Exploring Brussels

When we first began talking about moving to Belgium, there was a time that I was rooting adamently and passionately for living in Brussels. There, I was sure, I would be able to carve a niche out in the expat community, I would feel like I was living more of a cosmopolitan life, and I would, most likely, find an easy commute to a job in the city.

We, of course, didn't end up there, but we're close enough sometimes to feel the city's tugs and nudges. I have been to Brussels several times since we settled in Leuven, for various errands. We spent a weekend there a couple of weeks ago, after the last of my Dutch Level 2 test, and we walked from the north to the south in one go on Sunday morning, through dreary skies and bustling markets. I came away feeling like I knew the city just a little bit better. It's a city that has a lot in common with my former home - Philadelphia, with a brooding center that will also take your breath away with its monstrous, elaborate, and yet lonely architecture. Brussels, I feel, has that same personality, a monumental but serious beauty, one who will let you admire all you want, but will give you the cold shoulder if you try to snuggle up too close.


A city with its shoulders clenched a bit, built for deep-cutting winds and dreary rains. Or perhaps it's because I've never been there on a sunny day. Either way, I guess I prefer my cities with this kind of personality. Like feeling a city's flexed muscles. Its pose should be unwavering.

Passed

Just a quick update: I passed, with pretty good marks. Level three starts Monday! Whew!

Exams for beginners

I promise pictures in the next post (or maybe the one after that...heh heh), but I just had to write about this first...

Last Thursday and Friday, I took my first Dutch final exams. I always knew that the educational systems in the U.S. and Belgium were different, but one week of intense studying and a few panic-stricken days of threatening all kinds of crazy nonsense if I didn't pass, I sympathize much more with the Belgian student situation than I did before. This doesn't exclusively have to do with the cultural difference, it also has to do with my own personal background - I was an English major in college, and as all English majors will testify, nine times out of ten the "final" is a clean, double-spaced ten-page paper, typed out over late nights of thinking and analyzing and drafting and thesis-making in your pajamas, at your pc, spicing things up with some nuggets of delicious research after spending a few solitary hours in the library stacks followed by meticulous footnoting. My papers were things of beauty, my friends, and "exams" (the type where you sit down for two hours without any props or booster texts to help you along the way) weren't even a glint in my eye most semesters. And that's the way I liked it.

Here, it's not just that I've changed what I'm studying (I will admit that there is something to be said for testing language students). It's that all those little homework assignments, all those writing tasks and vocabulary activities count for naught. We even took tests to keep us on track with the curriculum - they mean nothing in the face of the final exam. Even showing up to class on time and on a regular basis (which I did -- perfect attendance, I might add!) only means that you can hope (hope!) all the class anecdotes, all that time put in will give you a head's up during the exams.

In the U.S., all this work during the semester would give you accumulating credit for your final grade. Lots of it.

For this exam there were exactly four hours and ten minutes (albeit, broken up over two days) reserved for me to prove myself worthy of moving on to Dutch level three. And even after I felt ready with the material, I was still incredibly nervous: What if something terrible goes wrong? What if you wear the wrong sweater and your back itches through the entire four hours and you can't concentrate? What if your stomach is suddenly not behaving? What if, ten minutes into the exam, you suddenly have to pee so bad you can barely hold it, but they refuse to let you out of the exam room? All nightmares of a novice test-taker.

Oh yeah, and as a former English major, I will also say that memorizing stuff is hard.

I took the exam, and thankfully, little interrupted my concentration besides a slight draft in the room and a few squeaky chairs here and there. I'll find out tomorrow if I passed or failed. So stay tuned...

Styling up

Everybody knows that coming to Europe means learning to tie a scarf in about 40 different ways, to fit any outfit and any occasion. I know of two, but don’t challenge me to a scarf-off with those two, because you’d be scrambling to gather your little threads off the floor at the end, my friend. I’ve mastered them.

A fashionista I have never been. But here in Belgium, I am both blessed and cursed with a family-in-law filled with women who are, as they say in Dutch, modieus. It’s not so much that they are interested in fashion as they are careful about looking quietly stylish, with just a touch of elegance, at all times. Imagine my surprise the first time I bounded down the steps in Belgium, ready for a day of site-seeing with H’s family, in a t-shirt with my alma mater splashed loudly across the chest, shorts and sneaks (of course, what else for a day on your feet??), only to be greeted by his sister. In a skirt. And high heels. Boy was my American face red.

But, as they say, when in Rome…Here in Belgium, I’ve begun to make an effort, at least most of the time, to dress nicer on a daily basis. As in, not just for nights out and special occasions. Of course, I wore high heels at my former job all the time, but I would be lying if I said I didn’t slip them off at the end of the day and throw on some flats to get me home. The less time I spend in them, the better – that was my motto. But here, I was lucky enough to find some very comfortable high-heels that I’m actually wearing to walk around town. In the daytime! By myself! Admittedly, the first time I wore them I shifted my weight wrong and the heel toppled in a ridiculous jolt to the side of my foot about eight times in the two hours I was out. (Then I debated whether looking decent was worth the humiliation of not being able to walk right in high heels on uneven cobblestone streets. I decided begrudgingly that it was.) It’s getting better. My average now is maybe two times of slight tripping per day.

So, my resolution is quickly evolving into results, and I feel good about that. Not so good as to drop my habit of slipping into my pajama pants and a comfortable sweatshirt the moment I get home for the day, but at least I look decent in public. And perhaps in the next few months I’ll even try a third scarf-tying technique. Not to get ahead of myself, but you never know. I just might be ready for it.

Time away

When I was a junior in high school, I was accepted into a summer academic program, a sort of overnight camp for nerdy types, and my parents dropped me off and left me hours away from the house I grew up in. It felt huge. I spent six weeks living in a college dormitory and attending a class on African literature (of which I remember very little, so don’t ask), and by the fourth week, it felt like an adrenaline rush to the finish line, a tight-rope walk to when I could be home again. I still vividly remember, after getting home, standing upstairs in the hallway that led from my parents’ room to mine, running my hands over an old quilt that they hung on the back of a chair, and feeling like I could relax, like there was something in me that had stayed tightly wound for all those days and hours that could finally unravel a little bit.

It’s funny how, as you get older, big gobs of time feel so much less epic, and not much more than a drop in an expansive ocean. Six weeks now rushes by in the blink of an eye. We’ve been here for about one blink, and there have only been one or two fleeting pangs of homesickness. Home over the past ten years has been divided between so many places – my hometown, my college town, Philadelphia – but I’m lucky to be far enough away from the entire expanse of my country that I get to miss it all, in one fell swoop, every now and then. Technology makes it so easy to keep in touch with the people I’m close to, and to see them, so that most of the time I don’t feel so far away. But every once in awhile, something sets my head reeling just for a moment. Seeing pets over the camera is one of them. You can’t chat with pets, and when my sister’s cat makes her way into the camera’s view, I feel the distance a little bit more. When my mother’s dog looks pitifully at the talking computer that seems to know his name (before he scrambles away – he’s the sweetest dog, but he’s incredibly cowardly), I feel like tearing up, just for a second.

I was a frequenter of independent coffee shops first and foremost in the States, and I only ever went to Starbucks because I was desperate (and it was the absolute only place to get a warm drink in the independent-business-wasteland of a neighborhood where my job was located in Philadelphia), so when I saw that big, round, green and white glow during a recent trip to Antwerp, I was surprised at how jelly-legged I suddenly felt. It was a cold and overcast day, so I sat and had an Earl Grey tea. The smell evoked something vague and desperate, no specific time and no specific place, not even specific faces. But it was something melancholy that made me think carefully about where I was, and, just for a minute, reminded me both cruelly and sweetly of where I was not.