By Megan Lanius

I have been in Europe for a week now, and it is still surreal. I believed that when I stepped off the plane into the Belgian airport, it would somehow magically become real to me that I was spending a semester in Europe. The reality has still not caught up with me a week later, and I am unsure that it ever will! 

We have been to three countries this past week: Belgium, Germany, and the Netherlands. Maastricht, Netherlands, has been my favorite for several reasons.

Our awesome chaperones always take us around on a historical walking tour of the place we are visiting. This helps me and most everyone on the trip get the most out of the locations we visit as a group.

Then we split up into groups. In Maastricht, my group of six went and found a nice place to picnic and then walked around until our feet got tired of walking again (this is when Tara Crawford and I found our new favorite drink, Strawberry Kiwi Fanta).

The best experience of that particular day was probably also the most stressful. I, being one of the only people in my group to have a phone plan, received a text message from one of our chaperons telling us that the train we were about to try and take was cancelled. At this point, we had never gotten on or off of a train without our chaperones, so adding a cancelled train on top of that was not a great start, I thought. We arrived at the train station information booth and asked if there were any alternative ways. The woman pointed at a bus parked outside and said, “The bus is leaving right now.” We sprinted to the bus and caught it just in time. Our driver tried spelling out the place it was taking us to, and he spelt it “Fise” when in reality it was “Vise.” We were trying to make it to a train connection in Liege, Belgium, so luckily the bus driver dropped us off at a train station in Vise, Belgium, where we could catch our connection. We found another group of ours on the train and knew we had made it all by ourselves! It was quite an adventure, and I am glad for the experience.