Back again!

Joder! So a decent amount of time has passed since my last post.  If you were attentively waiting for some new news I apologize.  A week of midterms followed by a visit from Emily left me little free time, to make my next post.  I didn't realize how much time had passed since Brussels and here I am two weeks later. 

A quick catch up....

We only spent one night in Brussels but we made the best of it.  During the day we ate Belgium Fretes, which are french fries, but to the citizens of Belgium, there is no such thing as a "french" fry.  This confusion could have came with the fact that they do speak French in Belgium.  At night we went to the "Delirium Cafe".  This bar holds the world record for the most amount of draft beers served... 2003.  I think that Delirium was a fitting name for the bar seeing as how the majority of their beers were above 10% alcohol content.  The next morning before catching our train to Amsterdam, we stopped at a local restaurant and had Belgium waffles.  A huge waffle with two scoops of ice cream covered by that chocolate that hardens on contact, was quite the hardy breakfast.  

After Brussels, Dave, Bo, and I headed to Amsterdam.  Amsterdam was a beautiful city.  If their reputation was not tainted by their risky night life and coffee shops I still feel like it would be a fantastic tourist destination.  The city is full of museums and historical sites.  Our hostel that we stayed in was a five minute walk from the historic Anne Frank House.  We walked by her house but the line was a little long so we procrastinated it for another day and never made it there. We visited the Van Gogh museum, which was incredible.  I have always had interest in Van Gogh's paintings and the premiere piece of artwork was "The Starry Night".  The city transportation is phenomenal.  I would break down their forms of transportation like so, 60% ride bikes, 25% use public transportation, and the remaining 15% use cars.  It is wild to see a 5-story parking garage completely dedicated to bikes.  The inner city is lined with boat canals, some for tourist rides and others for personal transportation.  We also went through the Heineken brewery.  They started the tour with a brief history of Heineken.  Then we went through the process of how they mix the ingredients.  We got to grind up barley and stir up the first mix.  Half way through we got our first beer.  They taught us how to properly pour a glass, and properly taste a beer, moving it around in your mouth to different parts of your tongue so that you could taste the sweet, bitter etc.  The tour took about 2 hours and than we got to have our second beer.  We left Sunday night for Spain but had one more problem before we got back to San Sebastian.  The last bus from the Santander Airport to San Sebastian had left and the next bus did not leave for six more hours, at 5 in the morning.  We had absolutely no options and we were exhausted so 6 of us had to sleep outside in an outdoor bus stop for 6 hours.  It was terribly cold and it felt like forever.  Long story short...we caught the bus at 5 a.m. and made it home alive.

We had a great time in both cities.  For our first trip outside of Spain, I would not have choose a better location.  Maybe I would cut out our difficulties that we had with getting to Brussels, but that's part of traveling.

Once again sorry that I have not posted for a while.  I hope that everybody still takes a look every once in a while.  I will be posting again tomorrow afternoon to write about London and the week with Emily.