We Made it-the first day!

“One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.” – Henry Miller

These are already some hearty travelers!

We are all running on less than 5 hours of sleep and we did do a full day of sight-seeing, including a large museum with their first “looking-assignment.” The flight from JFK was uneventful and we arrived about 9:10am Brussels time, which was an early 3am east coast time. Most students, but not all, got some sleep on the plane. It took quite a while to wait for our luggage and then by 10:20am we were off to meet our bus and Sasha, our day guide. We first went to the Atomium, from the World’s Fair here in Brussels in 1958 and continued a bus tour around the fairgrounds, also seeing beautiful buildings from the Japanese and Chinese from 1905.

Then we walked on a tour of the old city of Brussels, and by far the most impressive thing was the Grand Place, or city square. Various facades from the 17th century encircle a large Christmas tree and stable scene at the moment. We also saw the guild houses places their with their immaculate facades all around the imposing square.

Then a break for lunch allowed for some waffles and Pommes Frites (fries) and then a walk to the Fine Arts Museum in Brussels. You will see each student had to find and look at one work of art there and write about it briefly–just to spend some time with the artwork itself. We were all pretty tired by the end of this day and met our bus driver to ride to our hotel in Ghent. After a quick check in we walked around the Christmas market and found some places to eat. Now students are finishing their blog posts and sleeping. Soon enough I will be too!