Belgium...
4 years ago I did a tour with my family around 6 different European countries; it was just wonderful to travel all around those multicultural countries full of history; I didn’t have the opportunity to go to Belgium on that trip, so I was DYING to go to that bilingual and tiny country.
I got there on August 2004 to do an exchange student year; I went there with another 6 Venezuelans, none of them had been on Europe before, so I gotta admit that I had a great time looking at their facial expressions when we got to the airport of Paris, and then when we caught the train to Brussels. We don’t have trains to travel around countries in Latin America; we only use buses, cars and airplanes to move from one country to another, so, for us it was already something unusual to be travelling on a train, and even more excited to be doing it without our parents (we were only 17yers old), it was a really nice feeling, one of my best memories from that year.
I lived with the best host family EVER, on a little town called Mont-Saint-Guibert situated not so far away from Brussels (30km to the south). I went to high school on another little town called Gembloux, situated farther from the capital city. I used to spend the whole week travelling between those little towns, and during weekends we (when I say ‘we’ I mean the exchange students) used to go partying somewhere around Belgium; due to the fact that Belgium is a tiny country, it is really REALLY easy to travel from one side to another; we were around 300-350 exchange students, and some how we all knew between each others (you know how that works→ I know you, you know him, he knows them, and so on), ‘cause of that it was really easy to find parties all around Belgium every weekend, we just needed to pick up one to go, and that was it. Those parties have been the most wildness parties I have ever been to; if someone decided to turn on the lights of the pub, house, garden, etc. where the party was, there was a HUGE possibility to find at least to random couples having sex around us, or women and men vomiting, however, in general I really have to say that I didn’t see much types of drugs around me, just the typical one ‘marihuana’, and only some groups used to smoke it all the time, in general the parties were just made to do whatever you feel like it without drugs; I reckon we spent more weekends drunk then sober that year.
Belgium, this little country can be left aside by half of the tourists 'cause of its small size, however is one the best countries I have ever been!!... even though the weather sucks & u can spend more time running under the raining than with sunny days, the mixture of cultures, the people, the FOOD, the BEER & the chocolates CANNOT be found anywhere else around the world, not even in Latin America, where we are use to party like animals. Belgium is simply a country full of good vibs!!
