Bon weekend

Bon weekend is what you say in French to wish someone a good weekend, which makes that aspect of my French learning experience easy at least! My weekend has been low-key but fabulous. Yesterday, we had quite a mix of countries represented on our excursion to Antwerp, or Anvers, as it is called in French, although it is a Flemish city. It was me, the American, my new roommate, Loredana (Italian), my friend Anne and her flatmate, Julia (Germans), my friend from French class Lucy (Czech) and her male flatmate, Clement (Austria). Antwerp was quite lovely, but it was so cold! Most of the diamond shops were closed, at least the ones in the predominantly Jewish neighborhood we walked through to get to the city center due to the fact that Saturday is their Sabbath. In any case, all of us but Lucy, who had already been and preferred shopping, went to the artist Ruben's house, which only cost us 1 euro entry fee. Fantastic deal, as we stayed an hour and a half, looking at art. The night before, Friday, I had met up with Anne for a couple of drinks, but by 10:30, we had already called it a night in preparation for our trip to Antwerp. It's crazy what a little bit of snow will do, but seeing as how we just got snow on Thursday, the first since I've been here, no one seems to want to go out. Today was more museum hopping, 2 euro entry at the Magritte art museum, where I went with Loredana and her coworker, Valentina (both work at the Italian Mission to the EU). We stayed for three hours, so I have reached my museum capacity for the weekend! Now, it's just finishing laundry and getting ready to go back to work. However, one last thing to comment on:

Brussels, a city of 1 million people, is ridiculously small in some way. Today, we ran into Clement, the guy from our group last night. He also was the museum, and he started peering at me on the other side of the glass exhibit I was looking at, which made me laugh. This has been the seventh or eighth time I have run into someone, or someone has seen me in Brussels. The other day, I ran into our director at work around 8:30pm-I was on the metro going home from French class, and he was trying to get on the too crowded metro (he ended up waiting for the next one, but we said hello). Ah. C'est la vie.