Tuesday, August 23, 2011

lets compare shall we?

 So I've noticed that my entries are more or less just me rambling most of the time and today I've decided to talk about whats different here compared to back home. There is a really good chance that this will go off on a random tangent but whatever.
   Food: Food here is not the same , Of course the types of food you eat really depends on your family . But back home we eat organically and over all pretty healthy , and here too more or less but the quality of what you get here is much better. The good ol' U S of A really f-ed up when it comes to bread. We don't have bakeries in every town back home churning out heavenly fresh loaves of bread every day . They do here though , and oh my damn it's good . Bread is a staple here I eat it on average as two meals a day . There are specialty stores for everything here and everything is less processed . although there is Belgian junk food which is pretty much a variety of meat products battered and fried , sound familiar? But my God the fries are awesome and the Waffles , there are two kinds Bruxelles and Liege one is very sugary and thick and the other is less sweet and thin and you don't eat them for breakfast . For the people here who aren't particularly fond of eating meat i suggest you find a new blog that teaches you to suck moisture out of birch bark to keep your sustenance as you hunt for twigs and berries on the forest floor because I also forgot to mention that they eat horse here, mhmmm I'd like the my little pony special please with extra mayo *there will be no guilt , i don't care what it was , what it is now is delicious* . I've yet to try it but I've heard its good, but i have finally tried fois gras and that was awesome. 
 Cars/Driving: No two car's here are exactly alike , I've yet to see one car that is identical to the other . Not like in salem when you're like oh i have the dark green forester over there and there's 4 in the parking lot. It's because there are so many different brands of cars here , from France, Germany, the Czech Republic and there are the occasional fords and chevys. The streets here aren't big so driving is , adventurous . There are all these people jetting around in their tiny cars (no escalades here SONNN) shifting gears like formula one drivers . on most roads there is only enough room for one car so if you are driving down the street and there's another car coming you have to pull over to let them pass. And what really makes the whole thing a lot like racing is the fact that none of the streets are perfectly straight and set like a grid , like back home. 
  Size: Belgium is roughly the size of Maryland , so a long trip for them is an hour... In NY if you want to go shopping there's an hour trip. Most people are in disbelief when i say i have to drive almost 6 hours to my college in New York . But because it's so small and the distances are relatively small to me i've visited all over Belgium already, an hour and a half to the beach ? Yes! So what if the sun doesn't really shine and the water is a bit dodgy....
 Family/Social: Back in AMERICUH the only meal that my family eats together is Dinner . Everyone gets up at a different time so breakfast isn't together and we all do our own thing during the day so lunch isn't together either . But here we more or less eat every meal together , and dinner is much later . The other night we ate at like 10 and i was falling asleep at the table ... Also both my host brothers have girlfriends so most of the time they're with them and i'm here just chilling. Most of the people i've met that are my age are in a couple , so belgium is practically like a all inclusive couples resort with shoddy weather ahah. The same night when we ate dinner really late it was both my host brothers and their girlfriends and my host parents and they were all sitting in pairs around the table and then there was just me . definitely an outsider looking in but it was like a seat to a dinner theater that i didn't understand. Its tough enough to speak french when you think in english but when you're tired, forget it. One last thing , PDA , normal here , i went to the beach and everyone was all up on each other jk but there is a big difference , i guess it's just culture. Europeans are more romantic and americans are fat , cold people that don't have enough ....ya know....
   

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