we cancelled luxembourg. every single time, without exception, when we told people we were going to Luxembourg, we got a stiff "WHY???" so we heard there was nothing to do, spent an extra day at home base Tilburg, and then headed to Brugge. Chris, Lauren, Rach (who has gotten extremely lazy when it comes to being Snopp Bloggy Blogg - our online alter ego...even comes with a great rap song!), and i head to Brugge for the night. we book a nice little hostel (our second, of our backpacking trip...three months gone. i think we should write a book on how to beat backpacking. backpacking has nothing on us)

the city is SO OLD and beautiful, we loved seeing everything and walking around town. of course we had belgian waffles (touristy or not, they were delicious), had some more gluwhein, did a little shopping (happy birthday to my little brother!) and bought a coat that was more than a car payment (trip motto #1: you can always make more money)

not too much action to get in to, the pictures are worth a look, but i'm more excited to get back to Tilburg for the 4th time and get a little crazy. chris has to go straight to amsterdam to catch his flight, but not before the worst disastor in our training history occured.

oh, he probably slept in. first of all, we're waiting for our bus from our hostel to the train station. we have a healthy half hour to make our train, and the bus is minutes away...we think. close to 20 minutes later, we run in, ask the hostel guy where the busdriver is, and he says "oh, no worries, he probably slept in, just wait for the next one". okay what? slept in? it's 1 pm. reason 1 dad would not approve of Brugge. (not sure if there are more reasons, but he definately would not like that) so we finally catch the bus, get to the train station 1 minute late - no joke - for our train. so we have to reroute -- we wait for 20 minutes, catch another train, to get to antwerp for our next train, which is late. so our train shows up, we jump on, and i have this SINKING feeling that we screwed up. turns out our train was late, the later train was early, and we jumped on the WRONG TRAIN. as screwed up as this is, we have to wait almost an hour at the next station as rach and lauren are deep in their Sudoko books (now renamed to Ju-Lo-Roo for Julie-Lauren-Rachel). We get to Tilburg late, say bon voyage to chris, and have our tilburg roomies pick us up. i think they expected us to be 3 hours late, but i stand by it -NOT OUR FAULT.

the next few hours will remain a secret to those that were involved in the legendary Tilburg night. don't worry mum and dad - it's nothing bad, but no words will ever justify the night we refer to as "the best and worst" thing we ever did on the trip.

Baltic Avenue...Monopoly! we also had a quick catch phrase game during our swing by in Tilburg. girls vs. guys. we were amazing. poor lauren must have felt left out at time because rach and i could almost telepathically tell each other what we were supposed to explain. i turned to rach at one point and say "it's a game!" and she says "sorry!" and i go "yes!!!" our poor boys roomies had donny who for his clue said "uhhh...it's a special pizza, it's a normal pizza!" and he was talking about pepporoni. then there was the dutch roommate who would get difficult english words like "dustbuster" and explain it as "you were this around the house" hahaha easy win. we were supposed to win breakfast, but their boys, and we sleep in - so it worked out for everyone.