were Smurfs everywhere, though. Turns out a Belgian created the Smurfs. The cultural learning in travels like these truly are infinite. So, the food was great and the museums were nice. What, you may ask, did you enjoy less about this city? I answer by saying that it had a strange idea of how to incorporate modern architecture into an ancient city. Brussels dates back to medieval times, which would be fascinating if the structures from those times weren't surrounded by parking garages and ugly hotels. Philosophically I don't necessarily oppose this type of mindset, but as a sightseer it makes things a little less interesting. It gave an odd vibe to the city, like they were actively trying to destroy their past and move into the 21st century. This was so in contrast to all the other cities that we visited in Europe that it just came off a little flat. That and the trash that was left in the streets at 7 PM and stayed there until 9 AM. You would think that the center of the EU would have a more effective garbage service, but you would think wrong. The juxtaposition of old and new, trash and shopping districts, nicely dressed people and graffiti, all served as a completely different European experience than we had witnessed up until that point. I'm not going to completely write off Brussels as a city to visit in the future like the other members of party seemed to want to, but if I were to cut out one city Brussels would probably be it. Amsterdam, on the other hand, was a great way to end the trip. After we got there. Our train was delayed several hours because of a "collision" on the "train track", which was mildly annoying but better than the alternative of actually being a part of this collision. Nonetheless, we arrived in Amsterdam considerably later than we had planned to, and were robbed of a little bit of time that first evening. Amsterdam is a beautiful city, what with the canals and all, and may have been cheated a bit in the tourism department because of the whole "everything is legal" bit. The "coffeeshops" (they didn't sell coffee there) were widespread and clearly quite geared towards tourists, but I didn't find that this really distracted from the experience in any way. Clearly, a lot of people were there to kind of experience the most legally liberal city in the world, but there was also a lot of other things to do. Walking around the city, as we did by ourselves and as part of a tour, was enjoyable for the architecture and looking at boats and all that, but it was also easy and remarkably pleasant as the weather in Amsterdam was finally very agreeable. It was great to be outside near water, even if it was all just in canals, and just soak in the city. We also visited the Anne Frank house, where her and her family hid, which was converted into a great museum, and took a boat tour. The boat tour was disappointing. We only had a speaker (and by speaker, I mean a speaker like you attach to your computer, not a person) give us about 5 words of information about 4 different places in 6 languages. Those are the highlights and lowlight of Amsterdam; all in all I thought highly of Amsterdam and would recommend it to anybody. Don't worry about the Red Light District, weed, whatever you're worried about. Let's just say there's something for everyone, and I don't feel like any type of tourist would be marginalized in the city. So that takes us back to Hamar, I guess. Things were quite low-key for a while but now we're making weekend trips again. Took a trip to Stockholm this weekend, which was beautiful and afforded us the chance to see the new James Bond movie a couple weeks early. Then next week a cabin trip then the week after that maybe Bergen? Anyway, travel has definitely been a huge part of this study away experience for me, but my travelogue will likely take a turn toward the small and mundane in the next few posts. There's a lot of great parts about living in a foreign country, there's a few bad parts, and a lot of parts that are just different. I'm going to start addressing that sort of stuff soon, so my travelogue doesn't give the impression that I just travel all the time. Some may say the point of a travelogue is to document travel, but I respond by saying that this entire semester counts as travel and thus grocery shopping belongs in a travelogue just as much as The Great Adventure does. So look forward to that, and now I'll make my obligatory mention about the election. I'm glad it's ending soon.