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
Monday, January 29, 2007
Wednesday, January 24, 2007
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
...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
Monday, January 15, 2007
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
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