March Weeks

As I say I’m never quite sure how to start these blogs, so let’s just go with some pictures this time. Everyone likes pictures. It'd be cool if they were all artsy, let's pretend they are.



This is my one month anniversary cake. It was an entire cake except my host sister and her friends got home before me so it got eaten. It's still a cute idea though :P







Here are some more photos of my host family’s house, one day when it was a massive twelve degrees (double digits! I like almost had a heat stroke or something I was so hot) You can even see blue sky in some of them!



































































And inside…
















Here’s the palais provinciale in Liege. We stood outside here for an hour! I was cold.







We went to Luxembourg on Saturday. I wasn’t even sure if Luxembourg was a country but apparently it is. They even have their own language, Luxembourgish (lol). But they seem to speak French, Dutch, English and Luxembourgish all at the same time, it’s a bit confusing. Like the Macca’s we went into was either Dutch or Luxembourgish but then the next shop was all in French.

We also went to a tiny little brasserie, a beer factory, which only had one room with some big silver beer tanks in them. So the most amusing thing there was the multiple jokes about sticking your head under the taps and drinking all the beer. Then we went and looked at ham for about an hour and a half, so that was pretty scintillating. We saw many, many racks of ham, which apparently sit there for over a year to get the taste. Then we went and ate ham, which was actually very good. I mean, I suppose you’d hope the ham would be good if they take so long to make them.


ham


Beer


In the ham fridge


On the way back on the train, I was by myself and this man who had a broken leg got on and sat next to me. And I swear, he must be the most friendly guy in Belgium. He had a conversation with just about everyone in the vicinity. He started telling me about how the train controller didn’t believe his train pass was his because he’s shaved all his hair off so looked different from his photo. Then he told me some other story that I didn’t understand. And I felt bad because he was so nice and I just smiled a lot and said ‘oui’ and left it at that cause I had no idea what he was talking about.


We went to the Opera on Tuesday night (16/3/10) in Liege. Unfortunately the old opera buildings are under repair so it was held in a tent. At first it looked like a circus tent, but they’d done it up nicely inside (they even had chandeliers).
We saw Rigoletto, it that one with the aria "La donna è mobile" ("Woman is fickle")”. I read a few synopsises before I went and thank god I did. I mean there were subtitles but still. It’s a bit of a silly story really. They all run around swearing vengeance on one another for no particularly good reason. The Duke, who’s a bit of a player, runs around and gets all the chicks and nothing happens to him, whereas Rigoletto who doesn’t appear to have done anything wrong and who’s already a hunchback gets all the tragedy. The singing was impressive though and the costumes were modern but with hints of 16th century style clothing like elaborate masks and ruffles. But instead of the seats being built in gradients, they’d built the stage on an incline and the way they’d set it up gave this surreal effect with the perspective that was a bit odd to look at. Also I don’t think tents have the ideal acoustics for operas.




Oh and today we had slow-cooked chicken and peaches (SO GOOD DEAR GOD) fried potatoes and an endive thing (not so awesome, but only cause me and endives aren't friends) for lunch. And then crepes flambé for afternoon tea.
And I helped make chocolate mousse and a raspberry-hazelnut tiramisu thing, but we didn’t eat them. The mousse was good but didn’t exactly work because we put it in a nozzle thinger to make pretty shapes, but the mousse got stuck so we had to scoop it out and it got a bit eaten in the meantime.

hey im in belgium did you know?

Sup.

Here’s another blog. It’s pretty cool. I dunno if I’m going to end up starting all my posts like that. I kinda hope not, but let’s not hope too much haha. My creative writing skills are a bit non-existant and I stole sarah's title haha.

Erck I don’t even know where to start. Decisive fail.

Hrm well, yesterday was a Wednesday so we finish school at 12:00 usually, but we had this Rotary activity which required us to be at Liege at 2:00 in front of the ‘Palais Provinciale’. So we went to gym in the morning (sport at school is so weird, we did 'cirque' which basicaly meant we spent two hours juggling/balancing plates on sticks) and then left school at 10, even though our bus didn’t come until 11:30. We got to the Palais exactly on time but then we stood outside the front of the palais for an hour. A freaking hour! Trust rotary. and my legs almost froze off. It was cold. And then when we went inside and we just listened to some people talk about some stuff for about an hour and then we could go home. Man was it a waste of time, and I used up the rest of my go pass to get there and back and the go pass wasn’t checked either time! So now I’m annoyed cause I’ll have to get a new go pass. I swear my go pass is only ever controlled when I don’t fill it in.

Oh ok btw. A go pass is something you use to catch the train. It has ten spots and you fill them in as you take trips and a controller comes around and stamps it. It costs 50 euros (!), but the public transport here is so fricking expensive it’s apparently a deal. Thought I should explain that for all you non-belgian-transport-using-people

We had something for dinner which I think might’ve been sauerkraut. It had sausages so it was something german anyway. It was good.

And yesterday I somehow managed to eat cake at all three meals of the day, which is true skill. I blame Francesca’s host family’s house in part though :P

I just realised that I should probably explain where I am and all that jazz. That’d probably be a good idea, cause I’ve just been going along assuming you’re all psychic and know what I’m talking about. You’ll have to get used to the Belgian places names haha.

I’m staying in this town called Jodoigne which is about halfway between Brussels and Liege. Go look at it on a map (Go now!) Well actually I’m staying about 10-15 minutes outside Jodoigne at the moment but my next two host families both live in the town and I go to school there so yeah. There’s also Francesca who’s from Australia and from Sydney who went to Hornsby Girls and who’s very coincidentally in the same class as me. Then there’s Kate from the US and Lolo from Mexico who are in same school but the year above, although they’re are the same age as me. And there’s Rose from Canada who’s also staying in and around Jodoigne as well but who lucked out and got the good school as opposed to our slab of concrete. Rose, Kate and Lolo have all been here for six months already so they speak pretty good French and Francesca is like genius child and did French and French Ext at school so speaks good French as well (she got 99.something atar and she only turned seventeen two days ago wtf)

They’re all really nice. I feel a bit bad for Lolo sometimes cause we all just lapse into English which is fine for us but she has to speak a second language all the time, be it French or English. She often mixes up ‘to do’ and ‘to make’. So the other day she said she was going to have dinner and make suitcases as soon as she got home lol Of course she meant she was going to pack her suitcase but it did sound funny. It’s very cute :P And I was all like ‘lol Lolo I love you’ cause she doesn’t bother to correct herself at all.

Hmm what else have I been up to. I made a presentation in French at school about Australia to a class of like year 8 kids about two weeks ago. That was alright except I accidentally told them it takes twenty years to get to Australia by plane instead of twenty hours. And then they laughed at me for like 5 minutes lol.

It’s kinda cold here. The weather here changes really quickly. There was snow about a week ago but now it’s all gone. And there was sun today and yesterday so that made for a happy Bella. J But apparently it’s going to rain/snow again later this week, although I don’t know if I believe the weather. All the Canadians and North Americans are like ‘pfft Belgium is warm compared to where I live’ cause they all get -30 degrees and bucket tonnes of snow every year, so Belgium is balmy for them. Whereas I am freezing half the time. And then they all speak in farenheit, and go “omg it was 30 degrees today’ and I go ‘wtf as if, it wasn’t that hot or I might have noticed’ except then I remember that they still all use nonsense measurements. So yeah having conversations with Americans about the weather doesn’t usually work very well.
No photos for you this time! I'll put some on later