The rest.

Alrighty, so, the rest of what's going on:

Sunday, Emma and I decided to make cake for her host family. We found a recipe online and managed to get all of the ingredients together, which was quite a feat. It was yellow cake, and we made chocolate frosting out of Nutella, Nesquik, milk, crème fraiche, and an egg white. It was not nearly as gross as it sounds. In fact, it was quite delicious.

We hung out the rest of the night, and I raided Emma's closet. Gosh she has amazing skirts. We watched The Proposal that night as well. Well, I watched it, Emma fell asleep. :P

The next day was Monday, and school was closed, so we went to Brussels with Emma's host mom to see an exhibit on American history and how it's tied to Europe. It was quite interesting, and very well done. Both Emma and I loved it. I was familiar with most of the information, coming from the states, but it was really cool to see from a European point of view.

After that, we stopped at Emma's host mom's parents' house in Waterloo. Yes, Napoleon's Waterloo. Emma's host grandparents are the cutest people ever, and they gave us a ton of chocolate, which was so sweet. And delicious. When we left their house, we stopped at a British food store.

Oh.

My.

Gosh.

You may be confused. Why would I be excited by a British food store? This was not just any British food store. This was a British food store. In Belgium. They had things like pancake mix, cake mix, Oreos, the equivalent of Spaghetti-Os, BACON, and bagels. This store had most of the things I've been craving like mad the past few weeks. Emma and I were screaming across the store, things like: BACON. BACON!!!! or DUDE. SOY SAUCE. NO JOKE!

It was quite amusing, I think. I'm hoping to go back in the not too distant future. They even had taco shells there. For tacos!

After that, we stopped at the monument in Waterloo, which is a large, man-made hill with a lion statue on the top. It's pretty awesome. http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4069/4644210559_1a61b9226c.jpg

Yes, you can climb the stairs to the top. That's going to be one of my trips with Jordan, I think.

As wonderful, incredible, and just plain fun as Monday was, it turned into a not-so-great day. When we got home, Emma found out that her best friend's brother had died. Not two hours later, she learned that her uncle had a stroke. We both felt pretty crummy after that, so we weren't in much of a mood for chatting or movies or anything. It was a pretty somber evening, and we just went to sleep, both lost in our thoughts.

Tuesday was fine, just a regular day at school. We went to the beauty store during our three hours of study hall, comme d'habitude, and we went to the croque-monsieur place. It's a restaurant in Hannut with really good croque-monsieurs. We're becoming regulars, really.

Yesterday was, again, a normal day. I had an hour of study because my Science Sociales teacher wasn't at school, then two hours of French. We continued taking notes on surrealism. When I pulled mine out of my binder, my teacher looked at them, then asked me, "What is that?" I said, "My notes..." He stared for a minute, then said, "But... they're so DIRTY!" Not dirty like dirt, dirty like I scribbled something out at the top of the paper and continued using it for notes for this class. Dirty like I don't write in perfect cursive like all the Belgians. Dirty like I had doodled in the margins. Dirty like the top of the paper was covered in song lyrics. Basically, my notes look like the notes of every other American teenager. Belgians simply don't do that to their notes. They use rulers, multiple colors, formats, etc. Their notes are immaculate. And mine... Mine are crap to begin with, as they don't even make sense. I write things like, "Marcel Proust, when he was I'm hungry." Or "At the end of the First World War, you would not believe your eyes, if 10 million fireflies, lit up the world as I fell asleep..." (lyrics from "Fireflies" by Owl City).

Today, I went to school, then left for my 2 hours of study and lunch. I spent the time with Talia, Emma and Eduardo at the café down the street from our school. We ate fries and chatted about whatever we thought of at the moment.

I came home after school, talked to my mom, and then started writing this. I'm exhausted, and need to catch up on sleep this weekend. I always mean to go to bed early, but I never do. I'll catch up eventually.

Until next time,

Mikayla