Dutch is Ugly

October 5

First off, I hate the Dutch language. It's ugly and gutteral and sounds like the speakers are gagging on something. But it's whatever. At least they all speak English as well as Dutch. And usually French, too. Yeah they're smart, America's stupid, it's not a big deal. So back to my adventures. We started the day by travelling to Brugge, a city in Belgium, and went to a bunch of sights in the city. The first place we went was the Basilica of the Holy Blood, which was a really interesting church and very unlike all the other cathedrals we've been in so far. It was a lot smaller and the designs on the inside were different because they were more geometric and colorful instead of plain and thoughtful. What I really thought was interesting, though, was the fact that the church was displaying the "Holy Blood" which was a wad of bloody cloth that the Catholics believe was used to clean Christ's blood after He came off the cross. It looked kind of gross though and disintegrated in the little tube that they kept it in. I don't personally believe that it was really His blood, but it was still really cool to see. After that we went over to the city hall of Brugge and just walked around and enjoyed the artwork inside. Now to the good stuff. Belgian food. I know fat kid problems, right? Whatever. Judge me. So first of all we started by getting a belgian waffle and I almost died the second it reached my mouth. Let me just describe to you this amazing heaven sent thing. It was warm, battery, and soft on the inside and crispy and almost candy coated on the outside. And then to top it all off, it had melted nutella over the top with a fat glob of whipped cream. Oh my gosh I almost had a heart attack, I was so happy. The American version of Belgian waffles don't even compete. Then after I completely satisfied my taste buds I decided to try some of this Belgian chocolate people have been raving about and I must say, I was a little disappointed. I mean don't get me wrong, it was fantastic, but it was just as good as the chocolate in France. But I still loved it, I will admit.

October 6

This was just another fantastic day of bus trips. Although with Peter and his wonderful joking character, it makes the bus trips bearable. So we travelled from Kortrijk to Ghent this morning and we went to visit the oldest castle in Western Europe just known as the Duke's castle. It was very cool, a little deteriorated, but very cool, still. There was really no sort of embellishments or anything of the sort so all we could really do was walk around. After we finished at the Duke's castle, we went over to the cathedral in Ghent and saw the Van Eyk painting. It was really cool to see the painting because it came with an audio guide and I got to see a lot of insight into the painting that I would have otherwise missed out on. All of these cathedrals are kind of blending together in my head, though, it's bad. We've just seen so many. So so so many cathedrals and churches and museums. It's taking over my brain.