1 week, three museums and a day "sans voitures"

I have reached the end of my first week in Brussels and it feels like I have been here so much longer than that now.  My parents only left on Friday and that feels like an age ago too.  I've had a bit of a geeky weekend, you might have gathered that I'm not exactly the usual "party-animal" Erasmus student!

On Saturday I went to the Musical Instruments Museum, it was good but not quite what I was expecting- but I don't know what I was expecting really.  All in all an ok way of passing some time though.  After that I decided to take a wander and try and find myself some lunch, I eventually found a shop a bought a salad that was labelled "Ready to eat", perfect I thought, except for the lack of fork...  After making a mess of eating my lunch I was fed up and decided to come back to the flat where I spent the afternoon watching French TV that I didn't really understand and doing some cleaning.  I did manage to fit in a quick Skype session with the parents whilst I was eating my healthy dinner, it had fish AND vegetables!

I decided that today was to be a better day than yesterday and decided to go to a couple more museums.  Today is "Dimanche sans voitures" in Brussels which means that cars are not allowed in the city from 9am until 7pm.  All public transport is free for the day and there is lots going on.  My first geeky visit of the day was to the BELvue museum which is all about the history of Belgium.  It was interesting and I might have learned something-hopefully!  After that I went and found my self a bench to eat my (2nd geeky thing) packed lunch-seriously, you would if you saw the prices of things round here.  I then decided to take a walk around but went quite a distance so decided to get the tram back to where I started!  So that Luke can't tell me off for not going I thought I'd get it over and done with and so I went to the Royal Museum of the Military, after some slight navigational issues that is!  I was actually very impressed by it, it was huge!  I wasn't paying too much attention though I must admit but as entrance is free a return visit will be on the cards.  The museum is in Parc du Cinquantenaire and today, along with the lack of cars, there was an Olympics event, London came to Brussels for the day apparently, there were even a group of police officers, I thought they were Belgians dressed up but they weren't, they were there as part of some Home Office thing promoting safety at the olympics...?

I have also decidedthat I need to stop being nice when people ask directions, this time I had no clue but showed them my map, it took them a while to find where they wanted and by the time they had the torrential rain appeared...typical.  If I hadn't helped I'd have been pretty much home and dry before it started!  Never mind!

First day of classes at ISTI tomorrow and my very first class is a non-erasmus class doing French to English translation so it is a bit scary that I'll be going totally on my own, I hope there are more Erasmus students there, but there are lots of groups so they might not be.  Wish me luck!