En Belgique

So I made it alive to Bruselas, which is what the Spanish call what the French call Bruxelles and everyone else calls Bussels. I didn't want to actually GO to Brussels, just to Belgium, but the place is so small it was hard to avoid. After an email mixup I had to be rescued by my couchsurfing host, J., who picked me up from Charleroi to avoid sending the poor tourist alone on the trains. And also because he had some kind of train pass. Anyways, we made it back to Bruges okay and went by the pub to meet some his friends in his VW bug (confusingly, the kind with the trunk space in the front and the engine in the trunk). The car is like the love child of an angry motorcycle and a bumper car, with enough noise to scare the pedestrians, the appearance of going twice as fast as it is going, and only half a seatbelt. The first pub we went to was full (it only had about six tables and was located in the smallest street in Bruges) and the second was closed, so we ended up at a third one, and a fourth one... Anyways, my goal in life became to try as much Belgian beer as possible, and we started a list. As the two days in Bruges progressed, I think my hosts were proud of how far I'd gotten. I only have about 340 kinds left. The farther we progress in the evening, the worse the handwriting of the biere du jour.



My tour of Bruges was eclectic and lovely, passing canals, old gates (more on that later), old buildings, more old buildings, and lots of restord guild halls, courthouses, pubs, stores, and everything else. The place is like a living museum, full of picture-perfect buildings and masses of tourists. I can't help but take pictures, but at least I had a local guide to tell me everything and order things in Dutch if we wanted them. We ended up at the brewery in Bruges (Brugse zot beer) where we shared a table with some French tourists from Caen, a young couple, and a Belgian friend of my host. Our conversation was mostly in French for the benefit of our guests, though J., his friend A. and I all spoke english to each other, I spoke German with A., and J. and A. spoke Flemish to each other. Confusee... anyways, we agreed to meet the Frenchies at the main square at 9, and J. and I went home.




I wanted to go for a little run down the street, but J. had a better idea and told me to change and get in the car for a mystery trip. We drove through little hamlets and villages, between fields, left right left right ("where the heck are we going?" "I'm not telling, you will see"). We parked in a little town called De Haan (I think) which has won awards for being the prettiest coastal Flemish village. How you evaluate something like that is beyond me.... in any case, the place was out of a postcard and possessed several kilometers of wide beaches, firm sandbars and little streams running though it, which resulted in the best run I've ever had--absolutely gorgeous scenery (welcome to the North see!), great ground, perfect temperature... several people were riding or driving horses on the beach, and it was absolutely lovely. Makes me want to learn Flemish and move there. Anyways, it was a bit of a run to make it to the market on time, but we found our French friends and went back to the tiny pub of the night before, where you could get a paricular kind of beer only available at this pub and of which you are only allowed to drink three as they are so strong.



After the Frenchies left we went to another place, the Marquee, of the night before, and "on the way home" we landed at Bras, from where we tumbled out several hours and several rounds later. On our bike ride back we passed the old town gate which, miraculously and without explanation was unlocked, so we felt obligated to fully investigate and climbed up the tower (this is not for tourists, so don't get any ideas!) for a good view and some sleeping homeless people. We found a bicycle in the basement, which we liberated before setting off home.




We tried to get out relatively early the next morning, as I wanted to go to Ghent, but as we had gotten home at 5 AM it was a bit hard and we were a bit tired (though not as tired as M., who had been with us, as he got home at 5 and had to work again at 8 AM). We visited him at the supermarket where he worked, and he brought some pastries which we ate at one of the tables of a furniture store, known in the town as being the owners of the wooden monkey statue that someone liberated one night and put in the town roundabout. It was eventually returned but after public outcry the owner himself returned it to the roundabout. And then I went to Ghent.



I had a bit of an issue with the bus system in Ghent and ended up in Zjinwarde or somewhere that wasn't Ghent and was spelled with too many js for its own good. Feeling very lost and out of place I approached the bus driver with my destination "zuid" written on a piece of paper, at which he violently shook his head, told me to get off (in the middle of nowhere) and carefully told me to take bus 5 back to town. But I made it and my host V. picked me up at the bus stop. We spent the evening doing a walking tour of Ghent, visiting the old Nunnery and the old town, the canals and some of the unviersity buildings. We had a drink at a pub on the main square, we walked farther and here and there and took random streets. Ghent has many, many beautiful streets full of old buildings, but also does a fantastic job of combining old buildings with modern or renovated buildings, and the whole place (being a student's city) is full of life and people and cafes. There are almost 300 cafes in Ghent.




We went to an art gallery-cum-restaurant for dinner, where I had a lovely little omelette and salad for the whopping price of 4,50 euros. After dinner we had a drink at V.'s local bar and dodged the rain. Back at her place we played a bit of guitar and collected some warmer clothing before heading out for another stroll through the old town and another drink at a tiny tiny pub which looked like an ecclectic mixture of grandma's pottery and a biker bar--rock music and blue fillegreed tiles. The pubs and the bars here are amazing and each one is practically a work of art. There is one which plays baroque music and has rococco architechture, another with 70s sty;e kitchm and lots of homey, friendly places. I had a beer called Kwak, which is known for its peculiar glass. Some cafes make you give them your shoe as guarantee that you won't steal the glass:



Our walking tour of Ghent the next day commenced early, and I am pretty sure we walked down every street in Ghent at least once, some of them twice or three times. We visited the castle and the cathedral and the churches and the squares, guided by a map for alternative travellers which guided us to such destinations as the "lovliest tree in Ghent" and the place with the "best vintage postcards" and crazy small hole-in-the-wall shops and places. We discovered a statue of one of the noose-bearers (apparently some people were about to be hanged and were paraded about town, and someone liberated them but they were already dead, and then the liberators themselves were executed, or something like that...) with a cast-iron hard-on. We found quiet streets next to the water and watched the preparation for the Ghent festival, which will be the next ten days or so and will make me rearrange my plans to see it for at least one night on my way back from Paris.

Viva Espana

A friend of mine once ran away to Spain. I was kind of hoping she would stay there, because she had caused or been involved in quite a bit of trouble in Germany, but she came back. And stood on my doorstep. And rung my bell, to ask if she could stay. And I had to take her in, but she had to leave the next morning. It was awkward. Anyways…
I wasn’t running away to Spain, but going on vacation—I’d been invited by a friend of mine from the States, who is half Spanish and spends her summer with her European relations, of whom there are many. So I flew to Madrid—my second time ever—and my friend picked me up at the airport. I’ve been in quite a few European cities and capitals, as well as those few American cities graced with subways and undergrounds, and I must say I was quite impressed with the Madrid metro. Clean, smooth, fast—no clattering carriages or perpetual line closures of the London Underground, no endless connecting tunnels as in Paris, making you feel more a hamster than a passenger. If only there were wheels….



I was welcomed into a spacious apartment in Western Madrid, full of maiden aunts (four) and their expatriate relations (also four). And me. I had a bit of trouble keeping the aunts separate, but there was one who was a nun in Paris forever and spoke French, one with salmon-colored hair, one with curly hair and an incorrigible smile who asked me, slowly and smiling, “how…. do…you….do?”, and one other with curly hair, neither Spanish nor English, and less of a smile but a dry sense of humor. I’m no longer used to grandmothers and not used to masses of relations (my friend’s mum has four sisters and two brothers), particularly ones with whom I have no common language, so our connection is somewhat limited. And since we have no common language, and borne of my inability to understand even the simplest instructions given regarding someone else’s belongings in a different culture of which I have no foreknowledge, it is inevitable that I will, eventually, screw something up unwittingly (as I did this morning, as one of my ‘translators’ smilingly informed me on behalf of one of the many aunts as I happily munched on cherries for breakfast that the fruit available for breakfast included basically every possible fruit out there except cherries, which were for lunch). It is the stuff of nightmares—mine, at least—to be chased by an elderly lady in a floral dress (possibly a hairnet, but I don’t know the ladies in question well enough to assert this one), brandishing a toaster (not the electric kind) railing at me in a language I don’t understand. But before you get the wrong impression, no one has been anything but nice to me. Still, hairnets and floral dresses and and and and…




The bus came for us at 8 Am, but first we had to get there, across Madrid towing luggage and bearing lunch like a string of sleep-deprived, slightly lost and directionally challenged ducklings. Bus terminals are bus terminals, busses are busses, and ours distinguished itself in no feature whatsoever, perhaps only in its lack of TVs every eighteen inches. And lack of bathroom. Six hours, six hours, six hours turn into a long stretch followed by a desperate wish for a bathroom, a picnic lunch, and a repeat of the above, excepting the picnic lunch. Finally, after our music and our tempers were exhausted, we made it to Peniscola on the coast between Valencia and Barca. Our house, somehow made available to us due to the fact that the French-speaking aunt is also a nun and somehow has access to such things (apparently she has really the highest connections, or even nuns need weeks at the beach to better commune with God), had a living room larger than most student apartments in Germany and enough beds to house an army and somehow not enough for us. A tiny kitchen and one bathroom were to be shared among us seven, and a polish nun was occupying the downstairs mother-in-law apartment. A slightly musty smell pervaded the courtyard, provided by a mess of cats and kittens who had taken up residence there between the pool and the Chinese restaurant. And then two more aunts arrived, and we started stowing people on any halfway-comfortable horizontal surface available, which were few as the place was tiled and the couches musty.

A week of lather, rinse, repeat: breakfast mid-morning, when people get up, consisting of toasted baguette with olive oil and blackberry jam, perhaps a piece of fruit and coffee. Beach time until lunch. Lunch, served at three in the afternoon, is the main meal of the day and may contain several courses and for me, the vegetarian compromising for Spanish standards and eating fish, the meal invariably contained some kind of seafood. And baguette. After lunch: siesta. Considering how blistering hot it gets in the afternoon, it doesn’t seem like such a bad idea to sleep off your big meal before heading back to… the beach. Then dinner, which may be hot or cold, usually includes a salad, perhaps some fish or tortilla and finished off with fruit and cheese. And baguette. We had calamari pasta, omelette, tuna fish potato salad, fish steaks, normal steaks, chicken breast and other things, and chocolate or marzipan for desert sometimes.

After dinner we take a walk down the beach or up to the castle, to the jewelry-sellers. Spain doesn’t seem to come to life until 10 or 11 at night, when everyone heads for the promenade. Clean, well-dressed and well-styled families stroll along the beachfront promenade, past the caricaturists and painters, past the grandiose sand statues and castles lit with candles, the puppet theatre and the comedian, past the jewelry stands and restaurants and ubiquitous Africans selling knockoff handbags and sunglasses; music drones from one or many bars. The possibilities for evening entertainment are endless:

My friend’s little sister and cousin, both nineteen, had met some guys here on vacation four years previous, and these guys were still here. Like many small towns with locals with small dreams, a job that pays halfway well is reason enough to stay. (Here I must qualify my comment—this is coming from someone who sees no reason to stay put in any one country for more than a year or three, much less one town: therefore, take with a grain of salt). So they stayed. And the girls recognized them, which was reason enough to meet up again for a drink. My friend and I left, giving the sister the house key. The ladies left for their night on the town and we went home, but we unfortunately threw the extra bolt on the door, meaning that regardless of them having the key, there was no way they were getting in. So they had to scale the awning to get on to the second-floor balcony and its attendant door at five in the morning, possibly (though I have no verification and do not wish to make undue accusations) inebriated. Still, no fractures and no harm done…

…and even more fun when it was our turn a few nights later. Less inebriated but still without keys, it was up to my friend’s brother to scale the wall from the downstairs window, hoist himself onto the neighboring balcony and clamber onto ours.

I am the only person present who doesn’t speak Spanish. Even the polish nun, holed up in her downstairs apartment against the deluge of our delegation, even she speaks Spanish. It’s a giant game for me, to see whether and how much and what I can understand of the conversation. To make it more difficult, the conversation topics change as often as a fifteen-year-old going on her first date. What is yeast, whether Russia is next to Southern Germany (the French-speaking nun is known for her inane questions and questionable grasp of geography. And of card playing. And of history—she claimed Germany still forced-sterilized the mentally handicapped), cooking tips, latex allergies, vegetarianism, you name it. Sometimes I get the drift, much of the time I have no idea whatsoever, and the complete lack of logical connection confounds the foreigner. Watching TV is even better, because at least there I have pictures to help me out on the contextual clues. I can sometimes even follow the news, though of course I miss all the (important) details. It’s not the first time I have sat at a dinner table in someone’s house in some country and understood nothing. It doesn’t bother me to not understand. Personally, I thrive on mixed-language conversations. I don’t know any Spanish myself, though, which while reducing my opportunities for causing hilarity / humiliation, also limits my ability to contribute to the conversation without explicit translation. Sometimes, when I make a wrong guess, it’s like watching a movie with the wrong subtitles on, as if the picture were from one film and the subtitles from another.



One of the aunts—I am not sure which one, but I am pretty sure it’s not the one who speaks French—argued that this is not Spain, this shows me (the real tourist) nothing of Spanish life, of Spanish people. So many French tourists, some Danes and Swedes, there is no authenticity, no culture. I am aware of this. This visit is not like my visit to Seville, filled with ancient courtyards and reeking of slightly musty tradition and orange blossoms. Awash in light and sound, filled with browned and tanned tourists, the impression I have is of a picture come to life—everything perfectly designed for description on a postcard: “hi Mom, we’re in Spain, the weather is great, the water’s great, we’re having a blast. Lots of love!” Little variation, much enjoyment, and a sun tan to make anyone jealous. Unless you burn. In awkward places. Like I did. This is vacation, this is beach, this is Florida and Ibizia and SoCal and Cote d’Azur. This is sand and sun and brown little children eating sticky sandy chocolate and sand-filled SANDwiches. This is my grandparents’, this is many things, many vacations, many places.

....and why are you here??

I've enjoyed being the foreigner again, rather than "just another american", or, as it is more likely consciously put, "just like everyone else". Here I am "the" american, and if a qualifier is necessary, I am "the" american who speaks Germans well. I'm quite confident it is the sole reason they invite me to parties and dinner and such--there has to be SOME reason why people put up with me. Not to make fun of my Germany, but to rather be surprised by the random words I happen to know. It becomes a kind of game, to see if they can throw some word at me and I can come up with the english equivalent. Or a battle of aphorisms, to see who can come up with the most proverbs in a row, in a singular non sequiteur:

Me: "a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush"
Them: "oh yeah? well, the early bird gets the worm"
Me: "yes, but a penny saved is a penny earned"
Them: "absence makes the heart grow fonder"
Me: "all bark and no bite"
Them: "as much use as a handbrake on a canoe"
Me: ARRRGH

I usually lose. I don't have a quarter century's experience in collecting curiously coined phrases pertaining to time-honored wise-cracks. Usually I come up with something utterly bizarre which, while technically an expression in the German language, is so obscure and outdated that one might, perhaps, a very long time ago under barely memorable circumstances, have heard it from one's grandmother. Which makes it therefore hilarous coming from a 20-something American.

Then there are my "legendary" language mix-ups. I once tried to execute (as in, death penalty) a bit of mobile shelving (I wasn't even angry; the word I was looking for was to "erect" the shelving, which is unfortunately closely related). I told someone that there were condoms in my marmalade (preservatives are things used in jams and jellies, but Preservativen are condoms in German; Konsivierungsstoffe are used in German jam. Oops. There are probably dodgy jokes that may be made of this.

Anyways, I am flying to Spain tomorrow and coming back to good ol Germany by way of Belgium and Holland, where I've never been but where it rains a lot and I hear they have smashing chocolate. Oh, and it rains. The bikes are nice, too. And sometimes it rains. So in order to make myself familiar with the netherlands, I youtubed around and ended up with....this:

To those of you familiar with Dutch camping vans on the Autobahn:


And I wanted to write more, but instead I ended up watching youtube videos about Fernando Torres, whom I swear I am going to marry if I can ever meet. ANYways... saluto et goodnight.

I want to marry Torres. Just so you know.

Football is over. There will be no more soccer, no more constant media attention, funny hats, drunken bellowing of „Deutschland, Deutschland!!!“ or Autokorsa at 3 AM; I must once again actually plan my evening entertainment instead of simply deciding where and with whom one would watch the daily game. In short, reality has descended and imposed Ordnung on an otherwise reality-free soccer-maddened Europe. Spain won, which is not surprising considering how well they played and how poorly Germany played, and I am positive that every female under 50 who watched the game(s) now wants to marry Fernando Torres. I certainly do. I’ll take Castillas if Torres is taken ;). Ach, reality.

Tomorrow is my last move before I „leave“ for the „summer“. Monday is my last day in this corner of Germany for awhile, after the past six odd weeks I have spent here. It didn’t take me long to figure out things were different from the last time, but also not so long to build up a new life here, with new friends and with old. I will miss it, for sure, but Geneva isn’t nearly as far as the US from good ol Baden. I can’t say I’ll miss the accent, though—the natives have a slurring, musical lilt to their language which infuriatingly induces them to swallow the endings of all verbs and lay their emphasis on all the wrong syllables. Sucks to be a foreigner.

I haven’t been able to write much, and I may not for the forseeable future.--- I am of to Spain, Belgium, and most everywhere else for the next six weeks (!)