Follow me to school

 Last Tuesday was a misty morning-- low clouds from all the moisture in the ground made everything look very Halloween-like. The weather here can be a little strange sometimes.

 

 I headed toward the bus stop-- a different one than usual, because a giant hole in the road from all the rain stopped the bus from coming into Linkebeek. 

Got on Bus 43, direction Sterrenwacht/Observatoire, which takes me to school each morning.   

After a thirty-minute or so ride through the morning traffic of Uccle, I got off the bus onto Avenue DeFré. 

Walked up Rue Edith Cavell, towards Notre Dame des Champs

And here's my school. 

Headed into the main entrance... 

And here's what you see when you first walk in. 

Up three flights of stairs is the level where I have most of my classes. 

 

Here. 

If you look down, you can see the other two levels,

 

 and if you look up, you can see the dome.

Because one of my teachers was gone, I didn't have to go to that class. So, I took a walk around, taking pictures. 

Old stained glass windows aren't all that common in United States schools, I don't think... 

 

And neither are old wooden staircases. This school, last year, celebrated its 100-year anniversary.  

When you look at the doors to the library, you expect it to look like the rest of the school-- old. 

Actually, it doesn't at all. It was completely renovated a few years ago, so it looks all modern. 

It's a strange juxtaposition, because they also preserved some of the old paintings and architecture. 

Moving on to the bathroom. Because it used to be a girls-only school and they haven't added other bathrooms for the boys (they can't, really-- it's kind of hard to insert plumbing into 100-year-old walls), the two genders share the same. It's a little weird, but it works. 

I find it's always important to note the bathroom stall graffiti. 

Yes, that is English that you see. Weird, huh? How strange would it be if people in United States bathroom stalls wrote graffiti in French, or in other foreign languages? Maybe they do somewhere, but certainly nowhere I've seen before.

Of course, people write in French too:

A look at one of the halls... each of the halls are almost identical. 

The view from outside one of the windows. For the entire day, the weather was very misty. It was a strange ambience...

I had a second class without a teacher-- it's called a fourche, and people are kind of free to do whatever.

Voila, Celine, moi, et Lara! 

.

Et Celine et Viktor.

Some other misty pictures of the school and grounds around it....

Et des copains!

    

Woohoo!