More posts, more frequently now – I promise. I now have Internet at home, so I have no excuse.

Since I last wrote, a lot has happened here. I moved into a new apartment and out of the hotel. All of my clothes are permanently suitcase-creased, but it was worth the wait. The new place is amazing! Cool architecture, furnished, and right in the center of town:

Check out the awesome view of Grand Place!:

I broke the new pad in with a little party last weekend. Naturally, I wanted to put my best foot forward, so I decided to iron my shirt before everyone showed up. As soon as I plugged the iron in, all the power went out and, to make a long story short, it took 30 minutes and a trip down to the cave of a basement to get the lights back on. Luckily, only a few guests showed up before we figured it out. I mean, I like parties with music from laptop speakers and two candles for light as much as the next guy, but that would have sucked. Why do I keep having power issues?

Most people brought some alcohol to the party – more as a gift than something to drink that night. This is pretty different from the U.S. I think I actually ended up ahead because people brought so much. So it just solidifies the obvious: Having a party is almost always a good idea.

Other recent happenings include a visit from Grant, a friend from MKE. After he broke my water heater,

we hopped on a train and went to Antwerp for the afternoon,

before heading to Essen, Belgium for his girlfriend, Femke’s, graduation party. I can speak a bit of French which gets me around fine in Brussels, but I speak zero Dutch. So, it was a cool experience to see a traditional Dutch graduation party, but there was quite the language barrier.

We finished off the packed weekend with an afternoon in Amsterdam. Not really enough time to see the city, so I’ll have to go back. It’s only about 2 hrs by train from here.

You would think that the Circuits classes I took in college would have resulted in a little real world electrical knowledge – but you would be wrong.

The first night here I asked the front desk for a power transformer (to account for the difference between American AC and Chinese AC), and they gave me a power strip. I assumed it had some kind of power conversion built in…but it didn’t. I plugged in my iHome, the power went out and I smelled burning.

I called the front desk, and 10 minutes later I had three Chinese maintenance engineers in blue jump suits in my room trouble shooting the issue. We struggled through a bunch of failed communication, and they finally left after the power got turned back on. To make matters worse, my key card stopped working later that night. After going to the front desk three times to get it fixed, they decided to relocate me.

Suddenly I found myself in a suite with a living room, an LCD TV on the wall, and a whole wall of windows. Check it out: