My First Souvenir...

And boy is it awesome. Yesterday after class, Matt, Adam, Ryan, and I all hopped on a train at 10:30am to head to the Mardi Gras festival in Binche. It is a really popular Belgian carnival where people dress up in these crazy traditional costumes, parade through the streets with drums and instruments, and throw blood oranges into the crowd for people to eat or throw at other people. The train ride took about one hour, and when we got there we just followed the crowd to the town center. Binche is not a very large city, and it is kind of located in the middle of a bunch of farmland, but it was a pretty cool place. We met up with a group from my school and began to go to the various parties along the street. When the parade started, we all did our best to catch some oranges, and I succeeded and caught about 8 oranges. They were delicious. During the parade we met some Belgian locals who we helped catch some oranges for. I spoke with them for a while, and we became pretty friendly with a guy named Yannick and his friends. They hung out with us for a few hours. We wanted to stay in Binche until the fireworks at 9:00, so once the parade was finished we just kind of stood around for a little while.

And then a fight broke out right next to me between a bouncer and some drunk dude. So, being a good citizen, I held the drunk guy back and talked him out of fighting. He was like "Okay okay okay" and walked away. But then, he bent down and picked up an emtpy beer bottle and smashed in on the ground, started running towards the bouncer again, and I was stuck in the middle. He hit me with the bottle on my hand, making a pretty large gash on my thumb. He must of hit a vein because blood started dripping all over my jacket and pants. The drunk dude never ended up making it to the bouncer because right after he hit me four guys from the crowd came out and laid the smack down on him. I'm talking like UFC type stuff right in front of me. So not knowing what to do, I asked Yannick for advice. He brought Matt and I to a group of medics who were on some random street, and they looked at my hand and told me I needed to go to the hospital to get stitches. Great. I am in some random ass tiny city in the middle of Belgium and I need medical attention. Awesome. So after searching for the hospital with Yannick for a while (who is from Mons, not Binche so he didn't know exactly where to find it) we finally found the little place. SKETCHY...

We had no idea what to do so we asked an ambulance driver, and they brought me into the ER - more like a small warehouse which was pretty gross. As I am sitting there getting local anesthesia injected into my hand, a guy is overdosing on the floor. Makes me feel comfortable...not! Yannick helped us translate anything that they were telling me. So I get my thumb stitched up in about 10 minutes, which was actually kind of nice because for that to happen in the states the whole process would have been over two hours, in Binche - 20 minutes. Mind you, in the US at least you feel like you have credible doctors doing the procedure, here, I had no idea if this guy was even in highschool let alone a doctor. Oh well. It looks like they did an ok job. They instructed me to "remove the stitches myself in 8 days". I don't think so buddy, I think I will go see the doctor at school. So all in all I got three stitches and a good story to tell. I am not even sure if I have to pay for this thing, because all they did was quickly glance at my ISIC card, and didn't ask any questions or take any information from me at all...guess we will find out eventually. My first Belgian souvenir....a sweet scar:

Then we took the train home, and that brings me to the present where I am waiting for french class to start. What a day.