Do you wanna know why there are no fat people?

okay so where did I leave off...oh right the, its what the locals are calling the, "bus incident". So we get back to Dan's place, well I guess I wouldn't call it a place, so much as I would a......hmmm.....oh right a closet! Just kidding, sort of, it is basically a dorm room. Not that I am complaining....okay you are right I am bitching just a little, but it is cool I am in Belgium. So I told Dan that I want to shower and grab a bite then we can go out and explore. He does preface the shower idea with, you know its small.

Apparently, my idea of small, vs. Dan's idea of small are different, of course he is a skinny euro-chic "manly man" now. So I get to the shower facilities, this would be the time when I would spice up the story and tell you that the shower is outside or someplace cool but its not, the shower is down the hall. Think dorms....so I enter the little room thinking oh this is not too bad, then the fear of God is put into me, and that screeching sound from Psycho enters my head....ehhhh....ehhhh....ehhhh.....um yeah the little 3ft x 4ft space that I entered, it was the "holding area. The showers...let's just say that we are lucky my chest doesn't get caught on the shower head when I turn around.

So shower complete, I get ready and we are off on my first tour of the city. I just want to preface the next few days' entries with, I play the dumb American quite well...so Dan and I jump the bus and take it to the heart of Liege. Me asking questions, again unslick European people staring. For being the biggest tourist city in French speaking Belgium, they really do not accommodate to any other language. So we get off at the tourist center, and Dan runs to get me a map, and there it is my beckon of Liege, my first architectural wonder up close. I told Dan that I wanted to go in, he responded with, "um okay I think you have to be important to get in there, they have security, I tried once before." So we walked into the building, and into the courtyard, and let me tell you if you have not seen XXX with Vin Diesel, I kid you not this place looked just like the bad guys palace. So we walked through security, and nothing was said, and trust me the one thing my mom said before leaving..."Don't get arrested!" Now I want you to remember those words they will come back to haunt me. So we walk through security, which by the way was a shack with some ugly chick doing the security, and there in the corner of the yard is this door, that people are going in and out. I tell Dan that we should go in and we do, where Dan proceeds to tell the nice gentleman at the desk that I am his American friend, which in English translate to, "look at this stupid person from America" and I would like to see the courtyard. So he lets us pass, but tells us that we can only look through the windows...so we go to the windows and sneak upstairs, look through some file cabinets, and jimmy our way into this judge's office....okay so we didn't go through the filing cabinets, but let me tell you that floor had not seen a fat person in hundreds of years, the way it squeaked and moaned, damn I really thought I was going through the floor. So we left the "court house" is what we determined it was, only after taking some provocative pictures on the three Mazarattis out front.

We are off again, I tell Dan that I would like to see an old Church and the rest I was fair game for. He proceeds to tell me of this WWII monument, so I agree and we are off. Now if you are fat and hang with skinny people you know where I am coming from, if you are skinny, you are as clueless as Alicia Silverstone (aka Condoleeza Rice...hey I had to get some political banter in here!) Apparently when Dan was telling me about the monument he forgot to tell me about the 350 stairs leading to it, now doing some rough calculations in my head that comes up to 35 flights of stairs, roughly about 17 floors....okay one I don't walk 17 floors worth of stairs in a week let alone one day, and two I love the WWII vets and all of the sacrifices that they made, but for crap sakes, are you kidding me?!...but then something (okay someone) caught my eye, and we were off! About 30 minutes later and a heartrate of 185 we were there, beautiful view and all. I do have to mention that as we were walking to the monument we came across a street with a bus stop just behind the statue...Thanks Dan!

So we caught the view of Liege, it was definitely worth the heavy breathing and aching quads. We started heading back down and about halfway into it, I start feeling a little uneasy, my legs were a little shaky..."Dan if I go down..." "Don't worry Terri I will catch you." "Um no, I was gonna say if I go down I will meet you at the bottom." "The benches will stop you from going too far" Like I said before Dan is a skinny euro-chic guy now, so at this point I am thinking that if I lose my step and fall that I am tucking and rolling, because hell, lets face it we all know that I do not want to go down the remaining 17 flights, and the rolling will be a lot less painful for everyone involved.

The rest of the day we walked around Liege and grabbed a bite to eat at this Chinese restaurant. Dan explained some of the idiosyncrasies(sp?) of the Belgium people and other than that we just hung out. Went back to his "place" and crashed. I was so tired at one point Dan had been talking to me on the bus and I had actually fallen asleep. 36 hours awake and traveling, makes a girl tired. So there you have it, day one of my trip out of the country. Enjoy and come back soon.