hello!! all is looking very good, despite the rain outside - but coming from the city of rain, i am well and truely used to it!! i have a place to live, which was the top priority after arriving here. it is on the top (4th) floor of an early 20th century home - yes, 4 flights of stairs to climb up, but they are very nice stairs... shall send through a picture one day... anyway i guess in the 'olden' days, my room would have been where the maid or butler lived. we have our own mini kitchen / table / bathroom, which is shared between four of us. the room i am in would be larger than my own at home, with a desk, bed, wardrobe, shelf and basin with cold water. the place is very old but not at all cold. i also have a huge window that will get all of the afternoon sun. i am a 5 minute walk to the centre of town, so it's brilliant!!

a girl i met on the first day, just randomly off the street, is staying in the room across from me as i bumped into her when i was going to check the place out. she's from ottawa, canada, and is here with 6 other students doing a kind of exchange programme in their philosophy course. the other guy, stuart, is from holland, and is studying some ancient classical something, and the other girl - whom i am yet to meet - apparantly studies classical languages. so that's pretty cool.

yesterday benn and i went into brussels before he caught the train back to the airport and returned to kent. at the train station we met a couple of poms (ray and dan) who are here in leuven for a few nights visiting a friend. we ended up spending the day with them in brussels, and then when benn left, i spent the rest of the afternoon with them, checking out an awesome art museum. a huge place but a lot of the paintings and sculpture were very dark and depressing. i really only liked all the landscape scenes. also, there were pictures of macgyver (my dog) everywhere! i think the welsh springer was very much the dog to have back in those days!!

last night i met up with the guys again, and ran into morna (canadian flatmate) and all of her friends - it is very easy to run into the same people everywhere because it is such a small place. one thing that i find very interesting is that every different type of beer (and it seems belgium has a thing for beer!!) has its own type of glass with its name written on it. i have never seen so many different shaped glasses to be honest.

today i am hoping will be my first chance at driving over here! ray drove over from england (so the layout of his car is like in nz) and today we're planning to head to antwerp, which we have been told is the most beautiful town in belgium. it was either that or amsterdam - personally i liked the idea of driving into another country and showing my passport out the car window like they do on the movies - but the boys have been there before but haven't been to antwerp. and ray said i was more than welcome to drive his car. cool huh - he knows me for 12 hours and trusts me! must be my smile i guess!

it is so easy to meet people over here though. everyone seems to be in their twenties, and everyone is really friendly. it's hard to explain, because i remember reading about how my friends would go on their O.Es and would just make the best friends, and never really understand how they did it. but now that i'm here, i fully understand. as soon as i heard those boys accents, speaking english; it was like we were all best friends - suppose that is also due to the foreign language thing.