Ola, So I finished up working at the Mission on August 14th, and I felt like a vacation was necessary. I decided that I would head to Spain for a couple of weeks. I flew into Madrid on Sunday morning, and then took the train to Zaragoza. Zaragoza is located in the north east of the country on the Ebro River and it was founded by Octavian, the adopted son of Julius Caesar. I arrived in town and checked into the hostel. The hostel was cool, especially the basement bar. The basement bar is the only surviving part from the Inquisitor’s [View Full Entry]

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Moien, The weekend had finally arrived for me to visit southern Belgium. I had seen much of Flanders so far, but very little of Wallonia. That would all change as my friend Louis, someone who Gabrielle had put me in contact with before I left Vancouver, said he would drive me around southern Belgium I woke up early on Saturday (so what else is new), packed my stuff and hopped on the train at Schuman. There were a large amount of south-eastern Europeans on the train, I did not recognize the language at all but I thought that it might have [View Full Entry]

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Bonjour et Hallo, As some of you know, I can be a bit of a masochist at times. I guess I should put that in context first. I try to see as much as I possibly can when I’m travelling and I am beginning to run out of time in Belgium so I woke up very early (the day after visiting Vimy Ridge) and joined by room mates Cris and Mirjam for a trip to Maastricht and Tongeren. We slept on the train most of the way to Liege, where we would have to transfer trains. We had a bout 20 [View Full Entry]

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Bonjour, It took about a month of talking about it and organization, but finally the day, a beautiful sunny day at that, arrived for Teresa, Patryk, Claude, Phil, Laura and I to go to Vimy Ridge. For those of you who don’t know, Vimy Ridge was the first time during World War I that Canadian soldiers fought together and were led by Canadian commanders. We had to catch an early train (635am) because we had to arrive in Ypres by 830am in order to meet our guide from Salient Tours who would drive us to Vimy, in northern France if one [View Full Entry]

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Bonjour, Another little Brussels update. The day I flew back from France, July 21st, was also the National Day in Belgium. I had forgotten about it until the flight attendants made an announcement on the plane that they would be handing out chocolates in celebration. It was quite funny actually as they made the announcement in three languages. There were many cheers on the plane after the French announcement (I was one of them because I understood the French), then there more after the Flemish announcement and then the remaining holdouts cheered after the English announcement. I dropp [View Full Entry]

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Bonjour, A long weekend was coming up in Brussels and I decided that I wanted to take advantage of it. “Where do I want to go?” I pondered out loud as people on the metro stared at me in incredulity and trepidation. I decided that I would head to the beach. The closest beach to be was on the North Sea coast, either in Knokke or Oostende. So I decided to go to the south of France. I went to work for a couple of hours and left early because Brussels Airlines had a posting on their website saying that “due [View Full Entry]

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Bonjour, I’ve been reading through the blog, and I’ve realized that I haven’t said much about my general life in Brussels recently so I will try to give you a scintillating version of things over the last couple of weeks. There has been quite the transition in the house I am living in. At the end of June, many people moved out including Claire, Malou, Christina, Natalia and Lucia. Monica stayed here though, so the transition was a little easier because we each knew someone. We had some cake. Well, let me rephrase that. We had one cake and one mess. [View Full Entry]

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Happy Canada Day everyone!!! Both the Mission and the Embassy closed on Canada Day, so Christine and I decided to take advantage of the mid-week day off and go and visit something. We decided on Villers-la-Ville, which is a ruined monastery in the middle of a forest about an hour away from Brussels. I was wondering why the train would take an hour to get there, seeing as how the place was only 30 minutes away, but then I realized that we had to transfer and it was the milk-run train that had to stop at every possible stop in Brussels. [View Full Entry]

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Hey, So I was getting bored of Brussels. It had been stiflingly hot for a couple of weeks (29 degrees and 90% humidity) and I decided that I needed to get out of town. I felt like going somewhere near the water, so I decided that Malta would be a great choice. I hopped on the train to the airport and after it picked me up I felt a little ill at ease. I was thinking to myself that it was odd that it was a double-decker train heading to the airport. I also thought it was odd that the TV [View Full Entry]

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Bonjour, During my Study Tour, I had seen many signs in the metro advertising a recreation of the Battle of Waterloo. Every time I went past, I said that I wanted to go to it and finally I was able to scrounge up some friends and we all bought tickets. We were all coming from different places, Gare Central and Gare du Midi, but everyone got on the train successfully. That was about the only time of the day when we were really all in the same place. Sara, Nicola and I saw the sign from Waterloo and jumped off the [View Full Entry]

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