My First Belgian Hangover

So I've been in Leuven for approximately a day and a half and I've managed to be hungover for about 1/2 of my time here.  Not how I would've preferred to start off, but it happens.

I'll spare the details of actually making to Leuven, in summary, it was a nightmare that consisted of a 5 hour layover, a stage five clinger named Jason, and me taking the wrong train from the Brussels airport to some rando city in Belgium.  I am the most directionally-challenged person I know, so I honestly expected to get lost, but it fucking sucked.  I don't know one word of Dutch or Flemish so that was interesting.

I had orientation the first night though.  It was great, we met everyone in the program and there's about 20 of us total.  There's people from UPenn, University of Scranton, Western Michigan, and Hanover College in Indiana.  Solid Belgian wolfpack.  Anyways, they provided a lot of beer at the orientation, so naturally I treated it as a pregame.  Found out where to get good drunk food, aka fries or frites.  French fries came from Belgium!!  They put this bomb sauce on them and I thought I was going to cry tears of happiness.  It was the best drunk food I've ever had.

Then Jelte (some Belgian student that's looking over the Exchange students) took us to a bar in the Olde Market which is a huge cobblestone square that is only surrounded by bars.  There are apparently over 40 bars in Leuven and it's my goal to make it to them all.  Unfortunately, Leuven students are still on break so the city is kind of empty without them, otherwise the square is full with students at night and people bar hop.  It was still a lot of fun though with just our program, I drank Krieg (a beer that tastes like cherry soda but still has a higher alcohol content than American beers) and Mort Subite? idk.  I thought I could try every Belgian beer, but there's over 750 so that will sadly not be happening.  The beer is everything I hoped it would be, and after several rounds I was quite drunk and enjoying a dice game that the bartender taught us way too much.

So I spent a good portion of my day hungover as shit.  HOWEVER, it was very different than an American hangover.  I woke up feeling fine and thinking I had avoided any sickness... wrong.  I spent my morning randomly throwing up.  I felt completely fine but all of sudden it would be like BAM, vom naysh... I hope this isn't how every Belgian hangover is, because life is very inconvenient and embarrassing when you sporadically throw up.  I threw up on the streets on the way to registration, in a window well, in a garbage can in the main hall of where we registered, in a plant in the registration building... new low point in life... anyways, I threw up 5 times and I told the director that it was because of jet lag/lack of sleep and water but let's be honest, I was fucking hungover.  She probably knew it too.