Friday night, I officially started my Journey as an exchange student. It’s odd to think that I’ve been waiting for this moment for months and now that its here, I’m not exactly sure how I feel. Navigating JFK and KEF by myself was fairly easy. My gate at KEF happened to also be an emergency exit, so I got to watch a lot of people get confused and got to hear the alarm go off everytime someone tried to open the door. Honestly, I thought it was going to be pretty stressful, but it really wasn’t that bad. It was pretty interesting to have to get off the plane into the cold rain in order to have a shuttle take us to the terminal though. But other than that, it wasn’t bad at all. I arrived at BRU Saturday afternoon. It was pretty easy to navigate as well, but what made this part interesting was the fact that I couldn’t find the W.E.P representative for the life of me. I literally wandered for about 45 minutes before I decided to take a brake and they ended up finding me. Turns out, they had their flag set up on the opposite side of where I was blindly wandering XD I spent a good amount of time at BRU as we waited for other exchange students, but once we had enough students together we headed over to the hostel and got situated. Sunday was my first full day in Brussels. We had french classes in the morning, which is just some basics for about 3 hours, and went to Gand/Ghent in the afternoon. Gand is a really nice city so I highly recommend you visit if you ever get the chance. We got to take one of the 90 minute boat tours and that gave us sooo many picture opportunities. We also had some free time to wander around the city in small groups after the group picture we took near the river. I’ve never taken so many pictures before XD Today we had french lessons in the morning, before heading over to brussels for lunch and dinner. Lunch was pretty good, but I really wish they added more salt, but that’s probably just because Americans tend to use a lot of it. We also got to do a waffle work shop which was a lot of fun ^^. Gaufres de Bruxelles taste a lot like funnel cakes. After the Waffle workshop, we saw these two guys that were completely and totally drunk in the Grand Place/Grote Markt XD. It was kind of hard to pay attention to the tour guide while they were singing and stumbling around, but they managed to find their way out eventually. The tour was nice, we got to see some of the most famous parts of Brussels and it was quite pretty ^^. There’s so much Mannekin Pis merch though XD. Not to mention the fact that there’s so much beer here. Like the Delirium Café has over 3000 beers there. Plus, its right next to the Jeanneke pis XD. Of course, the best part of the day would have to have been the 2 hours we got to wander the city on our own. Hannah, Philip and I went into a Primark and a Zara and kinda just looked around. Philip tried on these random women’s jackets and a pair of heels and it was hilarious XD People kept trying to get us to go to their restaurants so we just kinda lied and said we had somewhere to be. As for the updating schedule, I plan to update this blog every Sunday as well as having special updates at the end of each month possibly along with a monthly recap? I dont really know yet… See you on Sunday, Raychel

Raychel