They have arrived

I am holding in my handle tickets to Cairo, Dubai, and Tunis. Life is sweet.

yes am typing with one hand so that I can hold onto the tickets and not do what I do best.... lose them.

One of those days

You know when you are late for the train but you still need pack up your things. So you run to your bag and dump everything out onto your bed, and the bag is filled with glass. And you realize that your glass bottle of water is broken, everything is wet and on top of that you are thirsty. So you try to pick up the glass only to discover that tiny pieces of glass are eching their way into your skin. You run to the bathroom, slip on the ground because your bathroom is also a shower and now you're on your ass with glass in your hand.

well today is kind of like that.

Except now I AM going to the train and my bag is packed and the only thing waiting for me when I get home is glass in my bed. But no worries, today is the longest day of the year so the city celebrates with bonfires on the beach all night long. I've got my bottle of wine and shisha packed up and I'm ready to go.

Happy Midsummer's Eve.

Brussels, Where the beer flows like wine

So i headed back to Brussels, to which I hadn't been since March of 2006. Anywhoo we were there strictly for business: DHL, IBM, and InBev. But us being the business college kids that we are, we clearly went and found the Guinness book of world record, most variety of beer bar first.

It is a placed called Delirium and when you walk in you are surrounded by vintage tins with painted beer ads all over the wall. We proceeded to walk to the bar only to see that there was no possible way to choose just yet. So instead we took the holy bible of beers book back to the table and flipped through the pages one by one. Soon most of the Americans got impatient and started ordering the strongest, most expensive thing on the menu. All in all the beers turned into hours, which turned into days, which turned back into beers, and a week later I have survived but still need to sleep off the 5 day hangover.

I also got a pretty groovy rash two nights in a row. It seems that I am allergic to a certain type of beer or wine. Thankfully I continued to drink and the rash went away.

oh yea, the companies were cool too. If you going to Beglium make sure to get a Leffe, Chimay and a Hoegaarden.

Broke and Broker

So Denmark has decided to turn on me. The person who rated this country one of the safest in the world must be confused.

So Broke #1, as in my body is broken. So we go out to this forest near my Kollegium which is actually very fun. There are trees and bugs, streams and oh yea robe swings.
So we decide to swing around on this rope swing which was probably the highlight of my day, and I'm doing my tarzan thing when bam, I go down. Basically as I was swinging back up to the hill the rope got twisted around another branch swinging me even higher and then jolting me back down when I then felt off. I did survive though and when I look back it was quite hilarious. I had about 7 Danes around me saying, "Oh no we killed an American" while I'm on the ground trying to get my vision back. One of my fingers blew up to the size of two, all while turning the color of a nice ripe grape and the rest of my body has some nice touch of black and blue scraps all along it. I will try to post the video later.... oh yes there is a video.

K here is the video... just wait till the end.



Broke #2 as in I got robbed.
So we are sitting at a bar and all the sudden my purse goes missing. It had been under the table but when I went to go get my phone it had disappeared. We looked around the room and saw it on the other side of the bar. They took my wallet, bus pass, phone, IDs and a varied of other things. Damn you.

No worries though. I'm going to Belgium on Saturday and I only pray that country doesn't hate me like Denmark does. :)

Talk about innovation

So the Danes finally convinced me to make something. So I made pasta haha. Only problem was that I couldn't read the label of the pasta sauce and found out that it was actually flavored as Ketchup. Yuck!

Never fear, Richard is here. He gave me a can of tomato paste which I could mix with spices to make something fabulous. Well all seemed fine until I had to search for a can opener. I looked for a good five minutes and finally told them it wasn't there. One reaches in and the next second pulls out something that could only be used as a claw on Halloween. Excited to see that I had no idea what I was doing, they watched me struggle with the contraption, laughing away.

They finally explain how to use it and sadly it didn't get easier once I knew the trick. So I struggled and finally got a hang of it. I conquered the can!

Now we are moving on to some extravegant cake. Man these Danes love to cook.

Saddest day in futbol

So we all decided that we couldn't leave Denmark without seeing a soccer game. I run into the kitchen to tell the Danes how excited I am to see the game and to show off my new Danish soccer knowledge (that my mom had kindly researched for me to regurgitate later), and they look at me and say, "What soccer game?"

I was clearly talking to the wrong Danes. "WHAT SOCCER GAME?! You guys are playing Sweden, your arch-rivals, and you are trying to qualify for the Euro Cup."
They reply, "Oh that's a big deal"
Now that I got them interested, I run into my room to pull out my bright red coat which now had a white cross on the back that I made with soap to symbolize the Danish flag. They laughed at me and took pictures and I was on my way.

So we have no plans for the game. All the seats are clearly sold out and ridiculously expensive if found, so our main plan was to find a bar nearby where we could watch the game. Little did we know that they had set up a huge screen in the park next to the stadium when over 40,000 Danes stood. Holy Crap, this is awesome (the typical American thing to say). Unfortunately Denmark was off to a bad start, down 3-0. BUT the big but comes. BUT, they came back 3-3. That means 3 goals of absolute madness. I'm just glad I didn't get hit with the full beer that was thrown in the air, barely missing me. You can see the rest for yourself... http://youtube.com/watch?v=ZcGMIkmLYWg

And of course when we did tie up the game everything was even more exaggerated. Fireworks were flying in all directions, granted it doesn't really get dark here, but it was still really cool.

Now here comes the sad news. A crazy guy comes out on the field and clotheslines a player and the referee. The ref calls it as a safety precaution and Denmark has to forfeit. I'm sure there is some crazy soccer lingo that should be used, but the gist is... they lost :( And now there is probably another Steve Bartmen out there running for his life.

Carlsberg Brewery: An hour is all you need

So the lovely program that we are on decided to take 150 American students to Carlsberg Brewery. They like taking us on Study Tours a couple times a week. Unfortunately the Danish are very punctual and I got left behind on my first tour for being 5 minutes late. Suffice to say I did not make the same mistake with Carlsberg.

So we get to the brewery and sit us down at tables with a bottle of beer for each of us and a table in the middle with sandwiches. Then one of the Danes gets up and explains the rules. For one hour we will get as much beer as we can drink. The only rule is that you have to finish the bottle and exchange it before you can get a new one.

Well as you can imagine when the time came to start it was complete madness. One of the older Danes explained that if we stole a bottle from the factory that we would get thrown in the trough of beer and said, "although you may die happy, you will still die". Always an assuring statement when you're about to guzzle down beer.

Anywho the drinking is madness, some skip the sandwich and go straight for the beer. And they wonder why we get the American stereotype of being belligerent drunks. I guess they used to do the tour for 2 hours but they found that 1 was enough.

So as noted before Carlsberg Brewery: An hours is all you need