A mini-tour

I promised a few photos of our place in Barcelona, now that the whole setup can function again, thanks to 1) a card reader, 2) my dad's help in backing up and deleting an unwieldy and hard-disk-gobbling amount of photos, and 3) internet, yay! Credit for most of the pics goes to K., poet and picture-taker extraordinaire.



Our new kitchen! As seen from the dining room (with original corner hutch) and towards the blue living room. The oven still isn't in yet, thus the big hole under the stove, but I love how it all turned out, especially the exposed brick (kudos to M. on that, who is the visionary in this relationship). There will be a marble bar extending from the free-standing shelf over to the counter.





The front, purple room, as seen from the green room, our bedroom. The purple room will be an office/library, thus the piles of books (which we hope to put on built-to-order shelves):





The blue room again, with a chest of drawers built by M's great-grandfather, and, yes, a TV.



A close-up of the bathroom sink. Flowery antique saucer used as soap dish, in contrast to modern slate gray tiles and sleek fixtures.

It will be a long process to complete all of the many details that we left unfinished this summer, with little bits done here and there on weekend visits. Some things will remain provisional for the next two years, until we move some of our favorite things from Brussels to Barcelona, and others will change as we refurbish old furniture and buy new items. Each step will be exciting, I think, even if it takes a long time.

Bruxelles redux

As the Mister and I were falling asleep last night, I whispered, "I'm happy to be home." What I meant was, happy to be in our own, big bed, happy to be alone in our own house, happy to unpack the suitcases (in which we lugged about fifty books purchased during our travels).

I have to admit that it wasn't so thrilling, however, after sunny, breezy Barcelona and the sincere, effortless beauty of Vermont, to return to the gray grime of Brussels. Everything I looked at seemed to be coated in a nauseating layer of ick; cigarette butts and beer at the train station tram-stop, crumpled paper and trampled french fries with neon pili-pili sauce revoltingly spread out over the sidewalk in front of our house. (A not uncommon sight, thanks to the frites wagon across the street.)

The gray skies didn't help, and neither did the knowledge that I would really have to knuckle down to work now that vacation was over. No more days spent being fed abundant mother-cooked meals, no more to-do lists that included such pressing items as "read Harry Potter" and "go to museum" and "play with nephew." I'll miss hearing him say, "Ook, Robin!" and his neverending question, "What's that?" to draw my attention to something, anything: the whole world is AWESOME when hanging out with a two-year-old.

Lest I get completely wistful about vacation being over, there are some things to look forward to: my mom is coming in a couple of days and we have lots of ideas for fun things to do while she's here, French class and choir will start up again soon, we will head back to Barcelona in mid-September, and back to the US in early October for a big family reunion: the two-hundred odd descendants of my great-grandparents are getting together for a big celebration of the centenary of their arrival.

And now, I need to do a little cleaning. Six weeks of neglect has left this house a little dusty.

Inferno, paradiso

To solve the problem with our tickets I spent TEN hours on the phone (this number is NO exaggeration, although the following might possibly be). I heard Pachelbel's canon approximately six thousand, four hundred and seventy-nine times, talked to approximately fifty-seven different Cheaptickets agents and "supervisors" (in quotes due to my suspicion that these were just "agents" who were more skilled in customer evasion), and repeated our "record locator" and our situation the same number of times. Every time I called I was greeted with a cheerful description of our old "confirmed" cancelled flight, which seemed to be deliberately conceived to get my goat.

I lost my cool just a couple of times, M. once shouted threats at the Pachelbel's canon hold music when I couldn't take it any more, and we were told we had new, confirmed tickets three times. I finally thought we had a new ticket at the end of seven hours on the phone on Tuesday, but woke up on Wednesday to find no e-mail confirmation, and BA only had a record of the last leg of our return trip, from London to Brussels. Three more hours on the phone resulted in, at long last, an actual new itinerary, a confirmation number, and what appeared to be a charge of over three thousand euros. Yet another call was required to make sure that we wouldn't be charged for the new flight.

The ten hours I spent on the phone were just about evenly matched to the ten hours we spent in the air yesterday, and British Airways in the heavens at least somewhat made up for the hell of Cheaptickets and the purgatory of Heathrow: we flew first class on our transatlantic flight! (The ticket we were given by cheaptickets was the slightly better "World Traveler Plus," probably because it was the only thing available, and then BA bumped us up to first class.)

Flying first class on a long-haul flight has long been a dream of mine, so I was giddy with excitement when we got on the plane and discovered that our seats were better described as seat/bed/entertainment compartments. Like little kids, we pushed all the buttons, zooming in and out in our fully reclinable seats, and ordered champagne and newspapers (OK, like grown-up little kids). The food was actually delicious, the china was real, the service was impeccable, and the movies were pausable. (We watched Waitress: SO good! Watch it!) It was the best flight I've ever had.

My spirits weren't even dampened by a lost bag in Boston, and after a late-night drive to Vermont with my brother and sister-in-law, all it took was one whiff of the good Vermont air to feel entirely at peace. When we got out of the car, the sky was brilliantly clear, displaying a magnificently populated starscape. I had forgotten how electrifying of a sight it is, this infinity of stars, the way the night sky was meant to be seen. The milky way meandered across the heaven, the big dipper scooped low at the horizon, and as we stood there, both M. and my sister-in-law, who had never seen a shooting star, saw a large one greet us with its light.

Not so cheap

Stop the presses! We are flying to the US on Thursday, or are supposed to be. But when I called this morning to order a vegetarian meal, British Airways told me that our reservation had been cancelled. When? The day after I bought the ticket, two months ago. And who cancelld it? Why, the reserving agent, cheaptickets. This is news to me, because we paid for these tickets (and despite the company’s name, not so cheaply, hoo boy no sir), and because we were never informed of any such change.

Cheaptickets.com, meanwhile, tells me (after answering the phone—in India, I think—“thank you for calling Orbitz”) that our flight is confirmed and there shouldn’t be a problem, and we should call back in four hours when BA offices in the US open. In four hours. Aaack, we just want some answers, and we just want to be able to get to Boston and then back to Brussels, without forking out more money.

This is the second time I’ve had a major problem with cheaptickets.com, so I don’t mind telling the world: DON’T buy your ticket from them! The last time, I was stuck for an extra day in Halifax because Delta told me I hadn’t paid for my flight, when again I most certainly had, and also not cheaply. This is beginning to sound sort of familiar.

Nesting

Where to begin, after so many days and so much work and fun?

Let’s begin with a color. Think of the worst color you can imagine. Specifically, the worst color possible for your new home’s entry, dining room, and kitchen. Then imagine walking into your house, a smile already on your face in anticipation of seeing the completed paint and the trim new kitchen, then wiped off after finding the walls painted exactly that color, that horrid color.

That color for me is a pale electric greeny-yellow, and if you come to visit you can still see it in the little guest bedroom. We could only afford to re-paint a certain number of rooms, so there it will remain until we someday take it upon ourselves to wield brush and paint. Actually, in an enclosed space, and one that I don’t tend to frequent (given that at the moment it serves as a storage warehouse for old furniture and dusty lamps) it’s even tolerable. It was the living spaces, the heart of the apartment, that I just couldn’t stand to see robed in that upsetting, nerves-on-edge tint.

The whole thing was more or less our fault, anyway. We tried to choose paint colors by computer, first carefully narrowing down our Pantone favorites, then through some complicated “translation” programs to get the color equivalent of the “Natural Color System” preferred by the painters. I don’t know how “almond cream” on our computer in Brussels translated to “pale electric greeny-yellow” on our walls in Barcelona, but so it did. (I would point out that the painters didn’t help much; we had described the difficulty we had of getting the color codes, and included a description of the color we wished for, and I’m sure I don’t know how they thought that the two were even remotely related.) To further add to our grievance, M. had actually seen the colors during a quick business trip the previous week, and had very much liked them, although they weren't exact. Turns out it was only the "tinted primer" that the painters had mixed up based on our descriptions, but they never mentioned the possibility that the final color would be different, nor did they remark to us that the color took a drastic turn between "description" and official "code."

The walls were repainted in due course, and are now a nice buttery cream. And in the weeks since that first rather shocking welcome, we have done a lot of hard work. I never expected the house to be as utterly dirty as it was, covered with thick layers of plaster dust, paint splatters (another gripe with the painters; did they not use drop cloths?), and wood particles, all on top of the decades of dust accumulated by the 97-year-old great aunt who lived here before us.

We moved in a couple of weeks ago, but it wasn’t until last Thursday, when the carpenter finally came in to put the doors and trim on the kitchen cabinets, that that things felt like they were coming together visually. (Also provoking another round of wood-dust cleaning.) The cabinet wood, a decision made so long ago I couldn’t remember what it looked like, goes fabulously with the exposed-brick wall, the rustic black stove hood, and the creamy countertop.

Meanwhile, we’ve been doing a million things, from buying curtain rods and doorknobs to dealing with the lovely and tangled red tape of electric, phone, and internet companies, from mopping and washing furniture to unpacking boxes, opening wedding gifts (like Christmas!), and trying to figure out where that box of bed linen went.

We’ve also managed to have some fun in the month since I last wrote; we’ve twice been up to the coast for a quick weekend beach trip, once out to the Catalan interior (the beautiful, sunswept Sagarra), and a good friend of ours came for a stay, prompting welcome respites like paella at the port, strolls in the city, visits to favorite restaurants, an afternoon in Sitges, and a ride on the cable car that sways its way over the water from Barceloneta to Montjuich.

What our quick Costa Brava trip this weekend (to celebrate our niece’s two-year birthday) told me, though, is how much I was looking forward to coming back to our breezy and serene apartment. I already love this place, knowing that it will be a home that we continue to build and live in, a place to come back to from wherever we are in the world.

Summer suitcase, or, la maleta d'estiu

It's one of those pre-departure evenings--you know the kind--of doing last-minute laundry, and taking out the trash, and putting things in semi-orderly piles so that the return view of the house in a month and a half isn't horrific.

Tomorrow we are off to Barcelona to begin, at long last, some semblance of a summer.

Although tonight it is back to pouring rain and chilly air, this weekend we actually did have something that felt summery: a couple of hot days, a bit of sunshine here and there, enough to wear sunglasses and sweat a bit--and a barbecue with friends, to boot. I've never been so happy to sweat.

I'm sure we're going to do a lot more of that (sweating) once in Barcelona, both for appealing reasons (say, weekends at the beach), and not-so-appealing reasons (the back-breaking labor of putting our house in order). But behind the unsavory prospect of hard work in the dog days of Spanish summer, sans air conditioning, is the exciting prospect of having a proper home of our own in Barcelona and getting it all set up.

I'm most eager to see how our house has shaped up now that the kitchen has been put in and the walls have been painted. The wall color question is making me the most nervous, because we had to choose paint colors via e-mail and internet, a process that I would not recommend, and M., who saw the apartment last weekend, is describing the colors as rather different than we had envisioned them. The calming light blue-gray that I wanted, for example, in the living room, sounds more like an energizing vibrant sky blue. Oh dear.

I'll do my best to update the blog with the results, and pictures, if I can get a card reader or magically make my computer acknowledge my camera's existence again. Also, I'm not so sure about the internet connection in our new place, due to Telefonica's notorious slowness in setting up accounts, so it may be spotty for a while. At least, however, I'm pretty sure it'll be sunny while the internet is gone, amounting to a kind of cosmic compensation.

(Un)moving day

I am sitting in the midst of a house full of furniture in various states of disarray: dining room tables with their legs removed, a sofa wrapped in old curtains, a host of bubble-wrap sheaths, a mattress trussed up like a pork tenderloin.

All of this is happening because, some five months after we moved into the place, the previous renter has finally come back for her things. It took her a long time to find a new apartment in Madrid, so we forgive her. But still, we've been looking forward to this for a good long while, anticipating the day our apartment is really ours. Even the things we loved so--and she sure has some beautiful furniture (good bye red-orange sofa! good bye lustrous wood table! we will miss you!)--were still not ours, and thus imparted a feeling of sort of not really living in our own place.

Ever since we found out that this would be happening, less than two weeks ago, we've been feverishly trying to find furniture that 1. we can afford, and 2. isn't crappy. This is easier said than done.

We have mostly resorted to online classifieds, and fortunately for us, Brussels has a huge turnover population, what with people coming from all over to live here for a short stint at the EU institutions. Everybody and their brother is selling furniture. Unfortunately for us, ninety percent of what's available is Ikea furniture. Don't get me wrong: Ikea's great for some things, like odds and ends and decor and decent shelves and tables.

Last weekend we went to see a secondhand Ikea dining room table and chairs and ended up buying a bed from the people as well. They are moving back to Puerto Rico, and asked if we needed anything else, and we said a bed. Well, they said, that's great because we'd like to sell ours! Chagrined, they added, the only problem is that we don't want to sell the mattress. Perfect, we said! Because we have a mattress! And indeed, it worked out perfectly. Our futon mattress fits nicely in the frame, and the frame looks good in our room, and boy were we ever happy to have our queen-sized mattress back! (We had been sleeping on her full-sized bed for lack of a frame to put ours in.) It felt gigantic, like we could have bowling competitions right there in our pajamas!

For a while there we've had the house full: two sets of beds, two sets of dining table and chairs, etcetera. The only thing we can't find is a sofa, because--and here's my quibble with Ikea--all the cheap Ikea sofas that people are selling look pretty crappy. They look like Ikea, you know? Like that extra guest room futon that seems great because it's both a sofa and a bed, but in the end it's not good at being either. I speak from experience: we have a tiny Ikea futon that's the most uncomfortable thing to sit on, and one of the slats broke and a bolt busted loose while we were sitting on it. It looks like it's going to be our sofa for a while again, though, until we find something better.

Anyway, gotta go! The moving truck and its big fancy hydraulic lift is busy hydraulicizing up to the window. Eeeek! Here it is! Kind of creepy, you know? A big machine creeping up and appearing at your fourth-floor window?

If they were pennies, I'd have a dollar

It's, um, hailing outside. Is that allowed to happen? Big pellets of ICE falling from the sky in JULY? Just wondering.

This meteorological phenomenon is probably Brussels' way of celebrating a momentous event: 100 posts over here at chez Cant d'ocell!

I know one hundred is a wee tiny number in the general world of blogging, but I'm actually surprised that I've managed to keep it up at a fairly regular pace these last few months, so Happy One Hundred Posts, little blog!

Ommegang

If you say it fast, it sort of sounds like a teenager's exclamation, but the Ommegang is actually a centuries-old Brussels tradition, which we attended yesterday. (If "attended" includes watching the free parts and craning our necks from the outside to avoid paying for 60-euro tickets.)

A long time ago, when King Charles was in charge of half of Europe (you didn't know that eighties sitcom, Charles in Charge, was really about a sixteenth-century king, did you!?), he deigned to visit Brussels. Everybody turned out in their Sunday best, and put on a show of all their favorite tricks: knightly hoseback parades, peasant jigs, synchronized flag-tossing, and so on and so forth. Meanwhile, the king and his upper-crust buddies munched on tasty snacks in the red velvet-lined pavilion overlooking the Grand Place.

Everybody had such a great time that they just never stopped doing it: every single year since then, they have repeated the spectacle, complete with people personifying the king and his court, munching on snacks in a red velvet pavilion, jesters running around in the crowds to make them laugh and/or uncomfortable, and a couple of guys in sixteenth-century janitor costumes who run out with a wheelbarrow and a straw broom to sweep up the horse doodoo (this we know because we were behind the bleachers and our main view was of these guys and their comings and goings).

Over a thousand people dress up in period costume, a huge array of styles and colors, and they make a procession on their way to the Grand Place in well-coordinated groups. Each group represents some sort of social class, profession, or political fiefdom, and most of them put on some sort of performance once they arrive. We caught the beginning of the parade--the mingling of old and new is quite amusing, as, say, the tram (plastered with fast-food advertisements) speeds past a calvacade of horseback knights and a bakers' guild.

After the parade passed, we took a different route down to the Grand Place in time to see some of the first groups arrive. The most amazing thing that we saw was the flag-throwing bunch: it doesn't sound like much, but huge flags twirled in the air and tossed from person to person in quick succession, all in swooshy color-coordinated motions, is pretty darn cool.

Once the first raindrops started pelting us, we felt luckier than the people huddling in blankets up in the bleachers, and headed to a cozy lambic pub, La Bécasse, to warm up over a beer.

Nothing says USA like the big screen and a jumbo bucket of popcorn

While the fourth of July brings visions of beach blankets and barbecues, spitting watermelon seeds and setting off fireworks, here in Brussels it is raining in a cold, ugly, spit-in-your-face, "HAH! so you THINK it's the fourth of JULY!" kind of way.

So in lieu of any other way to say "rah rah hooray" America, M and I and an American expat friend are going to see the sneak peek of Ratatouille at the downtown cineplex. They have a full roster of previews of American movies today, and I guess it makes sense to soak in Hollywood's fireworks if we can't have real ones.

One year ago on this date, we were on our honeymoon in coastal Maine and we watched fireworks off the pier. The sky was so foggy that they were just soft watercolor smears, but it was very endearing in a small-town kind of way: kids with ice cream cones, hot dogs and lobster rolls, little flags, a bright red firetruck.

That's the America I miss sometimes: the America of towns where there is no gigantic cineplex, where everyone says hello, and where there is a general store on the corner. The America of front porches, lawn ornaments, and--you knew I had to say it--apple pie.

Happy July fourth, everyone!

One year

Exactly one year ago today, the Mister and I became Mister and Missus.

What I remember of the day is all sunshine, flowers, and music, and the happiness--no, the blessedness--of knowing the man I love will be by my side for the best and the worst of life, no matter what.



It's been an incredible year, and has seemed both more than that--our wedding seems aeons ago, and we feel like we've always been married--and less--where have these months gone? It's already July again?

This weekend we took a trip to Luxemburg to celebrate, stopping in the capital for some sightseeing and super Italian food, and then on to the small town of Echternach, in the "little Switzerland" part of the country, on the German border, where there is a wonderful music festival every year. We heard a concert of 17th century popular music that was written for the journey on the Camino de Santiago (The Way of Saint James)--a fabulous performance, and a great idea for a concert!--and the next day we went to an exhibition on the same subject, then touring the town and its surroundings.

Although both days we were there were low-country gray (somebody should market that as a paint color) and sweater-cool, it didn't rain until we were boarding the train to come home, so we can chalk it up as great weather.

In this village, it's possible to rent a medieval tower for your vacation, which looks like the coolest thing ever, so next time we'll bring a group and live like castle guards. It will definitely beat our dingy lodgings that were "recommended" by a friend of a friend, although they ended up being very romantic in a bohemian garrett kind of way.

The concert and the exhibition on the Camino de Santiago got me thinking about the journey metaphor, the road of pilgrimage, which was appropriate as we celebrated our first year of married life. We're only on the first stop at a wayside inn, still eager for the long journey ahead of us, but I know that our path, walking it together, will be a beautiful, joyful, and adventurous one.

In which I complain about the weather again

May I just state, for the record, how indignant I am about Brussels' idea of summertime?

While the New York Times features articles about ice-cold thirst quenchers, web ads are full of bikinis and tank tops, and my sister has to install an air conditioner because it's too hot to breathe, here in Brussels a cup of tea, a fleece hoody, and a chenille blanket sound just about right.

Except they sound WRONG, because it's almost JULY, and I'm ready for a little bit of summer. I have actually been wearing my WINTER coat when I am forced to leave the house, and the bleak, cold rain just keeps coming. It hasn't let up for a week.

I wore a sleeveless shirt for M's party on Tuesday night, and actually got surprised comments about how "summery" I looked, everybody else having come bundled in coats and scarves and bearing gigantic umbrellas. It should not be surprising that one wears a "summery" shirt, it being "summer" and all, but of course here the term merits the ironic quotation marks. I just told people that since I didn't have to leave the house, the party being at our place, I could pretend for a little while that it's actually being seasonal outside.

If there's a silver lining in all of this, it's that in the absence of shorts and skirts I don't have to shave my legs very often, and folks, that is NOT much of a silver lining.

Easy as (apple) pie

I talk on my cell phone for maybe, oh, an average of four minutes per week. I don't own very many videos on iTunes, listen to my iPod for what I'm sure is a below-average amount of time, and I have very little true need for mobile internet and e-mail access.

Yet, yet...

I find myself drooling over Apple's new iPhone. Such is the genius of their beautiful simplicity and design innovations. They find common-sense solutions to problems that I never even realized were stupid, but now do (because they've done it better)!

Just to pick one example, listening to voice mail is annoying both for having to listen to messages in order and for having to repeat the whole message if I missed the phone number at the end. The iPhone lets you listen to messages in any order (without dialing a number or getting a computer voice), and lets you scroll back to any moment in the message.

I love how it uses the widget-look in a situation where the widgets actually are incredibly useful (I love them on my computer, but use them for little besides quick math and checking the weather). Can you tell I just watched the "guided tour" of the iPhone online?

How do they keep making such cool products?

Anyway, sorry for being a little mini-ad today. But I'm actually quite astonished at myself, never having wanted a palm or blackberry for an iota of a second, and here I am salivating over something I don't need at all.

I'm sure I'll be able to wait a few years until the price goes down, AT&T service is better (I doubt the phone is available in Europe, anyway), and I have an actual need for the thing.

Still: drooling!

Happy Birthday!

Today is the Mister's birthday! Three cheers and a hip hip hooray!

We started celebrating already last night, with a nice dinner out. Tonight a bunch of people are coming over to help us par-tay, and I'm baking a big carrot cake with cream cheese frosting. Yum! I made cinnamon rolls (from scratch!) for breakfast this morning, and just in case we haven't consumed enough calories, I'm also going to make that artichoke dip I didn't get to for the dinner party a couple of weeks ago.

As M. pointed out, this year I am as old as he was the first time we celebrated his birthday together, precisely six years ago (although we weren't exactly together; I called him from a Paris hostel in the midst of a backpacking trip with my brother, and we all met up a few days later). If you're clever at math, and that made any sense to you, and weren't distracted by the parenthetical tangent, you can figure out how old he is, heehee!

Happy birthday, my love!

Cupcakes, a castle, and Queen

This weekend's highlights were: 1. watching my two-year-old nephew open his birthday presents in Vermont, and 2. getting locked in a citadel.

How, you might ask, and how?

The first was made possible by the wonders of videocam technology. We got to be there with the rest of the family as he ate the chocolate frosting off of his cupcake and then proceded to open various presents, with wide eyes and appreciative "wow!"s. How did people ever get by with just plain old e-mail--you know, in the olden days?

Then, on Sunday, we traveled to Namur, a city about an hour from here, because my choir performed there as part of the country-wide Festival of Music. Our rehearsals and performances didn't start until late afternoon, so the Mister and I took an early train and visited museums, and then after the first performance we decided to climb up to the large citadel overlooking the town and its two rivers.

Unbeknownst to us, it was well past closing time, and as we strolled through the complex of walls, hills, towers, paths, and stairs, a groundskeeper shouted to us that he was about to close the gate, if we wanted to get through. We crossed a small bridge that spanned a deep moat, walked through the wall via a tunnel, and he locked the gate behind us.

Still unaware of our predicament, we calmly attempted to descend a path winding around a church, only to encounter another locked gate. We climbed back up, and found a group of three girls who were in the same boat (or, ahem, moat) as us, having been ushered through the gate by the same keeper (who was now nowhere to be seen). They had tried an alternate path, which also led to a locked gate. Circling the immediate area, we could see that we were entirely closed in; we even climbed up the mound of an archaeological dig on the top of the escarpment, only to find a long, tall fence with pointy arrows on top of it. The other side yielded a nice view of the scarily deep moat.

I was beginning to get worried I might not make it to my evening concert! We finally called to a passerby through one of the locked gates, instructed her to find someone, and only after she had discovered everything was closed did another keeper happen to pass by. Phew!

After a quick refueling stop at an outdoor table, it was off to the evening concert, which was quite the event: four pianos, a choir, drums, sax, cello, clarinet, and soloists, at the beautiful Theatre du Namur. A rough English translation of the concert's title is "Crazy Pianos!" and it was indeed pretty crazy. We performed everything from the Beatles and the Blues Brothers to Gershwin, Orff, Mozart, Ravel, Fauré, and... Queen.

I have been asked by the editor of the choir newsletter to write a poem about the show. I said yes, and then was instructed that it "must be funny." I have written here before about how not funny I am, but hopefully I can come up with some drivelly couplets.

Swimming, swooning, swaying

Look at me with this whole posting regularly thing! I go, girl!

Sorry. I embarrass myself and others when I attempt to be cool and/or funny.

Today's plans include an excursion to the indoor swimming pool that is ACROSS the STREET, but has yet to be frequented by these particular neighbors. We went in once to check it out, decided it looks good, and then neglected it entirely. I will have to buy a swim cap, which I have never owned or used before. I think I will find it amusing to put my hair into a rubbery bald-head thingo. Question: are you supposed to get your hair wet first, or will it stay in the cap while dry? If dry, what is the correct method for putting it on?

Today's plans also include an excursion to see Ocean's Thirteen. I can't believe they've continued the franchise this long, but at least 11-12-13 is more original than 1-2-3. I'm secretly a fan of heist movies (remember Sneakers? 1992? Loved it. The Thomas Crown Affair? Loved it.), and really rather enjoyed the first two Ocean films, and thus am looking forward to seeing this one. I mean, really, how cool is it when suave thieves plan elaborate infiltration schemes, and just when you think they've been busted, they show up with the stolen goods anyway? Although sometimes the plans stretch the limits of disbelief. OK, so they raised a whole house foundation that was was underneath a CANAL in Amsterdam. But now, I hear, they are going to simulate an EARTHQUAKE. C'mon, really?

I have yet to see the original Rat Pack Ocean's 11, but I did watch Jean-Pierre Melvill's Bob Le Flambeur (1955), which inspired the "original" Ocean's 11 and was an awesome French heist movie where a noir-y, smooth, trench-coated theif manages, with the help of his wily pals, to rob a casino. Sound familiar? Yep.

In unrelated news, I bought an iTunes album yesterday sort of impulsively, but am loving it: The Reindeer Section's Son of Evil Reindeer. Now, I don't get the band's name or the title at all, but I'm really digging the music and have been playing it nonstop. The reason I bought it is because I had heard "You Are My Joy" and couldn't get it out of my head, found the album, and went for the whole thing. (Most of the time, I stingily buy just a few tracks from any one album. Or just download the freebies.) If I were mechanically fancy, I would put the song on this website, but you'll just have to go find it for yourself.

But every time I listen to it, Bush's State of the Union address comes on right after (it was a freebie, and I had cancelled it mid-download ages ago when the address actually aired, and for some reason it finished downloading when I got this album). Sort of wrecks the mood, you know?

Summertime, and the livin' is easy

Happy first day of summer! Although the earth is physically farther from the sun now than it is in the winter, the northern hemisphere is on the end of the earth leaning towards the warmth. Our tilted axis provides just enough of a difference (a 23-degree lean) to warm us up and usher in the shenanigans of sunscreen, tank tops, and lemonade.

Not that, you know, there's any sign of sun on the little gray spot of earth called Brussels.

Speaking of natural phenomena, I've been more and more scared lately by environmental reports of climate change and ecosystem devastation. Most scary are unexplained and swift disappearances of our flying friends: bee populations and bird colonies are being rapidly depleted, and no one knows why.

Not only will we have a major pollination problem on our hands, threatening all of the crops we depend on for food, but with the birds and the bees gone, how will we explain to children where babies come from?

All ye like sheep

The concert I sang in on Friday night went reasonably well, and as expected I got some major spine-chills. The music we sang and the cathedral we sang it in practically guaranteed them. It was a full house, with people even standing in the back, and the response was enthusiastic.

But we had some creative challenges as well, most of them logistics-related. I have never seen greater choral chaos than I did that night while we were lining up in the back of the church. In the green room, the organizers had told us to go out to the church, and line up without talking. You must envision here some hundred-odd people attempting to put themselves in reverse order, and mentally reconfigure the five rows we had been sitting in during the dress rehearsal into the four rows that were in the front of the church on concert night, all while maintaning eight part divisions. We had not practiced entering or exiting, as is de rigeur for choirs in concert situations. It was mayhem, and last-ditch attempts of someone to corral us into correct order resulted in further confusion, and the women marched towards the stage in complete disarray.

When I arrived on stage, I found myself in the front row, which I knew was a problem because of my height. I switched with a short woman, but then found myself in the midst of the second altos, when I sing first. So once again I switched, this time after we had already been seated, causing an entire row of women to jump from their chair to the next one over, musical-chairs style. And this was just me; similar little dramas were happening the whole time.

After the intermission, we marched up again, this time theoretically in order since we had "practiced" once, but somehow an entire row of altos went around to the wrong side, and we all had to sidle past each other on the narrow risers. Verrrry classy.

Oh, and a couple of basses' chairs' back legs slid off the risers when we sat down during the Fauré Requiem, causing some shiny tuxedo shoes to suddenly appear in the air, and also frightening a lot of us. Fortunately, they were fine, but it definitely interrupted the mood, and we also discovered, during the soprano Pie Jesu solo, that the chairs were squeaky as a pile of mice and that some of us are unable to be utterly still so as to prevent said mice from squeaking their version of a duet with the poor soloist.

Alas and alack, I do think our physical blunders must have effected the singing, in part by breaking up the voice parts and resulting in the second altos somehow becoming separated from the flock, musically speaking, during one of the Duruflé pieces. My loyal audience members promise they noticed nothing, and more or less everything else went swimmingly.

After the musical adventures on Friday, M. and I continued to have a great weekend. Post-concert we went to a friend's birthday party, and Saturday we lunched with an Argentinian friend who lives in England and who was here briefly, and then went to another party in the evening with all the Spanish Parliament people, which actually turned out really fun. M. and I danced a couple of salsas, even though we don't actually know how! Sunday afternoon we strolled around with a group of our Catalan friends at the huge outdoor Portuguese festival in our neighborhood, eating grilled sardines and shrimp, empanadas, and lots of yummy egg-cream based desserts, and then Sunday evening we went to a friend's house to watch the three simultaneous soccer games that would determine the winner of the Spanish Liga...although Barça pulled out an amazing game, scoring five goals, Madrid unfortunately also had an amazing game, and thus won the big silver cup. With both Barça and Real Madrid supporters in the room, there were some intense moments. Anyway, that was our weekend!

And coming up this weekend, the choir has another concert, this time in Namur, and with a fun repetoire incorporating jazz, pop, and classical pieces (rehearsing last night, I discovered more intimately than I ever have before just how weird of a song is Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody"). I just hope we can manage to walk on stage without falling over our "little silhouettos."

Why I don't eat meat

I've been a vegetarian for over five years now, although not a terribly strict one, because I eat any and all fish and seafood. I've been thinking about eating meat again, and while I've eaten a bit here and there--even trying my mom's classic sloppy joe while I was home in May (flavors of childhood! could...not...resist!)--I think not having an overwhelming desire to continue eating meat after doing so means that I shouldn't rush into it.

As part of the process, I've been mulling over how my reasons for not eating meat have evolved over these few years, covering the gamut from political reasons to personal taste to questions of health and lifestyle. Thus, when people ask me why I don't eat meat, the answer is never easy, especially (as is often the case) when I'm explaining it to Europeans and in Spanish or Catalan or French. (Although, hands down, the hardest three people to explain it to are M's grandmother and my grandparents, who live in corn-and-cattle country. M's grandmother has resigned herself to strange food requirements, as our Senegalese brother-in-law and our two nieces don't eat pork.)

While the "easiest" reason to give, and the one people most like to hear, is that I just don't "like" meat (because it absolves the interlocuter of any implied judgement), this is only partially true. I've never been a huge fan of red meat in the form of a juicy steak or ribs, and poultry is all too often a bland white canvas for real flavors (and thus can be abandoned altogether), but I've got quite a weakness for a tasty German sausage, or a flavorful pork tenderloin, or a sweet and salty baked ham. So in many ways eating vegetarian has indeed been a sacrifice, and the smells of cooked meat are often terribly tempting.

The next most commonly assumed response, especially in the US, has to do with "animal rights." Again, this is only true in part. I don't have any problem with killing animals for food, and I believe that if animals are kept in a healthy environment and killed humanely (see the work of Temple Grandin on this problem) then there is no moral obligation not to eat animals. More on this in a moment.

In actual fact, what prompted my somewhat sudden decision to eat vegetarian was the influence of my housemate at the time (I was living in Ipswich, Massachusetts), and a book she had on her bookshelf: Diet for a Small Planet, by Frances Moore Lappé. (You can find information here on the book and the organization set up by her and her daughter.)

One Sunday afternoon, at home by myself, I read the book from cover to cover, and decided then and there to stop eating meat. I remember that I even called some "vegetarian hotline" number I found online to receive information about where to begin. I think I wanted to make it official, and since no one was around, I had the urge to call someone!

At that moment, the decision was a political one, wanting to do my part in re-adjusting the huge and injust imbalance of food distribution in the world, also addressing the environmental costs of food production. To put it very very simplistically, I think it makes much more sense to use acres and acres of wheat to feed a hungry world, instead of putting all of that equivalent energy and fuel into one cow. In other words, eating vegetarian is a more efficient way to eat, especially for fat Westerners who aren't exactly lacking in alternative sources of protein.

I still wholeheartedly endorse this point of view, and support the work of the Small Planet Institute (link above). But I have to admit that I find myself wondering if my unconsumed meat really makes a dent in all of this. I wonder if eating meat that has been produced locally and organically, not as the base of my diet but as an occasional treat, would be just as effective. (Here, of course, the problem is access. It seems easier just to be "vegetarian" in order to avoid what would be perceived as a snobbish insistence on local/green meat, questioning every restaurant chef and market vendor, dinner hostess and mother-in-law who provides my meat.)

But then I go back to some of the other reasons I have for eating vegetarian, the reasons that kept me going after the initial zealous decision. First of all, after meat dropped out of my diet, I felt great! I got more slender (although, ahem, I have certainly gained it back in the intervening years!) (oh, let's be honest: it was this year), and as an added bonus, I really learned how to cook. Because the experience coincided with my first on-my-own apartment, and my first real attempts to cook for myself, I was forced to get more creative with my meals and learn how to make some excellent dishes from my housemate's vegetarian cookbooks.

And then, of course, as I found out more and more about the meat-production industry (see, for example, Fast Food Nation, and any number of exposé articles on the unhealthy practices of feed yards and slaughtering houses), I became more and more glad that I wasn't eating meat. I won't go into any more detail, but the thought of the chemicals and waste products that go into making a chicken or a cow churned my stomach. And they still do.

So if I do start to eat meat again, I will try hard to know where it comes from, and what goes into caring for and feeding the animal before it becomes "meat." This is going to take some doing, as I don't exactly live next door to a farm. And I might have to retain a "vegetarian" cover so I don't have to be quite as pesky when we are guests at someone's home. But I feel encouraged by the fact that Europe in general has stricter guidelines about meat production, and the farm-to-market system in every neighborhood promises better quality meats than the plastic-wrapped supermarket stuff.

I guess I'm a little worried that if I do start to eat meat, it will become harder and harder to maintain these standards, and I'll eventually just end up giving into my bottomless appetite and willingness to try about anything by eating whatever kind of meat is offered to me, whether it is street food or at a cocktail buffet or even--gulp!--a McDonald's sandwich. Because the irony of the self-imposed vegetarian limitation is that I am SO NOT a picky eater, and I always want to try everything. (This was then and is now the principle objection of the Mister--who, by the way, has continued to eat meat all the while. We once had the wide-eyed owner of the restaurant in Barcelona called Organic pronounce our vegetarian-carnivore matrimony true love, because she could never marry across that--in her view--immense gulf.)

Anyway, the question of more easily maintained boundaries makes me wonder if I should just stick to not eating meat. In any case, I'm sure you can see why this already long process will likely continue to be drawn out for a while, and why I'm not even sure that I will go back to the meat-eating ways of my Iowan forebears, or my Iberian--um--postbears.

Po-Mo novel-ties

I know I just wrote a book post, but here I am with another. This time, it's about three novels that on first glance have nothing to do with one another: Umberto Eco's The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loanna, Orhan Pamuk's My Name Is Red, and Murakami Haruki's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.

The stories couldn't be more different (I apologize in advance for the absurdity of reducing complex novels to a few book-jacket sentences):

In The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loanna, a man wakes up from an accident with total amnesia of all personal memories, but can remember facts, books, all of his "public" memory. He spends days rooting through his childhood country home in Italy, re-reading old books and magazines, to recapture his family and personal past.

In My Name Is Red, a manuscript illuminator in 16th-century Istanbul is murdered, sparking off both a murder investigation and an inquisition into the nature of art as the Eastern styles are being influenced by the "Frankish" concepts of perspective, portraiture, and individual style. Each chapter is told in a different voice, including the voice of a coin, a tree, the color red, the murderer, etc.

In The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, a jobless modern-day Japanese man loses his cat and is suddenly deserted by his wife. He meets a curious string of people who might be able to help him get his wife back, including a 16-year-old suicidal neighbor, a psychic and her sister, a war veteran, and a fashion designer. The past and the present, the real and the dream world begin to merge into and emerge from one another.

What do these novels have in common, you ask? While reading them, my enthusiasm changed drastically from the beginning to the end. Reading the first two, I was completely enthralled at the beginning, and utterly tired of it all by the conclusion, almost ready to ditch the book altogether. The third begins "normally," and ends surreally, and is more complex, so my interest was more steadily sustained.

What all three also have in common is that I would characterize them as "postmodern" novels, in the sense that traditional notions of plot, narration, and temporality are violently skewed. I love that about them. Eco's book incorporates many visual reproductions, thus creating a simultaneous visual narrative; meanwhile, we question the narrator's reporting, due to his amnesia, his admitted need to reconstruct the past and thus present personality (an impossible task, of course). I loved the way the novel opened up questions of reliability, of present/past and public/private, of memory and history.

The Pamuk novel also plays with narration, this time using multiple narrators (even of objects, colors, and the dead) to accomplish its instability. The first and second chapters are titled, for instance, "I am a Corpse," and "I Will be Called a Murderer." The whodunnit plot, as well as a love story, drive the exploration of artistic technique and the clash of cultures. We hear from the murderer both in his guise as a murderer and as a respected artist, without knowing which speaker's voice is the same as the criminal's. I was really digging all of this. So clever, I thought!

But what happened in both the Eco and the Pamuk is that the story was abandoned altogether. By the end, the reader is lost in a murky chaos, unsatisfied and awash in the cleverness of the author's philosophical play with plot, narration, and temporality. Finding out who the murderer is somehow is a letdown. In other words, they're too clever.

The Haruki novel takes things from the reverse angle. It starts out as a straightforward story of a sad-sack guy, and descends into the worlds of his dreams, of visitors who explain the past, their letters, computer realities, television personalities, psychic connections, and more. I love that all of this is disturbingly surreal at times, yet is still logically linked to the quotidian details of a regular life, and the surreal seems to be explainable by the real.

What this novel does successfully that the others don't, in other words, is that the plot-drive is maintained, despite all of these flights of reality. The guy wants to find his wife and bring her back. And although the ending does not supply a hollywood scene of reunited lovers, it at least brings us back to that crucial point, recognizing that what the reader wants is not to be left with a big void, a big question mark. Even if there still is one (or many). Does that make sense?

Don't take this as a rant against postmodern novel techniques. What I guess I'm saying is that I think authors should somehow maintain a balance between narrative that questions narrative and narrative that provides a good story. Why do we read, anyway? It is both to find out "what happens" and to find out how we find out what happens, i.e., how the story is told. (There is a reason we read books even when we know the ending.)

Traditional novels, thrillers, love stories: these all focus mostly on "what happens," without drawing attention to the "how," even if the way of telling the story is breathtaking or original. Postmodern novels focus on the "how," playing with readers' expectations, sometimes abandoning the "what happens" altogether. I'm suggesting that novelists shouldn't abandon one over the other.