Chocolate and Graffiti

For this half term, we visited Belgium for 3 days, just because we are in England and we want to cram as much of Europe as we can into this year.

Some of the things we saw in Brussels were chocolate, Tintin museums, and lots of EU buildings. These were very much expected. The chocolate was wonderful (I mean, what else could it be in Belgium?), with lots of shops sprinkled about the city. We would usually come in, try to pronounce the chosen variety of chocolate in as best French as we could, pointing to the kind we wanted. On the second-to-last day of the visit, we made an excursion to the grocery store, where we stocked up on as much chocolates as we could get our hands on.

We then had a taste-test for the kids, which was comparing whether we kids liked the hand-made Neuhaus chocolates, which were much more expensive, and the machine-made chocolate from Leonidas. We threw a couple of grocery store chocolates in as well, just for more fun. We were blindfolded, just so that we wouldn't see which chocolates we were eating.

Our (my sister and I) genes may be similar, but our taste buds are very different. She ranked the hand made chocolate as the best, whereas I ranked it as the worst. It was vice versa with the machine-made chocolate. Did Neuhaus not do particularly well with their chocolate? Or is it just that I have bad taste?

One thing that we don't see in Cambridge a lot, and in which we were not expecting too much of in Brussels was graffiti. This is highly exaggerated, but I think there was more graffiti in Brussels than in the whole of Manhattan!

The artists must have been really desperate to find space for it. As in, extremely desperate. Someone scribbled some letters onto a bush!

Also, I often saw the same graffiti artist's design/word around town. For example, there was one guy who would put "Doug" on various walls around the lower part of the city. Another person put "Artist..." in the same areas of Brussels. Also, the same spots round and about the city were used, making the people who made the graffiti almost dog-like (no offense to them) in a way, in the fact that they marked their special design/word around the city.

Snowfall

There was a huge reaction at school about the snow today and on Monday, mainly because no one had ever seen much of it before. What was seriously surprising, though, is that at break, the teachers let us have a gigantic snowball fight in our uniforms, and yet in America, they didn't even let us set a toe onto the snow in our regular clothing. There are some things I really don't understand about my hometown.

However, the snow made biking much slower, especially on Tuesday, when all the snow from Monday had frozen, along with the bike-prints, just like footprints in hardened cement. This made the ride
a) slippery; my sister fell down once on Wednesday
b) bumpy, because of all the bike-prints
c) slushy, when the melted ice mixed with the mud
But of course, when we came home from school Lydia and I were rewarded by playing in the snow, making a snowman and an attempted snow fort, although there really wasn't enough snow the make one of those.