The Accomidations

About a week ago the heat in our room just stopped working. I'm pretty sure that it was warmer in the unheated hallway than in our apartment. It was about 15 degrees Celsius (59 degrees Fahrenheit) for three days straight. This may not sound cold but it really is when you have to live and sleep in it. I am so grateful for central heating back home. Also, our shower didn't give hot water so my roommate and I had to shower in the girls' apartment above us. We finally got the heat back on after about 3 days. It took so long because it was a little difficult to communicate with the couple down stairs about what we needed and we weren't exactly sure what was wrong.
Around this same time our program director called a mandatory meeting for all of the students in our program to discuss how people live and use energy in Belgium. This is the first time they've brought so many American students from Clemson to Belgium for such a long time. Apparently a lot of our landlords had been talking to the housing directors about the amount of energy we've been using since we've been here. We were never told before that things were different in Belgium than from America. However, we quickly found out that things are a lot different.
I feel like Belgium in general is more 'green' than the United States. At the grocery store we go to, they don't have the generic plastic bags like they hand out every day at Wal-Mart. We have some more sturdy plastic bags that we take with us every time we go shopping and we reuse them. They also sort their trash here according to paper, plastic, glass, outside stuff, and just general garbage. You get fined if you don't sort your trash corrrectly.
So, being the typical Americans that we are, we were totally throwing off their system. We learned at this meeting that energy was more expensive in Belgium. I'm not sure why they said that was... maybe because of the way their power is set up. Anyways, gas is like around $6 a gallon or something like that in Belgium. They sell it by the liter here so when I saw the $1.25 prices at gas stations I didn't think it was bad until I found out they don't do it by the gallon. Apparently water is more expensive here too. So we've been asked to make sure to turn off all the lights when we aren't using them, to turn down the heat when we leave and at night, and not to waste water. I think that these are reasonable requests anyways. I only see problems with us not exactly knowing how to work the heaters and stuff over here. At least we have heat now though.