A couple more pics to clear out

Those last couple photos were from "Castle Day" at the old mansion down the road in our wee town. It's set back on a fair chunk of land, with trees and whatnot, and they lined the road with art vendors and whatnot, and gave tours of the castle. I'm not sure where the rich people hid while us commoners trouped through their garden, but it was a fun Autumn outing, so here are a few more. (Why won't this dern website let me place those pictures the way I want to?)

Odds and ends

Last couple days, checking things off the list.

Eat Belgian food: check. This is fricadellen met kriekensaus, that is: meat-balls in sweet cherry sauce. And of course, Belgian beer.

Saying goodbye to familiar places; we passed over the keys to our ex-apartment this afternoon. Last times driving through some of the fantastically named towns, like Grobbendonk, Waasmunster, Melkouwen, and Aarschot.

Fyi: “aars” in Flemish means ass (think Scottish: arse). “schot” is the sound for a gun firing (think: shot/bang/boom), “helen” means to heal, “was” is laundry (think: wash), “melk” is milk, “koeien” is cows.

So in summary you have the towns of Laundry-monster, Milk-cows, Ass-boom, and Ass-healing. And Grobbendonk, that one’s funny on its own.

Return the computer tomorrow. Found this picture from the airport in Marrakech way back, summer-themed advertising, not sure who thought Fahrenheit was hipper, but they should have checked their conversion rates. (For the Celsius people, 20 F is about -7 C.) Of course, it was about 45 C (113 F) in the airport at the time, so 20 sounded good on either scale.

Trying to use up all the tortillas I made some quesadillas today.

Did I take my pill with dinner? Last Wednesday after the junk market my throat felt scratchy. Thursday it was sore. Friday felt like someone had punched me in the throat (reminded me of my days as a cage fighter in Thailand) and Saturday night I realized I had tonsillitis and was going to have to cancel the whole trip to get surgery. Sunday was manly stoicism…whereby I crept off to bed while K stayed up to make a Dr’s appointment for me when the new hours came available at midnight.

Woke up Monday morning with goop around my blastingly red eyes. Tonsillitis and pink eye? F that.

Turns out an infection can spread throughout your head, moving from a sore throat to goopy eyes, who knew? (Seriously, did you know that? It’s kinda creepy.) Those are some fast-acting eye drops though.

I’m going to miss Belgian graffiti, although those kids should stop watching so much British TV.

 We went to change our official residence in Belgian and the church across from City Hall has Tim Burton's version of Jesus (can you see his hands?)

 The forests are watching you.

And if they don't like what they see they will send the little people to eat you.

Hokay, that about clears out the odd pictures lingering on the computer. Check.

How much for the race relations?

Winding down, winding up! Our apartment is barebones, the mattress is on the floor, and the peripheral piles of miscellany were revealed. So: Wednesday junk market time. They open the hall for sellers to start setting up at 1:00, we showed up at 1:30 and the epic dustbunnies had already fled to the far corners to escape the chaos.

The main room was packed, these were the real deal junk marketers, elbowing for space, cigarettes poking out of their faces, so we were put in the back room, which was smaller, only large enough for a few basketball courts, a jumbo jet, or a moderate sized ferris wheel. K set up our little tables while I ferried stuff in from the car. The market officially opens at 5:00 but the pro's were already prowling, eyeing me with predators'  eyes as I carried our crap in, twice stopping me to bid on stuff tucked under my arm.

We sold some things, chatted to some folks, and had some serious gold-star people-watching. These markets draw an interesting set of people and genetic codes. My favorite part though was the interaction of cultures. We heard Flemish, French, a bit of Arabic, and Russian/Polish (I can't tell them apart unless they use one of the handful of words I know). When the first customer dug out a handful of change from his pocket, it was a mix of Euros and Moroccan dirham.

Integration is always difficult, and Belgium is no exception, but at the market everyone mixed in the search. I can't assume it's pure roses (in particular cultural notions of bargaining conceivably lead to some tension) but I saw no evidence of discord. In the world at large, there are so many barriers to contact and familiarity, but last night frequent customers greeted frequent vendors, and people interacted, seeing that we're all people, and that is the best cure for prejudice.

Penultimate Belgian Weekend

The first weekend of post-work and pre-departure has passed.

Saturday I woke up at 6:27, 3 minutes before my alarm used to go off for my Saturday teaching routine. I slept through the pre-dawn time when I used to stand on the train platform, Belgians smoking their morning cigarettes in the cold mist. At 9:27 I realized I would be half an hour into my first class, and wondered how that student’s 18th birthday last week went (take a minute and appreciate the absence of teenage angst in your life). That was my last teaching thought of the day.

Saturday night we went out with some colleagues from the old call center job. As always, I came home thinking “why haven’t we done more of that here?” We went to an Irish pub, where a lad with a guitar was playing Britney Spears, followed by the Spice Girls, then Metallica, Cat Stevens, Radiohead, Lynyrd Skynyrd and I don’t know what all. Normally either of those first two would get you drummed out of an Irish pub, but Belgium’s an amenable place, and the crowd was well pleased.

He was a funny looking little guy, kinda like this guy from the Pirates movies, only with a gap between his front teeth. But he was playing the guitar, playing it well (broke a couple strings) and singing popular songs, and my Theory (Truism) that playing the guitar is the #2 best way for a lad to endear himself to the ladies was born out this morning when K remembered him as being cute. (Out of self-interest I am unwilling to believe K has bad taste in men.)

Today was the day K’s brother-in-law and father could help us move the heavy stuff out of our apartment, so here I sit at our wee table which will fit in K's Corolla, the only piece of surviving furniture except for the two retro orange chairs sitting in front of the bare wall to my left. The refrigerator was the hardest thing to carry down from our fourth floor walk-up.

I’m pretty tired, since we didn’t go to bed last night until around 4:00 AM, so in a minute I’m going to go to bed to mattress.

Today I retired again. Moving forward.

Good evening. My name is Tim Tendick, and I used to be an English teacher.

Last days are an odd thing. Every gesture and act, even silly small ones for saps like me, is noted with the slight smile of finality. Last car rental. Last coffee at the favorite cafe. Last tram ride, train ride, bike ride down the middle of empty streets with soft air wrapping my face. Last goodbye to good people I met.

By now I know the odds of ever seeing these faces again is slight, although on the other side of the coin I’ve revisited ones I’d never thought to see again.

But the face I am moving towards seeing again is another of my own. The traveler me.

I have enjoyed being sedentary. I discovered that I like living abroad as much as I’d hoped I would. That Belgium is a great country, endlessly interesting and brilliantly fucked up, just like everything else humans do.

When I got back from Nepal I took off my sandals, put on my normal shoes, and it felt weird. When it got cold here, the Belgian Winter my sometime mistress, I put on my boots, and it felt weird. Now the boots feel normal, the solid clock of the heel on cobblestones or in train cars is background noise. So it’s time to change again, back to the sandals of a traveler, and it’ll feel weird…at first.

But it’s nothing retrograde, it’s all forward. (After all, the Nepal sandals were imitation Teva’s and fell apart on my feet after two months.) But where will that forward motion take me?

First back to America. Back to my country. My country? This was on the cover of the daily newspaper that floats around trains here.

This is what people are seeing of America. I can’t tell which is the salient sign of insanity here. Is it the “Don’t believe the liberal media” sign clutched in her claw? The Gingrich sticker slapped on her frickin forehead? No, I think it is the fanatical light of idiotic certainty blazing from her frightened eyes that look out at an ineffably mysterious world and instead of bowing in abject love of the Beauty, instead seek the loudest jackass in the room to tell her How It Is. She needs a simple explanation. She needs an enemy. She needs a scapegoat and blinders to shrink the world down to something she can claim to understand, and can then dismiss.

My country? Do I have to?

But asking that question is exactly why I need to go back. She is not America. Part of it, sure, but that fearful need to bleach the world down to black and white is a human trait, not an American one…hopefully.

I need to see real Americans, not the ones on TV. I need to see my friends and family. I need open spaces, absence of pavement, presence of growing things, and TREES glorious TREES! Morning mist on the divine Pacific Ocean, the waves that don’t notice me but will lovingly kill me anyway if I let them.

I need to leave home. I need to go home. Then I need to rediscover that Home is inside myself, and that inside encompasses the whole world. Even the fanatics I guess.

Last day at work

Today is my last day at work. It's been a long time, and a couple continents, since I was last sitting here.

(When I first quit the call center job it was unpremeditated the first time, and the second & third times they expected to call me back for another project, so there was little consciousness of departure.)

Students, today's vocabulary word is: bittersweet.

I think/hope/demand that I learned a lot there, and know there is a shit-ton left to learn...but them's're the breaks. (I'm also kinda embarrassed to have only worked there for a few months, but...yeah.) The students were a whole spectrum of groovy, but I haven't decided how much of that to put on here...and which ones might have this blog address.

The best part, bless the reality of it, was the coworkers. From the secretaries like queen bees running the place to the boss whose amiability and versatility were frankly amazing given the current of stress I suspect he swims in. The other teachers who always had a smile and kind word. The instructor coach, who I wish I'd had the chance to go get a beer with. In fact, I'd love to get a beer with any and all of those folks.

There's of course much more to say about all that, but...I gotta go to work. One more time.

Facing my fear.

I share a fear with the man in front of me. So we cast around for opinions to protect ourselves.

We’re standing in the florist, it’s Valentine’s Day, and we are both afraid of being the clueless guy whose gesture of love is entirely determined by someone else. Neither of us wants to walk up and say “make something to tell her I care.”

Last time I bought flowers here I confidently asserted “no roses.” That’s good, right? Roses are too…easy. Right? Help? Because when I say “confidently” I mean “monitoring the flower guy to see if he scoffs or nods” especially because this particular flower-guy is the perfect degree of metrosexual to reassure me of his expertise and nonjudmentalism.

But then I began to suspect that roses were in fact appropriate for V-Day.

The guy in front of me “confidently” fills in his card. That is, he writes with a shaky and unsure hand, frequent pauses, peeking at me over his shoulder to make sure I’m not reading his attempt at an original message.

It’s hard being a man.

I ended up with the roses, red, balanced with some orchid-looking guys with tiger spots inside, fleshed out with some wide green leaves. Good. (Good?) Then the exuberantly awkward and entertaining walk across town with a big bouquet of flowers in hand. Although less noteworthy on Valentine’s Day, it still occasioned a couple sly and knowing smiles from grandfathers.

It’s easy being a man.

Lab Rattery and Tea

Last night I went to get my results from the sleep lab a couple weeks ago. After a lengthy monologue featuring many numbers and a variety of graphs, the surprisingly young doctor (who I trusted more because he was balding) summarized that my sleep is utterly normal.

Just for comparison though, they had me go take an EKG, three letters that I remember from TV shows but wasn’t sure what they actually meant. This time at least, they meant getting a hairnet made of rubber tubing with a slew of wires and electrometer thingies attached to monitor my brain waves.

The even younger technician kid (I don’t mind celebrities being younger than I am, but it kinda bothers me when medical professionals are) had me close my eyes for a few minutes then open my eyes for a few seconds, repeating this several times. It quickly grew boring, so I began my own experiment, thinking about the taste of peanut butter & jelly sandwiches, the color green, the feel of an unsanded wooden door, the sound of Carol of the Bells, and as many other sensory thoughts as I could come up with. I’m pretty sure I heard Tech Junior mutter “wat is dat?” and the process took longer than anticipated.

Then he went a little Clockwork Orange on me, using a robo-demonic box to flash strobe lights in my eyes at various speeds. It was peculiar enough to be interesting, but I’m glad that part didn’t last very long.

It’s still colder than a witch’s teat out there (admit it, you’re jealous you don’t get to use that expression more often) so I made us up a big ol’batch of potato, leek, and cauliflower soup. And after dinner the last bag of masala tea we brought back from Nepal. It’s sad to see it go, but exciting as a preparation for departure. Do you know what’s in (some) masala tea? (“Masala” just means “spice” so I assume it differs.) This one was: (all spelling copied exactly from the packaging)

1. Organic Black Tea
2. Greater Cardamomum
3. Cinnamom
4. Cardamom
5. Long Pepper
6. Hot Pepper
7. Clove
8. Ginger

I am tempted to try making my own…with someone else to taste test it…

Anybody speak Inuit?

Remember that legend about the Inuit having dozens of different words for “snow”? Are there any Inuit people reading this? What do you call the ice crystals like fine-grained shredded coconut? Cocosnow? Or the slightly larger ones like grains of kosher salt? Koshosnow? Do we combine them and call it cocosnolt?

The cocosnolt fell on Monday morning. It was the day of a nationwide strike, and I can picture all those buses sitting untouched in the yard somewhere, sprinkled in cocosnolt. It lingered in the shadows and outside the pathways all week since the temperature never got above freezing. No thawing here.

The birds were not on strike, and the food we put out during the winter makes our balcony popular with the avian population.

Friday afternoon I finished classes early, and the snow was just enough to crowd the sidewalks with past footsteps.

The crystals are sticky, and outline everything, each twig on a naked tree, each spoke of a parked bicycle, and the cold figures of the War Memorial in our town.

I got home about 2:00, put on the kettle for a cup of tea, and turned to see the first flakes falling.

By rush hour several inches had fallen, burying the cocosnolt in legitimate powder, and the radio reported 1,200 kilometers of traffic jam. That’s about three times the width of Belgium.

But I take the train am in love with the world, so to me it’s all coming up roses, strung with newly improved spiderwebs.

Today I understand

It may not be this cold in Nicaragua…but right now I wouldn’t trade.

This week has separated out the thin-blooded immigrants from the Belgians (and thick-blooded immigrants; the Polish laugh at this temperature as they sit outside for a cigarette). A Canadian informed me that it was -45 C there and I wonder why (and how) anyone could live below freezing, but a second ago it all became clear.

As I finished today’s peanut butter & jelly sandwich…it started snowing.

There was already a bit on the ground since Monday, but it fell when we weren’t looking. Now I’m looking. And looking.

Now I’m loving.

Belgians always look at me like I’m crazy when I say I love the rain, and indeed it is a special goddess, but this…this is a whole different kind of beauty. I’m not going to try and think of something new to say about it, it’s all been said (better) before (especially about the almost tangible quietness of it all!) so instead I am brewing a hot cup of tea, in the big mug, and grabbing this excellent book, and I have a date with the couch and a blanket.

It's beyond me right now to make it look good, but here's what's on the other side of the window, getting heavier by the second.

Stay warm and quiet my friends!

The Countdown begins, with...Crepe Day?

Happy February 2! And no, not because it’s Crepe Day, (although celebrating the “purification” of the Virgin Mary via crepes is reason enough for a party…but how do Catholics “purify” a virgin? In my religion it would be when she, ahem, "liberates" herself, but that’s another topic.) Nope. We start our trip one month from today. We are T minus four weeks and counting.

We've packed up a lot of the assorted materiel that accumulates when humans live in one place for awhile (especially if one of them has a well-developed sense of style, by which I clearly don’t mean myself). Packed in boxes are the candle holders, dessert cups, and neo-feminist/style magazines. The flower pots are already at her parents’ house and the bookshelf holds only the little gifts we brought back from Nepal for my family.

I moved in via backpack, and having added little to my collection since (I averaged 2 items of new clothing in each of the last 3 years) I am largely exempted from the packing process.

So I have been contributing in the kitchen, where we’re working our way through the various and sundry food items that do not factor into frequent meal plans. My lunches lately have included an influx of sesame seeds, quinoa, and lentils. The risotto, falafel, and polenta stand exposed at the back of a newly naked cupboard. They look like I interrupted them plotting something.

We both love tea, but usually only drink green, so I’ve been struggling and steeping my way through the Others. I am particularly proud of finishing the German sampler box, where I never quite knew what I was drinking, but all of them made me feel like invading Poland. (Too soon?)

I am also working through my impressive collection of mini soaps and shampoos, though I anticipate refreshing my stash in a month…a word of advice to housekeeping at the Condor Hotel in New York: don’t leave the cart in the hallway.

It’s odd how things are conspiring to make leaving feel right. In December I had half of my regular students finish their courses, adding to my sense of the end of a time period. This month I have a few more doing the same and it’s starting to feel like graduation. (When do we sign yearbooks?)

And driving. I regularly have “charter out” classes at a student’s house/work (note: car-sharing programs are frickin awesome) and it’s been the first time I’ve regularly driven in…can it be 3 years? It was fun to be back behind the wheel, and I enjoyed learning Antwerp and surrounding environs, but the novelty of navigation has given way to normalcy, leaving me vulnerable to the repercussions of vehicular familiarity, namely: insanity and stupidity at unnatural velocities.

Just today I saw two examples of incomprehensible driving: a mac-truck on the freeway drifting over to fully straddle the lane divider while he dialed his cell phone, and three luxury sedans driving full speed into a busy intersection with a dead traffic light, coming incredibly close to plastering the other three luxury cars that were only-slightly-less-incautiously insisting on their right-of-way.

(Have you ever left a cup of coffee/wallet/cell phone on top of your car and driven off? Too many people seem to leave their brains on top of the car. I assume they are normally intelligent and logical creatures, but behind the wheel, not so much. Sorry, I’ve gone off on this particular tangent too many times before, I know, but I can’t help it… Humans are clearly not ready for the automobile.)

When traveling I have something of a talent for getting lost, and have enjoyed a departure from that tendency, but…I’ll just have to try and enjoy it when I find myself lost again.

And speaking of enjoyment, it’s been below freezing for the past week or so. I enjoy the fortifying/shocking chill…for a while. But riding home from the train station tonight, one chapped hand clasping the hood of my sweatshirt closed over my face, I kept thinking “I bet it’s not this cold in Nicaragua right now…”

I love you Belgium, but I think we should see other people. It's not you, it's me.