Friday, Day 20

This morning I had my first ensemble rehearsal at CvA; jazz trio with vocalists. All the musicians are really great players (well, the ones that showed up anyway), and it was really great to actually play my instrument with other people. After that I tried to write. As usual, it was a struggle. I was eventually able to muster the creativity and desire to at least play around with a piano piece, but I was soon interrupted by a Dutch student insisting that it was his turn to use the room. I tried to argue my case, but the language barrier was at last too much. So I went home and made a hamburger (the solution to most, if not all, of my problems).

The REAL adventure of the day came some time later. After half-jokingly asking everyone I could if they wanted to travel somewhere outside of the country, one of my friends was intrigued. So we decided to pack our bags and head to the train station and see where we could get to on the fly and on the cheap. As it turns out, last minute tickets on the train are much more expensive than last minute tickets on budget airlines. So we made our way to the airport to check the ticket counters. Naturally, since it was past 7pm at this point, most were closed, and the remaining counters had little to offer us. Our solution was to go to the train ticket counter and purchase round trip tickets to Brussels, naturally. So, without a plan, we were off to Belgium.

Once in Brussels (past midnight, mind you), we found our way to our hostel. It was a little bit of a treck, to be honest, and google maps did not have our best interest at heart when telling us to go through all of the sketchy residential neighborhoods on the way. Despite all of this, we did eventually find our way to the hostel. Upon check-in, we went to our dorm to find everyone fast asleep in all of the bottom bunks. This meant awkwardly undressing and bedding down on a top bunk in the total darkness and as much silence as we could maintain. This was compounded by the fact that neither of us had ever stayed in a hostel before, so we were unaware of things like edict and where to safely store our things. The only solution we could think of was to sleep with all of our belongings, and we could not put the sheets on our beds because of the lack of light and the noise it would make. All in all, a very interesting night to say the least.