Carnaval Saturday, Part 2

Instead of staying in Schriek for the Belgian Julio Iglesias (he’s the Wayne Newton of Spain, right?) we went to another town’s hall, stopping off on the way so I could follow the festival tradition of engaging in far too much fried food.  I was soon thoroughly podged on Belgian fries (which are well worth the fame, and make it clear that fries did in fact come from Belgium, not France) and a “bicky burger,” which is a colorless grey patty with fried onion bits on top, pickles, and curry ketchup.  Yum!  Well, yum at the time, remorseful soon after.  But hey, it’s Carnaval, man!

A few friends were converging at our place before the concert, and I introduced them to one of my personal favorites: bugs on a log.  Take a celery stick, fill it with peanut butter and line the top with raisins.  Mmm mmm good.  The Netherlands is one of the very few places outside the US that doesn’t find peanut butter repulsive, and Belgium is cautiously tolerant of the legume’s sticky deliciousness.  The first intrepid sampler declared it “humph” which, translated through his girlfriend, meant “that’s pretty good.”

After my curry burger and peanut butter ambassadorship, the cultural tour continued at the concert, which had a Celtic theme.  Well, the first and the third bands were Celtic, the second, which was the one we were there to see,  is kind of a more musical, 5 man version of Tenacious D, called pIE p.KLEIN (pronounced basically “peep kline“ and which translates to “really small“).

The crowd was mostly older people, who watched the transition from traditional Celtic ballads to blaring trumpets, sunglasses, and inflatable guitars with cautious amusement.  The songs about Spanish culture and Jack the Ripper’s more bloody brother (who is not as famous as a result of being discriminated against because he was gay) were well received, and the band moved on to one about how many women each of them have slept with.  Arms started folding and faces going blank in the crowd.  Then it was one about seducing other men’s wives, and the hall went very still.  I of course found all this highly entertaining, and I suspect there were a few other grins hidden behind frowns among the crowd.  Always fun to waggle a finger under the nose of stodginess.

The final number, which normally brings the crowd to its feet, was a sing-along cover, during which they unrolled banners with the words to each evolving chorus.  These refrains dealt with women, and how we like them, covering such variances as the popularity of lesbians and twins.  I think our table was the only one singing along.  My defense, your Honor, is that I was drunk on bicky burger.

After the joviality of lesbiphillic choral work, the Celtic ballads seemed rather staid (although they did play the song from the montage towards the end of Napoleon Dynamite, which was pretty kickass), and we realized we were tired and took our leave.  I think every pair of eyes in the place watched our exodus, and the band, now seated at the bar, was sorry to see us go.

Carnaval Saturday, Part 1

Saturday was Carnaval in the small town of Schriek (pronounced a lot like “shriek” but with more friction on the back of your tongue at the beginning).  Several towns in the area have their own Carnaval celebrations over the course of a couple weeks, but the one in Schriek is rumored to be the largest one specifically dedicated to children in Belgium.

The sky overhead was gray but the smiles and laughter were pure summer warmth.  The main event was a parade around town with floats, music, and costumes.  Both children and adults dressed up, and costumes ran the full range, from vampires to disco dancers to farm animals.  One float had cardboard cutouts of cowboys and Indians, and what looked like American Civil War soldiers; hey that’s my country’s tarnished and dirty history!  And wow, old school Disney sure was racist!

Each float had it’s own sound system, and the cacophony of different music gave an unmistakably festive feel to the air, which was already redolent with the smells of frying potatoes and grilling burgers from the mobile vendors who had set up their trailers in the central square, below the quintessential towering church steeple.  If the church bells rang, I couldn’t hear them, as the different anthems bounced back and forth off the bluff fronts of the brick houses ringing the square.

Every good pirate ship needs a Batman.

Many of the people on the floats had full plastic bags in hand; a few of them were full of candy, which they flung to the people lining the sides of the streets, but the majority of them bulged with confetti.  The people of this area must have been saving the bounties of hole-punchers all year, and spent the last month having all-night magazine shredding parties.  “Combative” and “aggressive” are both much too strong of words, but the confetti throwing was not so much of the gentle snowfall variety, but was more likely flung in faces and stuffed down shirts, all in amiable good humor of course.  The streets were covered with bits of paper, gathering in drifts in the gutters, which the children gathered up in handfuls, just like snow, to throw again.

The confetti gets everywhere, and I fully expect to be finding little paper squares around the house for weeks, despite the best efforts of the vacuum.  I think I will deliberately not clean out one of the pockets in my pants; I wonder where I’ll be when I rediscover it and remember the mass of laughing children throwing flickering fistfuls of floating paper at each other.

Here's Katrien getting confetti-ed by our friend Fana

Who felt really bad about it

Vampire-themed float, complete with ghost horses:

Vampire float riders, observe the full bag of the girl to the left of the inexplicably blue guy:

And its contents airborne:

After the parade, people took shelter from the confetti blizzard in the town meeting hall, where a long bar dispensed pints of Belgian beer in the back and an effervescent band played sing-along children’s songs on the front stage.  At the beginning of each verse of one particular song the singer would ask what language they speak in a given country, then that verse would be sung in that language.  We went through French, German, and I think Danish before reaching America, when I found we had been singing about Bob the Builder, who I recognized from posters and toys throughout Europe and America.

The Band

The audience, complete with oversized hot dog which was gone in a remarkably short period of time:

The post-parade party went all afternoon, people in costumes and normal clothes enjoying the music, hot dogs, beer and laughter until the frequency of tired-child-tantrums grew indicatively higher and people trailed off home.  There were a few hours of normalcy, then the evening’s adult party started.  Instead of a children’s band playing cyclical songs with exaggerated arm gestures, the hall featured Willy Sommers, who as far as I can tell is something of a Belgian Wayne Newton.  Everyone knows his name, though no one actually likes him (other than one guy‘s parents), but when he played in the small town people were grudgingly interested.  My own Carnaval took me to a different show though, so I can’t testify as to the quantities of spray-on tan or hair gel he brought to the stage.

An Antwerpian Oddity

Took a day trip to Antwerp on Friday.  Which had me thinking…when was the last time you said, or heard someone else say, the word “twerp”?  Had to be in the 1980s, right?  Someone’s older brother perhaps?  Maybe that mean fifth grader, when you were in fourth?  Does the word belong to the decade or the grade level?

Anyway, that’s not what Antwerp refers to.  Antwerp is hand-throwing.  Yeah.  “(H)and” which is pronounced “hant”.  The verb for “to throw” is “werpen.”  And here I’d led you to believe Belgians were such civilized people.

The supposed icon of Antwerp is a statue of a guy (naked of course) throwing someone else’s hand.  His name is Brabo, and in the “Act Like A Local” section of the  “free map for young travelers”  is says: “Never take pictures on the ‘Grote Markt.‘  The statue of Brabo on the square might be described in every tourist guide as our biggest hero, but many Antwerpians can’t even explain why he’s throwing that hand.”

(The story is that the giant Antigoon was charging too much in taxes, and maybe cutting off the right hands of people who couldn’t pay, so Brabo cut of Antigoon’s hand and threw it into the river Schelde.  Poetic justice, medieval style.)

For me though, Antwerp’s most famous (perhaps infamous) representative was found in a secondhand bookstore.  We were walking up Hoogestraat (High Street) which is one of those awesome pedestrian boulevards lined with shops and statues and interesting people.

Quick tirade:  These streets are so obviously awesome, but so few Americans towns have them.  The best one I know of is in Boulder, Colorado, but even my dear Santa Cruz, California has cars driving down theirs (that is, standing still on theirs while the drivers get pissed off), and pretty minimal character to the shops, since the exorbitant rents mean only chain stores can afford to be there.  Even small towns in Belgium often have streets with little or no vehicle traffic, lots of shops, people riding bicycles and walking around, and, oh yes, the fry-shops.

But anyway, me and the lady were walking along the street in Antwerp, and both being book- and bookstore-lovers, went into the first one we saw.  It had that wonderful smell of old books, and the walls were lined floor to ceiling with odd titles, flaking covers, and worn spines.

There were no English titles that I could see, but in one corner I found a travel guide for California from the late 80s.  I am always curious about what the “experts” recommend for places I know, so I was leafing through it, trying to find the section on my old stomping grounds (when I found it, it featured a prominent photo of about a dozen people dancing naked in the surf.  I lived there 28 years and never saw a dozen people dancing naked in the surf.  Well, okay, maybe I did, but rarely.)

There were two men in the store, presumably one the owner and the other one of those customers who spend a whole lot of time there.  The one I suspect was the customer came over and we were soon chatting away.  He was very friendly, and told me all about his travels to the US, and how he had visited many battle sites there.  Turns out he was excited because he had thought I was perusing the military section, which was next to where I’d found the travel book.  Then it got weird.

He mentioned that the (Civil War) battle sites he visited in the US were from the “War of Northern Aggression.”  Suffice to say, that roused my curiosity a bit.  His words were fast and his subject changes faster, and I was carried along like roadkill stuck under your SUV’s front axle.   He quickly moved on to a statue of George Washington in Richmond, Virginia, where he is holding a symbol from Roman times of absolute authority over life and death.  Then it was how the Italian fascists used the same symbol.  Then it was that the Nazis are incorrectly associated with fascism because they were National Socialism.  True, but it seems safe to guess that most people who get upset about this distinction…hmm.

I lost a lot of the substance of his rapid-fire and semi-fluent words, but was left with the clear impression that this guy has a half-hidden thing for the Nazis.  I’m guessing his apartment has a knife or twenty, maybe a luger in an often-opened display case, and has read Mein Kampf several times, with more sweet dreams than nightmares.

I was reeling a bit, trying to make sure I was correctly understanding him, when I realized he’d asked me a question.  He wanted to know my line of work, and when the conversation moved to the difficulties of getting a work permit he somehow segued that into an anti-immigrant rant during which he told us how juries were finding in favor of car-jackers because the cars stolen were too fancy and had therefore invited the theft, and that the government issued a list of cars that were sufficiently fancy that stealing them was understandable.

Then it got worse.  Over 18 only beyond this point, please.  He told us how the other day a judge acquitted someone “from a certain Africa country” who was riding on the bus, “got excited“, masturbated (complete with demonstrative hand gesture) and ejaculated on a 10 year old boy.  It was clear what he thought of “these people.”

Now, hopefully you can guess what I think of anyone who does any such behavior, but to somehow extend one incident into a justification for judging an entire segment of humanity, that is the problem.  If we are going to take insane and sick acts by an individual as condemnation for an entire skin color, then there is no one left innocent on the planet.

Suffice to say, my girlfriend and I were wide eyed and edging towards the door, for more reason than just his substantial body odor.  We made our way with cold demeanors but lively steps out the door.  At some point the had given us a little printed out flyer, on the back of which he wrote a website, and on the front he put a phone number.

I was scared to see what it was, but it turned out to be basically an infomercial for a vitamin supplement that he credits with restoring his knee after his years as a paratrooper, and he wants me to start selling for him in the US.

So that was that.

Notes and observations of Belgium, Part 3

My girlfriend is a social worker in a neighboring town, and I visited it nearly a year ago, spending a few long-houred days wandering the streets, waiting for her workday to end (sometimes 14 hours on Mondays, for heaven’s sake).  Now as I move around town again, there is a pervasive sense of the foreign, but pieces here and there are familiar.  I don’t know the traffic etiquette (I’m pretty sure I was supposed to yield in at least one instance) but I have a notion of the layout (the library was almost where I expected it to be) and I‘m pretty sure I used that particular ATM before.  I know where to get a sandwich, but can’t read the menu.

It is like an entire town made of 40% déjà vu.

The streets outside the town center run among brick buildings, all connected into long blocks, mostly houses with a few shops or offices sprinkled throughout.  The houses are generally two storeys plus an attic below steeply pitched slate roofs.  Stubby chimneys are on every roof, frequently with three or four lines from the different heated rooms and spaces below.  Big soft-looking pigeons and orange-beaked blackbirds gather around them on cold mornings.

The streets are cobblestone, with their distinctive sound beneath the tires of hurrying cars, and my arms on the handlebars feel massaged and softened by the bouncing while my eardrums occasionally tickle.  I do not miss the greasy grit of asphalt.

I have learned a few more Dutch words since last time, so I can recognize that “fietsers” on a sign means it refers to bicyclists.  Now I just need to find out if “uitgezonderd” means “prohibited” or “allowed.”

I am a member of the town library, which is clean and well-stocked (though I haven‘t found the English section yet).  The clientele are primarily distinguished and elderly, and there is a fancy coffee machine in the corner.  The awkward and rather shameful reality of libraries back home functioning as daytime habitat for the homeless is not at all true here.  The air is fresh and the furniture spotless.  The bathrooms are unlocked and tidy.  In fact, I don’t remember seeing any obviously homeless people at all in these towns.  There are definitely poorer neighborhoods, and a lot of people in need, but the social network is comprehensive enough that I have seen no one sleeping under filthy blankets in alleys, and have not been asked for spare change a single time.

The schoolchildren walking through the streets seem open-faced and genuine, with far less attitude than their American counterparts, though the adolescent search for identity goes on as always.  Early teens often hold cigarettes in still-growing fingers, but dress is sensible (although I have not yet seen the code for warmer weather) and make-up seems rare.

Minorities are few, though this is less the case in the cities, again as usual, though apparently there is a steady flow of asylum seekers coming into the country.

My final observance took a couple days to notice.  There are very few really overweight individuals here, of any age.  That is not to say it is an entire nation of svelte athletes, lord knows they drink far too much beer for that.  But though bellies and hips are often solid and rounded, to my eye there is a conspicuous absence of overweight people, and very few are morbidly obese.

Now I admit that all this is after only a few days here, and I could be completely wrong about all of it, as well as accidentally offensive, but those are my observations thus far.

Notes and observations of Belgium, Part 2

Belgian houses are solid looking, mostly brick, though without the boasting size of American McMansions.  There are definite architectural tendencies and similarities between buildings, but each house is distinguishable from it‘s neighbors, though never ostentatiously so.  I have seen no cookie-cutter subdivisions yet, with 350 houses of five designs.

It is an affluent country, and clean, modern, expensive cars hurl themselves through the narrow streets.   I don’t remember seeing any rusty clunkers, mismatched paint jobs, or panels of primer-gray.  Nearly every car is an efficient sedan or compact, there are very few SUVs (just the occasional Rover), and scooters are common.  I have seen very few declaratory (compensatory?) autos, that is, the red corvette, yellow viper, or giant truck.  The lack of these guzzlers could be due to the high gas prices, but I think they are outside of the Belgian character anyway.  Mercedes and BMW are common, but I get the feeling they are chosen for being good cars, not for any value as status symbols.

Drivers are polite and skilled, though simultaneously reckless and aggressive in the close quarters.  They drive quickly and precisely on the narrow streets, swishing closely past oncoming traffic, parked cars, pedestrians and bicyclists without slowing at all.  Town streets have frequent blocks in one lane to slow the flow of traffic, but to my eye this just results in a whole lot of darting vehicles in a masterful but precarious dance of timing.

In this casual acceptance of close proximity to other objects on the road I see a reflection of the different parameters of personal space in this land of high population densities for centuries.  You can also see this manifested in the nearness of tables in a café as well as the densely packed housing.  I have not noticed it in direct personal proximity though; that is, Belgians are not close-talkers.

Notes and observations of Belgium, Part 1

On a wonderful Sunday afternoon in March, I found myself sitting back in a chair in a fourth floor walk-up apartment in a small town in Belgium, watching episodic rain showers through the sliding glass door, listening to the susurrations of Dutch on the radio, and eating a midday snack of dark brown bread from the neighborhood bakery (one does not buy bread in the grocery stores here, but can get it from bread vending machines that are stocked by the bakeries every morning), nettle cheese from the farmer’s market in Heist-op-den-Berg, and blue grapes, each grape a struggle between fleshy fruit sweetness and the bitterness of the several crunchy seeds.

My cup of tea was vanilla almond, made from a bag taken from the ruptured metal canister that I pulled from my obviously mistreated backpack.  (I can see why baggage handlers are dubbed “throwers”.  My bathroom bag was blasted to shreds, shattered bottles of sample shampoo leaving everything coated a greasy white, which, though I haven’t taken that bag near a beach in months, somehow picked up a fair amount of sand.)

Spring was coming in the door when I left Portland, Oregon a week ago, but though only five latitude to the north, Winter still holds sway here.  But the cold is only brisk, not biting, and feels good your skin in the morning.  The trees are mostly bare, and when the rain falls it is colder than my beloved Oregon precipitation, but the snow is over.  The sun outside is still chilly, but when it comes through a window onto you, it is easy to feel the warmth of the season’s change.

Today I rode my borrowed bicycle along small country lanes through the towns of Booischot, Hulshout, and Morkhoven to the larger town of Herentals.  If I took a more circuitous route, I could pass through Haacht, Zandhoven, Grobbendonk, Zoersel, Begijnendijk, Scherpenheuvel, Boortmeerbeek, or Aarschot.  That last one would translate literally to “Butt-boom.”

The tidy country lanes of my bicycle ride to Herentals sketched a defiantly irregular grid through land that has known dense human habitation for far longer than my North American homeland.  The towns are small, we in the Belgian countryside, but the saturation of centuries of human experience means man’s presence has completely diffused throughout the space.  There are urban streets interspersed with pastureland and fields, with little or no buffer in between.  Coming out of a supermarket you can smell the must of farmyard dung and newly turned earth.  Walking among clods of dirt on the edge of a horse pasture you might hear the music from a downtown pub.

The country is a progressive, thoughtful, and eco-conscious one, and bicycle routes are impressively developed, clearly labeled, and well used.  It is not uncommon for employers to offer bonuses for staff who pedal to work, and all government positions have this option.  People of all ages ride bikes, stern middle-aged faces and softer elderly ones hovering among the flocks of adolescents coming to or from school.  The mailman rides a bike when weather permits.  No one wears helmets except the dedicated cyclists in full spandex gear, smothered in advertisements, just like the pros.  The bicycles themselves are simple and sturdy, without any frills or features like lightweight frames or shocks.  They rattle over the cobblestones and could quite plausibly be inter-generational hand-me-downs.

People have to pay to recycle, but nearly everyone seems to participate, and of the houses that have yards, many have compost bins in them.  The streets are clean, and graffiti relatively uncommon, though of course, the sides of paths through the woods are littered with empty beer cans, paper, and unidentifiable bits of odd plastic, just like everywhere else in the world.

Welcome to Belgium

While in Belgium I am staying with my girlfriend in her new apartment (sort of) near Antwerp, and the other night the regional cultural council had an event to welcome all new residents of the district.  It was nice.  I didn’t understand a word, but there was free wine or orange juice, little sandwiches, and I got some free postcards and a new pen, all of which rate highly on my scale of useful items while abroad.

The mayor gave a welcome speech, which was presumably very nice, while I enjoyed myself by admiring his tie and the fact that the Dutch word for mayor is “burgemeester”.   (Be careful though, if you say it with the wrong U sound, as I am sure I always will, it means something like Farm-boss instead.)  If I am ever elected mayor of a town, anywhere in the world, my first act will be to declare myself a burgemeester.  Or maybe Anglicize it to Bergmaster.  I am the Bergmaster, here me roar.  Or at least watch me sign a civic ordinance or open a mall.  For I am the Bergmaster.

Various city organizations had booths set up around the perimeter of the room, and we visited several of them.  One of them was for an adult education program which offers classes in Dutch, but unfortunately I am too educated in my home country, so am not the target demographic.  They do have classes for other languages too, and all of the teachers are volunteers, so I left my contact info in reference to teaching an English or Spanish class.  On the way home it occurred to me that I could potentially actually be contacted to do so.  Crap.  I am utterly unprepared for that eventuality.  Oh well, if it happens, you’ll get to read about the undoubtedly entertaining process of me floundering about in a classroom while a number of serious Dutch people look at me quizzically.  Which, if nothing else, will mean I will get the chance to again use the word quizzically.

How do you say quizzically in Spanish?

But today is a particularly fine day, and my sweetie is taking a half day, so I am going to tidy up a bit and see what I can rummage up for our lunch.

I hereby wish you a good day in my official capacity as Bergmaster,

The Right Honorable Farmboss Tim Tendick