Some pictures from my trip to Berlin, for those of you who aren't on facebook:


Straddling the border of the free world on the Glienicke Bridge in Potsdam. This is the very spot where they exchanged spies.



At the East Side Gallery of the Berlin Wall. Note that this is the eastern side of the wall, so all of this graffiti was done after the Wende

And then one picture from Brussels:


Out at a pub with Matt (left) and Brandon (right).

Hey all--
I must admit that the reason I haven't written in two weeks is that not very much has happened that I felt like it was worth bothering you about.

So I finally got out of bed on Thursday morning (two Thursdays ago) so that I could go to Chemistry class. When I arrived at the building where my class claimed to be, I was surprised to find it rather devoid of life. I was more surprised when this condition persisted until ten o'clock, when my class was supposed to start. I finally found a girl sitting on the steps smoking and asked her if she was in the inorganic chemistry class. She said she was. How many people, I wondered, were in the class? "Three, now that you're here," she replied. At least, I think that's what she said. Flemish accents are hard to understand. But indeed, I was one of three people in the class. This is not much of a problem, since the professor seemed to be happy lecturing to three people, and I imagine he would have been just as happy lecturing to the wall.

I'm trying not to pass judgement yet on the class, because I have no choice but to take it, and see what happens. I also have only attended class twice so far. "But it started three weeks ago!" I can hear you say. To this I reply that we are in Belgium, and that means that when the teacher decides to cancel the second week of class entirely, as well as half of the third week, no one bothers to ask why, they simply go with the flow. Everything he says is written up in a coursepack that we had to buy (for all of six euros fifty), which makes it easy to follow along with the lectures. Apparently on Mondays we usually get together and discuss some papers (next week we're talking about the position of the Lanthanides and Actinides, and whether they should be in Group IIA or IIIB), but we didn't this week because we have to catch up on the lecture. I asked about lab, and he said that we're going to definitely have one, and possibly two labs. Groan. It looks like I'm going to have to take Inorganic lab senior spring at Swarthmore,setting myself up for fun fun times.

My french class has been kinda lame, too. We've had the same kind of trouble where the class doesn't meet very often, because the professor was sick, and then because most of the kids were going on some trip somewhere. So I really only have two classes, and one of them is imagology, which is also lame in the face. I got back the only paper I had to write all semester, and one of the comments on it was "Excellent English!" I should hope so, I've only been speaking it for my whole life. Sigh. So I'll be lucky if I can convince Swarthmore to give me more than one credit for this whole semester. I'd better study for my Nationalism midterm this weekend, or I'm kinda screwed.

In other (beer) news, Matt and I went to to the Schaarbeek Beer Museum the other day, which was really fun. The best part, in my opinion, was watching one of the old men who works there explain to these two little girls, who were probably about five and seven, the process of making beer and all the different types of beer that are made in Belgium. I can't imagine that it would be interesting for someone who can't drink them, but his manner seemed to keep them paying attention.

I also discovered a beer store near the VUB campus that sells various Lambic beers (spontaneously fermented stuff, made with wild yeast that lives in the air around Brussels and no where else in the world) at excellent prices. My only problem now is how to get them back to the US. I am not 21, so it's illegal for me. I suppose I could give them to my parents to bring back. I have no idea what the duty is on beer, since the US Customs website seems to indicate that there is none, but elsewhere on the same site that it is $1-2/liter. This is not unreasonably high, but it would be nice to know whether one has to pay that or not. Who the hell knows? It's the Department of Homeland Security, after all. People like the freaking IRS better, just ask my dad.

In other (not beer) news, Leah came last week to visit. This was quite wonderful, although it did drive home for me the point that I am not at Swarthmore, and that we can't be together all the time right now, which is somewhat of a horrible feeling. But it was entirely worth it to see her. We went to the park in our neighborhood and saw a family of ducklings scampering around being fuzzy. We wandered around Brussels and saw pretty buildings and mostly paid attention to one another.

On Thursday night, we went to dinner at the house of Jacques Richelle, who was one of the brothers of the family that my dad stayed with when he lived in Belgium for a year after high school. Jacques and his wife Muriel are both very nice, and we had a nice conversation about Belgian identity. Here's the thing about Belgium: there are about ten million people living here, and every one of them has a completely different idea about what it is like to be Belgian, and is prepared to swear that everyone thinks the same way they do. I have heard Belgians claim that "every Belgian thinks of himself as either Flemish or Wallonian, not as Belgian" and others claim that "every Belgian thinks of himself as Belgian first, setting aside regional differences." I asked Muriel what it was like being Wallonian in Brussels, to which she replied somewhat indignantly that she was most certainly *not* Wallonian, she was Bruxelloise and that that was something entirely different. "Brussels is a French-speaking city," she insisted. "There are no native Flemish people here at all. The ones that are here don't want to be here. I just want to be free to speak French!"

I didn't want to ruin the evening by pointing out that I lived with a Flemish woman and her Dutch boyfriend, and that both of them were quite happy here. Then Jacques insisted that only five percent of the city speaks Dutch, and that ninety percent of the city speaks French. Asking Erik about this later, he claimed that it was 10% Flemish, 70% French...and 20% Turkish and Moroccan. Jessica claimed that she had heard it was thirty percent Flemish.

So with all this discussion, you might ask, why don't they just take a census. Because this is Belgium, and you can't simply do something like that. There hasn't been a linguistic census of Brussels since the mid-1960s, and the Flemish are perfectly happy about that, and they have veto power over anything that happens. I am quite serious that the only reason this country hasn't split in two is that no one knows what to do about Brussels. It's surrounded by Flanders, it's clearly a French-majority city, it's officially bilingual, and it's the seat of four parliaments: the parliament of the province of Brussels, the parliament of the province of Flanders, the parliament of Belgium and the parliament of Europe. It's a bureaucratic nightmare to do anything here, so often, I think that people simply don't bother.

On Friday night, we went to Leuven with Matt, Erik and Jessica for dinner, where Leah and I finally had moules frites, or as they call them in Leuven, mosselen met frites. Then we went to a cocktail bar, where we had goofy-named fruity cocktails like "Singapore Gin Sling" (wikipedia informs me that this contains 4 parts gin, 1 part cherry brandy, 4 parts pineapple juice and some lemon juice, although I suspect that mine was not mixed according to the original recipe) which had a lot more alcohol in them than they tasted like they did. Then we went to another bar and had some beer. Then we came home and had another drink, and then I discovered that I was not walking quite straight. Shocking, isn't it?

On Saturday night, we went to a Russian restaurant for dinner which featured a gypsy band playing the accordion and what looked like a highly overgrown balalaika (sort of like an upright bass, Russian style), and a buxom Russian woman dancing and singing. Occasionally this other woman, who it seemed was just there with her friends but who must have had some kind of connection to the place would get up and dance, too, a whirling spinning sort of dance that made me want to be Russian. The food was quite good, and we stayed there for about four hours feeling relaxed and happy. Then we went to a pub situated right by the Manneken Pis and drank Lambic and got home at 3 in the morning. It was fantastic.

This week, life has pretty much just been going normally. I bowed to peer pressure and went with Matt to karaoke night at O'Reilly's Irish Pub on Sunday, where I embarrased myself by utterly butchering Born in the USA. It was kind of fun, but I had that sense that I get a lot here when I go out with people of feeling alone around a lot of people. I'd rather go out and have fun with my friends, but since they're at Swat or dispersed about the globe, I'd rather do stuff by myself than with people I don't really care about one way or another, and who seem to feel the same way about me. It's not that I don't like them, it's that they don't interest me very much as people, so I'd just as soon be by myself.

Today I went for a walk to the park to see the ducklings again, and on the way I met an orange striped cat who seemed to like walking around my legs and being petted, so I let it walk while I took a lot of pictures. See it for yourself, along with the ducklings, who were just as cute and fuzzy as ever.






And that pretty much brings up to the present. Matt is going to sleep in my room tonight, I think, on account of some kind of complicated situation involving a girl with whom he is emphatically Just Friends spending the night here for some kind of complicated reason that I don't understand at all, given that she has a place of her own to live. I don't get it, and I have my suspicions about the manipulative nature of her relationship with him, but since it's none of my business, I'll butt out. Anyhow, look at the pictures of the fuzzy things and smile.

--Nathan

Barcelona, Berlin, and Bugs, Oh My! [Belgium #3]

Hi all--
it's been a while since I last wrote, since I've been really busy. Perhaps I can remember everything that's happened in the last week and a half.

Wednesday before last, Erik, my host, had his public PhD defense. It went fine, of course, and afterwards he and Jessica had a big party at their house. Since he is Dutch, and works part-time at the university in Delft, and she is Flemish, all the people at the party were Dutch speakers, so I had quite a good time practicing my Dutch with them. The whole thing felt quite convivial and nice, and it really made me feel at home there.

With that feeling of home, I then set out the next day for Barcelona. The party consisted of me, Brandon, Carmen and Jim. Brandon is a business major (and a Republican) from Texas who, despite these apparently obvious marks against him, is actually quite an interesting and thoughtful guy. Carmen goes to Mt. Holyoke and is majoring in Critical Social Thought. In other words, she's a swattie from another institution. The three of us got along very well, and we also got along well with Jim, the guy who was leading us around.

Jim is sixty-one and has more stories to tell than most people. He was apparently in the Navy in the late 1960s, where he declined an assignment as a pilot in favor of the least combat-likely job he could find: working on an oil tanker in the Mediterranean. Then, as the conflict in Vietnam heated up, he realised that he was a conscientious objector. The Navy took some issue with this and declined to release him, whereupon he sued the Secretary of Defense. After some wrangling, he lost the case but won in the sense that he got a letter from the Navy telling him that within 48 hours, he was to be honorably discharged the service and that special commendation by the President was "NOT AUTHORISED".

He's slept, or so it seems, with women in more countries than I was aware of the existance of; he's Irish-American and likes to refer to Northern Ireland as "Occupied Ireland" and in general, he's extraordinarily smart and well-read about everything.

Anyhow, Barcelona is a fantastic city. The whole place feels very alive: full of culture and life and beauty. And above all, the weather is fantastic, even at the beginning of February. The only complaint I have is that there's an omnipresent haze over the city, which makes it hard to see very far from the tops of hills, which is too bad.

The first day we were there, we went around and saw a number of Gaudi buildings: the Casa Batllo, which looks like it could play host to an enormous and fantastic Jules Verne-themed party, and La Pedrera, an apartment building, which feels rather more like a place in which one could comfortably live.

The next morning, we went up to the Montjuïc, which is the biggest of the hills around Barcelona, situated right onthe coast. There's a big fort there. On one side, you can look out at the port and the Mediterranean sea, and then on the other side, you can look out over all of Barcelona. It's quite a view, despite the smog. Then we went to the Miro museum. I like Miro a lot: he's playful in a way that a lot of modern art isn't. Instead of trying to shock you with the weirdness of what he's doing (Mr. Dali, I'm talking about you!) he's just messing around and having fun.

That afternoon, I went to the Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA). This is really out of character for me, I suppose, to go of my own volition to a contemporary art museum. There, they had an exhibit of a series of installations by two Canadian artists, Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller. If you ever get a chance to see any of their stuff, do. It's fantastic. What they did was create installations that used sound to make a sort of sculpture all around you and pull you in. My favorite was on called "Opera for a Small Room." They had built a small room that you could look into, full of LP records, turntables, shelves, speakers, and in the middle, a chair. The exhibit, which ran for about 15 minutes, involved the lights changing so that it seemed like a man was sitting in the chair, and then the man told a sort of long, rambling story while playing records. There was sound going on all around, and lights, and the whole thing was just exhilarating!

Then on Sunday, we went up to Figueres, where was saw Salvador Dali's museum. I don't like Dali. He's just gratuitously weird. I feel like I'm peering into a very diseased mind, and I just want it to go away. After leaving Dali, we went to a town with the excavated ruins of an old Greek and Roman village. At this point, the weather had gotten a little crummy, so it was less enthralling, but we did discover a marvelously cute little hotel right on the beach that I'd love to come back to before I leave Europe.

So that was Barcelona: a really wonderful weekend trip, with some fascinating people. The rest of last week wasn't very exciting, since what I was really looking forward to was going to Berlin. And that turns out to be a story full of ups and downs.

I'd like to start out by saying that if you or anyone you know is planning to take the Nachtzug from Paris/Brussels to Berlin, I would encourage you in the strongest possible terms to spring the extra ten euros for the bed, rather than the seat. The reasons for this will become abundantly clear. In any event, I did not have a bed on the way there. I was in a cabin with three seats facing three other seats. The three seats opposite me were occupied by one man, asleep, and one of the seats on my side was occupied by another sleeping man. This left me little room for sleeping myself. After much gyration and contortion, I finally decided that the best way to sleep would be for me to lie down on the floor, head underneath one set of seats and feet underneath the other. This way, I actually did get about four or five hours of sleep. However, later events would reveal this to have been an unwise course of action. Stay tuned.

So I arrivedin Berlin at 8 am, rendezvoused with Bryce and dropped my stuff off at his place. Fortifying ourselves with breakfast, we set off on the Berlin Wall segment of our exploration. First stop was the East Side Gallery, a 1.2km-long section of the wall that has been preserved along the Spree River. It differs markedly from the original wall in that it has graffiti not only on the western side, which is to be expected, but also on the eastern side, which was done in 1990 by a group of celebrated graffiti artists. Berlin has celebrated graffiti artists. Actually, Berlin has about ten million graffiti artists, at least, that's what it seems. There is not a flat vertical surface in the city that isn't covered in marker, spray paint or pen.

Walking along the East Side Gallery, my first thought was that the wall is very, deeply strange. But I still didn't really have a sense of it's emotional impact until we went to the Dokumentationszentrum, where a piece of the wall is preserved along with the no-man's land and the other associated fencing. This was what did it for me. Because here's the thing about the Wall. It's not that thick, really. It's not even *that* tall. It would have been practically the easiest thing for someone to go up to it from the West and blow a great big hole in it with some dynamite. But it wasn't about the actual Wall. The Wall was just a symbol for the whole thing, the great tearing emotional gash that the Soviets ripped through Europe. And while I was staring out across the death strip into what used to be occupied East Berlin, I realised that it's not right for me to gawk at the spectacle of the wall and think, "Woah, gee, that's intense, man!" It's not a spectacle. It's not stupid dorm room posters in American colleges of "SIE VERLASSEN DEN AMERIKANISCHEN SEKTOR" and silly men in Red Army uniforms posing for tourists by the Brandenburg Gate and stamping pretend visas. It wasn't our wall.

That wall, that gash across Europe, was a heart-wrenching emotional wound for millions of people. Real Berliners walked by the wall every day, knowing that half of their world was on the other side and that for all they knew, they were never going to see it again. I sat in the museum watching videos of people escaping across in the days right after the wall went up. The people in those videos escaping through the fences, that was life or death business for them. They left everything behind and bolted for the one chance they had, and thanked God that they had made it and not gotten snagged in the barbed wire or shot to death and left to die and as I watched them, I cheered for them as they made it across. I'm never going to have to do anything like that, and I don't know if they'd be happy or upset that people are gawking at the Wall like it's a spectacle, but I'm not going to anymore.

The next day, we met up with Bryce's aunt and uncle, who live in Potsdam, and his uncle showed us around a little. If one had been smart, and somewhat brave, about eight or ten years ago, one would have bought property in Potsdam when everything was still varying shades of Soviet Brown and Soviet Gray, because it's becoming quite a nice place. It's full of parks, some quite genuinely nice buildings, and it's cleaning up nicely. It might not have been a great investment in the short- or even medium-term, since there's a great deal of expense involved in restoring any of these historic Potsdamian buildings, but the end result would be very nice.

That evening, Bryce and I decided to try and see one of the films playing in the Berlinale film festival. Figuring that it was a film festival, so how could we possibly go wrong, we bought the two spare tickets that some woman was selling off while we were waiting in line. The film turned out to be the world premiere of a Bosnian (or perhaps it was Croatian) film called Armin, which purported to be about a boy and his father who travel from their Bosnian village to Zagreb so that the boy can audition for a movie. This synopsis is, in fact, basically all that happens. I read on Wikipedia that among other things, Armin is the name of "a fast-acting anesthetic similar to sodium pentothal." Let me tell you, there was no fast actiing in this movie whatsoever. There was hardly any acting at all. There was no need, since nothing happened for eighty-five minutes, and then the movie was over. Appparently the boy had some kind of ailment, which was alluded to but never discussed, since that would have brought a plot into the movie, and that would never do. In conclusion: world premier + film festival does not always equal good.

However, what I may or may not have thought about the movie was not on my mind for very long, because the delayed aftereffects of having slept on the floor of the train began to come into play. You see, around nine PM, as we headed home, I began to feel a little unwell. And then in the next couple of hours, my digestive system decided to empty itself out as swiftly and violently as possible. Finally, I woke Bryce up in the middle of the night and told him that I had to go to the hospital, since I felt very dehydrated and feverish.

The upshot was that I spent several hours getting IV fluids pumped into me, and then I went home and slept for the next eighteen hours. I missed my Sunday night train and ended up taking on Monday night instead. Since I got back, I've basically been resting, although I'm going to have to get up tomorrow to go to Chemistry class in the morning, and we'll see if I stay and go to class in the afternoon or not. Basically, I'm just feeling really, really tired now, and I want to feel better. I hate being sick and I hate not having any energy. It's gray and rainy out and I'm basically just feeling out of sorts, so if anyone wanted to send me a note with something cheery, it would be magnificent.

Sorry to end on such a down note, but I'm sure I'll feel better soon. The weather is supposed to get sunny and quite warm this weekend, so maybe I'll go down to the big park south of the city and walk around. Anyhow, until next time,

--Nathan

Mama, don't take me to International-Land [Belgium #2]

(Or, why I do not want to behave like an expat)

Ahoy--
so as I was sitting at the tram stop this evening, there were two little boys and their mother sitting next to me. Well, perhaps I should say that there was a woman and a little boy of maybe three sitting next to me, with another little boy of about four or five occupying all the empty space within about six feet of her. My inner child felt an instant bond with him. I first noticed them because the mom was saying things in Dutch (when you speak Dutch in a primarily French city, you learn to pick up on it quickly. More on that later). As I eavesdropped further, I realised that the little boy was asking (in French) how to say various things in various languages; in the span of about five minutes, they went through Dutch, English and Spanish. It made my ling-nerd heart warm for him, the petit polyglot: what a wonderful future he will have, growing up with a command of so many tongues. Pan-Europeanism is alive and well in the youth of today!

This is in stark contrast to the thing that has been on my mind quite a lot lately, which I referenced in the subject: International-Land. Based on the Vesalius people I have met, and several experiences in English-speaking pubs to which I was taken on someone else's initiative, I have made what is probably not a new discovery. There are people who are physically resident in Brussels who actually live in the parallel universe of the Brussels outpost of International-Land. International-Land has an outpost in any major city where people from many nations come together for trade or governance. The Hague certainly has one, Paris probably does too. They can be found as far away as Tokyo and Moscow, and more likely than not as close as Montreal or Toronto.

The people who live in Brussels-International probably work for NATO or the EU, but they might also work for some multinational which found it convenient to place their European Headquarters here. For people who live in International-Land, it doesn't really matter where in the world they live, since they go to work in English. After work they go to English-speaking pubs to drink Guinness or Budweiser. They belong to English-speaking clubs, with whom they play tennis or chess or hockey or whatever they play. Their children go to English-speaking schools, and then go back to the US to go to college. They might spend their whole career in one outpost of International-Land, but more likely, they transfer to different countries every couple of years. Their lives barely intersect at all with the inhabitants of wherever they live. If you drew an enormous map of the city, tracing the path throughout the day of every inhabitant, you would find that the paths of the inhabitants and of the Internationals would be drawn from two sets of starting points to two sets of endpoints, with barely any overlap. They cross on the roads and in the public transit system, but for the most part, the Internationals are going from different places, to different places, than the inhabitants are.

This is not to condemn them, not at all. It might be all well and good for the (I will assume male) head of household, since he has his job to go to during the day and then can relax at night. But his wife can't pursue a career, since she's jumping around the world every couple of years. His kids can't really make long-term friends. For them, each new culture isn't just another place to do the same job, it's a whole new *world*. I'd be freaked out and want to stick to my International-Land things that I know too.

But I am not them. I'm here for five months, and I can afford, emotionally, to jump into a new culture and try to figure it out. I don't need to go to O'Reillys, or Churchills, or Monkey Business. I don't need to watch football or baseball. I want to go to a place where I can have a beer, or a coffee, and listen to people speaking French and Dutch. And I'm happy to do that by myself, and not go out with the study abroad kids to International-Land.

I didn't mean that to sound as much like a polemic as it turned out, but I guess I feel kinda strongly about it. On a happier note, I was browsing Craigslist for Brussels (which is pretty lousy) yesterday when I came upon a wanted ad that read:

LOOKING FOR english/american reading material - EUR3
Looking for some fiction novels or fairly recent magazines from America or English language stuff...

On a budget but if anyone has some left over books they're done with I could really use some leisure reading in English. Looking to pay just a couple euros per book.

This person, I thought, is panicking. They need a hug, and something familiar to hang onto for a while. Fortunatly, I was a lot like that back when I was nine. Hell, I was feeling a lot like that last week. Instantly, my expat survival skillset sprang into action. I wrote back a couple paragraphs about English books at the public library, where to find the public library, where to find the English books in the public library, where to find the suburban outposts of the public library...in short, a little calm-down handholding, ending with "Hope this helps; I know what it's like to be in a foreign country and to just want to read something in English."

Today I got back: "Wow that's great info, thanks so much. I'll definately check them out. :-)"

I think I may have just saved someone's sanity a little bit.

Let's change the subject completely. I've been having a number of petits avontures lately. I have discovered that it's actually quite easy to have an adventure; all you have to do is make yourself look friendly, and place yourself in a situation where there are other people. The first time I did this was on the tram on the way back from hockey practice on Wednesday. I was sitting with my hockey stick, looking very conspicuous, when a elderly bearded gentleman sat down next to me and said something in French while pointing to my hockey stick. Sensing my confusion and lack of coherent response, he asked me if I spoke French. "Non," I told him. "Nederlands, English, Deutsch...pas de Français."

Then he did something that really surprised me. Instead of instantly switching to English, as just about everyone I've talked to has done, he started talking to me in DUTCH! It was very clear that French was not his first language, and that Dutch was certainly not his second language, but we had a very nice little conversation about hockey players and how agressive they look in their uniforms. Then he went back to reading his newspaper, but before he did, he shook my hand and said, in Dutch, "Thank you for the conversation." It just made me feel really nice, that someone valued a casual conversation enough to thank me for it.

Another petit avonture happened on Friday night, when Matt and I were coming back from seeing Blood Diamond. It was about 12:45 at night, after the trams stopped running. Matt considered taking a taxi, but since I was happy to walk, and was therefore unwilling to split the cost with him, he had to walk too. It wasn't that far, only about four km, which would take us about an hour. About halfway home, a guy pulled up next to us in his car and asked if we knew where such-and-such street was. I didn't, but I told him in a mix of French and English that I had a map in my pocket, and that he was welcome to look at it.

As it turned out, he was headed almost all the way to our house. Thinking on my feet, I said, "Well, since you're going up there, do you mind giving us a ride?" Of course he didn't mind, so we hopped into his tiny European car and got driven almost all the way home.  Petit avonture!

I've actually been walking quite a lot around here, even to school a couple of times, which between six and eight kilometers, depending on how you walk it. It takes between an hour and an hour and a half, and entails walking either a secant across the eastern part of the city, or into the center and back out again. The second way is longer, but more interesting, since it avoids walking through the heart of EU-land, characterized by horribly ugly glass architecture and badly-driven cars going way too fast. On the way, you get to see the progression from immigrant neighborhoods in Schaarbeek, to center-city governmental stuff downtown, and then upscale stuff in Etterbeek/Ixelles before arriving at the school. It's quite enlightening.

Speaking of downtown, having had my emotional experience by the tomb of the unknown soldier has had an unexpected side effect. As it turns out, one of the two main routes downtown leads right by him, so I pass by almost every day. Every time I pass by him, I make sure to take off my hat (if I'm wearing one), or give him a nod or a little salute. I think it's important to do, because he's all alone, and no one even knows who he is. And he was just a boy, maybe younger than me, off in a terrifying hell. And someone never knew if he came back. So it's important to do your part to make sure he's remembered.

Finally, I probably ought to end this overly long and rambling letter on a positive note: on Thursday, I'm going to Barcelona for the weekend, and the next thursday, I'm taking a night train to Berlin! You know who else takes night trains to Berlin? Spies, that's who. Maybe I'll meet a spy on his way to Berlin, and he'll drag me into a fantastic adventure of intrigue and deception, which will fortunately end in time for me to get to class in Brussels again on Monday morning. I'm very very very excited!

Time for me to go to sleep!

--Nathan

How to become a European...

...and my progress along that axis.

Hey all--
So I've been here for a week now, and I figured it was time to let people know how I'm doing. Now seemed like a good time, since I'm feeling mellow and unstressed, a welcome change. Homesickness and overwhelmedness seems to come and go in unpredictable phases, but it's always worse when I'm a) hungry b) tired or c) stressed out because one of the aforementioned factors. It's often tough to motivate myself to get out of bed in the morning, especially when it's still dark out when I have to go to class at 8:00 (only on Tuesdays, thankfully!).

Interestingly, this is the same trend that I noticed when I was on my NOLS trip: getting out of bed and getting going was difficult, since I was tired and just wanted to crawl back in bed. It got better during the day, and by the time I was ready to go to bed, I felt just fine. The same thing, basically, seems to be happening now. After dinner, I feel just fine, and then when I wake up in the morning, I don't want to get out of bed.

But enough of that, and more about what I've been up to. First, the least interesting part, my classes: Chemistry hasn't started yet, since it's at the VUB (Vrije Universiteit Brussel, as opposed to VECO, Vesalius College, the English-speaking institution I am officially attending). French (level still in flux, since I speak more French than the kids who have never taken it and can't conjugate être, but less than someone who has actually formally learned anything about the language.) Nationalism, Ethnicity and Regional Conflict, which is basically exactly what it sounds like. There's an astonishing twenty pages of reading a week, and an absolutely inhuman 5000-word paper due at the end of April. That and a midterm and a final are all the writing I have to do for that class.

Finally, there's a class that is called something like "Perceptions and stereotypes of America by Europeans," only jazzed up to sound academical. The professor is a specialist in something he calls "imagology," which appear to be the study of the ways in which groups of people express what they think about one another. It's like sociology plus psychology plus literary criticism plus self-aggrandizement, with a helping of B.S. on the side. The reading load is forty pages a week (no primary sources, of course). The writing load is to take two of the essays we read for one of the weeks, write 800-word abstracts of each one and a 1000-word compare/contrast essay about them both, and then, with another student, to present on them for no more than twenty minutes. Sigh. Swarthmore, Vesalius College is certainly not.

Moving on to more interesting topics: my living arrangement is quite nice. I and another student named Matt are staying in the house of one of the VECO professors, Erik and his girlfriend, Jessica (pronounced Yessica, in the Dutch fashion), who are both extremely nice. He's Dutch and she's Flemish, and though we speak English when Matt is around, it's fun to speak Dutch with them to practice. Erik also teaches in Delft, in the same faculty where my dad used to work, and he says I am welcome to borrow their apartment there any weekend I want to.

Speaking of Delft (actually not at all, I just needed a segué), the language situation here is quite interesting. Officially, of course, Brussels is completely bilingual, with all official material, signs in stores and everything else being written in both French and Dutch. By the way, there is no such language as Flemish, it's just a dialect of Dutch in which everything is pronounced much more softly, with no horrible throat-clearing guttral junk. This official bilinguality produces interesting things like street signs being written as, for example, "place COLIGNON plein" (French puts the modifier before the noun, Dutch puts it afterward, which is convenient), but also more bizarre cases like "rue de MARCHE DE CHARBON/KOLENMARKTstraat" (English: Coal-market street) where unless you speak both languages, the two names appear to have nothing to do with one another.

Anyhow, despite the fact that everything is *officially* bilingual, native Dutch speakers are as scarce as women in a monastery, and very few of the Walloons speak much Dutch. If you go into a store and try to speak Dutch, more often than not, you will be answered in English. There hasn't been an official linguistic census of Brussels in forty-odd years, but unofficial estimates place the percentage of Francophones at between 80% and 90%. This is above all a good incentive to learn French.

All in all, it's been an interesting week. After arriving on Tuesday and being totally jet-zonked, much of the past week has been something of a blur, and I don't think I really got my bearings until I went on a tour of Brussels on Saturday, and got a sense of what the downtown looks like, where the interesting places are to go (although I still don't know if I could find them again), and how I might function on my own. A particularly low moment was on Thursday afternoon. It was raining quite hard as I wandered around the financial district looking for the Central Bank to exchange a bunch of old Belgian francs, and I was getting a little hungry. The next thing I know, I'm standing in front of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, in the rain, alone and overwhelmed, and I just can't help but start to sob. It is comforting to know that regardless of what else happens in the next five months, I will almost certainly never feel as bad as that.

So let us move on to happier things. Thanks to everyone for the birthday wishes; I had an excellent time of it. We had a delicious tarte with creme fraiche and raspberries for dessert, and then Matt and I went out to an American bar (not my choice, but a bunch of other study abroad kids were going). It turned out to be a good choice, though, because not only did Matt buy me a beer, but upon hearing that it was my birthday, a drunken Irishman named Paul, who had graduated from Vesalius and who claimed to be some kind of big muckety-muck in the European something and who had told this UN guy and that EU someone to fuck off at some point, also bought me a drink, and then the owner, who was also a Vesalius graduate, brought me a tequila shot on the house. Having never done one before, I can't say that I would ever feel the need to do one again, except in exceptional circumstances.

Also on Sunday, I was shown to the largest flea market in Brussels, which covers a medium-sized square full of old junk, which is immensely fun to browse through. Not much more to say about it, though, without further investigation.

Before I finally head off to sleep, I will close by noting that I might join the Vesalius College ice hockey time, which apparently has a coach who actually teaches the players how to play hockey, which is terribly exciting, and which apparently also plays against other teams from other places, making it quite the step up from Motherpuckers in terms of thinking-it's-a-big-deal-ness. This could be good or it could be bad; I'll find out tomorrow when I go to practice. I have no class all day, but unfortunately I have to get up at 9 to go and register at the town hall, and even if I didn't, the cleaning lady needs to clean my room at 10, evicting me from my comfortable cocoon of blankets far too early.

I think that I have rambled quite enough for the moment, but I will close by saying that I now have a cell phone, and its number is [redacted]. Feel free to call me on it, but it will be expensive for you, and chances are an email is the better channel for just about any information I need to know about. I love getting emails, facebook messages and such the like. It's good to remember that there's stuff going on across the pond, too.

Au revoir/tot later,
--Nathan

Dearest Friends--
as some of you know, and some of you are about to find out, tomorrow I'm heading off to Brussels for a semester. This is good news for those of you who like to get long, wordy emails from me about what I'm up to, and bad news for those of you who detest such things. Luckily for those of you in the latter group, if you email me and ask me to take you off the list, I will do so, and save on internet postage. For those who wish to be in the former group, but are not, it would be very strange if you recieved this email at all. But if you somehow manage to get ahold of this without being on the distribution list, then feel free to email me and ask to be put on, and I'll gladly pay the internet postage. And if you miss anything in the email, all the messages (and maybe bonus photos as well) will be archived here.

So it's four in the morning, and I'm leaving tomorrow. And I'm not nervous...why should I be? I speak Dutch, hell, most of my classes are going to be in English anyway, I've already talked to my hosts, who seem incredibly nice, I'm all packed, and it's really no big deal. So why have I been waking up with my jaw clenched, my neck hurting, and snapping at people all the time? And why have I been having all these bizarre dreams in Dutch?

I should back up. So back in October, all my friends and I were sitting around at lunch, discussing all the cool places that they were going to go abroad. I had already decided that I wasn't going to, because if I did, I would go to Germany, since I've been taking German, only their school year doesn't end until the middle of July, and I have to be back in June to do research all summer at Swarthmore so that I can write a thesis so that I can honors major in Chemistry so that I can run away to Vermont, start a brewery and raise goats. So then I got to thinking: I speak Dutch. The Belgians speak Dutch. I wonder what their school year is like?

To make a long story short, it turned out that although I had missed many of the official deadlines, I had missed none of the unofficial deadlines, and after two trips to DC and a bit of phone calling, I had booked a flight, gotten my visa, registered for a program and was all set to go!

I'm going to be taking classes at the Vesalius College, an English-speaking college attached to the Vrije Universiteit Brussel/Université Libre de Bruxelles. Those classes are likely to be: Intro French; The International Role of New Media; Nationalism, Ethnicity and Regional Conflict and a class called European Studies which is basically learning about European cities and then going to visit them. I'm also going to be taking Inorganic Chemistry at the VUB, in Dutch, which promises to be an experience. In between, I plan to eat a lot of mussels and waffles, drink a lot of tasty beer, and in general have a wonderful time.

I'm staying with a host family the whole time, and my address is:
[redacted]

I don't really know whether you should put Schaarbeek or Brussels after the postcode, but that's how I received the address, so that's how I'm sending it to you. I'll be getting a cellphone when I get there, but for now, the number of the house is [redacted] I'm also going to be reachable by email. Furthermore, whenever I'm at home I'll probably be on Skype, an internet phone service, where my username is nlaporte. If you don't know what Skype is, go to skype.com and be informed. The basic gist is that it's free calling over the internet to other people using the service, or low-cost calling to normal telephones (2.1¢/min to most landlines in Europe and North America, 20-30¢/min to European cellphones (ask your friendly neighborhood telecom specialist for an explanation of why it's so expensive to call a European cellphone. Hint: Monopolies, competition and deregulation. Isn't that always the explanation?)). Finally, messages can be sent to me through facebook, or posted on my facebook wall. If you don't know what facebook is, you don't need to (Google it if you must).

In any event, given this plethora of communication options, it is absolutely inexcusable if no one sends me birthday greetings on the 21st, when I'll be celebrating my 20th birthday in one of two possible ways: either alone, sad and depressed, far from home and all things familiar, or with a group of newly-minted insta-friends met in the first week of orientation, jovially carousing somewhere in Brussels and more likely than not drawing dirty looks from the Calvinists.

Anyhow, it's now almost quarter of five, and I'd better get to sleep. And then wake up early, so that I can sleep on the plane.

Cheers,
--Nathan