We traveled most of Friday, so I didn’t get a chance to blog.

Friday morning’s lecture was great. Professor Weaver from The American University spoke to us about the differences between American and European culture. VERY interesting. I’ll expand on this tomorrow and post pics for these two days, but I wanted to stay in touch with a quick post.

We caught a 6pm flight to Brussels, Belgium and landed around 1am Dallas time, 7am Saturday here. Saw graffiti along the highway – grrrr.

We’re staying at the Hotel Leopold in the heart of Brussels. This afternoon I opted out of a 2 hour tour of the city so I could catch about 4 1/2 hours of sleep. I woke up and went with the group to dinner at a place called Dolce Vita. It was a little hole in the wall, and I think they were overwhelmed with 16 of us all at once. I mean literally overwhelmed — their electricity went out several times (we suspect their microwave couldn’t take all the work, since some of our food came out freezing cold).

After that (around 9pm here), six of us checked out the city’s one-night-only arts festival, Nuit Blanche. It was very cool: streets closed off for concerts, art exhibitions, and musicians; museums open late; and lots of avant garde art pieces (like what looked like a giant, white bouncy house — it took everything in me not to run up there and start jumping on it, but who wants to get arrested the first night in a foreign country?)

I would love for us to do something like this in Dallas. There were people of all ages. (I loved seeing the little kids especially. I have a great video of a 2 year-old girl on stage dancing to techno music — heeelarious.) This would be a great tradition for us to start in our city.

Off to bed. It’s past one here and we’ve got a 9am meeting. I’ll be meeting with a member of parliament on Monday to discuss homelessness. I really hope I get to meet with someone about their streetcar system here — it’s really expansive.

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