Carnaval

This past Fat Tuesday, instead of our weekly class, our CIEE program headed out to the small Belgian town of Binche to experience the town's renowned tradition of Carnaval. Located in the southwest of Belgium, Binche is a small town of roughly 30,000 inhabitants located in the French Speaking Wallonia province of Belgium. The town has come to be known for its annual Carnaval festival, a three day festival every February when the town becomes overrun with people piling into its small streets to engage in the festivities. What those festivities celebrate, I could not tell you, but hey its an annual event and seems to be pretty successful. The festival has been recognized by UNESCO for its cultural significance, another thing I don't quite understand but means it's important.

We arrived in Binche around 2 in the afternoon. Tuesday marks the final day of the festival, in which the local towns men known as Gilles wake up early and spend the day dressed in their traditional Gilles attire, 

Which look like this

Beers Beers Beers

This blog seems to have been lacking on the beer recently, so time to change that. I am living in Belgium after all, and if you haven't heard, there is beer here. In the little over a month that I have been in Europe, I have ordered and tried 37 different beers already. To try and rank the beers I have tried would be a foolish thing to do at this point, because rankings are completely subjective and rather pointless when you think about it, especially since most of the beers I have only tried once or twice. At first, I wanted to take a picture of every beer I drank during my time here but that failed rather quickly (and by quickly, i mean it didn't even make it through the first night). So i switched my goal, and am now just writing down everything I order, because when you try over 37 beers in a month, you're not going to remember each that well, and wow I've had over 37 beers the last month, geez Belgium what are you doing to me. I hope that by the end of my stay here, the number will be in triple figures. I don't expect to keep up my current pace, but am pretty sure i can reach that goal. That said, here's some of the different beers I have tried and some basic thoughts, impressions, and remarks I can honestly give so far:

The Da Vinci Code Taken During Midnight in Paris but Before Sunset

This past weekend, I took part in my first trip away from Belgium, traveling with a group of friends to one of the few places in Europe I've been fortunate enough to visit before: Paris, France. My first trip to Paris was a class trip senior of high school almost exactly 3 years prior. Although fun, I think it's easy to understand how different my experience in the city would be this time around.

I took the Megabus from Brussels for about 32 euros roundtrip. It took about 4 1/2 hours to get to Paris and only 3 hours to get back. We arrived around 7:30 Friday night, and by the time we checked into our hostel and had dinner it was almost Midnight in Paris so i took a stroll around the city so I could go meet up with Owen Wilson and F.Scott. Ugh, that reference was forced, I'm sorry. Anyways, that night we went to a club on the Champs Elysee called Queen (which will become important in a second). Although we avoided a cover charge by signing up online, I finally learned just how ridiculously expensive Paris is by paying 3 euros for a coat check and looking at a menu where soda was 10 euros and anything alcoholic was at least 15 euros. Me being somewhat responsible, decided not to blow all my money on booze that night (looking at you Hank), but still 15 euros for a drink is absolutely ridiculous. Paris, why you gotta be so rude?

Super Bowl Monday Morning

As most of you probably know, the largest American sporting event took place this past weekend with the widely despised and clearly superior New England Patriots defeating the Seattle Seahawks for their 4th Super Bowl title. It was a tremendous game that left most of us including myself on an emotional roller coaster and could go down as the best Super Bowl in history. I'm still in shock of what happened, and honestly haven't stopped smiling. While I probably would have preferred to be in the United States for the game, gouging myself on chicken wings and snack food, the experience of watching the game in Europe was different and still very enjoyable.

A Dose of Reality: Past and Present

Normally, these types of blogs tell tales of one's travels and the general excitement that occurs while studying abroad. That is why I'm going to be a buzzkill and tell you about my misfortunes to start because I want pity. The last week of January started off with me getting sick on the previous Thursday. Apparently 3 solid weeks of trying to sample as much Belgian beer as possible catches up with you, who knew? So while a large number of people in my program spent the weekend in Amsterdam I stayed home and barely got out of bed, and probably sneezed out my weight in mucus. Oh man isn't that a lovely image, yum. My housemate Cesar also came down with a flu or something worse and was bedridden as well, so our house was a whole lot of fun that weekend. Luckily, I was pretty much recovered by Wednesday.

Anyways, with that depressing tale of sorrow out of the way, we can move on to the good stuff that happened this past weekend. For the second straight Thursday, we celebrated the 21st birthday of a member of our program (Happy birthday, Natalie and Eamon). So yes, another night of more 1 euro Stellas than I would like to admit ended in roaring success, with me doing Karaoke for the first time. I helped some friends with a rendition of Mr. Brightside by The Killers that brought the house down. I'm not sure if it actually brought the house down, but you weren't there and can't prove me wrong so HA! I took Friday easy, watched the Grand Budapest Hotel and went to bed early as CIEE had a scheduled trip to the Battle of the Bulge battle site Saturday morning and the bus was leaving at 730.

Saturday morning, I woke up at 815. Now you may ask, Bo, didn't the bus leave at 730? And the answer is of course yes. I tend to have a history of waking up in the morning, snoozing my alarms and going back to sleep, which is a bad habit I seemed to have brought to Europe. So, What do I do now? Well, luckily Michelangelo had told us that if we missed the bus, we could take a train to Bastogne and meet up with the group during the day, so that's what I did. Somehow (thanks to specific instructions from Michelangelo), I managed to book a ticket, take a 2 hour train ride to Libramont and then a 30 minute bus ride to Bastogne and was able to meet up with the group for lunch around 1:30 where I arrived during the meal and had this beer  in a horn glass immediately ordered for me by the CIEE intern Elliot:

La Corne