Almost ready to go

Alright!  Wahoot!  The plane to London (then Bahrain then Nepal) takes off in 48 hoursish!  Let’s go!  Let’s get that 23 hour trip started!

The living room floor is covered in backpacks, stacks of clothes, and stuff we’re going to stash in the attic to make room for the subletter.  There are two massive bags of clothes that a local charity for street kids in Kathmandu dropped off that we are going to try and cram into our backpacks.  Oh, I need to run my $11 check from the United States Treasury for my 2010 tax return over to the bank…and hope they don’t laugh at the fact that I am bringing in a bona fide piece of 20^th century technology: a paper check.  For $11.  Maybe better to keep is as a souvenir?  It’s such pretty multicolored paper…

I just went to the gym for the last time before leaving, and it was like a little going away party.  The muscle men were chirping at each other like prairie dogs, and an honor guard was in full peacock mode, strutting about for my departure ceremony.  I love those guys.  Our species takes itself so seriously!

And then there was the blond cougar with the tattoos and tights, who wanted to do her lunges right behind the bench I was using, then lay down to do some sort of stretching that involved a lot of crotch thrusting.  She was moving around to different machines, and at one point I followed her over to a quieter area so I could use one and she looked a little uncomfortable and took off.  It quickly became apparent that the prowling tattoo cougar had just ripped a giant fart.

Sorry Cougar, see you in September!  Good luck on the hunt, there are some tasty prairie dogs around!

Then tomorrow we’ll race up to the border with the Netherlands to visit K’s shiny new niece, who has reportedly begun to smile, which we are of course looking forward to.  I confess I am also looking forward to the candy.  It is a tradition in Belgium that when you have a baby you prepare little boxes of candies to give out to everyone who comes to visit.  Called doopsuiker or suikerbonen which means “sugar beans”, they are kind of like giant M&Ms with harder shells, or maybe Jordan Almonds without the almonds.

No one seems sure where the tradition comes from, or if there is symbolism, but it seems plausible to me that it was started by a couple who loved the candy, but when they brought their new baby home they realized what a perfect choking hazard the little disks are, so they started giving them away to everyone who came by.  “Please help us get these out of here before she can crawl!” was met with “oh, you guys are so considerate!  We should do this too…”

Our fridge is nearly empty, and my just-completed lunch included an only lightly discolored bell pepper, the frozen chicken patty on the last and only slightly stale bread roll (close enough to a bun) with mostly unspoiled pesto and a reasonably reassuring-looking roasted red pepper (from the jar with the peeling label), the dregs of the tortilla chips that were still big enough to pick up without tweezers, and the flat soda I accidentally pushed to the back of the fridge a couple weeks ago.  Pretty tasty combo, I must say.  I wonder if I could have chucked those last few capers on there too?

Now I just need to eat the rest of my Ben & Jerry’s chocolate fudge brownie ice cream, because I like the subletter well enough, but she ain’t getting my fudge brownie Ben & Jerry’s, man.  She can have the capers.

Lessons from the bike ride home

Is there always something to be learned from the world around us?

For example on my bicycle ride home just now, an hour between growing fields of corn and livestock, which included a continuous pelting of insects on my face (making me wonder about the nature of probability, since the surface area of my cheeks far exceeds that of my eyes and yet the vast majority of my airborn friends took the latter path, or maybe I am underestimating the reaction times and mischevious self-destructive impulses of bugs).

When I squinted my eyes nearly closed I had less insect-cornea encounters.  So was the lesson that some carefully selected blindness can be useful?  For example in helping alleviate the spiritual exhaustion that can come with monitoring climate change or politics?

Or was the lesson there when I decided to open my eyes fully, risking the bugs (which scored two more direct hits) but then really noticing the gorgeous maroon color of the soil, perfectly damped by this almost maternal mist, under the vociferously green grass, freshly washed, and hearing the squirps of the half dozen ducklings swimming obediently close to their mother, forming a spatter of little brown forms offset by the impressive plumage of the mallard swimming a few feet away?  (And what percent of the western world still cannot hear the word “plumage” without thinking of Monty Python?)

Was there a lesson in the traffic, the same lesson to be found every day in traffic everywhere, when cars raced past me as if their hurry were legitimate, even swerving into oncoming traffic to pass each other, while I plodded along on my patient bicycle, then a few minutes later I was passing them while they sat in traffic or at stoplights?

And that reliable pace, utterly unhindered by any trace of haste, got me home with perfect timing, just as it was starting to rain, so I got to feel those myriad perfect kisses of the first rain drops, and then came into my apartment as it opened up more, and now this lovely cup of tea is steaming cooperatively close at hand, a team player to my enjoyment of the moment.

I don’t know, but I sure do like the rain.

Oh America, your scandals are so stupid.

Oh America, your scandals are still so stupid.  Congressman sends pictures of his junk in online flirting (god I hope “eSex” is not a word) and has to resign.  It’s just all so stupid.

A congressman molesting pages, or an IMF chief raping hotel maids, these things should result in the end of a career.  They are crimes.  (A guy seeking gay sex in airport bathrooms should only be fired if his legislative platform is anti-gay, because it means he’s a lying dishonest sack of crapcakes.)

A horny guy sending pictures of himself to women he’s mutually flirting with?  That’s…boring.  That’s standard fare in America.  The guy shouldn’t be fired because he has a sex drive and bad taste.

Meanwhile being a congressman is basically assumed to involve lying, backroom dealing, and betraying your principles and constituents.  People getting massive amounts of money from oil companies stand up and deny that climate change is happening, and we fire the guy in his underwear.

Congressmen try to secretly prevent an agency that lets consumers know what they’re signing, and we get mad at the guy taking cell phone pictures in the locker room.

Because he’s icky.

Talking about literal sex acts is apparently unacceptable, while (only slightly) more metaphorical fellatiation of Big Business is standard operating procedure.

Americans/humans are just so silly.  I vote we elect all dolphins to the next congress.  They can play, then screw, then concentrate for a minute on fixing things and taking care of the planet, then get back to playing and screwing.

(Again, not my photo, nabbed off a free wallpaper website.)

What my teachers taught me

(Oops, forgot to post this last Friday.  Yes, it's another post that's basically serving as my diary.  Dear Diary...)

Today was my last day of class, definitely for this module, probably for this school, and possibly for Dutch.  I want to continue learning the language, I am nowhere near thinking about being able to express the possibility of someday reaching the verge of becoming fluent, buuuut…  How do I say this respectfully?  I don’t know how, I’ll just have to hope my last teacher doesn’t read this.

The main thing my last Dutch teacher taught me, was how NOT to teach language.

This was actually of tremendous use, and since I am lucky enough to live in a country where they speak the language, and my partner is fluent in it, I don’t really need a good teacher.  Nice to have, it speeds things up tremendously, but I can learn it elsewhere.  It’s not like I’m trying to learn Swahili in Korea, and if my teacher funks out, I’m left stranded.

Actually I have been very lucky with regards to my Dutch teachers, both in their ability to teach me the language, and in their ability to teach me about teaching.

The first teacher was perfect for a first level class.  She was ferocious.  She grilled us on pronunciation, and hounded us on the basic details  She would seemingly get angry at us for making mistakes.  A third of the class dropped out, one poor little Polish lady, bonelessly sluffing down the stairs after her last class before quitting saying “I…can…no more!”  (But she said it in Dutch!)

So I learned the importance of being demanding on students, especially beginners, to help them avoid establishing bad patterns which will be harder to dig out later, but also the importance of patience, pacing, and encouragement.

My second teacher was much more relaxed, with a friendly classroom where no one was frightened (or as close as language classes ever get) and systematic mistakes were corrected, while the gazillion details of forming a correct sentence were given some leeway.  I think this friendly approach is particularly appropriate for adult education classes, where we are already a little uncomfortable about talking like children, we don’t want to be treated like them too.

But for a class of young learners especially, I would be a little harder.  I think students will rise to whatever level you require of them.  (Though I fear/suspect it may be different for something as fundamentally difficult as a new language, and with students who may not have much experience of education.  I have a lot of opinions for someone who has never taught a single day of class, no?)

Then there was the current teacher.  One of the key things a language teacher does is present the students with authentic language models.  This teacher certainly did that, talking a lot in class.  A lot.  Okay, pretty much the whole damn time.  Buuuut, the language needs to be scaled to match the learner’s ability.  If the students don’t know the vocabulary or structures you are using, and you don’t ever (EVER) explain them, then it is wasted time.  Wasted, passive, soporific time.

Presenting authentic language is particularly important when the students wouldn’t otherwise hear it.  But we live in Belgium.  We are going to hear Dutch all the time.  We didn’t need to spend all our class time listening to incomprehensible language that washed over us without leaving any silt of knowledge.  We already have the radio for that.

This last class was an utterly passive experience, where I experimented with new techniques for falling asleep sitting upright.  I spent more time in Lala Land in this class than I have at any time since that one sociology class in college that I stopped going to altogether after my snoring disturbed my neighbor…I suspect because it interrupted his nap.  (That professor had to average six syllables per word, twelve words per minute, seven minutes per sentence.  And it was an evening class, 5:00-7:00 with air like blankets.  I am getting sleepy just thinking about it.)

Back to this Dutch class, a couple weeks ago a classmate documented my somnolent experiments with the camera on his cell phone, so there I am on facebook, falling asleep in class.  Thanks Hamad!

The only speaking we ever did was when the teacher went around, prying into each of our personal lives and finances.  How much do you pay for rent?  How much do you earn or receive in welfare?  Do you work?

Those were all just really pleasant exercises, thank you.  Not at all awkward.  But the best was “when was the last time you cried” which was complete with several stonefaced moments of minimalist answers clearly unwillingly given.  Life is hard for everyone, but when a large percentage of the class may never see their family or home again, or when that family and home is engulfed in war, maybe making them talk about their sorrow in front of the class is not really a good idea.  I’m just saying.

So anyway.  The first teacher gave me an appreciation for intensity and really nailing the details, especially at first.  The second gave me a comfortable and productive model that I can ratchet up a bit.  And the third showed a classroom presence that was affable and completely useless.

God, I love how much there is to learn in this life!

Last Walk Through Lier

I’ve been talking Dutch classes in the mid-size town of Lier since January but tomorrow will be my last day.

Four times a week I get off the train, track two, walk down and under the tracks past the advertisements whose models scowl at me like I’ve just peed on their sandwich, then up the stairs past the vending machine of loaves of today’s fresh-baked bread, across the slanted parking slots of the bus station, each with a yellow plasticky pole bearing the route details. Around the corner past the little bakery selling the special Lier pastries (link?), sometimes the air is like living in a croissant, there is no more European feeling than that.

A few doors down is the deli with the dripping rotisserie chicken that will smell delicious later, but it’s still too early now, especially during the winter months when the sun was not yet up.  Then across the small bridge over the civilized wee river Nete, whose water is pure milk chocolate brown with wasted farmland soil all year round, and down the main shopping street of clothing stores with more irritated models taking themselves far too seriously, temp agencies with the same jobs posted in the window, a beautician school with never less than two would-be hairstylists smoking outside.

Along this street my regulars from the morning train peel off.  The middle-aged lady who looks kind of like a preoccupied poodle and has a surprisingly nice posterior turns left by the post office.  The guy I suspect is also an immigrant (one of these days I’ll say good morning to him in Spanish to test my theory) goes into the door across from the sandwich shop, though whether it’s work or home I can never tell.  The lady who one entire week in February wore two layers of skirts turns left at the H&M.  The stout gray-haired guy who looks like he’s walking twice as fast as anyone else yet stays right alongside us turns right after the store called “American Week” which has both the US and California flags hanging outside.

I am the only train passenger left when I pass the ice cream & waffle shop, whose smells will be in full saccharine bloom by my return trip, but there are town regulars too.  The stolid little babushka with the head scarf, I think she might look slightly happier when she has one of her two companion ladies with her, but it is impossible to tell.  She’s never made eye contact with me.  I’m guessing she’s either Romanian or Armenian.

There is the young mother pushing the stroller with the little girl who usually has a band-aid smack dab in the middle of her forehead.  The mother usually chewing her lip in some unknown and continuous angst, and has a blonde ponytail.  I would guess Ukraine for her.  She’s never made eye contact either.

The man with tired eyes and a sun-lined face is kind of a wild card, staggering slightly he sometimes passes me up by the station with a sandwich in his hand and mouth, and sometimes way down by the main square, bumming cigarettes off passerby or watching the ubiquitous roadwork crews.  He wears a slightly threadbare suit, dark, slightly too large for him, like it was made for him when he was younger and fuller, and he can’t bear to give it up.  I’d bet on Turkey for him.

I cross the grote markt (“big market”) square, past the city hall, often just as the nine o’clock bells are ringing in what used to sound horrible but has grown on me.  During the 18th century, there was a tax on curtains, so the long windows spanning several storeys are divided into panes roughly the size of your hand, roughly four thousand of them.

Another corner, past a children’s clothing store that for a while had a handmade sign on butcher paper in the window for “pimped cupcakes.”  Across another branch of the Nete, where work crews have been working since February on a new water main and a little terrazzo on the river, which I’m sure they were hoping to have ready in time for the good weather, but it’s still water pumps, mud, and sheets of metal laid over trenches.  Last week I politely and respectfully followed a granny’s cautious pace through this area, then when it was normal streets again passed her just as she hawked out a giant loogey into the gutter.  Grandma!

Then it’s down past the closed bar with the broken windows, and around the European-sized 14^th century gothic Church of Saint Gummarus, who, according to Wikipedia, is basically a saint because his wife was a total bitch.  (He went away to war, she stayed home and terrorized the servants, he came home and tried to make everyone happy, failed, they separated, he became a hermit.  No kids out of that one, but he did get a giant church to the patron saint of henpecked husbands.)

Around there somewhere I pass the one regular who I suspect is actually Belgian, and who is also the friendliest, a middle aged professional lady with blue eyes and gray hair.  After passing each other around the same spot for about four months we have begun smiling and saying “goede morgen” to each other, her voice is higher pitched than I expected.

Around one more corner and up a stubby street, also torn up for months by a municipal project of undetectable purpose, then across the brick courtyard of the school, dead grass that tried semi-successfully to grow up through the grout, faded lines of an ancient soccer field still visible in chipped white paint.  You have to pay attention when walking over the volcanic dips and rises of the buckled surface, a soccer game would be impossible.

So I’ll take that walk one more time, each way.  Goodbye fantastic assembly of classmates, tot ziens Lier.

Welcome to the world, little one.

What a remarkable day.  Yes, every day is remarkable, but today was different, for one glaringly obvious reason.  Today was little Ella's birthday.  As in day of birth, as in today.  K’s goddaughter, and the tiniest little puckered fruit of beautiful I have ever seen, Ella joined the world at quarter after ten o’clock this morning.

There is nothing quite like holding a newborn baby.  That squishy little bundle of unimaginable preciousness.  The pure hugeness of what she has to learn, has to see, has to experience in this rattling world.  She hadn’t even seen night yet!  She is a little bundle of semi-awareness, her sensations and emotions pure of words, expressions cross her tiny face that has absolutely no sense of itself.

What an unimaginably precious thing that is.

What an incomprehensible responsibility, for the parents, for the family, for the peers, for the world.

How can humans do the horrible things some of them do, when each of us was like that at the beginning?  And how wonderful that other humans (most of the first ones too) do the wonderful things for each other that they do!

How wonderful that this soul was born here, today.  This place, this family.  What a mind-bending case of luck, that she came into a loving family that wants and supports her, while so many others are born into so much less…

I only have two other experiences of holding a newborn baby, and to be honest the second one is somewhat vague in my mind.  But I remember that first one, and I remember looking down at this creature and knowing without a doubt that I am on his side.  That he can call on me for anything, and if it’s in my power, it’s his.  It was true that day and it’s still true today.

I felt that same way today, for this new soul.

What an incredible gift that is.  To feel a dedication that is totally uncomplicated.

The love of a parent must, by necessity, be a more powerful and more complicated thing.  I am still not planning on ever becoming a parent myself, but today I feel absolutely blessed to have held that tiny, vulnerable body with it’s invincible, precious soul and known that feeling.

Just call me the beerman. On second thought, don't.

K used to work in a bar, where she expertly served beer, coffee, beer, wine, beer and a few other drinks (most of which were beer) to the clientele, which in Belgium includes everyone in town, from kids sipping sodas and sweet ice tea to grandparents wheeling their walkers cautiously through the crowd.  (Other than the cigarette smoke, bars are much less seedy in this neck of the woods.)

One of her coworker’s husbands celebrated his 40^th birthday last night, and she asked K and I to tend the bar at the party.  I don’t know squat about drinks, beyond what I learned in college (i.e. that a screwdriver made with tang is really not very good) but since it was just beer, soda, and water, I figured it would be no problem.  “Just beer” sounded like a plausible enough phrase at the time.

As you are probably aware, Belgium is famous for its beer, and I in turn probably should have been aware that being known for expertise in something might mean a more…shall we say “expert” view of it.

Apparently you can’t just put some beer in a glass and give it to a Belgian.  We had eight types of beer on hand, and each one has it’s own particular method of pouring, which absolutely must be followed, or you might as well dump it down the drain.  Additionally, each beer needs to be served in the correct glass, bearing it’s name and logo as well as being the appropriate shape.  Put a Stella Artois in a Jupiler glass?  You fool!  Two days in the stockade!  On half your beer ration!  Okay, we’ll take pity, just the stockade.

(Again, I am not really a drinker, so if this is true in the States too, someone please let me know.  Anybody from Boulder around here?)

It’s a good thing Belgians are generally such nice people.  And that I’m clueless.  At one point I served a dozen pints or so to these two later-middle-aged women, and could understand enough of their conversation to know they were discussing the carnival outside.  (Belgians frickin love their street carnivals.  It seems like half the time we drive across town we have to detour around one, and there was coincidentally one on the same street last night.)

They seemed oddly bitchy though, and after they left K explained to me that “there’s a carnival in town” means there is too much foam on the beer.  Well excuuuse me.  The wine came out of a box, but hand them a glass with an extra half centimeter of froth and they hold the thing like it was seasoned with slowly drowning cockroaches.

By the way, the Dutch word for cockroach is “kakkerlakken.”  I love that word.  If I ever end up owning the combo shop/restaurant I wonder about, I am totally going to serve something called The Kakkerlakken.  Maybe something with candied pecans?

The Big Three of Belgian cuisine are beer, fries, and chocolate.  Unfortunately (fortunately) chocolate was the one missing.  They hired a fries-wagon to park next to the side entrance until 1:00 AM, ladling over fries and mayonnaise to the cheery celebrants.  (Please don’t call them “French” fries to a Belgian, that is insulting, they come from Belgium, dagnabbit!  I’m not sure the Dutch word for “dagnabbit” but when I find it out, I’ll let you know.)

Due to the miracle that is the Taco Truck, I am perfectly amenable to eating food passed through the open siding of a motor vehicle, which is good because these things show up at most events in Belgium.  The bizarre thing to me is that they don’t run on biodiesel.  There is a business opportunity there…