School, and strawberries!

Today was the start of my second week of school, I have learned quite a bit in the short time I have been at IATA, and by learning I really mean observing, nothing academic really. I have noticed quite a bit concerning culture and first and foremost the antics of Belgian Students. 1 example is this, if a kid puts their bag on the desk, they intend to use it to shield their texting from the teacher. Now the most interesting bit here is that teachers know this, some will tell kids to keep their bags on the floor but others will allow it. It seems that as long as the students make an effort to hide it and aren't too blatant they are ok with it. Smoking is an enormous part of the culture here, really enormous, so much so that I even wonder if I might somehow start craving nicotine due to the sheer amount of secondhand smoke. School days are sometimes ridiculously long, today (Monday) for instance I was at school from 8 to 5, luckily that's just Mondays though. Kids don't really pack lunches, the fashion instead seems to be to buy from the school store or to walk to the grocery store or burger joint and eat there, we get an hour lunch break at 12 so plenty of time to do either. The dynamics of peer groups are interesting, I'm still figuring them out, but the ever common kiss on the cheek has been cause for a little humor already. It's not that I don't always know when to kiss and when to shake hands, its just that SOMETIMES I don't. And when I don't I usually cause at least a little nervous laughter and quite a bit of the "at my expense" variety. Yesterday I went on a bike ride with my host dad, we needed strawberries, well, we wanted strawberries, weeeellll, I wanted strawberries... Anyway, we biked to Wépion, about a 25 minute bike ride, and found a stand:

Wépion is the Strawberry capital of Belgium, and for very good reason, I have never tasted better. The guy at the stand even gave us some from the personal stash that he has for his own eating. After Wépion we biked back into Namur and Luc-Andre showed me all the hot spots, nice cafe's, good restaurants, and the different squares where concerts will be held during Fêtes de Wallonie. Now, that is something I am very excited about, but it doesn't start until Wednesday, besides, you will probably come back and read sooner if you know I have something exciting to talk about! To end this post I will first thank you all for reading, I got to 1,000 views today, pretty exciting! Talk to you all soon, have this picture of a big church!