Settling in

So I know that I was supposed to be writing subsequent blog entries about our trip this summer but several factors have conspired against me. First, we remain internetless. From time to time, at unpredictable moments of the day, I am able to pick up a neighbor's wifi signal. But this signal is likely to fizzle out after a few minutes and be maddeningly slow. We have signed up for high-speed service, but according to the guy at the store, there's some problem with the "central system" and our request hasn't yet been uploaded. Once that happens, it can take a month to actually be installed.

Second, I have been preoccupied with getting comfortably dug into life here in Barcelona. Summer, as a result, seems like a distant dream. I'm loving--LOVING--being here. As the fourth person in a row complemented me on my Catalan today, I realized how handy it is to actually speak the language of the place where you're trying to settle in. Being my shy self, I probably, if subconsciously, avoided taking as much advantage as I could have of being in Brussels, due to my fledgling French. And the Belgiums, even if I had spoken superb French, don't so much do the complement thing.

The one ongoing disagreement I have with a friend of ours, a Catalan girl, who we met in Brussels and who now lives in Barcelona, is over the relative merits of each city. She pines for Brussels and makes what I think are erroneous claims about how much nicer it is there. Isn't it self evident that sunny boulevards, tree-lined beaches, and tapas are much better than grey, grey, and more grey? For me, there's also the hands-down superiority of a seafood-based cuisine vs. a ham-hock based cuisine. We had a reunion of sorts with her and other friends in Brussels for the Beer Festival two weekends ago, and although it was great fun, and boy they make good beer, it wasn't enough to make me wish to move back there.

Sure, there are things that are difficult about living in Barcelona too. Red tape and general administrative unhelpfulness abound (see above re: internet), and I'm still getting the hang of how things work. We finally received our libro de familia--the official Spanish document confirming our marriage--over TWO YEARS after our wedding. And now I'll be jumping through all sorts of hoops about residency and health care here. But it feels like putting down roots, so it's worth it, even if it all happens poc a poc.

Plus, I love our neighborhood. Around the corner: the metro stop, the market for fresh fish and fruit and vegetables, the cinema with good movie selections, and a plaza where children swarm over the playground and old folks sit on benches. The demographic seems to be predominantly families with little kids and retirees. Down our street or one over: the video store, my new gym (I just joined yesterday!), my hair salon, the grocery store, the greatest little wine shop ever, and a number of other tiny shops that are perfect for odds and ends. If I need to do more serious shopping, there's a Corte Ingles (Spain's major department store) and a whole fancy mall a ten-minute walk north. Most of the time I don't have to go up there, though. A ten-minute walk south, there's the train station, which can take me to the suburbs, where the Mister's family lives, to the airport, or anywhere else I feel like going!

The Mister's 93-year-old grandmother lives a couple of blocks over, and not only does she invite us over for delectable lunches, and tell me exactly where to go for anything I need, she also explains the history of this neighborhood. Strolling through it with her is like a walking history lesson. Through her eyes, I see this barri when it used to be a town on the outskirts of Barcelona, smell the smell of the chocolate factory that used to be here, hear the tram that used to pass where the four-lane road is now, and see the view of the Tibidabo hill from the fields that used to border the buildings (now, if I lean off our front balcony, I can just see Tibidabo's church lit up at night). Through her eyes, I see how the ladies in their fancy dresses used to gather at the town center for dances. As a little girl, she grew up in the apartment where we live now, and tells us about how she shared our tiny bedroom with a whole bedful of siblings.

Speaking of the house, we're getting it in shape slowly but surely. Still missing are a washer/dryer, a coffee table, and various other odds and ends, and we have yet to put anything up on the walls, but we finally bought a couple of area rugs that I'm really happy with, and I'm enjoying working in the office. I've been doing a much better job of writing for solid stretches of time every day, despite running around to get life in order.

The Mister is in Brussels during the week, but I much prefer having him to myself on the weekend rather than on weekdays. Plus, he's usually able to fly in on Thursday and leave Monday, so that's a nice long stretch. So far, so good. We'll see if I'm still singing the same tune in a few months! In any case, unless the unexpected happens, this arrangement will just be for another year, and then our lives will be one big question mark. Question marks are scary, so for now I'll concentrate on getting settled in here!

Sublime

No one told me just how desolate, just how cliff-hugging, just how hairpin-curvy, or just how beautiful the Big Sur coast road is. I mean, I had read Robinson Jeffers and John Steinbeck, and I knew it was going to be full of sweeping views and water crashing onto craggy stone towers.

But as we drove through the country just north of San Simeon (before the real curves start), I thought: this is what they are talking about! How lovely! No wonder it's famous.

I was getting ahead of myself, because I had no idea what was yet to come.

And we were woefully unprepared. Having no reservation for a campground, we planned to stop "somewhere along the way." I had a quarter tank of gas, which I thought I would be able to replenish, also "somewhere along the way." And it was starting to get dark.

Thus it was that we found ourselves swerving around the tightest of curves, perched upon the highest of cliffs, face-first into the most deliriously blazing of sunsets. I could barely see the road, both because the intense flaming orange filled the windshield and because all I wanted to do was stare down the horizon: undulating cliffs and cascades of clouds falling golden into the sea. But I crept along and hugged the side of the mountain and, alternating with incoherent exclamations about beauty and telling the Mister to take pictures, nervously watched the gas needle plummet as we vainly searched for campground indications.



It occurred to me that this moment would qualify as Sublime, capital S, in the 18th-century, Burkean sense of the word, an experience (usually of the natural world, most particularly the Alps) in which terror and beauty simultaneously overwhelm the beholder. If John Dennis' conception of the sublime was an appreciation of utter beauty "mingled with Horrours, and sometimes almost with despair," well, our drive along the Big Sur coast road sure was sublime.

Because we were starting to despair when at last we reached the little outpost of the outside world called Gorda, and I was grateful--grateful!--to pay $6.25 per gallon of gas. I asked the guy where the next campground was, and he said laconically, "just a ways up the road." We had already stopped at a couple of places that were totally full, and I was past freaking out, already stoically resigning myself to driving those curves in the dark.



"A ways up the road" turned out to be, oh, three miles, but they felt like twenty. We rejoiced at the sight of a sign saying Plaskett Creek campground, but despaired once again when it became quite obvious that most of the first-come, first-served campsites were taken. At last, we spotted a tiny spur off to the side with a postage-stamp campsite, and in the almost pitch dark, we set up our tent. We had to make do with no running water and pit toilets, and for dinner we ate peanut butter sandwiches out the trunk of the car, but we counted ourselves lucky.

Sublime.

Snapshots

It's September. A whole summer of sunsets have gone by. I didn't write any of it down while it was happening, and now trying to find the thread of this blog is a daunting task. The trips we took--to the US for a month, to Amsterdam, to Italy--stand out as a series of images, so I'm going to try to capture just a few of them here over the next few days.

The gist of the summer was this: I flew to Boston, hung out with family there, drove for three days with my parents and siblings and nephews out to Iowa, spent five days in the town of my birth (the Mister arrived while we were all there), and then another five in Yankton, South Dakota for a family reunion. Then the Mister and I flew to Las Vegas and rented a car and spent two weeks exploring the parts of the country we have never seen: Grand Canyon and Zion National Parks, then Los Angeles and up through Santa Barbara, Big Sur, Santa Cruz, San Francisco, then over to Yosemite, Death Valley, and back to Vegas. We camped, stayed with family and friends, and resorted to hotels when we had to. It was the best trip ever. We flew back to Barcelona for just three days, then spent a week in Amsterdam while the Mister studied Dutch. After another week in Barcelona, we flew to Turin for three days, and well, that was two days ago and now I'm here in breezy Barcelona, wondering where the summer went.

Like I said, I'm not sure how to write it all down, so I'll just start snapshot by snapshot, sunset by sunset as it were. They were all so different, but all equally magnificent.

On the docket

Today's focus will be packing bags for my Tuesday departure to the US (since we'll be at the beach for the weekend, returning Monday). I should say "bag" because I'm aiming to cram a month's worth of stuff into one carry-on suitcase. And since our activities range from camping and hiking to city dining and wine tasting, in temperatures ranging from Death Valley Pickle to San Francisco Fickle, I imagine the task will be a bit tricky. I will count on layers, and on laundromats, to make it work. I'll choose the most lightweight things I own. The clunkiest things (tennis shoes, for camping/hiking, and jeans and a sweatshirt) I plan to wear on the plane. So here's hoping for the best!

Almost a year ago was the disastrous pre-trip where I discovered that our paid-for tickets did not exist. So another task today will be thorough confirmations of all plane tickets.

There are still a million details to figure out for the Las Vegas/Grand Canyon/California driving tour, but I figure I can do a little bit of that while I'm in Boston, and that we can also just go with the flow and find places to sleep on the fly. Is that a bad idea? It being high season and all?

Last but not least, tonight we're going to see a Madeleine Peyroux concert at the beautiful Palau de la Música Catalana. Yippee! M's birthday gift from his parents were concert tickets, and we got to choose which concert (limited by the fact that it had to be, um, today, the only day M. is in town before our trip and without prior commitments). Lucky for us, this concert is happening today, and lucky for me, the birthday boy is sharing his present with yours truly.

Reader

Last night a friend came over, a friend we haven't seen in months, and part of his news concerned a business venture/harebrained scheme that involves selling ebook readers to the European market. He wanted our two cents as to whether this is a good idea. In the US, the Sony Reader and the Amazon Kindle have made some waves, but here there are few to zero places to buy such devices, and publishers are correspondingly slow to format new books in European languages. Anyway, whatever he decides to do, the best part is that he had a Reader with him. And he left it with us for a couple of days to try out!

I will defend and champion the old fashioned, ink-and-paper book as long as I have breath, but I have to admit I jumped up and down like the geek that I am when the Reader come out of its box. I've been loosely following the news on these things but hadn't yet held one in my hands, much less used one to read a book.

So last night before falling asleep I curled up in bed with a Ken Follett e-ink novel (pre-loaded, it was pretty much my only option longer than a twenty-page excerpt) instead of my ink-ink James Baldwin novel. I am rather surprised about this, but I loved it (not the novel--blech, the experience)! "Turning" pages didn't involve anything more challenging than a slight pressure of my thumb, which in bed with a husband who is bound to bolt upright and look about him as if an intruder had just catapulted through the window when I make too much noise, is an advantage.

I'm enthusiastic about the e-ink, which really is easy to read and easy on the eyes, in bright light or in low light (although there is no internal light source, so in the dark, I still needed a lamp). The device is a pleasure to hold, weighty without being heavy, and is a perfect compact size; I could slip it in my purse and easily bring it on the metro or on the plane.

And for sure, what made me interested in the thing in the first place are the implications for travel. I routinely lug around piles of novels to read while I'm in the air and wherever I'm going. Imagine no more heavy knapsacks! Imagine being able to refer to books that I needed for research without bringing the book along! Hundreds of books in one!

Which brings me to the drawbacks. As a literary scholar, I see great potential for this thing but have a feeling the realization is going to be long in coming. The titles available are bound to be best-sellers and standard classics, with not much in between. Poetry? Literary theory? History? Literature in other languages? (Which is the challenge our friend is facing.) Plus, it would be absolutely essential to be able to mark and annotate pages for future reference. The Reader has a "bookmark" feature, but it only enables you to "dogear" a particular page, with no way to distinguish why you did so. If you want to refer to your bookmarks, you get a random (the top?) line of text for the page, which doesn't help if you were interested in something further along. And your only option for deleting bookmarks is all or nothing. Plus, unless they come up with some very good interactive indexes and tables of contents, reference books will be as good as useless.

The menu interface leaves a lot to be desired, and can sometimes be slow. Even turning pages is annoyingly slow; there's a sort of black and white "flash" each time you do it. You can look at pictures and book covers but they're very slow in loading and only in black and white. It plays music, and you can stick headphones into it to listen while you read (not a feature I'd use, I don't think, since I don't like music piped directly into my head while my head is immersed in the world of a book).

I understand the Kindle does have internet connectivity, and does include newspaper and magazine reading capability. For me that would be useful, since a reader like this is the perfect distance between a laptop (on which I normally read the paper, but only at home or somewhere with internet) and a fancy phone (which I imagine is too small to really read a mag or paper), and would be perfect for commutes and travel--while saving oodles of one-use paper trash. The Reader, without these features, probably can't compete with the Kindle.

There are also looming questions about copyright, the price of books, digital vs. analog. Would I want both versions of the same book, if it's one I want to own and keep?

And the big question, the question our friend is asking us: Is it worth it? Would I buy it? For 300 bucks, I'd wait until they come out with better and cheaper versions before I'd buy. I'm thinking it's still not the moment to jump on this particular bandwagon. Hopefully someday the clever and cool folks at Apple will come up with a design that puts all the others to shame.

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...

Too sweet times two

It occurred to me after this weekend that I made the same mistake twice, once in Paris and once in Florence: I wasn't choosy enough about my street food.

The day we arrived in Paris, I was jonesing for a good crêpe. Dinner had been eaten, and I still hadn't had one; the situation was getting desperate. We were strolling the Champs-Elysées in the evening, and I decided to go for one of the little stands to the side of the avenue, even though I had my doubts when I saw that the crêpes were pre-made. Overcoming my doubts, I thought: it's Paris--all the crêpes are good, right? But sure enough, my lemon-sugar version was so terrible that I had to throw it away without finishing (which, if you know me, means that it had to have been really really bad): gummy re-heated pancake, too much sugar, not enough lemon to cut the sweetness. It was like eating pure, chewy, sugar.

By the time we had to leave, the next evening, I realized I still hadn't had a good crêpe. So as we headed back to the hotel to pick up our luggage and get a taxi to the airport, I stopped at a place near Saint-Michel, dangerously at the heart of the touristy area near Notre-Dame. But there was a line (not always a good indicator, especially if they're tourists, but still a positive sign) and the guy was making crêpes to order. Plus, the chocolate was pure dark chocolate, a bar broken up and melted onto the pancake, so I knew my favorite, the banana-chocolate version, would likely be good. It was better than good, it was delicious, a perfect harmony of fruit, bitter dark chocolate, and warm crêpe.

But I did not learn from my mistake. In Florence, after having dropped my luggage at the hotel, I was supposed to go find the Mister, mid-presentation, at the Palazzio Vecchio. But first I had to eat lunch. I ordered a slice of pizza just so I wouldn't feel guilty about eating only ice cream for my meal, because what I really wanted was a good gelato. I again made the mistake of choosing the first place that I saw, on the corner of the piazza in front of the palace, despite my misgivings about the gelato's rather insipid look. It's Italy, right? All the gelato should be good.

The coconut and melon flavors that I chose weren't horrible enough to throw away, but they weren't that great either. My idea of a good gelato is pure, intense, condensed flavor. It should bowl you over. But these were just overly sweet ice creams with a hint of coconut, a hint of melon. The coconut too pillowy, the melon too grainy, neither the texture nor the flavor made it special.

Fast-forward a day and a half. I still hadn't eaten a good gelato (although, thanks to the generosity of the conference organizers, I had eaten a delectable meal at Rossini). We were heading home from dinner, and in the morning we would be catching the bus to the airport, and I didn't think 8 o'clock in the morning would be a socially acceptable time to eat ice cream. So it was then or never, but my hopes were dim, since it was nearly midnight. Yet, we saw a glimmer in the dark, the warm colors of an ice cream parlour across the street from the Ponte Santa Trinita, and a line of Italians waiting to order their cones. A good sign indeed.

I ordered a small dish of the pear gelato, and it was heaven. Like eating a perfectly ripe pear, an explosion of fruit in the mouth, the cool, dense texture of ice cream. I could leave the city a satisfied gelato-eater.

So I hope my lesson is learned, next time I want to eat a city's signature sweet without trusting my better judgment. Go where there's a line of locals, where it's made to order, where the flavors are home-made.

Your brain to bubble cool

For my birthday last month my parents sent me a lovely package, including a book of Emily Dickinson's poems and letters written to her friend, sister-in-law and next-door neighbor, Susan Huntington Dickinson. I've loved reading through it, not only because it offers a perspective of Dickinson that quite shatters the fragile, secluded spinster myth, but also because of the tenderness and spontaneity of their correspondence.

Here's a poem I especially enjoyed, one that expands on the idea, contained in a (later I think?) Dickinson line, "slipping is crash's law."

80

He fumbles at your Soul
As Players at the Keys
Before they drop full
Music on --
He stuns you by degrees --
Prepares your brittle Nature
For the Etherial Blow
By fainter Hammers --
further heard --
Then nearer -- Then so slow
Your Breath has time to
straighten --
Your Brain -- to bubble Cool --
Deals -- One -- imperial --
Thunder bolt --
That scalps your
naked Soul --

When Winds take Forests
in their Paws --
The Universe -- is still --

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.

Broken

I return to my little home on the internet after what seems to me like aeons, but what in reality was only a few days.

My computer (the professor) died, you see. The hard drive just gave up and petered out. According to Philippe, the dude at the place where I brought it for a second opinion, it was broken in several places. I now have a new hard drive, but it is of course entirely devoid of everything that makes my computer my computer.

And of course, I hadn't backed up in a looong time. I lost all of my pictures, all of my music (although I'm going to try to reinstate what was on my ipod), archived emails, translation work, poetry, and my thesis. Yes, my thesis. I have some piecemeal versions of things stored on a little flash drive, and everything dating before last summer is on the external hard drive. But, but, but... I'm mourning even the loss of my web browser bookmarks, because I had a lot of research discoveries stored in that list.

Last Wednesday and Thursday were spent in horror and denial. I felt very very alone, not only because I was without my computer (my source of pretty much all connection with the outside world, plus all entertainment--movies and music), but also because in this country of PC's, I didn't know where to turn, and my husband was out of town. I called my brother, international cell charges notwithstanding, ostensibly to get his advice on some attempts at resuscitation (I initially thought it was just a question of a too-full hard drive) but really just to hear his voice.

Friday I flew to Italy to meet up with the Mister for a quick visit to Florence, where he had presented at a conference. It was my only chance to see him during a long stretch of his travels, so at the last minute I had purchased tickets. Although when Friday rolled around I wasn't very much in the mood to leave town, it was a good thing I did because I could somewhat escape my computer woes (and, not incidentally, escape the frigid air and incessant rain that this country seems to think is acceptable weather for June).

Philippe called when we were standing in front of the beautiful Santa Maria Novella, only to inform me that it was impossible to rescue the hard drive. If sackcloth and ashes had been available, I would have been wearing them, accompanied by garment-rending and gnashing of teeth.

Dragging my feet, because I knew it would be depressing, I went to pick up the computer today. And indeed, it is depressing. I don't know where to start to make the machine feel like mine again.

More Sardinia

It's been a rainy, cold, rainy, gray, rainy week in Brussels. The kind of week that makes me want to hibernate. My mind protests--it's June!--but my body shrinks in on itself, my eyelids droop, and I am uncapable of tackling that sinkful of dirty dishes.

As an avoidance measure and a dose of escapism, I'll allow myself to revisit Sardinia for a while, to travel back to its stark landscape and think of the sun... (For part I, go here. For musical accompaniment, go here.)

***

The morning after the wedding we managed to tag along with our friends from Naples for a bit of sightseeing in Alghero. She: a petite but formidable Italian political science professor. He: a French professor originally from the Congo, who always wears fabulous powder-blue suits. They've been married for thirty-eight years--yet another example of the many multicultural couples we meet in Europe. For me, the best part was that we could speak in French; thus, at least while we were with them, I didn't have the frustration of understanding much of what was going on while not being able to muster complete sentences in response (as with Italian).

En route, we found out that it was his birthday that day, and that the main goal would be to find a great place to eat seafood for lunch. Besides a momentary pang of worry that we were intruding on their celebration, I was delighted with the plan. And the pang quickly disappeared as they insisted that the celebration would be even better with us along.

Alghero is a beautiful seaside fortress town (most of the fortresses having been built by the Catalans) and that day it its sandy stone walls were sun-drenched, the water glittering. After a brief stroll at the port, our friend spotted a restaurant terrace with perfect balcony views of the sea. We were shown to a table perched on a little bridge crowning an arch of the city wall, and thus we had views in two directions: the boats and water portside, and the stone alleyways leading into the town. We committed ourselves into the restaurant's care, telling them to bring an assortment of antipasti and the freshest fish of the day. What issued forth: a huge array of delectable plates of seafood. I especially remember a fish that was paired with fresh peaches, and another version of the octopus and potato salad we had eaten the day before. And the main dish, a magnificent spigola (sea bass) was just what we had been looking for: delicious, fresh, simply prepared.

We asked our waitress about Catalan speakers in Alghero, curious to see if we would find any. She herself didn't speak Catalan, and told us we would have a hard time finding someone. Nevertheless, as we strolled the city after our long lunch (a stroll that was enhanced by refreshing homemade gelato), we saw signs everywhere that Catalan was actively spoken and promoted: all street names and tourist information signs were in both Catalan and Italian, and many shops sported stickers indicating that "Aqui es parla Català" (Catalan spoken here).

Soon it was time to re-traverse the island to somewhere in the vicinity of Tula, a tiny town smack in the middle of Sardinia, for a party at the bride's sister's farmhouse. Earlier that morning, I had mused aloud as to whether we would see any of the nuraghi, prehistoric conical towers whose ruins dot the landscape. These towers are over three milennia old, and still are among the most prominent man-made constructions to be seen outside of Sardinia's cities. Despite a lot of driving, we hadn't glimpsed any, but as we followed the ribbons tied on the corner of country roads leading us to the party, suddenly looming up out of the hill was an impressive nuraghe, which the bride's nephew later told us was one of the most well-preserved examples.

Thus cheered and awed by the sight of such a formidable piece of history (mysterious, too; they don't know for sure what they were for), we drove into the farmyard. Inside a walled courtyard the family was busy setting up snacks, including homemade wine (in big soda bottles, labeled either AM--which somehow meant fruity/sweet--or secco), cheese made from the family's goats, and fresh olives, plus leftovers from the reception the day before. We admired the sweeping views, watched as the sheep were herded out to a far pasture, the shepherd accompanied by four dogs of amusingly different shapes. One of the little nephews found a scorpion somewhere, put it in a jam jar, and delighted in waving it under the nose of all the women. We went to see the goats and pigs, and visited the milking room and watched the sister (they couldn't stop work even when the party was at their house!) and brother-in-law wrangle 150 goats into the milking machines.

Sometime before the steaming plates of pasta were brought out of the cavernous barn of a kitchen, Stefano the guitarist showed up and someone got out an accordion, a harmonica, and a tambourine. As dusk fell, they traded Sardinian songs and Neopolitan songs, and little kids danced around them. At about this time, I found myself sitting next to the bride's mother, and even though my Italian was rather more like pidgin Spanish with an Italian accent, we had a long conversation about the house that she and her husband had built, what it was like to have six children, to give birth in a house with no running water...

Here are a couple of videos of the music, including glimpses of the matriarchs of the clan:


Sardinia accordion from Robin from Cant d'ocell on Vimeo.


Sardinia harmonica from Robin from Cant d'ocell on Vimeo.

When finally it was time to drive to Olbia, where we were staying before flying out the next morning, we made the rounds to say goodbye and give our thanks to our hosts. That's the thing about Italians: by then we were sent on our way as warmly as family, even though we had known most of them just for a short weekend. When I told the bride how beautiful her family was (that was a sentence I could muster in Italian), she impulsively squeezed me tight in her joy that I had seen it too.

Whirling

Where to start? My head is whirling a bit. Maybe the varnish has gone to my head. I just spent the last two days staining and varnishing our wall-to-wall bookshelves in Barcelona (we wanted a grayish color and I think it came out sort of blue and I'm not super happy with it, but since I was never really happy with most of the colors in the house [we chose them over the internet {in case it's not obvious, choosing paint colors over the internet is not a good idea}] the bookshelves can just be part and parcel of the strange pastel palette we had already established).

And that was after a quick overnight stay in Paris that felt so much more than quick. It felt ample and romantic, as trips to Paris should.

I was sad to miss the funeral of our friend in Vermont over the weekend, but I am even more grateful than ever for the contact afforded by modern communication: this blog, photos, e-mails, cell phones. Though it can't be denied that a wired world has sometimes changed our lives for the worse, in this respect it is reassuringly good. Living so far away from family and friends in the states would be so so much harder if letters or even just phone calls were all I had.

Also I want to write more about Sardinia, as promised, and that already seems like so long ago. I will need to write about it soon lest it all dissolve into hazy memory. Soon!

The sting

It's a strange, sad day. After French class, I went to the train station to buy my ticket to Paris for tomorrow. As I walked into the station, I remembered that the Mister's train to Paris was leaving just about at that very moment (he has a conference there today and tomorrow and so we're meeting up in the morning), and I ran up to the Thalys platform and walked down the wagons until I found his familiar profile.

There we were, saying a surprise good-bye while the train steamed and beeped. But he broke some news that left me sobbing on the platform as the train pulled away, time only for a brief hug.

A close family friend of ours in Vermont, a young guy only 24 years old, died suddenly last night. He had battled leukemia for seven years, had gotten better, and then now, within days of discovering that the cancer had returned, passed away.

It's an incomprehensible loss; he was an only child and my heart mourns deeply for his parents, dear friends who have been fixtures of my life since before I can remember. My dad wrote, "[our friend] understood that his life was in God's hands. But it's so terribly hard to understand why he was taken from us." It is terribly hard to grasp such a thing, where human understanding and comprehension in the face of death fail us.

So no poem today, rather a passage from the Bible that is a lifeline for the shipwrecked, a promise in the face of human despair of death. In one of its beautiful metaphors, death is simply a change of clothes, something as quotidian and comforting as a new garment.

Listen, I tell you a mystery: We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed--in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed.

For the perishable must clothe itself with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality. When the perishable has been clothed with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality, then the saying that is written will come true: "Death has been swallowed up in victory."

"Where, O death, is your victory?
Where, O death, is your sting?"

Sardinian wedding

I want to write about last weekend's wedding, but it seems so unreal to me already, like I lived for a short time inside a novel--one that takes place seventy years ago, peopled with archetypal characters and elemental landscapes--but then I woke up, or the story ended. In the novel, I was a character myself; I spoke halting but lilted Italian with a tiny wizened woman who wore all black and a silver bun (the bride's mother), and I listened to the goats bleating and ate cheese made from their milk, and watched the moon rise heavy and orange over the fields while a bright-eyed boy in a black cap crooned Neapolitan songs on his guitar. But I was also reading the novel at the same time, I was the outsider who awkwardly observed, the foreigner drinking it all in, in order to remember as much as she could.

And because I want to remember it all, and since my memory is unpleasantly spotty, I need to at least get some of the key things down on paper (as it were).

One of those key things was the serenata. At nearly ten pm on Friday night, we arrived in little Alghero airport without a clue as to who was picking us up, what this person looked like, or how to contact him or her. To our utter surprise, the groom himself pulls up (on the eve of his wedding!!) in a tiny car and hurredly introduces us to the other passengers, and we zoom off into the Sardinian night. It transpires that we are smooshed in the car with the Neapolitan musician who will be helping the groom to serenade the bride and thus woo her to the altar (the wooing had I assume already taken place, but not the serenading). We drive over an hour, picking up other carloads of friends at several strategic points, until we are a caravan of some twenty five people, and after pulling onto roads that are increasingly narrow and tiny, we end up on a dirt road in the middle of the island, stumbling up the bride's driveway in the pitch dark, everyone laughing and shushing each other and hoping that no one heard the cars or seen the headlights. I am stumbling more than I might have because the stars are an inverted bowl of brilliance and all I want to do is look skyward.

There is a balcony, and when the singing starts, everything is just as you might imagine it would be. Lights go on one by one, the dog starts barking, heads poke out of windows and doors. Eventually the bride, laughing and surprised, appears, and descends to embrace her groom. With liberal kisses for everyone else as well. We all sing along with the last song, and I do too, though I don't know the words.

Everyone is invited inside and even though it is midnight, and no one has prepared for our arrival (the groom assured me it was all a surprise, a tradition from his part of Italy imported to her part of Italy), out of nowhere appear piles of paper-thin crispy bread (pane carasau), homemade salumi, cheese made from the bride's sister's goats, and bottles of wine. And huge heaping platters of tender almond cookies. Everyone lingers by the door, and back in the yard in the dark, the guitarist starts playing again. My husband sings along, and we watch the moonrise. I have never seen a moonrise. For the first few minutes as it quickly moved up over the horizon, it seemed as bright as the sun, but without the sun's brightening effects on the sky. He and I fall asleep on the drive to the hotel, forty minutes back over country roads.

***

The next morning, again to our surprise, the groom appeared at the hotel at the appointed departure hour, this time wearing a blue suit and a shirt with brass bells at the collar. Someone handed him a bouquet of red roses. A long line of cars gathered, and bedecked with ribbons, honking all the way, we drove to the bride's village. This time we rode with professors from Naples, and all of us were puzzled when we passed the town hall, where the wedding was to take place, and continued to the same house we had visited the night before.

It turns out that the groom has to show up to collect the bride Sardinia-style, and receive a blessing from the family--the equivalent, I suppose, of a girl's parents/father walking her down the aisle. The roses were to convince her to be whisked off by the bell-rung boy. While we waited for her to appear, the guests mingled about and enjoyed a lavish spread of more of those delicious cookies and a tableful of others, including cloudy almond meringues, and coffee and moscatel and fizzy Italian aperatifs. When I walked into the house I was surprised to see a row of five elderly figures seated on a couch, every one of them in head-to-toe black clothes: four women with severe buns in their silver hair, and a gentleman with a cane and cap. They reminded me of the pictures I'd seen of the Mister's great-grandmothers (black clothes and black kerchiefs on their heads, every day) or of Italian women in the 1930s. It took me some time to realize that one of these ladies, whom I assumed were grandmothers and great aunts, was in fact the mother of the bride.

When the bride descended the stairs, to thunderous cheering and camera flashes, and accepted the bouquet from her intended, he brought her outside, where her mother waited with a plate of rose petals and rice. As we all watched, she recited a blessing, flinging rice and roses over their heads, and smashed the plate at their feet. (More plate smashing was to occur throughout the day: at the town hall after the wedding, and at the hotel before the reception.)

The wedding itself took place in the town hall, a square unlit box with humidity-warped, faded 1970s travel posters on the walls. But the warmth and joy of all the participants filled the room, and the judge (who wore a red sash) made it clear that this bride was a well-loved daughter of the entire village. She is, in fact, the youngest and prettiest of six children, including five other beautiful sisters and one brother, who has severe mental retardation, but who raced around all weekend embracing everyone and hooting out his excitement. He was a part of the merry hubbub, gently watched over by all.

The main focus of the reception, back at the hotel, was the food: no less than fourteen (fourteen!!) courses, and when we studied the menu on our table, we knew we had to take it easy so that we wouldn't miss out on tasting any one of the regional foods. We ate an abundance of seafood, fried antipasti, two kinds of pasta specialties (one of them was gnocchetti, which despite the name are not like potato gnocchi but are smaller curled shells that look like gnocchi), delectable clams, big plates of raw carrot, celery, and fennel (I was skeptical, but these were surprisingly refreshing in the middle of a long meal)... Now I can barely remember it all (I meant to bring home one of the menus but failed to grab one when we left) but I vividly recall the first of three desserts (not including the piles of cookies everywhere): seadas. These are pastry pockets stuffed with pecorino cheese, fried, and smothered with the local honey. Absolutely amazing.

We ate, and ate, and ate. For over five hours, just eating. And talking, of course. Across the table from us, a woman who works at a national archive seemed nice enough at first, but as the evening wore on, got increasingly too-friendly, woozily telling M. how beautiful I was and liberally dispensing cheek-smoosh kisses to everyone who got near her. While we all crowded around to watched the bride and groom cut the cake, I felt someone grab my tush and thought it was the mister because he was behind me when I turned around. But HE had seen, as he walked towards me, that it was Mrs. Too Friendly. Eeek!

Despite this unfortunate incident, I was charmed to pieces by the other company, especially Stefano the singer who had led the serenata the previous night. He was upset that the DJ wasn't letting him play often enough (although he had already regaled the bride and groom several times), and with his injured air, his guitar and smile, he was the classic picture of the underappreciated artist. He and the Mister got to talking about politics, and it turns out that his views are somewhere in the idealist-Marxist-anarchist range, anti-institutional and pro-equality. Somehow this was entirely of a piece with the music and the self-absorption, and I felt that I had just gotten to know one of the people I read about for my thesis on 1930s Spain: the tragic artist, the anarcho-idealist. Lofty pride and political conviction, softened by the romantic strumming and the twinkle of humor in his eyes.

Hours of eating, one spectacular espresso, and a bit of dancing later, the Mister and I decided to retire to our room, thinking that the party was winding down. After a good two and a half hours, we came down to take a stroll, and the party was still going on, our friend Stefano slumped on a bench and strumming melancholy melodies on his guitar into the night air.

***

I'm going to stop here, but in the next installment, I describe the events of the day after, which in some ways were even more fable-like than the wedding itself. Oh, and I should mention that the pink dress was perfect! I was perhaps even a bit more gussied up than some guests, but as I said last week, overdressed is better than underdressed.

I should be packing

In a last-minute attempt to learn something about the Italian island of Sardinia before landing there without a clue about local culture, I did some surfing. A few helpful New York Times articles and a badly translated poem or two later, I discovered this BBC broadcast about the music of Corsica and Sardinia. The music is haunting and the interviews are fascinating. Both halves are worth a listen, but the second half focuses on Sardinia.

I also discovered that D.H. Lawrence wrote several long essays about the island, collected as Sea and Sardinia, which I would love to bring along (one of the best joys of travel is reading literature about/set in a place while you are there), but I have a slim-to-none chance of finding a copy before my flight tomorrow morning.

I'm especially curious about the town of Alghero, which is still Catalan-speaking, even though the Catalans haven't been in charge around there for centuries. I'd love to hear what it sounds like, if the Italian has influenced it enough to make it odd or even unintelligible to my ears. From what I can tell, the ceremony will take place either in Alghero or not far from there, so hopefully we'll have a chance to find some local Catalan speakers.

And I hope to increase my small Italian vocabulary--it's all about gleaning, picking up what I can, at this point, since I've still not properly studied the language. It's high on the list, though.

Thanks to those who responded about the dress: two out of two votes are for the pink one, which is what I also decided yesterday after trying them all on and confirming my suspicions about what doesn't fit and what's too casual. Pink is cheerful and just right for a May wedding, and it looks great with a vintage beaded necklace I bought at a flea market here in Belgium.

So until next week: ciao, arrivederci, ciao ciao!

Italian wedding

Five days of visitors (who managed to come on the sunniest possible days of the year in Brussels) followed by three days in Barcelona has not done wonders for my productivity. Neither will leaving again on Friday for a wedding in Sardinia.

I am stressing quite a bit about the question of what to wear to said wedding. The last time I went to a wedding in Italy (a very similar circumstance, where I barely know anyone except my date, except that wedding took place in a terrassed villa overlooking the stunning Lago Maggiore) I was distinctly and embarrassingly underdressed.

I had hastily purchased a flowered cotton sundress in Salzburg, where I was living at the time, and stuffed it in my backpack. After an overnight train ride in a hot and crowded cabin, I arrived in Milan on the morning of the wedding and changed into my dress in a filthy restroom at the train station. Upon finding M, who had come by train from Barcelona, we were picked up by some relative of the groom and squeezed in the back of a tiny (also hot) car with several other wedding guests, and driven to the wedding, at least an hour away. I stressed much of the way because we were late (the finding and and squeezing in and leaving had taken some time) and because I hadn't seen M. in ages and he had to make polite conversation with the other folks in the car.

I needn't have worried; evidently weddings, like everything else in Italy, start rather late. When we arrived, almost an hour behind the appointed time, the bride and groom hadn't even shown up yet. However, I was immediately self-conscious because every other guest there was impeccably fabulous in that Italian way of theirs. Not that everyone was dressed formally; I remember seeing women in pants and men without ties. But there was a lot of silk and satin, a host of perfectly draped scarves, exquisite hairdos, fancy heels: everything breathed elegance, expense, and fashion. My cotton sundress suddenly made me feel like I was twelve years old. And it didn't help that I still felt the grime of a long trip and a train station restroom clinging to my skin.

Hence my Italian wedding anxiety syndrome. This time around, I want to feel good about the way I look, even though I really have no idea about fashion and don't own a pair of heels. Just as before, I am completely unsure what the wedding will be like, but I'd rather be overdressed than underdressed. Just as before, we will be picked up by some unknown entity from the Alghero airport, but at least we'll have a night at a hotel before the wedding.

So I need help. What to wear? On Sunday in Barcelona night I was frantically trying to dig out a pair of sandals that would be appropriate for a wedding, quite fruitlessly. (Where, oh where did we put our summer shoes?) I will have to make do with ballet flats, I think.

My options are:
1. A muted hot-pink strapless dress. Simple but fancy because of shape/draping. I could wear with roped pearl necklace and a light blue scarf.
2. A black dress with a white swirly/chain pattern. T-back, fitted waist, draped skirt. Don't know how to accessorize it.
3. Black pants and a pleated green silk top. Shimmery and thin straps. Maybe the most flattering option. Could wear with earrings and necklace given to me by the Mister for my birthday. Too informal?
4. A red matching pants and top outfit with spaghetti straps. Dressier than option 3, but I've worn it to about five weddings already. May not fit me any more.

It's possible that, once again, I will arrive in Italy feeling rather grimy, because our shower has been cold-water only for a week now. Before, at least the bath spigot had hot water, and I could take baths. Yet upon arriving here yesterday, and despite the fact that workmen have been here twice already and have supposedly fixed the problem, things are worse: there is no hot water anywhere in the house. I have to shower at the swimming pool across the street. I'm clinging to the upside though: this weekend, there will be a hotel, where presumably I will be able to shower and dress. An improvement over the train station.

Chocolate and sun (have become ongoing themes, notably because this country has a lot of one and not a lot of the other)

So I'm sure the world is hanging on a thread to find out whether I found cocoa powder and whether the party was a success. Because, of course, the whole world reads this blog and this is all immensely interesting to everybody. (Dripping. With irony. But seriously: to the people who DO read this blog, especially if you're not related to me? I'm actually very surprised and honored.)

Thus you will be immensely gratified to know that--a million and one thanks to Anne--I was able to find the cocoa powder (with the coffee and tea! on the bottom shelf!) and make two ooey gooey chocolate cakes. Everybody loved them. Who wouldn't?

The party turnout was somewhat mediocre, because Friday and Monday are holidays in many European countries, and so people left for the long weekend. But the crowd was a good one, notably because it was a fun mixture of my friends and my co-birthday-girl's friends and very international.

And we have a ton of leftover chips and pizza and cake, and I always appreciate leftovers.

We have friends coming from Barcelona today to visit us for the long weekend--they and the mister took the same flight this morning and they should be here momentarily. Perhaps even walking up the stairs right now. Because they chose the best possible weekend to visit Brussels, weather wise, I'm sure we will be doing lots of traipsing around town in the sun, interspersed with lots of beer drinking in the sun.

Have a great weekend!

All this juice and all this joy

It's time for a spring poem. My favorite is Gerard Manley Hopkins' sonnet "Spring and All." Quite a number of his poems are on the springtime theme, which fits with the fecundity of his language, all of the assonance and alliteration and swinging (he called it "sprung") rhythm.

The line, "When weeds in wheels shoot long and lovely and lush" is one that I whisper to myself when everything is green and bursting around me. I'm not a big memorizer, but somehow Hopkins' poems are ones whose words stick with me, and chime out when I least expect them to.

Spring

Nothing is so beautiful as Spring--
When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;
Thrush's eggs look little low heavens, and thrush
Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring
The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;
The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush
The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush
With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.

What is all this juice and all this joy?
A strain of the earth's sweet being in the beginning
In Eden garden. --Have, get, before it cloy,
Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning,
Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy,
Most, O maid's child, thy choice and worthy the winning.

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.)

Help! Send cocoa powder!

My plan is to make two decadent chocolate cakes for the joint birthday party on Thursday (one of my good friends here was also born on May 8 so we've joined forces). My mom sent me her famous chocolate cake recipe, and that's what I really want to make; I can already almost taste it and my mouth is watering. Besides, it serves like a million people because it's towering and huge.

BUT, that recipe, as well as all of the chocolate cake recipes in my Gourmet cookbook, as well as most from my go-to food websites, call for cocoa powder.

Which is apparently not to be had, in this, the COUNTRY of CHOCOLATE.

Am I missing something? Is there a secret baker's supply store that I am unaware of that would supply all of my missing ingredients? This is not the first time I've run into difficulty over seemingly normal baking needs.

Alas, I shall just have to find a powder-less recipe. Maybe this one?

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.

Spring in a bottle

A surprise came in the mail a few minutes ago: a bottle of the perfume that I've been wanting for ages!

I won it in a contest, believe it or not, and I hadn't even known I'd won, but the mailman rang the bell, and there it was, the perfect surprise for a sunny spring day. Especially because the perfume itself is a green, fresh scent, with lily of the valley (for May day!), jasmine, freesia, citrus, and hyacinth.

Although I almost never enter contests, this one caught my eye because of the prize. Also, since it was from a new expat magazine, I figured probably not a ton of people would enter. I had to take a picture of myself reading the magazine in my favorite spot, and send it in with a short explanation. That's it! I had the Mister take a picture of me reading it at the airport, because most of my magazine reading these days takes place at the airport or on the plane.

I've never won a contest like this before; I can't stop grinning. And since it arrived just a couple of days before my birthday, it's like an early present. How lovely!

(Later: pictures of the new couch!)

Twitterpated

This weekend has been the first this year during which it is possible to leave the house without a coat, scarf, and umbrella. Yes, the first days that really and truly feel like spring, a spring of sandals and sunshine. Today I spent the afternoon at a park, just soaking in the warm sun and marveling at the fact of my green surroundings.

The one drawback? The one really big and yucky drawback?

The mister isn't here. (He's somewhere over the Atlantic right now, on his way to a conference in the states.)

I remember this, from the long years of our relationship's long distance, but recognizing it doesn't make it any more fun. It was always a kind of catch-22: when things were gray and sad and not going very well, I longed for the mister (well, back then he wasn't the mister, but you know...) because everything would be better with him there; I'd be less lonely. But when things were bright and beautiful, or when I was having a great time, I also longed for him; I wished he were with me to experience that particular great time, to make it a memory that we would share.

And that's what this weekend has been like. It's spring and gorgeous and everyone in sight seems lovestruck, lolling about on blankets in the park, holding hands in Brussels' suddenly less-gray streets. I myself have unusual amounts of energy, I've cooked and cleaned and worked and also strolled about happily outside. But about every five seconds I wish that the Mister were here, too.

I guess it's just hitting me kind of hard, this really long trip. We're quite used to being apart for three or four or even five days at a stretch. But this time it'll be ten days (and it was supposed to be even longer than that!), which is seeming rather...excessive. Especially when it's spring and that special springtime elixir is in the air.

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.

A rose and a book

Today is the worldwide Day of the Book, but more specifically in Catalonia, April 23 is the day of Sant Jordi. On this day, lovers present each other with a rose and a book.

Why the rose? Legend has it that Saint George (Sant Jordi), Christian martyr who died on this day, killed a dragon who had menaced the realm for years and who had a princess in his claws. From the dragon's spilled blood grew a perfect red rose, which he, gallant knight that he was, presented to the princess.

Why the book? In Catalonia the book tradition developed in the 1920s to celebrate this day, on which falls the births of Shakespeare and Nabakov, and the deaths of Shakespeare and Cervantes (same day, same year!), as well as Josep Pla and William Wordsworth.

Every year the Generalitat de Catalunya creates a nice Sant Jordi web animation. I recommend checking it out here. There are three different animations, one each for the rose, the book, and Sant Jordi. Click at the top of the page for the English version.

Although I've never been in Barcelona on April 23, I know that the streets fill with book and flower sellers. I'd love to see it, and to rummage around the bookstalls. This year, the Mister and I have to make do with a virtual rose and we'll postpone the books a bit until he returns from his trip.

I bought myself a few books yesterday, though, in honor of the event (well, not that I really ever need an excuse, but still...): a couple of Margaret Atwood novels, a Haruki Murakami novel, and a volume of Auden poems. Rather unusually for me (because I usually read faster than I buy), at the moment I've actually accumulated quite a pile of "for fun" reading, so they'll just have to go on the stack.

In honor of the day of books and roses, I have for you a rose poem. It was hard to choose just one, but ultimately I had to choose Rilke, because the rose was a kind of totem for him throughout his life: his epitaph is two lines composed on the rose, "no one's sleep beneath so many lids," and the leukemia that killed him purportedly first showed its symptoms after he was pricked by a rose.

This poem, in a translation by William Gass, so closely observes the world of roses that you are drawn in on a minute, tender level. It's worth reading slowly, and savoring all of its turns and swirls of imagery. Plus, it was composed on the island of Capri (!), in a little cottage called "The Rose House." I especially love that last stanza before the final line, its whirlwind of world focused down into a handful of rose.

The Bowl of Roses
by Ranier Maria Rilke

You've seen their anger flare, seen two boys
bunch themselves into a ball of animosity
and roll across the ground
like some dumb animal set upon by bees;
you've seen those carny barkers, mile-high liars,
the careening tangle of bolting horses,
their upturned eyes and flashing teeth,
as if the skull were peeled back from the mouth.

But now you know how to forget such things,
for now before you stands the bowl of roses,
unforgettable and wholly filled
with unattainable being and promise,
a gift beyond anyone's giving, a presence
that might be ours and our perfection.

Living in silence, endlessly unfolding,
using space without space being taken
from a space even trinkets diminish;
scarcely the hint there of outline or ground
they are so utterly in, so strangely delicate
and self-lit—to the very edge:
it possible we know anything like this?

And then like this: that a feeling arises
because now and then the petals kiss?
And this: that one should open like an eye,
to show more lids beneath, each closed
in a sleep as deep as ten, to quench
an inner fire of visionary power.
And this above all: that through these petals
light must make its way. Out of one thousand skies
they slowly drain each drop of darkness
so that this concentrated glow
will bestir the stamens till they stand.

And the movement in the roses, look:
gestures which make such minute vibrations
they'd remain invisible if their rays
did not resolutely ripple out into the wide world.

Look at that white one which has blissfully unfolded
to stand amidst its splay of petals
like Venus boldly balanced on her shell;
look too at the bloom that blushes, bends
toward the one with more composure,
and see how the pale one aloofly withdraws;
and how the cold one stands, closed upon itself,
among those open roses, shedding all.
And what they shed: how it can be light or heavy,
a cloak, a burden, a wing, a mask — it just depends —
and how they let it fall: as if disrobing for a lover.

What can't they be? Was that yellow one,
lying there hollow and open, not the rind
of a fruit in which the very same yellow
was its more intense and darkening juice?
And was this other undone by its opening,
since, so exposed, its ineffable pink
has picked up lilac's bitter aftertaste?
And the cambric, is it not a dress
to which a chemise, light and warm as breath,
still clings, though both were abandoned
amid morning shadows near the old woodland pool?
And this of opalescent porcelain
is a shallow fragile china cup
full of tiny shining butterflies —
and there — that one's holding nothing but itself.

And aren't they all that way? just self-containing,
if self-containing means: to transform the world
with its wind and rain and springtime's patience
and guilt and restlessness and obscure fate
and the darkness of evening earth and even
the changing clouds, coming and going,
even the vague intercession of distant stars,
into a handful of inner life.

It now lies free of care in these open roses.

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.

Spa, part deux

(Part one, here.)

This repeat visit to Spa was a different as could be from the first time around: it's one thing to walk around in slippers all day with your husband, another to do so with a gaggle of girls. Both have their charms.

In fact, the weekend was particularly great because I got to know some fantastic and beautiful women, including several who work for the US government here in Brussels, a barrister from London (she has to wear a curly gray wig to work!), and a woman who works for the Japanese embassy here. It was especially nice to be speaking native-tongue English when making friends--almost everybody else I've met while living here is European and either the language is Spanish/Catalan/French, or the English we speak is not the other person's first language, which does hinder the kind of "click" that feels so great when you meet a potential friend (at least for me; I tend to be a slow friend-maker). Oh, plus two of the ladies brought along their oh-so adorable baby girls (the husbands came along too, and kept mostly out of sight, except to make breast-feeding deliveries)!

We started the day with champagne in the hotel room, and rode up the funicular to the spa in our bathrobes and slippers. From there, we enjoyed a day of massages, swimming, and lounging, plus plenty of chit-chat. The highlight for me was swimming in the warm outdoor pool while grey skies plopped fat, cold raindrops onto my face. I did have to hurry inside when it started hailing, though!

Then we got gussied up, had a fun Italian dinner, then headed over to the Casino of Spa, which claims to be the world's oldest casino. I was so relieved that pretty much everyone else was as green as I when it came to casinos. We felt distinctly out of place, and dramatically overdressed, in the small (albeit baroque) salons, compared to the wizened, chain-smoking figures hunched over the machines or the tables.

We each got ten euros worth of tokens, our limit for the evening. Big spenders, right? A bunch of us immediately lost about half of our tokens in the slot machines, although a couple girls made some money. As in, four or five euros, whoo hoo! We then decided to pool all the leftover tokens and play roulette. We started out with 29 euros and ended up with 49, after one of us with the knack won us back a bunch of money. All the winnings went to the bride-to-be!

The next morning, after a late buffet breakfast at the hotel, we all wandered off either up to the spa, into the town, or back to Brussels. The bride and I decided to go fleamarketing in Spa's Sunday market, and it was the best flea market trip I've ever made! She and I snatched up some amazing finds amidst the cast-off electronics, dingy appliances, and piles of moldering books, including gorgeous antique jewelry, an old manual coffee grinder, which I bought for the Mister (he has admired his grandmother's), fun books, and mod vases. She found a solid silver 1970s watch and some fabulous rhinestone jewelry, and I bought an art-deco ring and a lovely pale blue milk-glass bead necklace. We were also endlessly amused by the characters selling the wares, all of whom had an eagerness to talk. One woman, once she found out we were American, had us trapped for a good quarter of an hour, and was most enthused about pictures she had seen of a friend's son's house in--"that country, what's it called?"--New England, where they have "little wild animals who live in the trees and eat hard fruit, what are they called?"--squirrels!

Flush with our purchases, we drove back to Brussels in the rain. The Mister was already back from Barcelona when I arrived, and as always, it was especially nice to see his face again after traveling in opposite directions. Actually, when we sat down to go over the April and May calendar, it was sobering to realize that he'll be away from Brussels for 30 days out of 47. So a lazy Sunday afternoon side-by-side was a storing up of together time, embraces that will have to last us twice as long.

Swirly

I have to write about Madrid last weekend, and let me warn you, it's going to sound like bragging. Because it involves fantastic weather and amazing food and the Mister solemnly promising--under flashing lights and video--to do his new, prestigious job to the best of his ability. His mother got teary-eyed, I fumbled the voice recorder, but kept snapping pictures (it went so fast!), and my dad got lots of good shots of Spanish men in suits doing a lot of shaking of hands until they were all whisked away to sign papers. Oh, and to cap it all off, that evening we toasted champagne glasses in the breathtaking rotunda bar of the Palace Hotel with a well-known NPR correspondent.

In less than three days we managed to visit the Prado, the Reina Sofia (I was happy to have the chance to revisit Picasso's Guernica), and the new Caixa Forum, which features a garden wall--no, I mean a wall of garden, as in, the garden is integrated into a three-story building's facade. Let's see, there were lots of tapas, especially Galician pulpo and empanadas, an attempt to learn a bit of the local lingo both on advanced levels and beginner (um, my dad), and the consensus among our little group that while Barcelona is the superior city, you can't beat Madrileños for friendliness.

Once back in Brussels, our life is already changing. We'll (he'll) be traveling even more than we were, which I imagine could get tiresome but for the moment seems great. We'll have to see how things go between here and Barcelona and whether we'll tend to favor one over the other as "home base."

Another bit of exciting news came in the form of a package that held the page proofs for my book translation. I was most tickled when I saw my translator's introduction all book-like there in the front, being the only thing that I actually wrote, instead of translated, besides a few scattered notes. Still, it's quite something to feel the project coming together so tangibly, a stack of paper that is starting to look like a book!

Tomorrow I am going to revisit the town of Spa, Belgium, with a gaggle of other girls for a bachelorette weekend. (Yes, the same place the Mister and I visited with a wedding gift voucher.) I have never been to a bachelorette party (that I can remember...), much less a whole weekend, so I'm both ridiculously excited about it and a little nervous. My wedding-party attendance has pretty much been limited to prim wedding showers that usually involve tea and lots of pastel. Events this weekend will range from pampering (afternoon at the spa and spending the night at a nice hotel) to gambling (at the town's Casino). The fact that I've never gambled at a casino in my life and I wouldn't know the first thing about how to play the games--not to mention my risk-adverse and penny-pinching nature--will probably limit any craziness that might occur.

Now that I think about it, it works out nicely that the first of many weekends the Mister has to be away for work, I'll be off with the girls for some Spa fun.

New job

So, the exciting news of this week is that the Mister will be inducted into his new position on Monday! We just found out yesterday when it would be, and since it's taking place in Madrid, this entailed a last-minute scramble for tickets. Even more surprising is that my dad is flying to Madrid as well--he couldn't resist seeing his son-in-law's formal installation in his new position. Or rather, couldn't resist being there to take pictures! M's parents will arrive by train, so I'm really looking forward to all of us getting together.