Blogs

By cturpel on 6/16/2009 10:15 AM

So it's a sunny Tuesday morning in Brussels, but scarily enough, this is my last Tuesday here! We're going to Prague this Saturday through next Thursday, then I fly back home to Portland the following Saturday, the 27th. It's just such a strange feeling--I've been here since the frigid month of January, and I feel like I have grown and changed and learned a lot--certainly a lot of French, but I suppose you could say I've done some soul-searching, too. Travel tends to do that to someone. And I definitely feel a bit more adult and independent, after living in an apartment and having to shop and cook for myself, something I really never had to do before for a long period of time. Looking back on the past five months (that seem to have flown by!), I really enjoyed my time here, and Belgium will always have a special place in my heart.

A quick recap of the last week:
Last Wednesday afternoon Alix, Etienne and I flew to Rome, which was an easy two-hour flight from Brussels. H ... Read More »

By cturpel on 6/9/2009 3:39 PM

Hey there, I write as a recently finished-with-exams student! It's all very exciting that I finished yesterday, though now that I don't have mad amounts of studying to do I feel that I'm a bad influence on all my other friends here because they're not yet done with exams. But I'll find things to do, don't you worry.

Last week I just studied and studied and studied and didn't do much else that takes reporting, and then went to my first exam on Saturday afternoon. I thought I would feel weirder about taking an exam on a Saturday, but since I haven't been doing anything but studying I really didn't know what day it was anyway. It was a written exam, and thus I was taking it with the whole class--about 60 of us in total. It was in a big auditorium and when we entered the room we had to give our ID card to the professor's assistant, then dump our bags and everything (except for waterbottles, snacks, and writing utensils) in the front of the classroom. This is because Saint Louis--well ... Read More »

By cturpel on 6/3/2009 3:34 PM

Wow, I cannot believe it but it's time yet again to set aside a few moments to reflect on the past week and to blog. I'm sitting in my room on a sunny and warm Wednesday afternoon, taking a bit of a study break. All of my exams are coming up this weekend and early next week, and while I'm nervous to take them since it's a different system (and a different language!), it'll be really nice to be done.

Last week I tried to study a lot, then on Friday morning I took the train to Paris. In Paris I transferred train stations with the Metro, then took an afternoon train to Châteauroux, which is a little town in south-central France, near Limoges. There I was met by a girl whom I lived with for a month when I was 15 and lived with a host family in Bretagne, in the north-west of France, at her grandparent's house. It was really fun to see her again after 5 years, though I was kind of nervous to see how it went. Turns out I had nothing to worry about, the weekend passed quickly and ver ... Read More »

By cturpel on 5/25/2009 11:50 AM

So it's a warm Monday here in Brussels, can you believe that it's already the 25th of May? I sure can't, because that means that I have only one more month here in Europe and I still have so much planned. It'll sure be a whirlwind month, that's for sure, and I'm looking forward to everything (except, possibly, the exams).

So last week, on Wednesday morning, Nadine and I flew to Geneva. It was a lot simpler than when I flew to Barcelona, since the airport we flew from in Belgium is the airport in Brussels, not the one an hour away in the south of Belgium. Then, once we got to Geneva, the airport was right in the city, too, so it was just a 5-minute train ride to the main station, and our hostel was only a few blocks away from the train station. So that was all pretty easy. Since we had flown so early in the morning on Wednesday, we still had pretty much the whole day in front of us, which we used to wander all around the city. Geneva is situated at the confluence of the south-west ... Read More »

By cturpel on 5/18/2009 11:18 AM

Well, it's the second week of our "blocus" here at Saint Louis, which means we don't have any classes or exams but we're just meant to STUDY. Which I've been doing, pretty much every single day. This creates a sort of internal struggle for me: I know that I'm in Brussels, so I feel that I should be doing tons of stuff, seeing parts of the city that I still haven't seen, traveling as much as I can, because the sad reality is that I'll be leaving this lovely country for my own again in less than six weeks. But the other side of that is that I'm here to study, to be a student, and now that exams are rolling around (and they're the only thing I'm graded upon), I need to take care of business. So I've struck a deal with myself: I'll study as much as I can before my exams on June 6 and 8, and then after that, I'll have three free weeks before heading home, when I"ll get to do as much as I want to because I'll be done! I think that's a pretty good deal. Besides, I have a few trips planned before ... Read More »

By cturpel on 5/12/2009 4:29 PM

Well, I'm officially done with my classes here in Brussels, so it's now just on to studying for my three finals that remain. While I only have three and that may sound harmless, I'm rather stressed about them because they're all in French. So yesterday I printed out all of the notes that I need to study, bought some highlighters and a notebook to write out my outlines, and got to work. I figure that if I pretty much study every day until my exams which are the first weekend of June, I should get a lot of work done. Then I'll have three more weeks before I leave, in which to travel and soak up the last bits of Belgium that I can before going home.

Last week I had one more class of each one of my courses, except for our French class we took our final exam. It wasn't actually that bad, she had given us the essay and oral prompts the week prior so I prepared my stuff beforehand, which was nice since then there weren't any nasty surprises. So that class is all over with now.
Read More »

By cturpel on 5/5/2009 3:05 PM

This weekend was really fun here at the apartment because we had so many visitors. My friend Cindy came from the Budapest campus, and Etienne had four friends come from Paris where they're studying for their Erasmus experience, though they're from Quebec.

So last week, after my classes, I picked up Cindy at the train station on Friday afternoon. Then we went downtown so I could show her the main sights there--the Grand Place, the Bourse, and the Manneken-Pis. It was fun to "show off" the city, especially the Grand Place, because everyone always has the same reaction--of total amazement--to it. Then that night we ate all of us together, we made a big feast and then we all went out to the Delirium so we could offer our guests a long list of truly Belgian beers.

Saturday morning Cindy and I went to Bruges because that was the one thing she really wanted to do this weekend. We had a really cool experience at the tearoom we went to lunch at because w ... Read More »

By cturpel on 4/28/2009 2:36 PM

This past week was glorious here in Brussels, the weather was rather good last week, so we spent a lot of time outside in the sun. Though today is colder and rainier, but I suppose that's the way spring goes!

I had a busy weekend while I stayed here in Brussels, I went to the French-speaking Amnesty International Belgium's General Assembly, which was held here in Brussels. I am a member of Amnesty International USA, and I've been lucky enough to go to one of AIUSA's general assemblies, so it was fun to go to the Belgian version and compare. It was held in a really cool building not far from where I live, located on the canal that is in a pretty industrial part of town. It was just one day, but they did a lot that day--they elected new members, went over their past and upcoming years' budgets, and then had some inspirational speeches. The most exciting part of the day for me was to see Irene Khan, the secretary general of the International Secretariat in London. She had some really ... Read More »

By cturpel on 4/20/2009 11:22 AM

Well, it's the beginning of another week here in Brussels, with the sun shining and the flowers blooming--not to shabby, I'd have to say.

Last week was the second week of our spring break, and now we're back to classes, though I don't go back to class until Wednesday because that's when my classes start. So last week was another week off of classes, and while I got some of the studying done I mostly wanted to explore more of Brussels and Belgium, which I got to do.

Wednesday morning a friend, whom I had met while I was studying abroad at the University of Reading in England, came to visit me during her spring break. She is English, so it was very easy for her to come to Brussels for three days; she had found relatively cheap Eurostar tickets (what we call the Chunnel). So Wednesday morning I headed over to the Gare du Midi to pick her up, then after we dropped off her stuff at my apartment we explored the city. I showed her the city center, because everyone wh ... Read More »

By cturpel on 4/14/2009 4:17 PM

I found myself thinking today that it's already Tuesday, and that I hadn't yet blogged for this week, which just goes to prove how extremely fast time can fly sometimes. Feels like I just wrote the last blog, but alas, it's been an entire week!

Not too much to report this week. We laid pretty low despite it being spring break, and while I've wanted to go on as many day trips as we can around Belgium since it's so cheap (but everywhere else to go to fly was really expensive), my other friends here are stressed about their work and exams and such. Don't get me wrong, I have stuff to do, too, but I also have the least amount of classes and I've been keeping up with my reading throughout the semester. Also, after the next three weeks of classes we've got another two weeks off for just studying, so I figured I'd have as much fun as I can during spring break, right?

So last Friday the five of us went to Ghent, a city in Flanders that we'd heard is a nice place. (Li ... Read More »