Brussels: Arrival

Currently writing this at 10:17 pm Brussels time after getting very little sleep last night, or this morning, however you look at it, so please excuse spelling, grammatical and logical errors.

I’ve finally arrived in Brussels, Belgium for my three-month-long study abroad/internship program. It seems very strange and I’m not sure I quite believe I’m here yet. You know that feeling when you wake up really early and you get through half of your morning routine without really realizing you’re even standing up? Yeah, that’s about how I feel.

Some things I learned from my first international flight this morning!

1. If, hypothetically, you decide to place a water bottle in the inside pocket of your jacket and then go to sit down on the plane, you’re probably, hypothetically, going to sit on the bottle, causing the cap to explode off and soak your seat and your neighbor, causing a very tense and wet beginning to an eight hour flight. Hypothetically.
2. Airplane food isn’t that bad.
3. Airplane wine is.
4. Drinking four bottles of water prior to an eight hour flight is not the best thing in the world. Especially when you have the middle seat. Yikes.
5. London airports are fun because all the announcements are done in a British accent and somehow that makes them less annoying.
6. That is the only fun thing about a London airport.
7. The flight to London from Fort Worth is eight hours long. It is NOT seventeen hours long, no matter what the New Girl episode you watched the night before incorrectly informed you. Please don’t pass this false information along to others.
8. Star Wars is still a great movie even when you watch it in the bitch seat of a long ass flight in-between going to the bathroom and spilling water everywhere.

So I made it to Brussels (barely) and then discovered a few more important fun facts. Such as:

1. BRUSSELS PEOPLE DRIVE LIKE THEY’RE GOING TO GO PUT OUT A FIRE BUT DON’T REALLY CARE IF THEY MURDER SIX PEDESTRIANS AND THEMSELVES IN THE PROCESS.
2. Belgian beer = just as good as people say it is. Better, actually. Much better than natty light, my dear freshman year Kaley.
3. Water isn’t free at restaurants? Which sounds bad until you realize that water costs the same as beer, which means you are allowed to get beer everywhere and not even feel bad about it.
4. Brussels has these random green posts about three feet high everywhere and I’m sure there’s a good reason for them but the only purpose they served today was for me to run straight into one of them while taking a picture and literally fall over it and onto my face on the sidewalk. So. Yeah.
5. Brussels is beautiful. I know that’s an obvious statement, but I’ve only been here for less than one day and I’m already obsessed with the multicolored blocks of houses and the flowering trees and the rows of shops and the people and the food and yeah, pretty much all of it, even just the four blocks I’ve seen.

Oh, and here’s my first meal in Brussels (aka typical tourist/instagram food pic post) and the picture I took that caused me to faceplant on a sidewalk in the middle of a group of people. Worth it?

Croque Monsieur