Season: Spring.
Weather: Chilly.
Location: Brussels – chocolatey, Antwerp – funky, Amsterdam – eye opening
Company: Locals – regimented, foreigners fun.
Affordability: Can’t say, everything was paid for.
Highlight: Tormenting our Belgian handlers on a daily basis.
Lowlight: Brussels, apart from the center square, I just don’t see the point of it. It’s like an experiment to see if you can bore someone to death.
I originally wrote this many years ago, but thought it was worth a mildly edited repost here.
This is all about my first trip to Europe, in May 2000. I’d been
out of the country before, but never to a place that required a flight. Being a poor student at the time there was no way I
could have managed this trip on my own budget, so fortunately for myself
and a young miss Winnie Zwane, we were sponsored by the Belgium group of
Katholieke Studenten Jeugd, a Belgian youth movement, supposedly related
to the catholic church, but in reality not at all. Winnie and myself
were on the NEC (National executive committee) of the Association of
Catholic Tertiary Students (ACTS) and were therefore a fairly logical
link for the KSJ guys in South Africa. So KSJ would pay for us to go
join them on a youth conference called WorldShake. Then in a few months they would all fly out to come explore South Africa.
