Liège, Lena and a day trip to the Netherlands

Lena's house

Lena is a former exchange student, she lived in Wellington mid 2009-mid 2010. Her city Liège is kind of near the border with Germany. I love her house, its in the centre of the city and is three stories tall but narrow, I find it really crazy compared to our bungalows in NZ. The buildings here are mostly brick or plaster, and grey or brown, I like it because its different but really I guess its a bit dreary. The people here are more of a melting pot than those in places like Mainz were, there is a lot more migration from places like Africa, I guess because its French-speaking, this neighbourhood particularly reminds me of Newtown back home in Wellington. Lena's mum speaks quite good english, her dad not so much but as a former actor he was pretty good at conveying things without words. He is always joking around but with so little english it was really hard for me to tell what was meant to be a joke and what wasn't!

Friday night we had a traditional dish from Liège, giant meatballs with fries, and just relaxed catching up and watched a movie. Saturday morning I woke up to possibly the best discovery of my trip so far; Speculoos. Speculoos are a kind of biscuit traditionally made for St Nicholas Eve in early December, but now eaten all year, they are pretty good (remember me talking about the Lotus biscuits me and Hauke had in Austria, they were Speculoos actually, Lotus is a brand) but a million times better is Speculoos spread that you put on bread. I can't even describe it, its more amazing than anything I've ever tasted, its maybe like a caramel KitKat chunky on bread. Awesome. After breakfast we walked around the city to explore, with Lena showing me all of her favourite places and bars. The bars here are all centered around a few narrow pedestrian only alleyways that Lena calls The Square, its apparently very famous (a lot of exchange students here in Belgium say they came here because they heard about the square). I had a few Belgian beers, one tasted like banana that was quite weird. We popped our heads inside the Cathedral here but its the outside that amazed me, its filthy! You can really see the effect of pollution on the buildings here, old ones have a layer of thick black except where grafitti has been removed. The whole city is quite dirty actually, the streets as well, as people just throw their rubbish on the ground. That night Lena's parents left us the house so that Lena could throw a party for her friends to meet me and to celebrate the end of their exams, except that most of her friends don't really speak english, or at least they were too shy to do so in front of so many people. Another former exchange student, Adrien came, cool to see a familiar face!

part of the market

We woke up pretty late on Sunday and then rushed around because Lena's mum reminded us that the market was on, its over a mile long stretched out along the bank of the Meuse River and is the oldest market in Europe. I am getting much better now at not spending money, so we mostly looked at all of the different types of food and weird things like heaps of birds in cages. I did get a kind of cape thing for 3euro. We visited a museum that her mum was really passionate about me seeing, but we were really too hungover for it and just strolled through getting lost and making jokes about things. They had a pretty cool exhibition of glasswork, it made me really want to start collecting glass artefacts but I've already learnt that glass and travelling don't go well together. We walked around some more, to see part of Lena's university (heaps prettier than Hauke's in Mainz!) and the statue of Tchantchesis, according to folklore a puppet that appeared from a crack in the ground in 760 and only would drink Pékèt, a kind of gin. Kind of random. Lena is a funny tour guide, she really knows nothing about this city!

Monday I had to fly back to Madrid to go to my appointment with the Foreigners Office, so we just had a picnic lunch in the botanic gardens and then I jumped on a train, we were running late so Lena didn't get a chance to explain to me where the hell I was going or how to use my ten-trip ticket. The trains here are really cheap, as I'm under 26 I got ten trips within a year for 50euros, so that works out as 10 NZ dollars per trip of any distance, much cheaper than any other country I am visiting. I flew out of another middle-of-no-where airport with Ryanair. I really have a love-hate relationship with that airline, I love paying 20 dollars for an international flight, but I hate flying with a company thats so useless! We had to wait for ages on a staircase between going through the gate and getting on the plane here, and this Spanish lady in front of me was geting so worked up, pacing back and forwards and sighing loudly, she got me really annoyed and I wanted to tell her to either deal with the long waits or stop flying with Ryanair. She also skipped in front of me in the line, Spanish people are so huge on that, but I got her back by beating her onto the plane anyway - you don't have seats allocated on Ryanair and often they overbook the planes and refuse passage to some people, so its like a race to get onboard.


Anne-Marie and me


Madrid was hot! It was 18° when I landed at 10pm, and the Metro underground is even hotter. Its only the beginning of February and I found it too hot, I can't imagine what summer will be like. Anne-Marie, girl who went to Costa Rica with me was in town on holiday, and I hadn't seen her for five years so I picked her up, dropped my stuff off and we went out in search of a beer. In fairness to Madrid it was a Monday but we seemed to spend quite a lot of time walking around looking for an open bar for a city of that size and reputation! Its funny how you can go five years without seeing someone but still hang out like nothing changed, and its good talking to someone who has kinda gone through the same stuff as you, like what we experienced returning to NZ after doing an exchange. As I am staying with families in most of the countries I am visiting, it often feels like being an exchange student, trying to fit in when not knowing the culture, language or that family's particular way of doing things. Anne-Marie called it 'The State of Confusion', when you have no idea whats going on but you stop stressing about it, like you don't know where you're going or what you are going to do when you get there, but you get in the car along with everybody else anyway. I am getting really good at just smiling all the time and coping what other people do!

Lena, me and Adrien on Saturday

For all it was a Monday night, I had sworn never to drink before travelling, and I had to both deal with the Foreigners Office and catch an international flight the next day, I ended up back at home at 6am and was not impressed with myself when Miguel woke me up at 8am to go to my appointment. This started off badly, the lady at the last office made it for me but didn't give me the reference number so the security guard wouldn't let me in the door without a fight. This time I only waited for half a hour, but again the lady insisted she couldn't do anything for me and suggested I go back to the last one or try the police. Despite a fierce hangover that made me want to do nothing except curl up in a ball I kept fighting her and eventually got to go upstairs to see her boss, who said that after I had been at the other office the last time, they had decided that that same office actually would give us ID cards, she showed me an internal memo about this from last Friday. Trip to Madrid for nothing! The NZ Embassy keep emailing me to see what's happening, but I might leave it for now until I'm back in March, I don't feel like wasting any more money going to Madrid and I doubt that they have a template for the ID cards ready yet! Oh Spain...

Liège

Then it was back to the airport, a nap for a couple of hours in the air, then a couple more hours on a train back to Liège before Lena was rushing me out the door again to go out. We headed back to The Square, and ran from one bar to another ripping out coupons from flyers given to the uni students for drink specials. Bars here are gross, they floors are sticky and covered in ciggarette butts, and I can't work out where all of the toilet seats disappear too. I really have to explain here about drinking in Belgium, I think NZ's reputation for a bad drinking culture is un-deserved when you look at this country. The legal age for drinking is 16, but many young people start going to bars at about 14. At University, they have a crazy system, similar to fraternities but insead of being people who live together it is based on what faculty you study in. The students undergo around 2 or 3 months of torturous initiation activities, things like eating catfood and live goldfish and staying for a hour in the cold on your knees with your hands in the air singing songs, and excessive amounts of drinking. Every fraternity has a competition to see who can skull the most beers in five minutes, and then all the fraternities compete against each other, some guys get up in the 50s so thats about a beer every five seconds right? They just puke and then keep drinking. At parties, they skull beer as a way of saying hello to people they bump into. To me it all seems sick, so either I am getting too old for that kind of thing, or young Belgians really are crazier than young NZers.

Apart from watching all of this crazy drinking around me, the night was pretty standard, until I saw a guy wearing a hoodie with a NZ flag on it! He had spent a year on exchange in Hamilton and was as surprized to meet a kiwi in Liège as I was to see a NZ flag. He was quite cool, I spent a lot of the night talking to him and his friends. For us Wednesday only begun around lunch-time and was pretty quiet. We visited some friends of Lena, and then spent the evening hanging around the house and watching a movie.

Maastricht

On Thursday we went to the Netherlands. It took us 30 minutes by train to reach the city of Maastricht, it really is an unreal feeling to jump out of the train after such a short amount of time and suddenly everything is in another language! That was quite funny actually, after my three weeks in German speaking countries I could understand Dutch better than Lena could! After yet another amazing kebab we wandered into the city and had a look around. The first thing you notice is the bikes, everyone was biking everywhere, and no one wears a helmet which still seems strange to me. It was much cleaner than Liège as well, and there are a lot of english speakers around who attend university there.

Red, yellow and green decorations on everything

We checked out the market place, the town square and some churches. Everything was covered in red, yellow and green decorations, the first couple of times I wondered what that was for Lena reckoned it was just because they are the Rastafari colours and the Netherlands is quite into pot, but even places like optometrists had these decorations, so I reckon they were from a festival or something. I brought my obligatory wooden clogs, tried Dutch beer, and then we took a train back in time for Lena to go to work.





Maastricht


Friday I accompanied Lena to one of her psychology lectures, her university is outside of Liège surrounded by woods, quite strange, but the buildings were similar to those in NZ, more like Canterbury Uni than Wellington in that its more spread out. The only real difference between uni in NZ and here that I noticed was that people here talk throughout the entire lecture, I couldn't believe it, just chatting to their friends. In NZ the lecturer would have stopped the lecture and refused to talk over so many other voices. After eating possibly the worlds largest 'small size' sandwidges we rushed back home so I could pack before meeting Daniel, the colombian AFS student that Lena is looking after at a Latino bar. It was cool to meet him and to see Lena having the same kind of conversation with him that I used to have with her back in New Zealand. We were running really late when we flew back to the house to get my stuff and head back to the train station, and Lena's mum kept insisting there was no way I would catch my train to Brussels, but I arrived only two minutes late and the train was still at the platform. Now off to Brussels to visit Arthur!