‘Leuven’ the Dream: a Belgian Blog 🍻

Kia ora friends, fellow kiwis and future exchange students alike!

My name is Tess and I’m writing to you from Leuven, Belgium, where I’m spending a semester exchange to study law (and just be ‘Leuven’ the dream in general 🤪). I’m nearing the end of my second week here, and am rapidly trying to adopt the Belgian way- I’ve currently got some fries in the oven and a beer in the fridge, both for thorough cultural immersion and investigative blog writing. I also didn’t need a lot of convincing to hop on the Belgian cuisine train.

I am accompanied in Belgium by fellow Auckland law student and boyfriend Fin, who joins me here to carry my heavy luggage and prevent me from getting lost.*

*Also to study law at KU Leuven, the university that makes this small town a student city, but I’d say that’s more like his side gig. And, right on cue, he serves me a plate of hot fries from the oven. I’m not saying turn your partner into your PA, but at the same time I can’t stop you from gleaning whatever travel tips that might fall into your lap from this blog.

And as I enjoy these extremely traditional, frozen supermarket frites, I’ll tell you a bit about the Leuven we’ve seen so far.

This small city is entirely walkable, and you navigate it either by bike or foot. It’s nearing the end of winter here and it rains often, but the rain is always light, and feels far from harsh as you walk through the city tucked into narrow streets. If these streets open up, it’s into very European squares, which are usually occupied by various glowing bars and eateries.

Every Friday one of the squares will hold a market for your weekly essentials (fresh produce, meat, fish, bread, all sorts of accoutrements), and every Saturday another will hold one for all your weekend extras (waffles, tulips, warm food truck lunches, etc). This helps give a little padding to the end of the week as most students travel home for the weekend, leaving the city feeling a lot quieter. This weekend migration mostly happens on a Friday, necessitating, of course, that Thursday evenings bear the title of student night. Unsurprisingly, students’ location of choice most Thursday evenings is the square that’s deemed to hold the ‘longest bar’ in Europe (achieved by an impressive sequence of bars, one after the other).

The university itself is spread wide across the city, which only reinforces the surreal feeling that this town exists just for students (which historically is somewhat true: back in ye old, another municipality was given the option of either establishing a university, or sheep-rearing. They went with the entirely obvious choice, sheep, leaving Leuven with the short end of the straw- higher education 🙄).

As you might imagine, a town with such a dominant university presence produces a very different vibe. It’s quite fun. You can’t help but feel that the students are sort of all in it together, and the city is like one big urban clubhouse. And you’ve got to give it to the clubhouse members, who all give the impression of understanding at some incredibly deep level what it takes to be a student. By this I mean that if you’re walking into a room of students, it’ll either be a focused one of quiet study, or a plaza alive with the potential of a greater night ahead. And if students aren’t doing one of those two things, then it’s getting between them on a bike. Here, studenthood is not some state of ambiguity between high school and the rest of your adult life. It feels much more concentrated than that. In this small city you have your student tasks, and you complete them with gusto.

And student gusto is exactly what a few initiatory situations have required of us, such as the ambiguously titled ‘City Game’. Just picture The Amazing Race minus overseas travel, plus a much higher concentration of university students. That night saw us taking to the streets of Leuven to complete various challenges, including but not limited to: highly competitive battles of paper-scissors-rock, respectfully harassing strangers for selfies, and coughing up four euros for the privilege of consuming a drink with worms in it.

But like I say, Leuven life demands its own kind of balance. I don’t claim to be fully in the ‘work hard, play hard’ mentality just yet- probably because I’m more used to our slower NZ lifestyle- but I will say that being in a totally new place does somewhat renew one’s academic energy- which brings me to the university library. Buckle in, Aucklanders.

The KU Leuven library- yes, the library pictured on the left is the university library- is a civic treasure. Let me sell it to you: it has a clock tower within which a carillion is used to mark the hour and regularly cover pop songs, and as if that’s not already cool enough, the reading room inside looks like Willa Wonka was commissioned to design it. It’s like walking into a highly ornamental piece of milk chocolate due to the beautiful, warm wood that makes up every surface inside. Add to that stained glass windows and long wooden tables, and you’ve also got yourself Harry Potter’s Great Hall to study in. Absolute score for academic romanticisation.

Hence, it’s all too easy to conclude that Leuven has treated us kindly these past few weeks. The attractions could have just stopped at Europe’s longest line of beer taps and the Willy Wonka x Harry Potter library collab, and I’d have been perfectly happy. But I think Leuven is holding back a little more for us yet. I don’t think I’ve blown remotely enough euros on Belgian chocolate, and I’m still eagerly awaiting the day I learn what the difference between a lager and an ale actually is.

So until the day I can write to you with more knowledge of Belgian cuisine, I shall humbly leave you with one photo each of fries, beer and waffles; behold:

Ka kite anō (or tot de volgende keer) friends! Until next time!