40!

wow, day fourty already! dreary sunday here in belgium. slept in till sometime past noon then went downstairs to eat the sunday brunch type of thing. usually they have bread for breakfast and lunch all other days except sunday. sunday they combine the two and have croissants, hard roll type things and sometimes other flakey filled-pastries if we're lucky! after that i think i just hung around the house for a while. a little while later we decided to go to a museum! well we origionally planned on going to two but the fist one took too long so we just went to one. it was a printing museum..with old printing presses and stuff. ve

ry interesting but frankly kind of boring/redundant after a while. first they show you how theymade the little letters, then they showed you the first manual press, then the second, then the third, then the steam press, etc etc. the evolution of printing presses from 1800-1900 pretty much. the first picture is my host mom showing how a comic strip was made..and the second is the metal thing for printing music back in the day!

it was good to see though and i am happy my family made an effort to do something with me! then it started raining and we came home. once home i decided to attempt to make sugar cookies! i tried two different recipes, one more of a shortbread and one more of a traditional rolled sugar cookie. the traditional ones worked and the other ones didn't bake very well but i think they still taste fine. i used the cookie cutter and sprinkles my mom sent me from home! normally the frosting would be some bright fall color but guess what? food coloring doesn't exist in belgium apparently..some of it is even illegal!! you have to search really hard to find it and i guess you can usually just find red. weird don't you think? i guess it causes cancer..so watch out america! what does that make red velvet cake...deathly delicious? (now i am wanting cake..yumm)!!

after baking cookies we had dinner. dinner was pretty cool tonight actually! little pita breads that we each added our own filling into. there was lettuce, mayo, meat, tomatoes, and stuff like that! really yummy and fun too. the pictures on tonights blog are all from my host mom by the way!! so this is what dinner usually looks like if you would add my host mom sitting at the table. actually this is what dinner always looks like. and on the weekends breakfast, lunch, AND dinner...always as a family at the table remember!!

actually a normal dinner wouldn't have as much stuff on the table..for example the toaster, just there to toast the little pita breads before we stuffed them. speaking of which, you all know english muffins right? these little pita breads tasted just like english muffins! if you ask them what an english muffin is here they will tell you its a legitamate MUFFIN that is like a sweet bread or something. english muffins at home are the things you buy a 12 pack of for 99 cents at hyvee..right next to the biscuits in a tube and sour cream (which are two other things you cant commonly/easily find in belgium..so weird!). when i talked to my dad on the phone the other day he said "after reading your blog you would think all you do is eat!"..he's partly correct because it seems all i blog about are the differences in food, but in my brain that is the biggest difference, and the biggest part of the culture. sure school is different, language is different, etc..but if you think about it you spend a big portion of your life eating..and sleeping for that matter. so its just a subject that i find fascinating and it think it is fun to share!! anyways i need to go to bed now..big day tomorrow after all these late nights out..not to mention my sore throat has turned into a cough..lovely. goodnight!