Our last day
Oct 7 (written Oct 8)
Ok, I woke up to the, “click click clicking,” of high heels on the tiled floor of the room above us… I’m not kidding, this lady must’ve been having a nervous breakdown or something because I could hear her pacing around the apartment for, liek, 30 minutes. Any other morning and I would have been liek whatever, but this particular morning I woke up feeling like my head was going to fall off and the clicking made it a bajillion times worse.
Of course we all slept through breakfast again; the morning was painful but after a shower, some advil, and liek 4 bottles of water we hit the streets in search of breakfast (in the country that, oh yea duh we learned this yesterday, doesn’t eat breakfast). We ended up at the bar that Dan and Ben ended up at on our first night in Brussels. When we walked in the dude that was working behind the bar made a big scene and I’m pretty sure he was making fun of us but since none of us even knew what language he was speaking there was really nothing we could do about it. Psh. Asshole.
We ate omelets – wait, no, Ben and Dan ate omelets while Laura and I enjoyed ketchup with a little bit of egg. God it was good to see/taste Heinz again! This continent seems to think that it’s okay to use mayonnaise as an alternative to ketchup. Uh-uh, I’m sorry, that’s not okay with me.
So then, after being lost in the metro station for a while, we finally managed to navigate outselves to the ATOMIUM. Ok. The Atomium. Google it right now. Here’s a little description as stated by the brochure I got: “Designed by engineer Andre Waterkeyn, for the International Exhibition of Brussels in 1958, the Atomium represents an iron crystal molecule, magnified 165 BILLION TIMES.” This shiny, glistening, thing is in the middle of nowhere and is 102 meters high… it looks like a fatty UFO just decided to land in the middle of some trees. 102 meters high is one big ass atom. It was the most bizarre structure I have ever seen; the inside (oh yes, you can go inside… and we did) was more random that the outside.
To get to each ball (literally, it’s a bunch of big silver balls connected by silver tubes) you had to either walk up and down huge staircases OR ride escalators up tubes that were liek 30 yards long… it was what I would imagine being sucked up a vacuum might feel like. Each ball had something totally bizarre on display in it: a Barbie doll exhibit, a case of silver dishes, some of those bent mirrors that make your head all gigantic and your legs all midge, some huge carved out balls with mattresses in them that you could only gaze at through glass and couldn’t actually sit/lay on – being hungover and claustrophobic in those balls and tubes made me want more than anything the opportunity to climb into one of those hollow-ball-beds and pass out… it was such a tease.
The dorks that decided to build this thing had to be total drug addicts. In fact, I recommend that anyone that goes to see the Atomium drops acid before hand; literally though… maybe then I would have been able to appreciate the ball with black walls and a neon, green, hanging, light thing cuz I seriously didn’t get it.
After our adventure with the Atomium we stopped at a little restaurant for some chocolate waffles; god they were good.
At the waffle place we were harassed by two ghostly, mutant, cats that really acted more like pigeons than actual cats. They were prolly the first cats in my life to ever really gross me out (besides the cat that used to live by my old house who’s nose was totally cut off; yea that one was way worse than these ones).
When waffle break was over we considered heading to “Little Europe,” where they have little, Laura-sized, versions of all the famous monuments and statues in Europe. Yeah, the tourist attractions in that part of Brussels were totally wacky. We decided that we’d rather spend the admission fee money on beer instead (what? We’re in college).
So then it was back to the metro (where somehow I managed to get hit directly in the mouth with a smelly dog tail – no joke. I almost gagged).
We made a quick stop at the local grocery store cuz a) we wanted some strawberry beer for evening cocktails and, b) you can learn a lot about a country based on the things they sell in the grocery stores. I enjoyed roaming around.
Raspberry beer/group massage/spill raspberry beer all over Ben AND the bed Tera sleeps on (yea, me) at night/watching “Made” dubbed in French with Flemish subtitles on MTV/talk about stupid things and laugh at each other time was incredibly entertaining and relaxing.
Before heading out for the evening, we packed all of our stuff and set our alarms for 3:45AM – oh yea, did I mention that we had a flight back to Pisa the next day at 6:30AM? Oh, and that to get to the airport we had to take a 45 minute bus ride that left at 4:30AM? Oh, which meant that we had to be in a cab on the way to the bus stop at 4:00AM? Yea, which made it so that we had to be out of bed and ready to go at 3:45 IN THE MORNING?!? Cuz we did. It was so painful to think about that we all kinda tried to ignore the 3AM concept and just enjoy our last night.
For dinner we hopped on the metro and navigated ourselves to the Grand Palace (AKA tourist-ville) and after a little bit of strolling around, taking pictures of chocolate fountains, and asking a Chinese lady if she enjoyed Chinese food, we found the most incredible ally of restaurants I’ve ever seen. The ally was 50ish yards long and was jam packed with restaurants all offering the same food… it was actually really overwhelming and Laura, Dan, Ben, and walked down and up the entire ally before a dude working at the restaurant negotiated some crazy seafood platter deal and we gave in.
It was one of the most entertaining meals of my life. Between watching the host-dude-guy jump out of the shadows at the tourists passing by in attempt to lure them in, and watching Ben and Dan chow down on fatty platter of shelled and scaled organisms, there was never a dull moment. We even had a group snail eating moment – yea the world thought it would never come but TERA LINSLEY ATE A MOTHER FUCKING SNAIL. And it was a mother fucking nasty snail. And I’ll prolly never do it again.
After dinner we strolled around tourist-ville, shopped, enjoyed our buzz, the architecture, and the full moon then decided to make a final stop for one last desert waffle before calling it a night. It’s crazy to think that for almost three whole days the four of us had spent every sleeping and waking moment together; we’d sat down to eat, ridden the metro, slept, shopped, traveled, walked around, danced… together for three days straight and yet never seemed to run out of things to talk about. I was freaking out before the trip cuz I was liek the “random girl” in the group; seriously though. Ben, Laura, and Dan, had been doing stuff together for the past month whereas I sorta was good enough for a: “Hi. How are you. Good. Kay bye.” A lot of times I get super self-conscious around people that are already really close but the three of them were so awesome that I hardly ever felt that way. I’ve felt a little bit unhappy for the past year or so and am only realizing now that maybe it’s cuz I need new people in my life. I dunno… it’s one of those things I have to sit and think about for a while. All I know is that I like how I feel right now.
Before heading to sleep around midnight (ha, I had just consumed one of the sugariest waffles of my life and didn’t have a tired ounce in my body), Dan and I watched some super mellow, sorta weird, sorta scary movies on his I-pod (which I need to get a new one of also cuz mine is lame). Something about those movies totally knocked me out and I didn’t wake up again until it was 3:30 when it was time to leave…
Ok, I woke up to the, “click click clicking,” of high heels on the tiled floor of the room above us… I’m not kidding, this lady must’ve been having a nervous breakdown or something because I could hear her pacing around the apartment for, liek, 30 minutes. Any other morning and I would have been liek whatever, but this particular morning I woke up feeling like my head was going to fall off and the clicking made it a bajillion times worse.
Of course we all slept through breakfast again; the morning was painful but after a shower, some advil, and liek 4 bottles of water we hit the streets in search of breakfast (in the country that, oh yea duh we learned this yesterday, doesn’t eat breakfast). We ended up at the bar that Dan and Ben ended up at on our first night in Brussels. When we walked in the dude that was working behind the bar made a big scene and I’m pretty sure he was making fun of us but since none of us even knew what language he was speaking there was really nothing we could do about it. Psh. Asshole.
We ate omelets – wait, no, Ben and Dan ate omelets while Laura and I enjoyed ketchup with a little bit of egg. God it was good to see/taste Heinz again! This continent seems to think that it’s okay to use mayonnaise as an alternative to ketchup. Uh-uh, I’m sorry, that’s not okay with me.
So then, after being lost in the metro station for a while, we finally managed to navigate outselves to the ATOMIUM. Ok. The Atomium. Google it right now. Here’s a little description as stated by the brochure I got: “Designed by engineer Andre Waterkeyn, for the International Exhibition of Brussels in 1958, the Atomium represents an iron crystal molecule, magnified 165 BILLION TIMES.” This shiny, glistening, thing is in the middle of nowhere and is 102 meters high… it looks like a fatty UFO just decided to land in the middle of some trees. 102 meters high is one big ass atom. It was the most bizarre structure I have ever seen; the inside (oh yes, you can go inside… and we did) was more random that the outside.
To get to each ball (literally, it’s a bunch of big silver balls connected by silver tubes) you had to either walk up and down huge staircases OR ride escalators up tubes that were liek 30 yards long… it was what I would imagine being sucked up a vacuum might feel like. Each ball had something totally bizarre on display in it: a Barbie doll exhibit, a case of silver dishes, some of those bent mirrors that make your head all gigantic and your legs all midge, some huge carved out balls with mattresses in them that you could only gaze at through glass and couldn’t actually sit/lay on – being hungover and claustrophobic in those balls and tubes made me want more than anything the opportunity to climb into one of those hollow-ball-beds and pass out… it was such a tease.
The dorks that decided to build this thing had to be total drug addicts. In fact, I recommend that anyone that goes to see the Atomium drops acid before hand; literally though… maybe then I would have been able to appreciate the ball with black walls and a neon, green, hanging, light thing cuz I seriously didn’t get it.
After our adventure with the Atomium we stopped at a little restaurant for some chocolate waffles; god they were good.
At the waffle place we were harassed by two ghostly, mutant, cats that really acted more like pigeons than actual cats. They were prolly the first cats in my life to ever really gross me out (besides the cat that used to live by my old house who’s nose was totally cut off; yea that one was way worse than these ones).
When waffle break was over we considered heading to “Little Europe,” where they have little, Laura-sized, versions of all the famous monuments and statues in Europe. Yeah, the tourist attractions in that part of Brussels were totally wacky. We decided that we’d rather spend the admission fee money on beer instead (what? We’re in college).
So then it was back to the metro (where somehow I managed to get hit directly in the mouth with a smelly dog tail – no joke. I almost gagged).
We made a quick stop at the local grocery store cuz a) we wanted some strawberry beer for evening cocktails and, b) you can learn a lot about a country based on the things they sell in the grocery stores. I enjoyed roaming around.
Raspberry beer/group massage/spill raspberry beer all over Ben AND the bed Tera sleeps on (yea, me) at night/watching “Made” dubbed in French with Flemish subtitles on MTV/talk about stupid things and laugh at each other time was incredibly entertaining and relaxing.
Before heading out for the evening, we packed all of our stuff and set our alarms for 3:45AM – oh yea, did I mention that we had a flight back to Pisa the next day at 6:30AM? Oh, and that to get to the airport we had to take a 45 minute bus ride that left at 4:30AM? Oh, which meant that we had to be in a cab on the way to the bus stop at 4:00AM? Yea, which made it so that we had to be out of bed and ready to go at 3:45 IN THE MORNING?!? Cuz we did. It was so painful to think about that we all kinda tried to ignore the 3AM concept and just enjoy our last night.
For dinner we hopped on the metro and navigated ourselves to the Grand Palace (AKA tourist-ville) and after a little bit of strolling around, taking pictures of chocolate fountains, and asking a Chinese lady if she enjoyed Chinese food, we found the most incredible ally of restaurants I’ve ever seen. The ally was 50ish yards long and was jam packed with restaurants all offering the same food… it was actually really overwhelming and Laura, Dan, Ben, and walked down and up the entire ally before a dude working at the restaurant negotiated some crazy seafood platter deal and we gave in.
It was one of the most entertaining meals of my life. Between watching the host-dude-guy jump out of the shadows at the tourists passing by in attempt to lure them in, and watching Ben and Dan chow down on fatty platter of shelled and scaled organisms, there was never a dull moment. We even had a group snail eating moment – yea the world thought it would never come but TERA LINSLEY ATE A MOTHER FUCKING SNAIL. And it was a mother fucking nasty snail. And I’ll prolly never do it again.
After dinner we strolled around tourist-ville, shopped, enjoyed our buzz, the architecture, and the full moon then decided to make a final stop for one last desert waffle before calling it a night. It’s crazy to think that for almost three whole days the four of us had spent every sleeping and waking moment together; we’d sat down to eat, ridden the metro, slept, shopped, traveled, walked around, danced… together for three days straight and yet never seemed to run out of things to talk about. I was freaking out before the trip cuz I was liek the “random girl” in the group; seriously though. Ben, Laura, and Dan, had been doing stuff together for the past month whereas I sorta was good enough for a: “Hi. How are you. Good. Kay bye.” A lot of times I get super self-conscious around people that are already really close but the three of them were so awesome that I hardly ever felt that way. I’ve felt a little bit unhappy for the past year or so and am only realizing now that maybe it’s cuz I need new people in my life. I dunno… it’s one of those things I have to sit and think about for a while. All I know is that I like how I feel right now.
Before heading to sleep around midnight (ha, I had just consumed one of the sugariest waffles of my life and didn’t have a tired ounce in my body), Dan and I watched some super mellow, sorta weird, sorta scary movies on his I-pod (which I need to get a new one of also cuz mine is lame). Something about those movies totally knocked me out and I didn’t wake up again until it was 3:30 when it was time to leave…
posted by tera a firenze at 1:46 AM
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