This Weekend

Last week was the first week of actual classes, and I have to say that I think this semester is going to be a little bit harder than I had initially thought. But thats probably a good thing in the long run, right?

My history class (Conflicts since 1914) is going to be the most interesting I think, but the Intercultural Communication class should be really interesting too. French will be ok, although probably the most important one that I'm taking, and Political Communication will be ok too, but it's a 3 hour long class and thats pretty much the longest one I've ever taken. Plus the professor isn't really the best, but oh well.

Even though this school (Versailus College) is an "American-style" university, and many of the professors are from America or have taught there in the past, there is something a little bit different about it that I'm going to say is more "european" in style. Mostly things are pretty much the same, though, its a paper or 2 in just about every class, along with a mid-term and a final.

Well thats about it for school.

This weekend we (about 5 of us) visited Atomiom, which I think I talked about a little in a earlier post (we had briefly visited it during the bus tour back in week one). For anyone who missed that, Atomiom is a giant replica of an iron atom that was built for the 1958 World Fair in Brussels. You can go up inside of it to a few of the spheres and look out over the city. The stairways and escalators inside are really long, narrow, and steep. Here's a couple pictures from the trip.

So there's a couple of pictures from the outside. Apparently this was never supposed to turn into a perminent thing, but after the World's Fair there was massive public support for keeping it around, so they did, and it's still here 50 years later. Kind of like the Eiffle Tower or those weird disk things in Flushing from the Paris and New York World's Fairs respectively.

So thats a couple pics from inside, one going up one of the escalators and the other one coming back down. In addition to the four spheres that you can access from the inside, you can also take an elevator straight up to the top one, which is an observation deck and restaurant. Unfortunately, even though this was one of the few non-cloudy days in the Belgian year, there still wasnt too much to look at. Atomiom is located too far away from the center of the city to see any of the downtown area really well and there just isnt too much to look at from the air in Brussels. Oh well, it was still a cool trip.

One last thing from Atomiom: at night they light the whole thing up and it looks really cool. I hope this video works because none of the pictures I took really came out too well.

On Sunday I decided to go out for a little walk around the city, which ended up taking close to three hours. I managed to find a bunch of really interesting things, some of which we had seen during orientation, but some of them were completely new. I think thats one of the best things about this city: there really isn't any single thing that everyone has seen or knows about before coming here (except maybe Grand Place), and alot of the cool stuff is kind of hidden and unknown, so you just have to run into it in order to find it. During orientation they took us around to a bunch of the sights in the city, some common and some a little more unexpected, but we were always walking around in these big groups of close to 50 people and so it was difficult to actually learn where everything was in relation to everything else. I felt like I had all these tiny little snapshots of Brussels in my head but had no idea how they all fit together. So the long walk on Sunday helped me to put alot of those peices in the proper place; I'd be walking along and I'd suddenly realize I had been here before, but then I'd go into another area I didn't recognize at all. Anyways, it was a good experience and I got some good pictures to go along with it. Here's a few of the best ones: