By a woman, of course!

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  Herentals, Antwerpen, Belgium
Friday, December 18, 2009

For the longest time today I thought I wasn't going to be able to write a proper entry because once I got to Gerdje's house this morning and had access to the internet finally, I realized for the first time that Belgian keyboards are NOT like American keyboards.  But I figured out a way to hook up my laptop, thankfully, and here I am!

So a lot has happened since I arrived in Europe.  My stay in London was rather uneventful yet so far the most fun I've had since I left the US.  I spent my day in the UK majorly jet-lagged and then spent the evening talking and laughing with new found friends.   When I awoke on the 16th, I was ready to head to a country I've never visited...Belgium!  The train ride was rather painless but once I got to Brugge, the cold weather stopped me in my tracks.  I knew it was going to be cold, but this kind of weather is biting and to be out in it by yourself for hours at a time is rather sad.  The town itself was rather charming, though.  The city is made of three different markets, one of which is very large and has a monstrous fountain and that is where all the young kids hang out and act like punks.  The tourist shopping surrounds it as well.  The second market is small and has historical buildings on all sides, while the third--'t Zand--is tagged at this time of year 'the Christmas market' and with good reason.  In the center of the square was a large ice skating rink with christmas trees lining all sides of it.  A huge Merry Christmas sign made of thousands of lights hung above the rink and little wooden huts selling everything from gloves and scarves to jenever (a Belgian liquor that comes in all kinds of flavors, sort of like schnopps but really really good!).  Although I wanted to take a whirl around the rink a few times, the first day I was in town I was really more interested in getting used to walking around in the cold.  I must admit I spent most of my time going in and out of caffes, writing in my journal.  One good thing did manage to come out of the day.  As I was sitting in a caffee called verCaffe, no one was paying any attention to me whatsoever.  Everyone was speaking a language I could not identify because at that time I had not learned from Bernard that the official language is Flemish, a mixture of German and French.  I assumed they spoke either French or German.  All day I was confused!   Anyway, I went to the bathroom at one point and on my way back to my seat I got lost.  Stupid me, right!?  I couldn't find the door leading from the corridor where the bathroom was to the door that led to the caffe seating area.  A white-haired, bearded man in his seventies stood there, watching me turn around and around not knowing where I was.  He spoke to me in a very thick British accent.  "Are you lost?"  It was a rhetorical question.  He turned his body and pointed to the door behind him, right in front of me.  He didn't smile.  I felt like an idiot.  I ran quickly back to my seat and made a mental note not to make a fool of myself again.  At least not on that same day.  About twenty minutes go by and I see the old man walk into the caffe from the door that I could not locate.  I immediately turned my eyes away from him, embarrassed.  But he strode over to me, looked at the table next to me and told a waiter matter-of-factly that he wanted a glass of white wine.  He took off his Burberry scarf and tweed jacket and plopped himself down in the seat next to me.  I was stiff with uncertainty.  But before long, he struck up conversation.  We ended up having a blast.  He was a good 'ol English man who believed the decline of the United Kingdom's economy was due to the current generation's lack of working morals.  "Nobody thinks they are good enough to work these days!  It's all rubbish, I tell you, rubbish!"  Every now and then I could get him talking about something other than labor and work, like his family.  He has 16 children and he told me this as if it weren't odd at all.  I immediately said, wow, and he looked at me quite frankly and told me that most people say "How do you have 16 children" and that he always responds by saying "Well, by a woman of course!"  He thought that was very funny and I couldn't help but laugh.  We sat there talking for about an hour and I was sad to go.  He wanted to meet up again in Brussels but our itineraries did not match up, unfortunately.  I would have loved to have spent more time with him.  Anyway, the second day I was much braver.  I arrived in town around noon (I spent the morning writing and looking at tourist information written by locals that my host, Bernard, gave me the night before) and quickly realized it had snowed all night.  There was snow everywhere!  I was glad I had decided to wear my capilene thermals for the first time!  't Zand was full of shoppers, lovers, families, bikers.  Oh so many bikers in Belgium.  I quickly found a place to have lunch and got my first real taste of Belgian cuisine.  The food here is so rich, so dense, so amazingly easy to devour.  I definitely have to watch and make sure I never finish what is on my plate or else my pants won't fit in a week's time for sure.  After lunch I did some roaming, taking pictures of the beautiful buildings that were hidden in the alleys off to the sides of the market where no one seemed to care to visit.  Everyone else was preoccuppied with the rink and shopping.  I found a special Salvador Dali exhibition (yaay) and spent over an hour looking at rare sketches and paintings set in some of the oddest configurations I've ever seen Dali works placed in before.  I took bunches of photos.  I knew I had to get food for dinner before I met with a woman I met on the couch surfing website named Liesebeth so I hopped into a little caffee and had my first Belgian waffle.  Not good.  It was very disappointing.  The banana and powdered sugar was the best part!  Oh well, bummer.  I did a little shopping for a few friends and then made my way over to the post office at 7 where I met Liesebeth.   She took me to the oldest pub in Brugge, established in 1515.  No tourists know about it.  It is very small and heated by a wooden stove and there are big picnic-like tables with big wooden chairs to match.  Old Belgian men were in one corner smoking their pipes (everyone in Belgium smokes) and playing cards while a group of young women sat in another corner rattling off story after story in Flemmish.  Liesebeth and I sat smack dab in the middle of the pub and talked of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict for over two hours.  It was marvelous.  She is pro-Palestine, I am pro-Israel, and we found so much common ground that by the end of the night we couldn't stop hugging one another and repeating how glad we were that we had met.  She taught me a lot about the European Union's stance on the situation, which I knew nothing about, and I taught her what the media in the United States has convinced the public to believe about the conflict.  We were both amazed at what each other's world's had made of the situation and then presented to us.  So much of the information we had been given did not match up.  It was very enlightening.  She walked with me for the 25 minute walk home in -7 degrees celcius with her bike by her side.  By the time we got back to Bernard's it had started snowing again and I was weak with hunger from the walk.  I never want to take that route again in that kind of weather!  I went to bed that night peacefully, falling asleep the moment my head hit the pillow.  Well, then there is today.  I arrived in Herentals around ten AM and have had a wonderful time since.  But I will save that for tomorrow.  For now, I must get some sleep.  Tomorrow we are getting up early to drive to Antwerp, where Gerdje's husband Pol is going to show me the town in a local's perspective.  He was born and raised there.   Lucky me!

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