This weekend, I went with seven new and old friends on my most exotic trip scheduled for this semester: Bruges and Amsterdam. Though I certainly know plenty of people who have gone to these cities while studying abroad, they are a bit further off the beaten path than your standard Italy/France/Ireland fare, so I'll start with a bit of geographical explanation.
Bruges, for those of you who may not know (cough Laura cough), is located in the Flanders region of northwestern Belgium. Right here:
In Bruges, as in all of Flanders, they speak a few different languages. The city technically falls within the German-speaking portion of Belgium, so there is plenty of German. As French is the other main language of Belgium, many people in Bruges also speak French. The region of Flanders also has its own dialectical language, Flemish, which is roughly a hybrid of French and German with a little Dutch mixed in sometimes, and which is pretty much total nonsense. Finally, since Bruges's main industry is catering to tourists who, as is so often the case with tourists, speak English with some significant frequency, almost everyone in Bruges speaks English, too.
The linguistic situation in Bruges can be pretty much summed up by an exchange I witnessed on Friday afternoon in a chocolate shop between a saleswoman and the French family that was in line behind me. After hearing the saleswoman bid my friends and I goodbye in nearly accent-less English, the père of the family behind us approached the counter and apologetically said to the woman, "I need French." In response, the saleswoman laughed and said, in nearly accent-less French, "Je parle les tous, Monsieur."
Roughly translated, this means, "Homeboy, I speak errythang." Given my fluent English, very shaky grasp of French, and desperate desire to be worldly and speak twenty languages, it's safe to say that I hate everyone in Belgium.
Things in the Netherlands - where, for the record, Amsterdam is located - aren't much better. Their official language is Dutch, which is yet another nonsense-looking Germanic language. It sounds vaguely like what German probably sounds like when spoken by goofy clowns, and it looks like English as typed out by someone with a first-grade-level grasp of spelling and a keyboard that sticks on every vowel. ("Noord" means north, "friis" means fries, etc.)
Luckily for the 95% of the world's tourist population that doesn't speak Dutch, Dutch appears in Amsterdam about as often as Latin appears in a post-Vatican II Catholic church. It's there, but you don't really need to bother learning anything but your native language to get by. Everything in Amsterdam is labeled and announced in English, and if your preferred language is something else - French, Italian, German - you can probably find extra handouts printed in that language, too.
By way of general information about the country, the weirdest part about the Netherlands is how close it ultimately is to the UK. Amsterdam is located at (A) in the picture below, and London is (B).
Though that map shows the lengthier driving route, the straight-line distance from Amsterdam to London is only 223 miles. To put that in perspective, the distance from South Bend to Detroit is just about 220 miles. Amsterdam is in a country my sister had barely heard of, it speaks a language that sounds like it should come from the other end of the world, and it is as far away from London as Detroit is from Notre Dame. Riddle me that, Batman.
Anyway, now that I've blown your minds with my astounding linguistic and geographical knowledge, I suppose I should talk about some things that I actually did this weekend.
The trip began bright and early Friday morning with the Eurostar train from London to Brussels, a train ride whose uneventfulness is paralleled only by the uneventfulness of Brussels itself. We didn't make an actual stop there in Belgium's capital city because, as the popular phrase has gone among the London program kids, Brussels is the Philadelphia of Europe. (Catchphrase credit goes to Cee-lo Green; sorry-I'm-not-sorries go to my favorite PA-born Howard RA, the artist formerly known as ladysasalol.) From the city that dad says brussels sprouts are from, we hopped on another train over to Bruges.
Bruges had three main events: the bell tower, the chocolate, and the waffles. The bell tower, located in the center of town at the edge of the Markt, or main square, consisted of 366 increasingly narrow steps leading to a bell-filled room from which you could see various incredible views of the whole city.
Hallo!
The bell tower also contained stopping points pretending to be museum exhibits every 50 steps or so, which is how I managed to get to the top of it without dying.
After summiting the bell tower, we decided to reward ourselves in the only appropriate Belgian way: chocolate. You may recall from an earlier post of mine that chocolate is my entire life. Bruges, then, is a great place for me. There are chocolate shops not only on every corner, but in every other storefront. Did I spend 40 euros on chocolate in something like an hour and a half? I don't know. Maybe. Yes.
When not eating and buying straight-up chocolate, Bruges also offers another Belgian dessert specialty: waffles. Reading this from America, you may think you already know what a Belgian waffle is. It's, like, a thing. Everyone knows. Right?
Wrong. In Bruges, a Belgian waffle is a magical thing made approximately as follows: 1) Roll huge quantity of perfect-looking dough into a giant ball; 2) toss said ball into glorified panini maker; 3) remove your newly-made, rough-around-the-edges, golden-brown waffle; 4) humor your gluttonous American customers by covering it in chocolate sauce, a heaping scoop of Ferrero Rocher ice cream, more, insta-hardening chocolate sauce, and powdered sugar. If I could marry this waffle, I would do it. And we would live a long and happy life together.
Please note the bag of chocolate hanging off the wrist with which I am about to shovel an ice cream-covered waffle into my mouth
While Bruges was great, though, it was a fairly short stop, and on Saturday morning, we headed on to Amsterdam. For those of you wondering, no, I did not smoke, eat, or otherwise ingest any cannabis-based products during my time in the highest of the Low Countries. My friends and I did, however, do a variety of other, tamer Amsterdam-y things. These included:
- Walking (briskly) through the Red Light District, so that we could say we did. Here, we concluded that the Red Light District made us all really uncomfortable and also vaguely sad, and I decided that the writers of Les Mis could make, like, so much money if they could somehow sell the rights to "Lovely Ladies" to the RLD to be played there on an endless loop (as it was the entire time in my head and the heads of anyone who matters).
- Eating more delicious breakfast food at non-breakfast times, specifically, pancakes for lunch.
Nom.
- Narrowly avoiding death at the hands of totally reckless bicyclists approximately 80 times each. Giving them their own lanes of traffic: good idea. Giving them free reign to use those lanes irrespective of traffic patterns, stoplights, and pedestrians: REALLY BAD IDEA. Especially since most of them are probably high half the time anyway. #stereotypez
- Visiting the house where Anne Frank and family made their hiding place during the Second World War, which has since been turned into a very tasteful, powerful, and excellent museum that I would very highly recommend.
- Seeing a windmill.
Cue "Man of La Mancha" references
- Seeing a giraffe.
In case you thought I was kidding
- And finally (and most importantly), staying on a boat hotel called the Gandalf, owned and operated by a bearded, friendly Dutch hippie man named Hans. For those of you reading this who were a part of or a visitor to my group in Miami back in January, imagine the European Guesthouse floating on a canal, actually in Europe, with a landlord whose name was actually Hans, and without the stray cats, and you have the Gandalf. It is just as incredible as you think.
In all, this trip, too, was pretty great. It had chocolate. It had waffles. It had canals. It had Hans. As my tripmates and I would say, on a scale of ugly to prutty kewt, it was definitely, uh...prutty kewt. Next on the schedule for all of us in the London Program is spring break, which starts at the end of this week. Keep checking back here on da blog for my tales of adventure and intrigue (read: probably just more chocolate) - and my 21st birthday - in Venice, Florence, and Par-ee!
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