Nate's Travels

The Canal in Bruge , originally uploaded by Nate Brunk . So this weekend we headed to Bruges, Belgium... What an amazing little town! Full of tourism (and tourists acting like tourists), the town had plenty to do and to see. We arrived by train on Friday night (only about a 3 hour ride from Luxembourg City) and started to hike around to try to find our hostel. We ended up staying in a place called Snuffel Backpacker hostel... it's an awesome place with tons of people there. The common room was a bar... a bit smoky, but a neat place to socialize. Taylor and I ended up talking to people from France and Holland (in French, incidentally... well, slightly drunken French...). They were studying to be train conductors, and had the weekend off for holiday. Anyway--that night, we took a night walk of Bruges, an incredibly beautiful city when the weather is nice and the lights are on... Awesome! We stopped before we went back to get some fries (did you know they were invented here?!) wi...

The Valley in Lux City , originally uploaded by Nate Brunk . Hey ya'll, here's the first of the pictures! I'm constantly working on uploading them, and doubt i'll have the chance to upload more tonight... then we're heading to Bruges, Belgium tomorrow... I'll get to it though, I promise! The rest of the photos are at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/nathanbrunk/ xnatex

Bonjour! Sooooo, we've been extremely busy, and I haven't much time to check e-mail, etc, but when I can, I am trying! Linda... I'll email you the thing asap, I dont have the zipcode here on me right now... Anyway, we've done some more cool things on our orientation trips... we've had the opportunity to go to the Moselle region of Luxembourg (on the border between France, literally separated by the Moselle river. The moselle region is known for it's amazing wine production (mostly white wines... apparently the soil isn't sandy enough for red grapes). We first visited La Musee du Vin to see exactly how wine was made historically by smaller winemakers. We tasted a wine at the finish of the tour, it was pretty tasteless for wine, but meh.. whatevs. Next we headed to the Domaine Vinsmoselle winery. It's a coop winery for the growers around, they jointly purchased the equipment to create some of Luxembourg's best wine and champaigne equivalent (did you kn...

Ah! Finally, Le Internet! Moyen! Well, we arrived safely (much more so than on Air China Flights) on wednesday morning in Brussels, Belgium. After getting all of our things, we headed for the bus where MUDEC staff greeted us. After a three-hour long bus ride, we finally made it to Differdange (lovingly known here as "The Diff"). We hooked up with our host family's son, Johnny (not to be confused with their dog Johnny), who packed our luggage in a tiny van and took it ahead of us to our house. We walked to the house, literally a 2 minute walk from the chateau (yay for rolling out of bed!)! We checked out our rooms--they're really nice! We each have our own room on the 3rd (2nd here) story of Claire's (host mom's) house, then share a newly renovated bathroom--it's really nice! We came back to MUDEC on Thursday to begin our orientation: first a lecture from Dr. Stiller (the dean), then introductory sessions about living with a host family, and student activi...

Ahhhhh... travel time is here again.. In less than 12 hours, I'll have started my journey towards Differdange, Luxembourg, my new home for the next four months! I'm super excited, and way more at ease about traveling a long distance after having traveled to China. I've been watching Rick Steve's DVD's, reading information, and basically just getting mentally prepped. I say mentally since I just finished the majority of my packing about an hour ago :P I'm really stoked that so many people have access to this site; It'll be sweet to share my experiences... these are your souvineers :P Stick around, come back every week or so and I'll do my best to update regularly! I would like to note that I'm not going to have internet access at the chateau in Differdange for a few days, so if ya'll don't hear from me, assume the best. Au revoir mes amis... ALLONS-Y A EUROPE! xnatex