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