Happy World Nutella Day!

Bonjour, everyone! It's officially World Nutella Day - get excited! This morning instead of just PB on my banana, I celebrated by putting Nutella on half of it instead.

I'm thrilled that the dreaded Monday/Tuesday are over this week... Those are tough days. Like I mentioned last week, Wednesdays are great because we don't have to go into the school until after lunch. I made more eggs, like I did last week, and I tried my hand at baking in the oven. 

I found this recipe last week for a healthy "breakfast cake" and saved it for this week. It's similar to a banana bread or coffee cake. The recipe called for Greek yogurt, butter, flour, sugar, etc. Our kitchen in our apartment had some sugar, salt, baking soda, flour, and vanilla (which I didn't find until AFTER I put the bread in the oven) but I still needed to find Greek yogurt and chocolate chips and baking powder at the grocery store. I only found the Greek yogurt, so I had to improvise. 

I bought this chocolate and chopped it up into fine pieces. If I do this recipe again, I think I'll find something less dark. It's hard to find many varieties of cooking chocolate here - no semi-sweet chocolate chips, that's for sure! It's either extremely dark, or candy bars chocolate.

We didn't have measuring cups, so I gauged everything by eye and put in what I thought seemed normal. I used a pot to bake it in because we didn't have a bread or cake pan. The recipe was in Fahrenheit so I had to convert it to Celsius (350F=175C). 

I added some of my own things to this recipe since I couldn't find the baking powder. We had the baking soda so I just needed a "base." I added mashed banana and a diced apple, and some apple sauce and a splash of milk. Looking back, I guess I created an entirely different recipe! I'm not sure I could replicate it exactly if I wanted to do it again.

It came out better than I expected. It was light, fluffy, and delightful to eat warm. Angelina and Alex gobbled it right up so I take that as a good sign too. Now, I'm not going to hesitate to use the oven here - it worked out fine! Maybe I'll try something similar next Wednesday. I'm very pleased with how it turned out!

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Today marks the official two weeks since I've been here. Yesterday I did all of my laundry...I was starting to run out! The washing machines worked great (much better than the awful ones at Miami), and I had some trouble with the dryers but laid clothes out to dry and it was fine. 

The tricky part about laundry is that you have to lug it to the Chateau to get it done. This meant it had to come on my one-hour commute with me...and back! Some people use suitcases but I chose to use my boat bag and take it in two trips...this was WAY easier to manage. 

Note to everyone, this is the best chocolate I've had so far. Maybe in my whole life. I will bring some back for you all.

One of my favorite assignments is to keep a journal and write a letter each week. I write each one in this journal (tangent: this is a "Clairfontaine" notebook and I remember seeing a really cute Clairefontaine commercial in French class in high school... I just thought that it was cool that years later I've ended up using the product!) and then hand it into the professor every week. The great thing is that it gets returned to us and I can take it home and use it both as a memento and to share my thoughts of each day with my family and friends when I'm back. I think it's a great idea.

This weekend we're planning 2 days and 1 night in Bruges, Belgium. I think this will be a really neat place. It's about 4-5 hours from Luxembourg City, and we plan to leave early on Saturday morning to get there and come back to Luxembourg mid-Sunday. Right now our loose itinerary includes: 

• Going to Markt Square. This is located in the center of Bruges and has lots of tourist-geared attractions and shopping, and is home to some of the oldest historical buildings of the city. 
• Seeing the Belfry. This is a medieval tower in the middle of Bruges. We plan to climb to the top!
• See Michelangelo's Madonna and Child in the Church of Our Lady. This will be AMAZING. It's Michelangelo - need I say more? I love getting to see all of these works that I learned about in Art History last year.
• Go to the Choco-Story and/or go on a chocolate crawl. The Choco-Story is a Chocolate Museum! It sounds really neat, and Belgium is said to have the best chocolate in the world so I think it would be neat to see a museum and learn about it.
• Eat Belgian fries at Chez Vincent. This is one of Alex's picks. This restaurant is said to have the best French fries in all of Belgium. French fries were, in fact, created in Belgium. So this will be important. I'm glad we're both so active - makes it easier to enjoy these special (but indulgent!) foods :)
• Go on a canal boat ride. We're not sure where or how to find one of these yet, but we're told it's one of the best things to do in Bruges, and is also a good way to see the city, so we're trying to figure this out too!

The nice thing about Bruges is that all of our destinations are about 5-10 minutes of each other! Paris included A LOT more moving around. This time we'll be able to walk everywhere! Should be a nice, short trip.