A Sunny Week Away...

The last week I had an excursion to the Belgian part of the Ardennes. It’s an old mountain range with only steep hills to remember how splendid they once were. I went there for a minor course I follow for geography and we went there for the interesting rock formations under ground. The first day we followed the Ninglingspo (I was starting to wonder if I was in Thailand or Belgium?) and it was really hot but when we got back to the vans it started to rain and as we got closer to the chalet we would stay in it started to hose.

We were lucky that it cooled because of the rain and thunder so we could sleep well. This was actually the weather for the rest of the week, sun during the day and rain and thunder at night. During this week we had to make a geological map of an area we were appointed to by going to that area during the day and work on the map after dinner. It was a really busy week but we also had a lot of fun.

In the south of Belgium they speak French (Waals) and I’m really bad at French (more like I speak a few sentences and a few words I once learned at school) and one day one of the vans broke down and the teachers weren’t able to go grocery shopping and Daisy and I wanted to cook that night so we were given money to go shopping. Well it was hilarious, as we both speak french so poorly. It started with the word supermarket (supermarché in French) and when we asked someone where it was in poor French they were Dutch and they told us we were standing right across from it. In the supermarket we were confronted with many other obstacles as minced meat that we had to be sure of was made from cows. I remembered cow was bouf (of la vache) and I practically screamed it at the man when it popped into my head. We also had a problem that there wasn’t enough brown bread.

After all this we had a great laugh and it really was a fun week even tough we were all tired at the end we felt like we really learned a lot.