Budapest

One would think that we've got enough on our plates, what with moving a truck of stuff out of one apartment in order to trip over it in another apartment, and with cleaning and fixing up yet another apartment so we can (finally!) get renters moved in. Oh, and there's the question of preparing for our trip to the US next week, which for me may turn into a seven-month stretch rather than a two-month vacation if I decide to just change my return ticket instead of buying new ones. Because it seems that I am going to be back at my university stomping grounds in order to teach for the fall semester. Which also means finding yet another apartment to live in (will we never tire of not living in one place?), and also implies the terrifying prospect of packing a suitcase that will suffice for seven months.

But no! That's not enough, evidently, because we're leaving for Budapest on Thursday. Thursday, as in the day after tomorrow. The trip--the Mister will be speaking at a conference and I'll be a plus one--is actually a compromise, because he was initially planning to be in Budapest and then Bucharest until next Wednesday night (we leave for Philadelphia on Thursday morning). I said I didn't that would be a good idea, except I said it in a slightly more forceful manner. But after we ruled out Bucharest, compared to returning the day before our flight to the US, returning four days before from a shorter trip seemed totally doable, and I was tempted by the glittering idea of a weekend escapade in a country and a city I've never visited. So I said I'd go along, and that's how I find myself about to go to Budapest.

Maybe Budapest will be a good break, though, because all of the other stuff is, to say the least, stressful. I'm nearly paralyzed by the magnitude of "to-do" and the spiral of "what-if" and the sadness of "don't-want-to-leave." The not wanting to leave Barcelona part is not just about spending Fall Semester in the great wide midwest; it's also about the Mister being a candidate for a (really really fantastic and prestigious) job in.... Brussels. Yes, the place that sapped our energies over several years with its uncannily gray skies, and the place that we just turned our backs on in a diesel-puff of exhaust smoke.

Which is why I'm counting on Budapest, one B-city that at least has no emotional connotations in my life, to be a clean slate of a weekend getaway.

Beastly

In my last post, I referred to the van as a beast, and I after four solid days of driving it, I did not waver from this opinion. We encountered a bit of everything: mountains and rain tempests and hailstorms and border-crossing traffic, and I freaked out regularly (am I doing this right? is the engine supposed to sound like that? what gear am I supposed to be in? should I wait for him to move or try to squeeze into that spot? how will I get out of this space? what if something is behind me and I can't see it?). We learned that big huge vans, especially ones loaded with books and furniture, go pretty slowly, and that it takes sixteen instead of twelve hours to travel from Barcelona to Brussels or vice versa. But there were long stretches of smooth sailing, I learned to trust my sideview mirrors and find the clutch's sweet spot, and we had really good luck across the board.

First of all, the city driving went very well on both ends. And secondly, we were buoyed by the kindness of strangers and friends: the passer-by who parallel-parked the van for me in a tight spot (in front of our house!) in Brussels, the neighbor who carried furniture down the stairs with the Mister, the car rental agent who gave us a 35% discount, the neighbors who took other items off our hands for us, the Sicilians at our favorite neighborhood pizza place, the friend who cooked us dinner when we had no kitchen, the friend who gave us a ride when we didn't want to move the perfectly parked van, family who arranged for help when we arrived in Barcelona, and so on.

We sure did need help; those four days of driving were interposed with one and a half days of frantic packing and paperwork and carting of heavy objects up and down many flights of stairs. The good news is that the van is gone and the stuff is now in our apartment, even the sofa (we planned to sell it, but the buyer backed out and the van was so big that we could take it for its first road trip to Barcelona).

The bad news is that the stuff is now in our apartment.

As in, we now have two households worth of things crammed into our already-small space. This morning we did some major rearranging to accommodate piles of boxes and suitcases and furniture, none of which we have room for. I'm quite disheartened by the impossibility of it all, and the major projects we will have to tackle just to incorporate and/or sell or give away the stuff we didn't have time to deal with in Brussels. On our drive back, we solemnly vowed never to buy anything ever again.

But it feels really good to have one less household. For the first time all of our wedding gifts are in one place! My summer clothes and my winter clothes are in the same city! The two Murakami books that were in Brussels can sit on the shelf next to the two that were in Barcelona! All of our financial records can be merged! And so forth and so on. All thanks to the beast.

Next move

It's May. Our plans for the future change every day. They now may involve any or all of the following: teaching in Indiana for a semester, moving back to Brussels, staying in Barcelona. For the first time in a long time, I can't concentrate on what I'm reading and have trouble falling asleep because I'm worried about big abstract puzzles, like The Future, and What I Am Going to Do in It, and How We Are Going to Get There.

There are also short term complications. For instance, given that the Mister only needs to travel to Brussels a few more times over the next few months, it made sense to move out of the apartment there. We did manage to find someone to take over the lease so as to avoid paying a two-months'-rent penalty, but now that means, um, actually moving out of the apartment. By May 15.

The Mister looked into moving companies, and the cost of moving our furniture is more than the sum total of the worth of that furniture. So our new plan is to sell what furniture we can, and abandon or give away the rest of it. But there still remains a goodly pile of clothing, bedding, books, kitchen items, paintings, decorative objects etc. etc. that we want to bring to Barcelona.

So, if all goes well, next weekend you will find me driving a minivan or a small truck over the midsection of Europe with the Mister, in a marathon session of highway miles and heavy lifting of boxes up and down flights of stairs (remind me why don't we ever live in apartments with elevators?).

It's not how I envisioned my first large-scale European road trip, and it's not how I envisioned spending my birthday weekend. But a road trip it is, and in that sense it should be fun, I hope.

We're still stuck on what to do with the piano, though. Yes, the piano that cost more to hoist up to the second floor than it did to purchase. Any ideas?

Away and back again

So, remember that idea of mine where I was going to continue to write every day for the month of December, just like I (almost) did for the month of November?

Ha! So do I. Unfortunately, it remains in the realm of idea rather than fact, because I have rather spectacularly--although not on purpose--abandoned that plan.

First there was last weekend, which as weekends will, ended up being rather stuffed full of going-out-and-about activities. Then we spent the week in Brussels, and I discovered that four days (more like two and a half, once travel on Monday evening and Thursday morning is factored in) was way too little time to have lunch OR dinner OR coffee OR a beer with every person I haven't seen in three months, AND buy secret santa presents for the Mister's work Christmas party, AND clean the neglected apartment (the Mister is hardly ever there any more, and it shows...) AND pack my bags full of the winter clothes and books I would need in Brussels.

The advantage of having to buy the secret santa presents was that I got to roam the city and peruse most of my favorite shops, but the disadvantage was actually having to buy them. Every year they refuse to set a price guideline, and every year that leaves us in a pickle. Everything seems either too inexpensive or too expensive for the gift exchange.

In addition to the above, I did see a bit of snow, which was cheery and Christmasy, and I did enjoy the brisk temperatures and the Christmas festival and the Grand Place full of a beautiful light-and-sound display.

Things I neglected: the blog, and remembering to bring any Christmas decorations back down South. So when this afternoon the Mister and I finally were able to "put up the Christmas decorations," I found myself peering into an empty box much more quickly than I would have wished. We have two lovely wool stockings from the Mister's mother store, now hung by the [dining room buffet] with care, a few ornaments hanging off of doorknobs and houseplants, an advent candle, a little creche scene, and a poinsettia, but that's about it. We searched high and low for the lights we thought we had somewhere, but no luck.

Ah well. Listen to enough Messiah and Bing Crosby, and Christmas is conjured out of thin air.

Tintin

While living in Belgium, I enjoyed exploring the endless varieties of its greatest cultural exports, including chocolate, beer, frites, and gaufres--oh, and believe you me, I have the extra curvy hips to prove my anthropological thoroughness--but I had until not long ago been largely ignorant of another great Belgian phenomenon: the bande-dessinée. (Also known as BD, or, for those anglophones among us, the comic book.)

The crown jewels of Belgian BD are the beloved characters Tintin, the intrepid boy reporter, and Milou, his fluffy white sidekick. I was vaguely aware of these personages--living there it's not easy to remain completely in the dark--but had never read a Tintin comic, nor ever had much desire to do so. Having lived in Europe for some time and in various countries, I was also aware that Tintin was a pan-European figure, universally adored, and whose books are more or less required reading for all European children. Created by Georges Remi, aka Hergé, Tintin might be compared most closely to a comic-book version of Hardy Boys, especially because of his retro knickerbockers and crime-solving skills, but he and his clever dog sidekick invite comparisons to Timmy and Lassie, or Shaggy and Scooby-Doo, or Dorothy and Toto.

So for my birthday last May, when I was given a charming small-format version of episode number 7 in Tintin's adventures, "Le sceptre d'Ottokar," or Ottokar's scepter, I decided to take the plunge into the world of Belgian comic books. Tintin travels to Moldavia, an invented Eastern European country, where he of course saves the day from an attempted coup. I have since purchased "Tintin in America" as I was curious to see what happens to the poor guy when he gets mixed up with gangsters, and also to see exactly what myths of Americana would be pulled out of Hergé's hat.

It's a great way to practice my French (yes, back to picture-book stage, especially useful for learning action verbs!) and get on the cultural bandwagon so I'm not in the dark when it comes to European conversations. I will probably have to read and/or watch some Asterix and Obelix, as well.

During the summer I visited the Comic Book Museum, of which a portion is dedicated to the mythology and creation of Tintin, and the comic books are a fascinating look into the sociology and geopolitics of Europe (sort of in the same way that the bad guys in James Bond movies changed before and after the Cold War, Tintin's adventures around the world always have an implied political slant). Indeed, comic books are taken rather seriously by French scholars and are considered "le neuvième art," the ninth art. As wikipedia points out, "It is not insignificant that the French term contains no indication of subject matter, unlike the American terms "comics" and "funnies", which imply an art form not to be taken seriously."

Although there's a comic-book store every five paces in Brussels, I've never been attracted visually to the more dense and quite "adult" series that are most prevalent. Tintin suits me just fine; I like the bright colors and sturdy forms, the linear adventures that pause with a cliffhanger every couple of pages.

All of this is to say: on my (long) list of things to bring back with me from Brussels when I visit next week, another installment (or two) of those cute small-format Tintin books is at the top.

Estiuet de Sant Martí

In early November, the Catalans predict warm weather: the "little summer" of Sant Martí, which falls on November 11. Sure enough, today was a winner, crisp air and warm sun. We ate lunch outside for the "festa major" of my in-laws' town (every town and neighborhood has its own week of celebrations, based on the day of the patron saint). After some days of decidedly cooling weather, we are enjoying this estiuet.

I couldn't help thinking about what it'd be like in Brussels right now: ten degrees cooler, and gray. Maybe raining.

So I did a little poking around on the web, if only to confirm my suspicions. Brussels has, on average, 208 "wet days" per year, or 17.33 days per month. And this statistic does not include not-wet but still gray days, which I would unscientifically estimate to be another 10 days or so. 27 days of gray per month.

Barcelona has, on average, 79 "wet days" per year, or 6.5 days per month. Maybe a couple more are gray without rain. 9 days of gray per month.

If you could choose between the two, where would you want to live?

It's funny that I care so much about this, because I'm not a sun-worshipper, not a beach bunny. I burn and don't tan, I stay in the shade. Really, it's all about the effect of so much gray on my spirits. It's SAD all year long in Brussels.

And Barcelona? Happy.

(source)

Resume

How has it happened that several whole weeks have gone by since last I wrote anything here? It was kind of not my fault, because of the lack of internet in Barcelona, although it is kind of my fault because I can usually get a neighbor's signal if I sit on or near one of the balconies. Plus, we were in Brussels this past weekend for a wedding, and there was internet. But again! Not so much my fault! Because we had guests staying with us and you know how it is with having guests: you end up running around doing stuff and not so much bloggity blogging.

So, enough excuses. Since I've dropped off the face of the earth (no skype either, not since the Great Computer Failure of June 08), I should just briefly--but chronologically, as I am unfortunately linear in my thinking--summarize what we've been up to since I came to Barcelona with intent to live. (You see, strangely enough, after all of this time visiting Barcelona on summers and vacations and weekends, and even after we bought an apartment here, I've never truly thought of us "living" here. And now I do, because we are. It feels good.)

Hold on, first another (non-linear, parenthetical) note: I just typed the word "resume" instead of "summarize." Even as I pressed the delete button I was dumbly trying to process: why isn't resume right? why on earth did I think it was resume? what's the right word anyway? My fingers, typing faster than my brain, typed resume because in Catalan, you say "resumir" to mean "sum up," "go over," "summarize." Can it be that Catalan has so infiltrated my thinking that I am using reverse false cognates?

Anyhoo. The first week here was a madness of getting the apartment in shape for the Mister's birthday party and for guests who were to spend the following weekend with us. It was grimy from disuse and lack of time, on prior whirlwind weekends, to clean. I finally was able to convince the electrician to come and install all of our lights, which was a relief because it meant that our restored original lighting is now in place, instead of naked lightbulbs. The weather was sultry hot, humid, sunny. I didn't sleep properly for days, because of the heat, and the noise from the street through the open windows. But it was better than Brussels, where jackets are still necessary.

We had a fun family-and-friends birthday party; everybody had just left the house around midnight when our weekend guests arrived--the same Italian friends whose wedding we attended in Sardinia. We went to the beach for the first time this year, we ate lots of good food, we trudged around the city in the heat, we watched Spain win the European football championship. Our Italian friend (a big football fan himself) was a little puzzled, I think, as to why the Catalans were rather lackluster on the cheering front, until we pointed out the Franco-era flags waving in the stands and listened to frenzied radio commentary about the "raza superior": it's amazing how football in Europe can be so...political, so closely tied to ultra-nationalism.

Our friends left last Monday, and I finally had a rather calm few days to myself here. I got some work done, explored the neighborhood, did a little sales shopping. (In Europe--well, at least in Spain and Belgium--the sales are restricted to post-Christmas and late summer. Other times of the year, it's rare to find anything on sale, and so during these sale months everyone goes crazy, and it makes the news, sort of like Black Friday. I myself rather prefer NOT to shop during these times, as formerly orderly shops become bargain-basement jumbles of clothes, and formerly solicitous salespeople become surly and snappy. But I went to buy some items I had my eyes on earlier, and snagged them on sale on July 1.) I also finalized our rather complex set of plane tickets from Barcelona to Boston (me) and Brussels to Sioux Falls (him), then Sioux Falls (me) and Omaha (him; yeah, don't ask) to Las Vegas, then Las Vegas to Barcelona. It'll be his first trip to my midwestern birthplace, and I haven't been in years. We'll be in Iowa/South Dakota for a family reunion, and then we're taking two weeks to drive around California. I have never been (less surprisingly, he hasn't either) to Las Vegas, the Grand Canyon, Los Angeles, or San Francisco. So those are all on the list, and I have a feeling two weeks is going to start seeming awfully short.

I also got a haircut! I got a very short cut--a pageboy?--with long straight-across bangs. I've never had bangs like this and I'm still adjusting to them, but I think I like it. It looks kind of retro, kind of flapper-ish, and it went well with the beaded dress I wore to the wedding this weekend.

I had a bit of a misadventure when I flew to Brussels last Thursday. Somehow in setting the alarm I changed the time as well, so that when I thought I was waking up at 5:30 in the morning it was really 3:30 in the morning, and I had in reality only slept for two hours. Not until I was wheeling my little suitcase down the dark, deserted street did it occur to me to wonder why there were so few people and why it was so dark at 6 am. I showed up at the train station at 4:15 in the morning, and had to wait for it to open at 4:30. The first train to the airport was at 5:30, so I kind-of-slept for an hour, dragged myself to the airport and through check-in and security, and then kind-of-slept for another two and half hours because--Murphy's law!--the plane was delayed for two hours.

Upon arrival in Brussels, I had to rush home--shivering, because the skirt and tank top that had seemed so smart in boiling Barcelona did not quite cut it in chilly, rainy Brussels--change, and meet my Mister at a super swanky delicious restaurant called BonBon to celebrate our two years of weddedness. It was worth it though, because the meal was a memorable one and the travel stress melted away under the influence of a nice wine recommended by the sommelier and the handsome face across the table.

Unfortunately the glamor could last only for so long, because we had to clean the house in preparation for the guests who would be with us for the wedding, arriving later that night. The weekend was full of wedding flurry, inevitably. The bride and groom and many of the guests were a group of friends who had studied with the Mister at the Johns Hopkins International School in Bologna, a fun mix of Americans and Europeans of all stripes, and I got to meet some of them for the first time. The wedding itself was a civil ceremony that took place at the very grand town hall in the very grand Grand Place, and drinks afterwards were Belgian brews at a nearby brasserie. We danced and mingled until four o'clock in the morning, and the next day we were plied with the famous fries at Chez Antoine in Place Jourdain. I flew back to Barcelona late last night (the Mister had flown to Madrid for a conference) and well, here I am.

Here I am, that is, until a week from tomorrow, which is when the whole American adventure starts. I'm super excited to see family and celebrate and lolligag in cabins by the lake, but I'm really quite beside myself that we're finally going to take a driving trip around the west coast. Even if I end up feeling like foreigner in my own country.

Homebody

Somehow I managed to wake up an hour early, without realizing it. So at eight o'clock on a Sunday morning, I am already dressed, my suitcase is packed, and I'm ready to leave for Barcelona. It's like someone just handed me an hourglass and all of those grains of sand are available for me to do with as I will.

I'm glad I have the chance to do a quick update here, because once I'm in Barcelona I won't have internet. We will alert Telefonica that we would like their services as soon as humanly possible, but we are resigned to the fact that Telefonica will not in turn provide us with their services as soon as humanly possible. In fact, they will probably wait as long as humanly possible to give our home an on-ramp to the information highway.

It has been quite stressful to contemplate leaving Brussels. Even though I know I'll be back here often, and I can use my husband to ferry any object I wish from one city to the other, I feel like I'm abandoning this little home I have created here, and all of my favorite things that make it feel like home. It's not so much a question of the stuff as it is a way to ground myself. I worry that I'll feel divided; I'm such a homebody that I need that extra reassurance of place, like a dog circling round and round before being able to settle down with a snuffly sigh.

Oh, one detail that I should not forget to mention is that the princess of Belgium came to our concert at the Cathedral on Friday! Even if I do say so myself, the concert was quite beautiful, fit for a princess, though during the event itself I hadn't figured out who in the crowd was Her (maybe my angle wasn't good). But we happened to be standing by the front entrance when she was escorted out, and the funny thing about the princess is that she totally looked like a princess. She wore a bright yellow dress of some stiff, tapestry-like material with a matching coat that flared at the knees. Her hair, in a shoulder-length bob, flipped out on the bottom. She carried a little matching bouquet of yellow flowers. As we stood there gaping, she was walked to the car, someone holding a huge umbrella over her head. Then, as her car pulled away from the curb, our friend decided to wave to her, and she waved back! We decided that's what she does for a living, so she should wave, shouldn't she?

A few more grains of sand...

Interlinking links

It turns out that the internet was neither invented by Al Gore, nor first developed in the 90s by a crack international team of programmers, but was dreamed up in 1934, right here in Belgium.

Today's New York Times contains a fascinating account of Paul Otlet, a Belgian librarian who conceived of a vast interlinked network of information, which one could access through a screen. From one's desk, one would summon text, images, audio, and film, and the screen could be divided into multiple "pages" to view documents simultaneously. This "bibliothèque irradiée" (radiated library) would serve to make humanity's thoughts available to all. He called his central storehouse of knowledge the Mundaneum, and today one can visit the Mundaneum in its incarnation as a museum in Mons, Belgium. Which I will have to do one of these days.

As I read the article, from my screen with its multiple pages, which came from a link in my electronic mailbox, and watched video within the newspaper article, and then googled a snippet of French from a visual of one of Otlet's manuscripts that I had glimpsed at the end of the video, and then read more articles about the same subject, I was floored all over again by the mere existence of the web, and its vast complexity. (And was all the more impressed by Otlet's prescience.) Even in the misery of an information crisis, the breakdown of my hard drive, the interconnectedness of digital knowledge is pretty mind-blowing.

Then again, there's of course something to be said for the tactile, the hands-on, the ink-and-paper world of knowledge. As a book lover, both of the world of language they contain and of the bound pages that form a beautiful object, I can't forget the generous sense of discovery afforded by the physical archive. There's a lot out there that's not online. In that spirit, a short editorial laments the disappearance of the copy editor's position in journalism.

Also, speaking of text and tactile, here's a charming story about an architect who designed an apartment as a chamber of secrets. The owners, after a year of living in the house, were sent a clue that sent them on a treasure hunt in their own home, in part directed by a book of stories that they soon found behind a false wall. Hidden panels, complex word games, cranks, keys, puzzles...I love how the physical space and the materials of the home's construction were fitted together in new ways to send them on a journey. Even better: the final "reveal" of the whole elaborate game is a poem written by the father and hidden in the walls of the family room, right under their noses the whole time.

And speaking of homes: this weekend we're making the "move" to Barcelona. As of Friday, I'll be done with French (oral exam was today), and will have sung in my final choir concert (we're premiering a new work, at the Cathedral). So off to Barcelona we go, in a summer experiment to transition our lives from based-in-Brussels to based-in-Barcelona. The Mister will still be in Brussels Monday pm-Thursday am, and I might come along from time to time. Hard to tell how it will all pan out. Of course I have not done any "packing" whatsoever, and have barely had time to contemplate what I should do to prepare for such a (semi-)move. I have no doubt that the transition will be slow and that bits and pieces of my life will remain in between the two places for quite a long time. I know it's the right decision, though, because the thought of leaving Belgium isn't at all making me mournful (yet?). I will miss choir, and the few good friends we've made here, and the swimming pool across the street. And I'll definitely miss my spacious kitchen and the living room that we've only just managed to furnish how we wanted it.

But in Barcelona there's an empty bookshelf, waiting for us to fill it with our beloved books. I know that then we'll feel like we're really settling in, building our own secrets into the walls.

Frisky

Click on this link. Go ahead, it's OK! I'll wait.

Now, what did you see? FIVE suns? Five suns without any clouds or raindrops on top of them? That's what I see! Oh yes I do.

For the first time in my (admittedly porous) memory, the Brussels forecast is a sunshine FLUSH. (Forgive me if my poker metaphor is off, because I don't play poker.) A week of suns. A week of warm.

Earlier this evening, I said to the mister, musingly, "Can you believe we've had four straight days of perfect sunny weather?" And then I clicked over to the forecast, and I saw what you just saw, and rejoiced.

(There's a good reason to have a birthday in May, and this is it. Everyone gets frisky.)

A room for living

The sofa and coffee table came almost a week early, last Thursday. It was perfect timing, too, because the Mister showed up from his long travels just a few hours later, and it was nice to have both of them get here on the same morning. We are tickled pink just to have an actual sofa to sit on; we keep patting its back it like it's a new, albeit unwieldy, household pet, and marveling to one another, "It's so big! We can both sit on it! And it doesn't sag in the middle!"

I'm thrilled to have it in time for the party (over 50 people on the guest list...it's going to be a humdinger!) and for the friends who are coming to stay next weekend.

So, without further ado, here she is, the lovely Chesterfield:


I did a pretty good job of the advance mockup, right? For comparison:


We decided against the bamboo rug--I kind of like the clean look of the wood floors--but everything else is pretty much how I envisioned it. It's much more welcoming to walk into the room and see the sofa in front of you--arms out, like an embrace--than when it was up against the wall. I guess I've learned something, after all, from those interior design magazines!

Here are a couple of closer views:



I'm already loving my little window workspace, especially today with this incredible weather and the windows flung open to the warm breezes. Of course, that clean desk surface has an evil twin; the other desk, which you can't see in the pictures, is covered in a swamp of papers and doodads. That's my next job.

But for now I think I'm going to pack a little picnic and go to the park for lunch. It's too gorgeous to stay inside.

Interior design

So I had a little fun playing around with a website called polyvore, which lets you snatch images from the web and edit them into collages and layouts. It seems to focus mostly on fashion--putting outfits together and that sort of thing--but I thought it might be a good way to help me envision a new layout for our living room once the new sofa and coffee table arrive, using photographs of these items snipped from the web.

(Yes, I finally got around to ordering them! It's embarrassing how long we put off getting these rather essential items of furniture, instead living with the truly crappy little white futon. But we have guests coming soon, and I'm planning a big bash for my 30th birthday, and there's actually a bit of money in the bank at the moment, so now was the time.)

Anyway, in order to picture this, you have to take this photo of the apartment, subtract all the really lovely furniture that got taken away from us after we babysat it for a while, and then overlay the following collage into the room. The only things carrying over are the plant and the cheap Ikea bookcase, which I've moved to the right. I want to change the orientation of things, too: the sofa will be perpendicular to the fireplace instead of against the wall, and I'm thinking that I'll tuck my desk right behind the sofa, hidden, to create a study area (i.e., boundaried by the bay window and the sofa back) that I'm more likely to spend time at than my current undefined space.

The lamp somewhat resembles the new one we got over a month ago, and the chair is actually green velvet, a curbside find. The bamboo rug is a darker color than represented here (by a tatami mat, the only thing I could find that would work in the picture). There are of course a few other things in the room, but this would be the basic view looking straight in from the dining room, which is how the earlier picture is oriented, too.


I'm excited about the prospects of moving everything around, and looking forward to having an actual sofa instead of this thing that has probably done unrepairable damage to my posture.

What do you think? Is it missing something? Too bland?

Grocery schizophrenia

Nearly every day I end up carting a bag or a half a bag of groceries up to our apartment. This in itself is not a problem at all, and I rather like making the ongoing small food purchases characteristic of city living.

The problem is, however, that I can never find everything on my list in one grocery store, and this always makes me feel absolutely scattered. Certain staples of my diet--hummus, black beans, cheddar cheese, quinoa, garlic-stuffed olives (yes, don't laugh), for example--can be found in one place only, and never all of them in the same place. The only store with good hummus is a 25-minute walk away. I stop there on my way back from French class, and pick up some nice vegetables, too. No problem.

But then I decide that I want to make Mexican food for dinner, and to get refried beans I have to walk down the hill to the only store that has them, which is NOT the store that has tortillas. The OTHER store, the one that has tortillas and the salsa, does not carry the breakfast cereal that I like. But that's the one that does have the beans. This one has the rosemary crackers, that one has the pretzels. Neither of them have both. This is an endless process, and one that is hard to keep track of. I often enter a store sure that I'll find a certain item and then only remember that it doesn't after walking fruitlessly through the aisles for a while. "Which was the place that carries real vanilla extract?" I will mutter to myself. "Was it X or Y with the cereal?"

The same thing happens with the markets. Only the market in Chatelain has those amazing olives. Only the market at the St. Gilles town hall has those Italian guys with the great pasta. Only the organic market sells quinoa in bulk. As a result, I end up shopping regularly at no less than SIX grocery stores and THREE markets, can you believe it?

It's not that I want everything to be found in one American-style behemoth of a grocery. It's just that it would be nice if I could have reasonable expectations of finding my top frequent purchases mostly in one place. Maybe I just have a really weird diet, by Belgian standards. That's probably it. At any of those places I am guaranteed to find goopy pastel salads, stacks and stacks of cookies that all look like waffles and all have different names, and--the beauty of this one cannot be denied--a truly impressive selection of Belgian beer.

Speaking of markets, I am going nuts--in a good way--over the flowers currently available at the markets. They are so beautiful! And springlike! And reasonably priced! Seriously, twenty gorgeous longstem roses for 7 euros? I even saw one sign offering 80 roses for 15 euros. Last week I saw the most exquisite roses in an antiquey faded pink beige color that I was itching to buy, but didn't since we were going to be gone over the weekend. So this week I made up for it (although, disappointingly, I couldn't find the same ones) and have, over the course of the week, purchased a bouquet of bright yellow tulips, another of white roses, and a bunch of peonies, which didn't come as cheaply but I was so excited to see them. I can't wait to watch their tight round knobs burst into hot pink ruffles. I have a house full of flowers and this makes me inordinately happy.

Oh, and an update on the coffee travel mug. Today I again brought it to French class, and my neighbor, whispering, asked me if that was coffee, and then gave me the strangest look, the kind of skeptical eyebrow uptilted half-smile that you give to someone whose behavior you find odd but whom you don't want to offend. She then whispered something I didn't catch, and when I asked her what she had said, I'm pretty sure when she told me "C'est une bonne idée," it wasn't what she had said the first time around.

miGo

This morning, for the first time since I've lived in Europe, I carried a travel mug of coffee with my during my morning commute. It was one of the items that claimed a little corner of my suitcase after my visit home; when I saw it nestled in its newspaper packing in a cardboard box in the musty basement, I remembered all the walks to class, especially that horrible semester of teaching at 8 am, when the perfectly shaped, brushed-aluminum travel mug made my mornings a little brighter, and I just couldn't leave it behind.

However, I shouldn't have been surprised that my mug drew outright stares on the metro platform. Stares that clearly said, "Who is this crazy girl and what is in that metal thing?" "Is she drinking out of it?" "Where does she think she is, a giant coffee shop?"

It just hadn't quite dawned on me that NO ONE carries a travel mug. Once in a blue moon I see someone clutching a coffee-to-go paper cup, but they have a furtive look, as if a little guilty for resorting to drinking coffee on the move.

So I can't say that I'll make a habit of carrying the thing around (it's already taken me weeks to use it in the first place), but it sure comes in handy for days, like today, when I just don't have enough time for coffee before leaving the house.

Unrelated to coffee: I'll be internetless again for the weekend, in Barcelona. We're going to have to get plugged in there pretty soon, especially if we spend so much more time there! Anyway, that's where I'll be, and I'll be back here on Monday.

Local explorations

Yesterday's peripatetic combination of activities left my feet aching, but my brain (and tummy!) satisfied. We saw several areas of the city we had never explored, and ate at places that have long been on our to-do list.

In the afternoon we took a visit to Tour et Taxis, a gigantic exhibition space and urban center. (Check out the website, which with its electronica vibe, seems to try to be promoting the thing as some sort of nightclub.) The building itself is breathtaking, although it is located in the midst of a wasteland of derelict structures, seedy warehouses, and piles of trash. It's not exactly a place you'd end up wandering around in, which is why we had never been before.

Two exhibits are going on at the moment, one a Star Wars extravaganza, and the other called C'est notre histoire (This is our history), about the history of Europe over the last 50 years. I suppose you can imagine which one we were there for, but it was a bit depressing to walk past the long lines, teeming with children and adults, to the ticket counter for the Europe exhibit, which had no line whatsoever. "History, schmistory!" they seemed to be saying. "Let's go look at light sabers!"

Still, the European history exhibit was truly impressive. The concept itself is massive in scope, with an astounding array of historical moments, people, countries, and topics to cover, but the gigantic exhibition space and well-thought-out distribution of information were equal to the challenge. I loved that contemporary artworks were interspersed with the historical events they respond to, and that the quotidian (a reproduction of a 1960s home, for example) could dialogue with the monumental (an American and a Soviet warhead, pointed at one another, dwarf you as you walk between them). Of course we ran across the inevitable dull bits, such as a large diagram trying to explain how the various European institutions work, involving a lot of arrows. Even the Mister and our two friends, who also work at the Parliament, just shook their heads at it. But overall, well worth the three-plus hours we spent wandering through the galleries.

Stomachs grumbling, we walked to Ste-Catherine, the area of town known for its seafood, and strolled up to the little outdoor seafood bar called Mer du Nord, eating our fill of fabulous tapas-like dishes, a perfect late lunch/early dinner. We stood there for hours, and ate--quite literally--everything on the chalkboard menu: fish soup, perfectly delicate oysters, grilled scampi, shrimp croquettes, sea snails (whelks), battered cod fillets called Kibbeling (such an odd name!), grilled scallops, and plenty of rounds of white wine. Slightly chilled, but happily stuffed, we walked around the corner to Café Frederic Blondeel, where we sampled some of the fabulous chocolates and little tarts along with our coffees: there's always room for chocolate, right?

Having lingered over our meal and our dessert, it was already nearly 8 pm, and time for a concert at the Botanique, a huge greenhouse-cum-concert space. I had never been inside, so it was fun to see the place, and the concert was pretty great (with the exception of the opening act, an experimental electronica group). Even though my aching feet kept complaining (am I now too old to go to concerts without seats? I found myself incredibly annoyed at the people pressed around us, but it wasn't their fault), Vinicio Capossela's music was just strange and energetic enough to keep me from tumbling over. Ragtime, circus, western ballads, latin rhythm, folks songs: the music was wonderfully weird, the lyrics literary and mythic (Medusa, anyone? Rime of the Ancient Mariner, anyone?) and all of it a spectacle: a different jacket, hat, or mask for every song, wacky instruments (including a toy guitar and a toy piano with real candles), and Monty Pythonesque video projections.

Home again, jiggety jig, to put up our feet and watch Lost before bed. A more satisfying day I couldn't have invented if I had tried.

Superfat Tuesday

Yesterday was an adjective-enhanced Tuesday if there ever was one. Because the day fell on Fat Tuesday of carnival fame, and Super Tuesday of political fame, it was bound to be exciting. Super exciting, if you will.

The Mister and I tried to squeeze as much excitement out of it as possible here in Belgium, which is both geographically distant from the Mardi Gras ideal of tropical Brazilian parades, and temporally distant from American political reporting (most results didn't start to come in until 2 am, well after our bedtime).

For the "fat" portion of Superfat Tuesday, we went to Binche (pronounce Baansh, light on the "n"), a small town south of Brussels that is known for its centuries-old carnival celebrations. The Binche carnival itself is, in fact, a UNESCO "masterpiece of the oral and intangible patrimony of humanity." Despite the buffeting winds and rain, the parade we saw was indeed pretty darn cool. It features hundreds of men and boys (no women, harrumph) dressed up in the traditional "Gille" costume, which is... kind of hard to explain. The costume involves wooden shoes and towering feathered headdresses, belts of bells (they all clonk shoes and jingle the bells in a shuffling kind of dance to the drums and horns that follow them), elaborate lacy cuffs and collars, white skullcaps and ear-bandages and a sort of puffed-up back and front panel that makes them all look like their too-small heads are perching on hugely inflated shoulders. Earlier in the day, they wear those scary green-glasses masks, but not for the afternoon parade (trading them for the ostrich-feather headdresses). So I was happy and unfrightened.

Oh, and they all carry narrow straw baskets of blood oranges, which they hurl into the crowd one by one. We lugged home about three kilos of oranges, and fortunately managed to avoid being injured by flying citrus. I wondered aloud as to why the oranges, and the Mister replied: "You know how Belgium is known for its sunshine and its orange trees, right?" The streets after the parade were cobbled with muddy, crushed fruit. I fully expected the oranges to be rather tasteless, but on the contrary, when we finally ate some at around midnight, they were fantastically sweet and tart, and bright red inside. Yum!

How I do go on. Instead of trying to explain the bizarre spectacle, I should show you some pictures.

Before the parade, we caught some of the Gilles leaving their house. Each one has a sort of entourage, people to carry backpacks full of oranges (for refilling the baskets), people to help out with the feather hats (from the looks of it, they were heavy and tough to hang onto in the wind, and were thus only worn for short stretches at a time), and people to ratatat-tat on drums everywhere they went.

This little Gille didn't want to go with his dad and brother. He was crying, and I felt kind of bad for taking his picture, because that's probably why he didn't want to go in the first place: all those scary tourists snapping flashy pictures.

A group of Gilles heading to the parade.

And here's me, with one of the oranges we caught, just before the camera battery died.

After a crowded train ride back to Brussels, we went on to the "super" portion of our superfat Tuesday: a big primaries party thrown at one of the nice hotels in town. There, the signage insisted on calling it a "Mega-Tuesday party" which may be a French way of saying it, who knows? The Mister and I really just wanted to follow the primaries on CNN or something, and since we are TVless, we asked some friends where to go and they recommended this party. We paid five euros to get in, only to discover that: food and drinks were not included (to be paid for apart, at exorbitant rates), all of the rooms were intensely noisy and overcrowded, and there was no TV. Instead, there was an endless (and endlessly boring) parade of pseudo-debates, people trying to get you to sign up for Republicans or Democrats Abroad, and eurocrat "celebrities" talking about how the elections were important (duh), none of which you could hear over the crowds anyway. We just wanted some news!!! And the friends we'd thought we'd see there never showed up, so the whole shebang was one big superbust.

We went home, ate some blood oranges, and scoured the internet for some news. There was precious little, so we went to bed. I do have to say, though, HOW exciting this primaries race is. Regardless of your political affiliation, is it not AMAZINGLY awesome that a woman and a man of color are neck-and-neck as frontrunners? This, my friends, is history in the making. Who would've thunk?

I find myself feeling hopeful about American politics for the first time in a long time, and Obama has a lot to do with those hopes. If he is elected, and can deliver on his messages of hope and change, the nation will be in for a major turnaround, one that is badly needed.

Anyway, I've gone on for superlong, and you're probably supersick of me, and supertuesday is over, so I can stop using superlatives. Hee hee!

On a Sunday, does "this week" mean the last six days, or the next six days? Depends if you're asking an American or a Catalan.

In case you weren't aware of the fact, it is February already. I myself am only barely aware of the fact, and this is probably because I am in denial. February means cold weather, and still more to come. It means a little blip of red hearts (the chocolate stores, which in Brussels are as omnipresent as corner groceries, won't let us forget it) and then back to the gray wait for signs of spring.

So, in order to pretend that it is not February and not gray and not cold, we are going to Italy. More specifically, on Thursday we're headed to Naples, where the lemons are the size of your head. The Mister has a conference for two days, and I'm tagging along, and then we're taking two days for ourselves to go whither we wish in the area. Capri? Sorrento? Amalfi? Any recommendations?

Also, on Tuesday we're going to try to make it to Binche for carnival, which is the most famous of the Belgian celebrations on shrove Tuesday. It involves lots and lots of people wearing the costumes pictured here, which I find to be slightly scary. We'll see how I feel about it in person. I may have to keep my distance, especially if any break away from the parade formation and head directly for me with those eerie green eyes and twirly moustaches.

We're thus hoping this coming week will be an improvement over this past week, during which the Mister had surgery on his hand, and I developed even more of a cold than I had before. On Thursday, we spent seven hours in the hospital for the surgery, and in hindsight (and because it went very smoothly, and because it wasn't *me* having the surgery) I can say it was kind of a cool experience. The doctors were able to remove the strange lumpy thing that was in there that has been puzzling them for months (they're still analyzing it, so it will remain a mystery until next week), and the Mister has had hardly any pain in his hand. He was calm and collected when I would have been a nervous pre-op wreck. And in the end, he ended up taking care of me, instead of the other way around, when my cold took a turn for the worse.

The good news from the week was that I passed my French class, at the head of the class! That's not saying a whole lot when you consider that half the class failed and our teacher called the general level of our class très faible (I got the highest grade with a 77, a figure that in any other academic context would definitely make me cry). But it is saying a lot when you consider that I skipped a level, didn't have very much opportunity for conversational practice, and wasn't terribly confident. I'm looking forward to starting the next level (like a video game!), hopefully with a congenial teacher and friendly classmates.

There you have it. The news from this (last) week, and the plans for this (next) week. American calendars place Sunday on the left of the grid, and European calendars place Monday at the left of the grid. The Mister would say "next week" when referring to this coming Thursday, whereas I would say "this week." It's all very confusing.

Warm welcome

I realize I have been avoiding writing in my blog, partly because to do so would somehow be to admit that I am no longer living the internet-free, sleeping-late, holiday-meals life of the previous three weeks. Instead, I am back in Brussels, where the golden Christmas sun of Barcelona is but a chimerical dream.

We've been here for a week, but the Mister was home sick for a few days (like everybody else in the world, it seems) and so the normal schedule wasn't quite normal yet. I have been baking up a storm, but avoiding washing dishes in protest against having had to leave my dishwasher in Barcelona behind. The chocolate-encrusted bowls sitting in the sink mock me.

Also mocking me: the unlit Christmas tree and the dust bunnies under the dining room table. Coming back to a not-quite-sparkling-clean house is never fun, and in this case, when combined with sleety rain and buffeting winds...

An incident occurred on Monday night that is utterly representative of the way I feel about returning to Brussels. As I rounded the corner to our street, carrying a couple of bags of groceries, I heard a terrible coughing sound. The crazy old man who always totters up and down our street smoking a cigar was in the process of hocking up a lung.

As if in slow motion, I realized he was about to spit, and his position, leaning against the wall of the corner building, meant that I was directly in his line of fire. I dodged, but I wasn't quick enough, and a large clod of spittle and mucus OH HOW GROSS I AM GROSSED OUT EVEN THINKING ABOUT IT AGAIN landed on my jacket sleeve and glove. I sort of screamed and looked at him, but what does one say to someone who has just SPIT ON YOU?

Plus as I mentioned he might be crazy, and I don't speak the kind of French that allows me to quickly formulate a response to invasion of personal space and cleanliness by spit. So I rushed on, my arm awkwardly outstretched in front of me, all the way up to our apartment where I ran to the sink and washed it off as best I could, holding back a gagging reflex. I still have yet to use the gloves again.

With that as an emblematic welcome back to our neighborhood, you can see why I just want to run back to Barcelona. Actually, running there is a good idea because I might work off a few of the million Christmas calories I ingested over the break.

I suppose I can pretend I'm still there by downloading the pictures we took. One of the presents that came out of the sturdy Christmas box from Vermont was a FANTASTIC camera, so pictures will indeed be forthcoming, I promise.

Meanwhile, it's still January, and all I can think about are the weeks and weeks of cold and gray that we still have ahead of us. They should make Christmas later in the year. Are you listening, "they"?

Saint Nicholas and the little pigs

Today is the 6th of December, the day on which children here in Belgium wake up to find that Saint Nicholas has come to their house, bishop's mitre and all squeezed down the chimney, and left them some goodies in their shoes. He comes accompanied by a donkey and a man named Pere Fouettard, which roughly translates to Father Whipper. Fouettard is black, due to sliding down the chimney first, he bears a whip, and he's looking for bad kids. Nothing like a little crack of the whip to warm the Christmas spirit!

One of the day's beloved Christmas songs involves three little children who get killed and chopped up like sausage by a butcher, and all of that within the first two stanzas. Saint Nicholas comes to find them seven years later and wakes them up from their salty nap. They say they feel great, and are then alive to run around the countryside again. In some versions, the butcher becomes Pere Foettard and ends up as Nicholas' sidekick.

Besides the kids being chopped up like little pigs, the stores are full of little marzipan pigs. Turns out it's not because of the song, but because pigs are symbols of prosperity (think piggy banks, and also the days when families fattened their pig all year long and then killed it right around Christmastime).

Much of this I learned from my French professor in today's class, and we listened to the song with the lyrics in front of us, so I am confident this was not a question of misunderstanding. She was very nice and brought us chocolate and a special Belgian Christmas bread vaguely shaped like a baby Jesus, but she also started making crazy claims about the US and Santa Claus, one of which was to state that America is a mostly Catholic country.

This is not the first time professors and others have made wildly incorrect assertions about the US. I think it's normal for people to have stereotypes and preconceptions about other countries that must sometimes be dispelled. But I think in the case of good old America, people believe themselves to be knowledgeable about the place because of cultural exports like movies, products, and so on, even though they have never been there. So a false confidence causes some false assumptions to be believed. Which can be rather annoying to someone who finds herself in the position of trying to explain what the (crazily diverse and geographically huge) country of America is actually like. Anyway, I have now officially gotten off on a tangent! Back to the bishop born in Turkey who became a symbol of goodwill and presents. Mostly presents.

So how did we celebrate Saint Nicholas here in our little household? The Mister came home bearing a huge speculoos cookie (a cinnamon Belgian specialty) in the shape of Saint Nicholas. I had also purchased Nicholas cookies, wrapped them, and placed them in his shoes. Yes, we got each other the same thing! It was kind of like The Gift of the Magi, but without me cutting off my hair or him selling his watch. The poverty is there though, because this month's paycheck has been lost. It never arrived in the bank, and M's employer insist they made the payment. We are in dire straits, so much so that we debated whether or not to buy a two-euro sandwich on our way home last night (from seeing Lorin Maazel conduct Beethoven's 9th! for free!) and had to beg off paying rent for a few days while we wait for people in Spain to finish partying. (M's employer is incommunicado because today is one of its numerous holidays, and since there's only one day between today and the weekend, why, they take that day off too! So no contact until Monday.)

For further amusing tales of wacko Christmas traditions from around the world (why does this holiday seem to inspire such specific and bizarre practices?), I recommend listening to David Sedaris in this episode or this episode of This American Life. Too bad he doesn't get to the Catalans and their pooping log.

Brussels sparkle

This afternoon M. and I met to run an errand at a store. It seemed a mundane kind of a thing to do, but when we got to the store, the mundane errand was transformed into an amazing sensory experience. The errand was, in a mouthful: to choose a fabric for M. to bring to Barcelona this weekend to give to the restorer who is refurbishing some antique chairs for us. We had already run into difficulties, as other places had limited selection in stock.

So today, on a recommendation, we went to Le Chien Vert, the Green Dog. This place was incredible: a huge warehouse with luxurious, artistic and unexpected details. And the fabric! No little swatch books for them. Everything was in huge rolls, hanging on undulating chains. The texture, the color: I wanted to swim in it all. The metaphor is appropriate because everywhere boats were hanging from the ceilings, and water was flowing. Click here to see more pictures of what I'm talking about. (The picture above is just one of the store's beautiful fabric displays.)

I left the place feeling fed, and so was well-disposed toward Brussels as a whole. From there, I set out to do some Christmas shopping before meeting fellow choir members to do a final publicity push for our concert this weekend.

As it turns out, today was the day of putting up the city's Christmas decorations, and setting up the annual Christmas fair. Everywhere I walked, baubles and sparkles and lights and greens were being strung around the city by men perched precariously on ladders. The lights spanning the streets were partially up and partially turned on, and it was like watching a gray old lady put on her spangled evening gown.

(My favorite non-Christmas Christmas decoration of all was a street strung with rows of black umbrellas beneath cascades of "rain" in light; under just one umbrella could be seen the silver sillhouette of a man clicking his heels. How perfect for this rainy city!)

As night fell, and I walked around to the central hotels with my choir buddy/fellow leafleteer, a lovely Hungarian girl, the bright blue lights climbed further up the tallest spire in the Grand Place, a sparkly spiderweb woven by invisible bugs. The desolate streets of the city were made alive with light, so that even the cold and the drafty spaces usually so unfriendly to pedestrians were somehow welcoming with warmth.

When I finally managed to drag my weary legs home, I had to laugh at the only Christmas decorations visible in our outlying neighborhood. Pitifully small (live) Christmas trees, without lights, were lashed to all of the lightposts and traffic light bars. They looked for all the world like fir-tree imitations of Odysseus' crew, trying to withstand the sirens' lure by being tied to the masts of their ship. The siren tonight was Brussels, singing Christmas carols with light.