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