Today was our first full day here. We got a good night's sleep and were up and ready to go by 8am this morning. We had six hours of classroom class today which was long and tiresome but we did get a chance to go explore more of Belgium on our own later on. We had breakfast at the University Agora which is the equivalent to our Student Union. The food here is very good, a lot, a lot of bread (Michelle likes, Melanie not so much L) We had orientation and lectures until the later part of the afternoon. After class we found some local grocery stores so we could buy food to get us through the week trying to save money and being able to cook at our place. After we shopped a bunch of us went downtown and walked around to get dinner. We experienced our first trip to Quick, the Belgium version of McDonalds and the guys loved that because they got beer with their "happy meals". We walked around more and decided to check out some of the bars. We ended up at a bar called Da Prof near the University that was really fun. It was cool to be around some of the local college students. One girl tried to buy our bras but other than that it was a pretty normal bar experience. The first couple of days have been awesome but tiring. The culture shock has not been that bad but there are a few very noticeable things that we have found pretty different.

- You have to pay to pee

- Cars and bikes drive crazy and could care less if they hit you.

- Alcohol is served absolutely everywhere

- Water is more expensive than drinking alcohol

- They have no concept of personal bubbles and like to get right in your face when they talk

- There are no free refills on any drinks

- Their Diet Coke tastes much different

- Tipping at restaurants is included already

- They love their dogs an unusual amount ha and if you ask for a to go box or a doggy bag at a restaurant they give you scraps for your dog

- They move at a much slower pace---an average meal takes like 2 hours

What we have seen of Belgium so far has been beautiful. It has a lot of character and really cool architecture. We posted some of the pictures from the first few days and will add more as we go along. Hope all is well bag in the good old US of A!!! -Michelle and Melanie