Day 1: Sunday, July 3

Today has been exhausting and exciting. During my flight to London, I sat by a cool British chic named Fran. We ended up talking for a few hours and she gave me a lot of advice on where to go in London and the places to avoid when we return at the end of our trip. Fran gave me a little bit of royal family dirt that I didn’t know…apparently Prince Harry is stupid! She says he goes to Eaton, the prestigious university and made such bad grades that he brought his class GPA way down. I hated to hear the bad news about the red-head that Americans always swoon over.

I also made 2 other friends on the plane, both students that are studying at the London School of Economics for the summer…one from Cornell University and one from Washington University in D.C. After the flight, we ended up waiting in the customs line for almost 2 hours and were pretty sleepy by the time we ended up making it to baggage claim. While we were stuck in customs, I made more friends: a retired couple from Boca Raton, Florida that are renting a flat in London for a month because they said they love the city so much. A coach bus then picked us up and dropped us off at St.Pancras International where we hung out for a few hours waiting for the Eurostar train ride to Brussels, Belgium. I sat in the front of the bus and talked to the driver about a lot of different things like the Royal Wedding, Harry Potter and his life growing up in the southern most region of England. He looked like the character Peter Pettigrew from the Harry Potter films and said he’s been to Georgia before and really enjoyed his stay.

I saw some really interesting people in the train station while having a "Budweiser" beer with my class, professor and his wife. I used the quotation marks because it doesn't look like the REAL deal from America!!!

There was a young-backpacker-guy sitting with me on the train to Brussels….he didn’t speak English, but he smiled a lot and seemed friendly enough for the ride not to get awkward. The train ride was about 2 hours long and I slept most of the ride.

When we arrived in Brussels, our tour guide greeted us when we got off the train. Her name is Svetlina and she is from Bulgaria but has lived here for many years. She is very pretty and very polite and I offered to tour her around Georgia if she ever came to the states and visited the south. The hotel is SO GREAT. We are in the center of the city and right across the street from a Handmade Belgian Chocolate Boutique. This is heaven!

Even though we were all soooo tired when we arrived, we took a walking tour for about an hour. It was beautiful and we saw a lot of the city. After the tour, we had a delicious dinner at "StreakFrit." Loved the food and the servers were friendly. On the way home from dinner, I saw a group of people eating dinner outside of a tiny restaurant and they had 2 King Charles doggies that looked just like Ella. Wish she could've come in my carry-on.

Don't have much time, but above are pictures of the things we've seen so far...can't figure out how to drag them down but will work on it for the next post!!! Since French is one of the official languages of Belgium...Au revoir!