Moonlighting as a lab rat.

Mlugh. You’ll have to forgive me, I’m a bit tired today. I didn’t sleep that well last night, mostly due to plastic tube stuffed up my nose, although all those wires glued to my head didn’t help either.

You see, ever since I was a wee laddie, I’ve had an occasional tendency to wake up panicking, full-on fight or flight, heart pounding, vision shaking, and it sucks. I always just dealt with it, but since I am temporarily a member of a functional medical system, I figured I’d try to find out wtf was going on.

So yesterday evening at six o’clock I found myself sitting in the hospital lobby, watching everyone watch everyone else, all trying to figure out who was dying, and of what. (Kinda macabre, but be honest, you know that’s what’s going on in the minds of those people who aren’t particularly dying or visiting someone who is.)

They gave me room 339, fine, we went up there and checked in again, okay, then entered the room…kind of a shock. It was also a totally normal hospital room. But it was, you know, a hospital room. For me!

The narrow bed that can be raised in the back or the legs. The broad triangle handle hanging down to help the ailing one sit up. The bulky remote control, clunky like it just escaped from 1970, with two yellow buttons to turn off the lights, and a big glowing red one to call the nurse. The TV mounted up in the corner above a utilitarian visitor chair and atrocious curtains.

Thus far in life, “patient” has only been applied to me as an adjective, rarely before as a noun.

They asked if I wanted dinner. We’d quickly scarfed down a vegetable stir-fry before leaving the house, but I figured something more solid would be a good idea. White plastic tray. White IKEA plate. Two packages, sealed in plastic, each with two pieces of thin white bread. Two packages, in sealed plastic, each with two pieces of white cheese. Two pats of butter. A small cup of yogurt, cherry.

Why is hospital food so bad? I know some patients need bland and basic food, but at those prices, can’t the rest of us get a little flavour? Or at least a second color?

For beverage they offered coffee or black tea. Odd choices for dinner in a sleep lab, no? Can a brother get some chamomile?

After the monochromatic dinner the nurse dude came in and started gluing shit to my head. Well, first he strapped a plastic powerpack to my chest to which everything would be attached, starting with a belt around my stomach, a stethoscope taped to my jugular, and then the wires. Most of them went to my head and had a little metal cup on the other end, but I was mildly alarmed to see a pair of little alligator clips in the mess too. These were attached to little metal Frankenstein nubs sticking up from pads glued on my gut and shoulder. If they’d brought out a car battery I would have told them everything.

The cups at the end of the wires were glued on. Top of the head, sides of the head, back of the head, behind the ears, temples, two on the chin, and one smack dab in between my eyebrows. That’s 13 wires hanging off me. I expected a man with six fingers on his right hand to tell me it was simple really, he was going to suck one year of my life away…

Later the night-shift nurse added two more wires, connected to Velcro ankle-bands, and the plastic tubing stuck up my nose that I associate with the colossal case of emphysema my grandfather had, then said “call for the nurse if you need to pee.”

It’s all connected to a machine humming away in the corner, and there’s a camera on the opposite wall recording the whole time.

Sleep tight!

I sat there, wired up like the display at a tech museum, trying to decide if I felt closer to A Clockwork Orange or Captain America. Either way, I found it entertaining that K came to the US and saw things from the movies (like diner waitresses topping up your coffee from those big bulbous coffeepots, “regular or decaf hun?”) and I had the same in Belgium. I wonder if my amusement showed up on the screens?

I’m not sure how one is supposed to have a normal night’s sleep in those conditions, but I gave it the old college try, and after what only felt like 3-4 nights, the nurse charged in, slamming on the incredibly bright light and bustling brusquely about as only a nurse can.

She quickly bustled away again after plunking down a pair of feedback forms, in Dutch of course. As I was puzzling over those I started yanking the shit off, starting with the chin and jugular (the plastic tubing came off as soon as the light went on). By the time she came back to collect my forms I had ripped most of them out of my hair, and let me tell you, those f’ers didn’t come out easy.

Nor did they come out clean. They said the glue will come out after 5-6 showers. So I walked out and across the lobby, already busy at 7:00 AM, looking like I had been, shall we say “anointed”? by an impressively large seagull with an incredibly toxic diet. Must be the hospital food.

In two weeks I’ll go back to hear if I’m good at sleeping or not…

A couple days in Antwerp

I love the way the seasons work. We’ve passed the apex of Winter, when Life, mostly unnoticed by us poor modern mammals, held still for a long night in perfect frozen equilibrium, a clear blue liquid depth, from which we are now slowly rising back towards the green air of Spring and the mythic yellow air of Summer.

But that warmth is still a long way off, and this Saturday morning was a loving reptile, slow to awaken in the cold but we don’t mind waiting. Sluggish buses, reluctant dog-walkers with arms clenched tightly to their sides, and a sun so bright and cold it can’t possibly be the same entity that will redden white Belgian posteriors on vacation in Spain in a few short months.

This winter has actually been remarkably mild, the cold only coming in Friday night. Thursday and Friday were borrowed from Autumn, which was great timing on two days where I taught in the morning, then had several hours of free afternoon before an evening class.

Thursday I wandered towards the University district through an urban crevasse of building facades, not quite united on a single plane and each unique to themselves, but united in a texture of Continental age, with walls of bricks chipped by centuries, or weathered gray stone showing a grayscale of accretions from generations of rainfall.

Cobblestones under the tires of small gray fuel efficient cars, with breathily metallic exhalations from trams that pass at an unexpected variety of velocities. Opposite a tidily imposing storefront of Romanesque columns that now shelters a gay bookstore, I found one of those perfect European cafes to stop and warm my hands.

The walls are rich dark wood chosen in full expectation of centuries of service, lightened here and there by mirrors. There is a coat rack. A silvered man in a well made sweater is reading the paper. Good coffee is served in small curvaceous cups, each coming with a small cookie. Two cubes of unrefined sugar in one of those little jars used in hotels for single servings of confiture (nothing so crass as jam). I wonder if the waitress is reading any of the same texts I read in college.

This place has nothing to talk about with Starbucks.

Three tables are occupied, two languages, neither of them English, the man reading the paper is alone. His sweater exults in cold misty mornings, and his hands are worn and confident. After a half hour he is joined by a younger woman with large startled eyes, whose own coat has repurposed some of its functionality to fashionability. He greets her with a nearly wordless calm that is clearly paternally pleased to see her. Happiness leaks out of him in small smiles during their conversation. His eyes disappear completely during his rare laughs, which seem like a newly acquired skill in a formerly harsh life.

On Friday I go to a funky young place for dinner. The façade is neon green, the front door handle is an indoor-rock-climbing hold, the music is Johnny Cash, Nina Simone, and company. I have the tortellini, with zucchini, sun-dried tomatoes, artichoke hearts, arugula, and quality mozzarella. A little pesto drizzled on top of the hearty tomato sauce.

Outside the window a rainbow arcs down in shouting defiance of the northern European grayscale onto the theater building across the square where schoolboys are skateboarding with impressive skill and minimal image-consciousness.

Both Thursday and Friday were astrologically blessed, with lessons to be learned from observation, an Ipod with impeccable timing, and flirtatious weather that drizzled precisely the right amount of precipitation as I walked across Antwerp to my evening class Friday night.

Yup, I’m going to miss Belgium.

A Little Scratch on New Year's

I am waiting, drowsing. Not too much longer, just another two turns of the calendar’s pages.

The calendar is hanging opposite the tankless water-heater in the little closet off our tiny kitchen where we cook our incredibly healthy vegetable stir-fry dinners that I will soon be missing. It was made and gifted by my folks and has pictures from their trip to Europe last September. Pictures of places in Belgium that were eye-grabbing to me too when I first saw them, my big traveling backpack on, but now I wear a functional day-pack and don't always notice them as I pass by in the fugue of the familiar.

I have accidentally and incorrectly given the impression that I do not like Belgium, that I don’t want to be here. I do, and I do. Belgium is still a great place, my vagabond feet don’t change the places they step. I am voraciously thankful for the shelter I have found here. The lessons and the growth. The smiles and sighs of contentment.

The deliciously maddening thing about sighs of contentment is that they’re a renewable resource… that needs renewing.

There is a new and delicious plate of food to go find. There is a new and gorgeous vista to go see. There are new and wonderful people to go meet. There are new and frustrating episodes to go through. There are new and important lessons to go learn.

There are urges, familiar and beloved, perhaps inimical. And maybe even dangerous? But Belgium is and will remain a haven of goodness.

We’ll see what happens to those urges in 2012. And to start the year, a little scratch of the traveling itch, courtesy of a Christmas gift hotel voucher from my folks. We found a place in Neiderbronn-les-bains, just across the border in France, that looked like a nice place to spend New Year’s Eve.

We packed basically toothbrushes and snacks, reaching a good ratio of healthy (homemade hummus and cherry tomatoes) and junky (peanut snack-things, Szechuan flavor), and stopped to get fresh bread on our way out Saturday morning.

This specific area of Belgium has it’s own New Year’s Eve tradition, where kids go door to door singing short songs and receiving little treats. It’s sort of a combination of Christmas caroling and Halloween.

With a 9 grain baguette in hand I got back to the car just in time to hear a handful of Flemish children, all bundled up, singing to a smiling old man:

Oud jaar, nieuw jaar

Twee koekjes is een paar

We wensen jullie

een gelukkig nieuwjaar

("Old year, new year, two cookies is a pair, we wish you a happy new year.")

Perfect. Geweldig.

It was only a 4 and ½ hour drive, and passed from Flanders, through relatively rustic Wallonia, into some snowy forests of Germany, then along winding Alsatian farm roads in France. I love Europe.

Unbeknownst to us, the GPS was set to avoid toll-roads, so we left a wide Teutonic freeway and drove the last hour through sleepy villages that can only plausibly be inhabited (in my mind) by Hansel, Gretel, and various other Brothers Grimm fairy tales. Worn brick walls built by hands that never left the village, long wooden beams bowing under the weight of centuries, street names in dialects particular to the village, and those winding streets that descended organically from whatever paths the horses felt like making.

Oh, and much to my giggling delight, one of those towns is called Bitsch (Bitche on the French side). I wish I’d taken a picture of the fork in the road that featured Bitche on one hand and some quaint-sounding village on the other…a metaphor for how we respond to the minor irritations of life. “Will you take the Bitche road, or the delightful little village path?”

Neiderbronn-les-bains is almost one of those sleepy towns, but is a little too enlivened by money, is now larger, and features a sizeable casino, yet remains ineffably picturesque. It holds to the regional integrity of prominently not featuring chain stores or modern blech like neon lights. There was of course a grocery store that is probably not full-fledged Mom-and-Pop, but it was small, packed to coziness, and locals were chatting away in the Alsatian blend of German and French. I would bet you dinner that they knew all about each other’s parents and children.

The hotel was the other exception to the no-chains rule, as it was a Mercure.

The first time I remember leaving the US was when we went to England to visit my little British granny when I was circa 8 years old. We hopped over to Paris for the weekend (a trip that included my first experience of throwing up on a train…I have currently thrown up on trains in 4 countries, and although the following 3 were all the results of poorly timed food poisoning) and stayed in a Hotel Mercure.

Thus, I have reason to believe that the first words I ever learned in another language, taught to me by my responsible mother, were “où est l’hotel Mercure?” Followed shortly therafter by my brother’s and my improvisational “où est l’merde?” which earned us a stern look from the severe old Parisian woman stalking past us on the Champs-Élysées.

Neiderbronn-les-bains (named, I assume, after the thermal baths located there, which I think the Romans were fond of) saw a second childhood return on New Year’s Day, when we went for a walk on the train tracks. No, that wasn’t the childhood activity, remember, I mentioned my responsible mother. Instead it was the practice of putting a penny on the rails for the train to run over. I assume I have several smeared slivers of ex-penny stashed somewhere in my parent’s house. This time the penny was knocked off almost immediately, so I have a slightly oblong and distorted 2 Eurocent as my new lucky coin.

The town is only a half hour away from Strasbourg, so after abusing my small amount of Continental currency we headed there to wander around. Strasbourg is a university town, one of the primary European Union capitals (European Parlaiment, Court, and Commission on Human Rights), where Gutenberg invented the printing press and Goethe fell in love, and takes quaint/epic old architecture to a new level.

It being New Year’s Day, all the Strasbourgians were abed or fled, leaving the streets empty of all but burned-out firecrackers and tour groups. Not the worst way to see a city, but a bit odd.

There were two eating establishments open, one of which had an entertainingly incomprehensible menu (it seemed to be entirely appetizers, drinks, and flams…without any explanation of what a flam is) so we ended up eating in an American-themed burger joint, with stacks of Prohibition-labelled crates under an American flag, Roy Lichtenstein’s cartoon pop art on the walls, and a Bonny & Clyde special of the day.

I could tell we were still abroad though by the indigestible Euro techno assaulting my heart rate and the order-taker guy who looked like a distinctly French caricature of J. Edgar Hoover, don’t ask me how. The cook was French Eminem, and had been in a fist fight within the last week or so against someone bigger than him.

Monsieur Hoover was very likable, which made it confusing when our food continued to not show up for an impressively long time. People who ordered after us got their food and my patience was somewhat frayed by the nonstop nnn-tss-nnn-tss aural attack, and I found myself wondering if it was that infamous French stereotype of arrogance and passive disrespect for foreigners…but I don’t think it was. He said the tape on the order machine had run out, and (after we ate) followed us out the door to apologize again, which he didn’t have to do. So Monsieur Hoover d’Strasbourg is still mon amie.

We took the toll roads home, thereby avoiding Germany in favor of Luxembourg, which ended just before I realized we were there. We gave a cheer to enter Belgium again, and listened with satisfaction as the Flemish radio stations came back in range.

Gelukkig nieuw jaar, everyone!