aug 20

Hi!

The sun finally came out in drizzly Belgium!! :) Yesterday was really nice and today is even nicer. Not a cloud in the sky! Right now if I were in Terrace I would probably be heading out to the lake. That is something that I definately miss! I'm not sure what we will do today but I doubt we will be going to a lake to swim. Yesterday we just kind of relaxed around the house for the morning and then later on in the afternoon my host mom and my host brother both had appointments. My host mom had a meeting downtown and she said that I could go with her so I did. I actually just found out a few days ago that she is a fashion designer! I knew she had three shops but I didn't really know what they were for and then the other day we went into them and my host sister told me that her mom designed all the clothes in the store. I thought that was really really cool! The clothes are really nice too. So while my host mom was at her meeting for about half an hour I just walked around. I was pretty lucky because i just walked down a random street and I came across really really nice buildings! All the architecture here is so amazing and there is not really one normal building downtown. They all have some kind of carvings. There are also so many statues all around the city! I wish I could take pictures of them all but that would probably be pretty hard. We always drive by new ones on the way home or going somewhere else. Its very different than Canada. So as I was walking I just happened to come across the Grand Place again. It looked so nice with the sun shining off all the gold on the buildings! One of Louis' friends told me that the Grand Place is supposed to be one of the most beautiful places in Europe! There are a lot of tourists that go there and as I was walking around Iheard a lot of english being spoken. But yeah walking around Brussels by myself made me feel pretty independent I guess. This whole thing will probably make me much more independent which I'm looking forward to. Yesterday I also had my first Rotary Meeting. It was pretty different than the one that I went to in Canada. It was in the evening and there were no women in the club. The men were really nice though and everyone kept telling me not to worry that it was a stress free club. They had a presentation about cameras and I was trying really hard not to fall asleep because it was really hot in there and I get really tired during the day still. I had to make a really short presentation just to introduce myself but it went fine. I spoke some french with the rotarians and felt pretty good about it. Louis was also there with me which helped when I didn't understand something. One rotarian came up to me and invited me to come to his house for a weekend or something because his daughter went to Williams Lake on exchange a couple years ago and would like to hang out with me. I'm not sure when that will be because she has university tests to study for right now he said. I'm supposed to go back next week and I guess for that meeting there will be a dinner. One rotarian was asking me if we had a lot of Indians where I live and if I could speak the language. I said we did but no I didn't speak the language and that it is a very difficult language to learn. After the meetingI was very tired and very hungary and just came home, ate, and then slept.

Oh! Yesterday I also went for a little bike ride by myself. It was cool to just bike around all the little narrow streets. It was a bit scary though as well because the cars drive so fast down the little streets and bikers have to go on the road I think. On most of the roads they have these little speed bump like boxes that are supposed to slow the cars down but they still take them going pretty fast! But yeah it was a very nice little bike ride and I stopped at a little lake along the way, but I don't think you could swim in it.

Thats all for now though!

Bye