I've started avoiding television.

In my first post I mentioned a Belgian children's show about a rabbitclown named Bobo. Apparently in the sleepy haziness of jet lag, I merged two different characters in my brain. It's an important distinction because these two characters are Julian's and Karlyn's favorites, so I need to keep them straight. Bobo is a blue rabbit who goes on adventures with his friend and his neighbor and his mom. Bumba is a child clown. Over the past few years I've become more and more uneasy with sports mascot type costumes and since both of these characters are played by humans in suits, they make me equally uncomfortable.

Bobo was fine when all I knew of him was Julian's stuffed animal and the illustrated children's book that Joost reads to them at night. But then I actually caught a bit of the show and was surprised and slightly horrified to see that it wasn't animated at all. Go ahead and watch the first thirty seconds or so of this video if you want to see what I'm talking about.

Bumba is a clown -- redundantly played by a person in a person suit -- who, as far as I can tell, works at a circus as the only performer but also sometimes goes on adventures. Here's an example of a typical Bumba DVD:

And here's the description on the back:

Roughly translated, I think it says that in this story, Bumba leaves for the conquest of America, where he falls in loves with Poncha (a reference to Pocahontas?), his new girlfriend. Together, they play tennis, ride horses, and make popcorn. Eventually, Bumba takes all of his friends and has the coolest adventures in the Far West.

He also apparently learns to hunt.

Admittedly, I've always had trouble staying awake in class (and everywhere else), but I like history and I don't remember clowns and popcorn playing a big role in manifest destiny. 

Speaking of getting history wrong, I am unbelievably excited to participate in the Dutch Christmas tradition of Sinterklaas this year. If you've never read or heard David Sedaris's essay on Dutch Christmas, you should probably stop what you're doing right now and read it here or listen to him read it himself here (highly recommended). 

I remember laughing uncontrollably at this several years back, so when I started seeing SantaPope everywhere with his black friends I could hardly contain my excitement and I had to show Kirsten the David Sedaris essay. Luckily she thought it was hilarious and was not offended.

I've learned a few new things about Sinterklaas and his six to eight black men since I've been here, though. First, here they call them Zwarte Piet, or Black Piet. I asked Kirsten what 'piet' meant.

"It's just a name."

"Just a name?"

"Yeah, like a first name."

"Oh! Like Pete! Or Peter."

"Exactly."

"Oh, okay, got it.  ...So they're all named Pete?"

There's Pete that cares for the horses, and there's Pete that brings the presents, and there's probably Pete that's in charge of logistics for the return trip to Spain with all the naughty children.

The other thing I've learned, and I'm not actually 100% sure about this one, is that Sinterklaas's friends are played not by actual black people, but by people in blackface. Or I guess they might be black people in blackface. 

Either way, they are everywhere. In toys and coloring books and all over ads.

Dutch will be Dutch, I guess.


That's all I've got for now. To wrap it up, here's a picture of one of my favorite things in this house, the comically oversized desk lamp:

I can't think of a title. Let's call this Post #3.

Before I start on new stuff, I'd like to amend my last post. Somehow I forgot one of the very weirdest things that European people do.

Weird Thing European People Do #5

Mayonnaise in Weird Contexts

I knew that Europeans had a questionable fondness for dipping french fries in mayonnaise, but I wasn't going to write anything off without trying it first. So now I've tried it, a few times, and I've decided I just cannot get behind it.

It doesn't stop at french fries, though. The other day I ordered something at a restaurant that came with a small salad on the side -- think a couple of leaves of lettuce and two slices of cucumber -- and on top was just a giant glob of mayonnaise. I was kind of just avoiding it and then Kirsten's mom asked me, "Oh, you don't like salad?" So I had to tell her that I like salad just fine, but that I didn't really eat mayonnaise on it. So I pushed the mayo off and ate the dry veggies left behind.

It's funny because I actually do like mayonnaise quite a lot in the right contexts (they thought it was strange when I told them I usually spread it on my sandwiches), but they now have it in their minds that I'm just not a big fan. Compared to them, I guess I'm really not.

Speaking of food, they also have something called filet américain that's essentially just a strip of raw meat. It's also available in paste form for spreading. Apparently that's what we eat in America.


So! Onto the new stuff. I started class on Monday, which is pretty cool. There are about eighteen people in my class; two come from Spain and everyone else comes from somewhere different. We've got someone from Austria, someone from Iraq, Venezuela, Paraguay, Iran, Lebanon, India, Indonesia, Nepal, Australia, etc. The girl from Australia (incidentally also named Erin) is the only other native English speaker in the class, but everyone "speaks English," to some degree.

So far I've learned a couple of basic questions (Who are you? What country are you from? What languages do you speak? How long have you been in Belgium? Where do you live?), some regular verb conjugation, how to count, and the alphabet.

On Monday Kirsten drove me to class, but on Tuesday I had to take the bus. I've never been particularly good at public transportation, even when the signs and schedules were all in English, so this was a little daunting for me, but I figured it wouldn't be too difficult. Two euros later, I was sitting on the bus and we were on our way. The stop I had to get off at wasn't listed on the line so I figured it was one of the ones where they only stop if someone is waiting there or if someone presses the button. With this in mind, I devoted my full concentration to staring out the window, not wanting to miss my stop. I saw a sign with an arrow pointing to Sint Jansplein, so I got off at the next stop, which turned out not to be Sint Jansplein at all. I had gotten off one stop too early. I knew it couldn't be too far up ahead, though, so I set off, map in hand, toward the university.

Taking into account the extra walk and the bus being late in the first place, I was going to be about ten minutes late to class. When I got there, though, there was no one in the room. I went to the office and asked if they knew where my class had gone but they said they had no idea. So I waited outside the classroom, thinking they might come back. I waited for about an hour, emailed the teacher to explain my situation, went exploring a bit, then finally texted Kirsten to tell her what had happened. Right when I did that, the class was going on break and the teacher got my email and called Kirsten (the only number they had on record), who called me and told me where to go. So I made it to the last hour of class.

I've decided that I must look a lot more confident than I feel because the day that I was getting hopelessly lost in the city and in the bus system, four different people asked me for directions and/or information -- twice in Dutch and twice in English. I had to explain to them that I had already gotten lost more than once that day and so I probably wasn't a good person to ask.

After that my week was largely uneventful, except for my misadventures in laundry with an exclusively Dutch washing machine.

I think bullet point observations/experiences are going to be pretty much unavoidable for any given blog entry, so I guess I'll just throw those in at the end of each post. Here we go!

• I haven't counted in every room but there are at least twelve fur rugs in this house. No idea if they're real or not.
• Nobody here can catch a ball. We were practicing counting in class with a game -- say a number, throw the ball to someone, they say the next one, and on and on -- and I swear I was one of only two people in the room to catch the ball. Everyone else just stood there with their hands out in front of them, fingers splayed, and every one of them was surprised that the ball didn't just fall into their hands and stay there. If we were a team and this were a kickball game, Andrew would have been extremely unhappy. I caught it every time, though, so, for probably the only time in my life, I was not the least athletic person in the room. 
• The bus has its own lane! This is wonderful. It might actually be generally universal, though. I'm not sure.
• There is no taboo here about telling people that they will get fat from eating something. I don't really mind this because I know nobody is saying it with any kind of malice; they say it about themselves as often as they say it to other people. But what I have noticed is that a statement of "Careful, you'll get fat if you eat too many waffles! No one will recognize you when you go back home!" is usually paired with "Do you want some more? You're not eating enough." Silly Europeans.
• In asking about people's motivations for moving to Belgium, I'm realizing that it is incredible common for people to move to a different country to be with their significant others. One of the people who asked me for directions the other day ended up waiting for the bus with me and she told me her whole story. She's from Hungary and she met her boyfriend when he was on holiday there. He liked her but she was dating someone else. He pursued her for a year until she finally admitted to herself that she wanted to be with him and now she's living in Antwerp because she's in love. A guy in my class, Xavi from Spain (the only other person to catch the ball), moved here because his girlfriend is Belgian. Europeans, it seems, are very loyal to their boyfriends and girlfriends, and a little less loyal to their citizenships. But I guess that makes more sense when home is never more than an hour or two away by plane.

Here's something weird. The other day I opened my laptop and the icon next to my username had been changed from a gingerbread man to a bald eagle. 

My first thought was that the housekeeper had done it as some kind of American joke? But that doesn't actually make any sense, so I'm attributing it to an oddly timed technological hiccup.

That's all for now, I guess! I have some pictures that I want to post, but I'll probably just dump them all in another entry. This one is long enough.

The UnDutchables

Apparently I need a lesson in blogging because I didn't realize until about thirty seconds ago that my last post was just one giant paragraph. I swear it was broken up when I wrote it but apparently blogspot still relies heavily on HTML, so just hitting Enter wasn't enough. Anyway it's fixed now.

So! The theme of today's post is going to be Weird Things Europeans Do. It might be described even more accurately as Weird Things Dutch People Do because pretty much all the people I've been exposed to so far are Dutch. Anyway.

To set the stage a little bit, Kirsten and Joost have been in Italy for the last couple days for a board meeting and the kids and I have been left in the company of Kirsten's mother, Sarah, and her mother's neighbors from back home, Patty and Edo.

Weird Thing European People Do #1

Tea and Coffee

I have been offered tea and/or coffee at least once every [waking] hour since I got here. I certainly appreciate the gesture, but I don't drink coffee (which I eventually started mentioning each time they asked, but they don't seem to understand), and I've just recently started drinking tea. Unfortunately I haven't been able to match my back-home tea concoction with the available ingredients here, but I'm not sure whether the milk, sugar, honey, or tea itself is the problem.

The point is, I very rarely want tea, and I never want coffee, and now I just feel rude because I'm turning down these perfectly friendly offers constantly. As near as I can tell, the Dutch Coffee Schedule goes something like this:

Wake up and have morning coffee
Eat breakfast with coffee
Post-breakfast coffee
Mid-morning coffee
Lunch
Post-lunch coffee
Relax outside, usually with coffee
Dinner
Coffee with dessert
Post-dessert coffee
Bedtime! (Don't forget to bring a cup of coffee up to bed with you)

Without exaggeration I turn down coffee at least four or five times a day.


Weird Thing European People Do #2

Thatched Roofs

There's really not that much to say about this except that they're everywhere. It's actually kind of cool in that a thatched roof can transform a completely normal house into a house that Little Red Riding Hood might live in, but I really hope they've improved the technology in the last hundred years or so.

This isn't a very good picture, but it's the only one I have.

Weird Thing European People Do #3

Conform to Stereotypes

I say this because the behaviors themselves aren't that weird; it's just funny to me that stereotypes can sometimes ring so true.

I mentioned before that Joost gave me a book called The UnDutchables, which was all about the interesting habits of Dutch people, as told from the perspective of an American (or possible English? I'm not really sure) expat. As a side note, the book often refers to these people as Hollanders, which I like because it makes me feel like it's a whole book on generalizing and stereotyping my family. 

Anyway, one of the things the book mentions is the Dutchman's love of flowers, and how a Dutch person will present flowers at every conceivable occasion. They mention the thriving flower business in Holland and even go into detail about how a Hollander must carry the flowers upside down, by the stems, so that the residual water drips all over his or her pants. 

Long story short, I met a family friend yesterday and now I have these:

They were carried upside down, by the stems, and given to me by a Dutch person. I guess you can't fault them for consistency.

Weird Thing European People Do #4

Categorize Things by Animal

I went to Mobistar with Kirsten the other day to get my phone sorted out and noticed this breakdown of phone plans that I thought was kind of funny:

(I think I have the Dolphin plan, but I'm not sure.) And then yesterday we went to Antwerp and the parking structure levels were named after animals too. (We were parked on Monkey, but we accidentally got out of the elevator at Ram.)

 

So I don't really know what that's about, but I like it.

I guess that's about it for the organized portion of this post. Now for some bullet points.

• We were at lunch the other day when Patty asked me if I knew Johnny Depp. 

           "Um...not personally..."

           "I know. But he was in that movie, right? Mr. Scissor Man?"

• There's a store in Brasschaat called So Bling Bling. It has things like this:

I beg to differ.

• People keep joking about American portions, but I'm sorry, not even The Hat comes close to this. That's a very large dinner plate you see being dwarfed by those fries. Four adults and two children didn't even make a dent.

We went to Antwerp yesterday, which was cool. Here are some pictures of buildings that you could find online anywhere.

This was a really cool building too:

Everything was super intricate and gilded and beautiful and looked like it might be a museum or a church or something really culturally important. 

Surprise, it's a train station.

Last but certainly not least, these kids are so freaking cute:

Even if I can never get them to look at the camera at the same time.

That's all for now! I start my Dutch class tomorrow so I'm sure I will have plenty to report back on. :)

Sandwiches for Breakfast

Well I'm on Day 3 here in the forest and all is good so far. I meant to write my first post while waiting for the plane a couple of days ago, so I guess we'll start there.

Normally I'm at the airport way earlier than necessary, so it was a little weird to check in, go through security, find my gate, and board almost immediately. I was in a middle seat, but it was just to Chicago, so it wasn't so bad. The flight was late coming in, though, and I only had 45 minutes between one flight landing and the next taking off in the first place, so late was not good. They made a request that those who did not have to make connecting flights please wait in their seats while those of us that did got off the plane. Well either every single passenger had a connecting flight or no one really cared because I was one of the last people to get off that plane. I basically ran to my gate, which was pretty far away considering it was in the same terminal. I wasn't the only one late, though, and there were some other flights even later than ours, so we waited for about twenty minutes for the remaining passengers to get in and board. (I was a good portion of the way through Star Trek: Into Darkness when I looked out the window and realized we hadn't gone anywhere.)

I sat next to a mid-60s woman named Pam who had temporarily abandoned her dental hygienist position to go to Nairobi and volunteer in an orphanage. I thought that was pretty cool.

The flight itself was uneventful, except that it got in kind of late. We flew in circles for about ten minutes before landing in Brussels. Then my luggage took forever, and I was a bit worried I wouldn't be able to find Kirsten and would have no way to reach her. But in the end my luggage came and Kirsten was right outside and we started home to Brasschaat.

The plan was to stay awake the whole first day so as to combat the jet lag early on. I was doing okay at first, but after going to the City Hall to get registered, attempting to open a bank account (apparently more complicated than it might seem), getting my phone set up, and meeting the kids, I was exhausted by 4:30. I went upstairs for a bit and fell asleep while trying to calculate how many hours I'd been awake. Karlyn woke me up an hour later to tell me dinner was ready ("Eten is klaar!") and I barely made it through without falling asleep at the table. I was in bed and asleep before 7pm.

I woke up the next morning feeling much less out of it, but also in a weird place. I was homesick and a little depressed and mostly just thinking, "What am I doing here? How am I going to handle this for the next nine months?" At that moment if someone had offered me the chance to go back and undo the whole thing, I might have said yes.

I went downstairs where the kids were eating breakfast (turkey sandwiches, interestingly enough) and getting ready for school, although they were running pretty late. Kirsten asked me what I like on my sandwich in the morning, and I had no idea what to say to that. (I ended up going with Nutella, if it matters.) We took the kids to school and once I was out of the house in the fresh air, I felt better about everything. We went home for a bit and I read a book that Joost had given me called The UnDutchables, which is basically about all the weird things Dutch people do. He also gave me some chocolate from his secret chocolate cupboard, and that was pretty great. Then at 10am, once the stores were open, we went out to give it another shot at the Mobistar Store, since my phone still wasn't activated. (It's all sorted out now.) After that we went to a drugstore to get some stuff, and then to a restaurant that Kirsten told me had the best waffles and pancakes, where her mom joined us. The waffle was a lot crisper than any waffle I've ever had, but it wasn't burnt. I just got mine with powdered sugar, but they had a lot of options. Waffles filled with cream, waffles with chocolate sauce, waffles half-filled with cream, waffles with cream on top, waffles with cream and fruit, waffles with chocolate AND fruit sauce, and on and on. I also got a coke, which they very Europeanly brought me in a glass bottle with a wine glass to pour it into.

Then we had to go home so Kirsten could pack for Italy. Kirsten's mom brought her to the airport and I stayed home to have some time to myself. I watched a little TV online before the kids got home from school and then we watched TV in the living room. I like to think I'm now pretty familiar with the Flemish children's TV show characters. There's Mega Mindy, who's a cop named Mieke with a superhero alter ego (and she's completely in love with Toby, another cop who apparently becomes Mega Toby later in the series); there's also a group of singing pirates, a rabbitclown named Bobo, Maya the Bee, and three backup singers who are apparently on every single show. Since I couldn't understand anything, I spent most of the time trying to figure out if the actress playing Mega Mindy was pregnant and that's why she wouldn't take off her trenchcoat and they only shot her from the chest up. (I did some research afterwards and she definitely was.)

Then we had dinner (spaghetti and meatballs) and dessert (pudding from a milk carton) and the kids played for a bit before we brought them upstairs and put them to bed at 8:30. I followed shortly thereafter and was asleep by 9.

And that gets you all caught up! I haven't really taken any pictures of anything yet, but I'm sure I'll get to it soon.