The flight was okay. We disembarked around 8:30 this morning in the Brussels airport and my mom's high school friend Mary picked us up and brought us to her home in a suburb of Leuven. Ever since I got off the plane I kind of really feel like I'm in a parallel universe – so many things are just slightly different. For example, curbs, toilets, light switches, the shape of cars, street lights... and this is only the beginning.
Later we drove out to the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (KaU), where Mary's two daughters and daughter's boyfriend go to school. It was pretty beautiful, but abandoned. They told me it's typical for students to go home Friday mornings and come back to school Sunday evenings because living on a campus is much more expensive than in the U.S. This means that they party hard on Thursdays!
Then we went into the actual city part, which I thought was really beautiful but apparently it won an award for "worst architecture". I am just dazed at how effortlessly aesthetically pleasing everything is. Or not so effortless, in terms of the giant Baroque churches that will suddenly appear as you turn a corner. We stopped in a Brauhaus and I drank my first legal alchohol drink - a Kreik (cherry beer), mmmm. Thanks, parents.
This church is ridiculously detailed. It made me a little nauseous to look at. The entire façade is covered in minutely rendered sculptures:
Here is a typical square (Platz, I think) in Leuven. I guess the squared off roof lining, as seen in the building on the far right, is a common feature in Belgian architecture. It is also rare for the sky to be blue, which apparently gets really depressing in the winter when there's only four hours of daylight.
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