Castles and Belgium

So a lot has happened since I last posted, I have been really busy seeing places and going to school. So first I'll talk about the castles that I saw with my geography class. It's a geography for tourism class, so the idea was to tour different castles and evaluate the services that they offered and the accessibility of the castle for tourists. We visited four, Castalla, Onil, Bier and Villena. They were all so incredible. So much history! It is so weird to stand on something that had started in the 11th century. We walked a lot all day. Only one castle had street access, every other one you had to walk uphill to get to. We walked through the old parts of cities where the roads are so narrow, and very steep.

The picture with Darth Vader was taking at the Volvo Boat race event in Alicante. The beginning of the around the world started yesterday, and they had events going on all week; Including the cast of starwars walking around to take pictures with.

The part about Belgium in below these pictures.

 

 
 


This weekend I went to Belgium to visit a friend who is studying there. Katie, another CMU student and blogger( so you should check our her page) went with me. We were only there two days really, but we saw so many beautiful places. The climate is really similar to Michigan, so it was nice to have a few cool days away from the heat of Spain. Daniel, my friend there, had class on Friday so Katie and I explored Kortrijk on our way. We found some amazing sites, and even a house that was abandoned. Kortrijk is a smaller town which is becoming a college town as more students are studying there. His school, Howest, is pretty neat from what I saw. When we got there a band was practicing and we met some of his classmates, it was fun seeing their work. On our walk around we tried Belgian waffles, from a vending machine. Now you think they would not tasted that good, but they were amazing! We also found a vending machine that had bread in it. Shopping at Aldi was fun because we don't speak Dutch, which is what they speak in that part of Belgium. Most people we found spoke English though so it was easy getting around. The train system made traveling easy, and was not all that expensive. 11 euros to travel from Brussels to Kortrijk, which is two hours away by train.

On Saturday we left late in the day to go to Brussels. I wanted to see some museums, but we got there kind of late so I'll have to come back another time. We went to the Hard Rock Cafe there and Katie about died of excitement. We later found a book store that has books that Daniel collects and he was really excited, and the artwork in the store was really awesome. Walking around Brussels we saw some interesting sites, and I fell in love with the city. The architecture is incredibly detailed and ornate. We tried real Belgian waffles, which tasted amazing, and also Belgian fries, which I could have eaten a lot more of.

I could talk a lot more about Belgium, but I'll just put pictures below instead.