St. Nicolas at St. Union and Other Things

      Yesterday was quite a day at school. During class ‘St. Nicolas’ and ‘Père Fouettard’ showed up to tease us and give us candy. My classmates insisted that the American get her picture taken on St. Nicolas’ lap since she had never met him before. That afternoon all the Education classes put on their annual St. Nicolas animations for the elementary kids. Our class’ theme was cowboys and Indians, so I got to dress up like an American! Ha. I was also rather helpful with some English spellings of ‘Farwest’ and such. Our obstacle course went relatively well, and I got to teach kids how to say bonjour in Indian and Cowboy (howdy and how---those h’s were rather tricky).  It was a lot of fun to see everyone dressed up like cowboys, Indians, Baloo the Bear, Tigers, Gypsies, Cinderella, and more. There are no school spirit days here, so seeing all the well-dressed Europeans being a bit goofy was especially delightful.

            Our report cards also came in yesterday. I am passing all of my classes (I had a little tweaking help for my language issues in one class, but other than that, I did it all normally)! Hooray! Hopefully it will stay like that through the finals, which are coming up next week. All the finals are worth more than all the other work we’ve done this year, and all 8 of them are cumulative. Yeesh, I’ve got some studying and memorizing to do! At least I know I’ll pass English!

            Speaking of the scholastic system, I have realized how extremely convoluted and complicated Belgian and European systems of running things are. At the school level, every teacher only teaches a few classes at each school, so they don’t come every day and have to travel in between. This makes arranging classes a bit complicated. We recently had a class taken away from one of our teachers and given to a brand new teacher---week and a half before finals, and we still have our original teacher in some another class. So now we have a whole new ball game for the finals. Belgian politics are so complicated I’m not even close to being able to say anything about how they run---even Belgians don’t really know. I DO know that when I tried to send a package through the mail it was a small nightmare because all the post offices have been being downsized and moved despite the same demand. At the international level, the European parliament somehow functions (I put their efficacy in serious doubt) with 785 members and 23 different languages. Then there’s the European Commission with 27 members, the European Counsel with the 27 head shmos of each country, and the Council of Ministers with 27 members for each different department.  The European Court of Justice has 27 judges that rule on each case---3 times as many as in the American Supreme Court. I will never complain about the American government being cumbersome or complicated again.

            Another note: European governments are also much more repressive in some ways than the US. For instance, the 2^nd amendment, right to arms---forget it. You also do not have the right to be openly racist. They do have an actual document for the Rights of Man, but apparently being racist is not one of them.

           

I have learned some new Belgian sayings:

Sauter du coque à l’âne= jump from the rooster to the donkey=to change subjects randomly

Punaise=thumbtack= crap, dang it, etc. (not a real cuss word)

St. Hubert

I have some catching up to do. Several weeks ago, Cécile and the pony club put on their annual show for St. Hubert (the patron saint of dogs and horses. All the ponies are blessed each year). Of course, a buffet was also available, as well as plenty of things to drink.  Jean-Pierre, Julia, and I enjoyed the frites and porkchops that Marianne helped make and then settled in to watch the show. The little kids performed drill routines with themes like Snow White and Oui-Oui (a British cartoon character) and were simply adorable on their little ponies. The older kids showed off some very well-done dressage and tumbling, and many a proud parent took photos. The highlight of the show (at least for me) was the in-between acts. Marianne started this tradition one year when there was an unusually long pause between acts (naughty pony), and ever since the parents get together and do something silly between classes. This year the theme was Robby and the Jacobettes (I’m told this comes from Robby Jacobs in the TV show Dallas). Marianne and the other parents dressed up in orthodox Jewish costumes and pranced about to Jewish music and everyone’s great delight. It was wonderful to see grown-ups having so much fun. During one intermission Marianne came out in a ‘wedding dress’ to re-enact Robby Jacob’s marriage. After a spirited wedding dance and their exit, the bride came running back because she had forgotten to throw her bouquet. So she did. With all the force of a full-time, dog-wrangling vet. Rather like a quarterback. The rather heavy bouquet smacked the wall, showering the spectators with straw, and left Julia and I bent over double laughing. Our host mother is awesome.

Comprehension

Gauntlet of the week: standardized tests in French. Good thing my scores don’t even count for the school! Standardized testing here is super super lax in comparison to the US---none of the wasted hours and hours going over how to bubble in your name (no bubbling at all, in fact) and security recitals. Even though I couldn’t answer most of the reading comprehension questions completely, I was still pretty pleased with myself for understanding the gist of the story. And I think I might have gotten a few right!

Yesterday Julia and I did errands, and for the thousandth time I was glad to have another student in the house because it gets pitch dark out around 6 PM and walking home for 20 minutes in the dark alone would be unpleasant and possibly creepy. Same goes for walking to school; it gets light around 8, just when we are heading out. Pretty soon it will probably be dark completely, and once again having a walking companion will be very welcome.

Today I had several American moments.  First off, my English class was reading about Thanksgiving. I got a little excited to see something about Thanksgiving the week of, so my teacher had me explain this tradition to them. Most of them thought it had something to do with Christmas, so I told the whole Pilgrim-Indian story and described some traditional food for them. I’ve found that although American ‘culture’ is extremely marketed and lots of American individuals and products are well-known, American culture really isn’t understood. For instance, all Belgians that I have met have been surprised to find out that we don’t celebrate St. Nicolas or kiss each other to say hello. These same Belgians know Lady Gaga, Doritos, and Twilight. Some American items are also adapted but still known as ‘American’, such as their popcorn (sugared instead of salted). Before coming, I thought American culture was pretty well worn-out and uninteresting thanks to Hollywood and all our other marketing, but it turns out that there are a lot of cultural elements to America that are not obvious to the international audience. My second American moment came during science class when a video had some interviews with American cancer researchers with wonderful Midwestern accents. Everyone else had to read subtitles but I understood everything. –Insert smug grin here-

Today we went to the movie theater with the class.  I had been once before, this last weekend, with Marianne, Jean, and Gilles (we watched a French film called ‘handkerchiefs’ that was actually really good and I mostly understood.) The movie theater here is very Americanized and very nice---very cushy seats and very clean. Here in Belgium they have intermission during the movie, and I think I like this. It’s a nice break to discuss the film, and it gives me a chance to figure out what I missed! Our class and quite a few others watched ‘Le Rafle’, a movie about French Jews during WWII. I bawled my eyes out. And not just once. The movie finished and I was still wiping Catharsis off my face. Sigh. I guess I can take that as a sign I understood the movie well!

We are supposed to have snow by the end of the week! Guess who's super excited to see some familiar white fluffy stuff??? 

Photos

Crunchy Speculoos! NOM

                                                                    Cowboy Bread

                                       Belgian Thanksgiving with my Wonderful Belgian Family

                                                        St. Nicolas Chocolate at Chimay

PS: I promise there is more to Belgium than food, but food is a safe subject and very cultural!

PPS: Also, today I understood enough of religion class to explain today why Obama is not a star for many Americans such as myself. (Not that that had anything to do with religion, really!) Hooray for improving language skills!

Brave Boys, Belgian Notes, Blood, and Cowboy Bread

I asked around and now I think I understand how this whole St. Nicolas deal goes down.  It is a very Belgian Holiday, and is a bigger deal than Christmas for most people. St. Nicolas is traditionally the holiday where kids write lists and receive gifts; it was American soldiers who brought over the notion of giving presents at Christmas. Thus, Christmas evokes ‘coca cola’ here. St. Nicolas brings presents for all the good children and young men and Père Fouettard (Father Whip---dark scary dude) comes with him in case anyone has been naughty. St. Catherine is in charge of bringing gifts for the unmarried girls who’ve had their period. (A boy mimed this word for me because the girl who was trying to explain got embarrassed. Ha. ) So there are lots of ads for presents and busy parents right now. The big day is the 6^th of December.

I have also learned lately that Tournai and this area is a very French part of Belgium; the people speak more or less French French and are Belgian but not BELGIAN. I have run into a couple people with heavy Belgian accents and had a lot more trouble than normal understanding what they were telling me.

Several other notes on Belgian culture:

Marianne told me that the European man-purse and men kissing other men to greet them didn’t exist in Belgium before the social revolution of the 60’s and 70’s. These things were seen as too girly. Interesting.

I have discovered some traditional Belgian food combinations:  tuna salad with peaches and hazelnuts in sausage. Tuna salad here consists of tuna, mayonnaise, and often boiled egg, and then they either eat it over peaches or put it on a baguette with peaches. Very interesting flavor---like nothing I’ve ever eaten before. The idea of putting pickles in tuna salad is totally bizarre for them. The sausage was a sort of salami with whole hazelnuts inside---really super yummy.

Also, I have learned that Francophones really like to call people animals or other evocative names. For instance, being called a chicken or a flea is an endearment. (Go figure). A duck, however, is a jerk/twerp, and a turkey is a stupid woman. A fat woman can be called a certain type of fat sausage (Budin) or a whale. An ugly woman is called a tuna.  Ouch. I'll stick with the chicken and flea! 

Today we had our first swimming class of the year and I got a look at the craziness of a Belgian swimming pool. First of all, there is no male/female locker room. There aren’t any lockers either, for that matter. You come in, take a coat hanger thingie and go into another room full of little stalls that each have 2 doors. This is where one gets changed. You have to enter the stall from the left and exit on the right (I have no idea why). Much more modest than American locker rooms. Then you leave all of your stuff in a sort of closet-room, without any kind of covering or lock. Then you have to walk through an ankle-deep pool of ice-cold water to wash your feet off---gah! Finally you make it to the shower room and walk out on deck. I didn’t see a lifeguard (of course, I didn’t have my glasses so I didn’t see much anyway), so I hope my PE teacher knows how to save drowning teenagers. There were no gutters around the pool, and the bottoms of the lane weren’t marked, but otherwise the pool itself was pretty much familiar. The other craziness I noticed is that none of the girls used soap in the shower to get rid of the chlorine and that the normal price for admittance translates to be about 6 bucks a pop. Heek. I’m glad the school gets a cut rate!

I am feeling more and more socially normal and adept in school, although I haven’t made the leap to hanging-out-on-the-weekend-casually yet. I’ll get there eventually, hopefully. I do have some inside jokes now. For instance, the other day after learning about blood types in health class Sharon asked me if we had the same blood type system in the US. However, I thought she asked if I had blood. I replied with some incredulity, 'Yes, I have blood' at which point Sharon looked at me quizzically and burst out laughing. Now this has become a favorite reference when I miss something or she's not sure if I got what was going on. Blood has never made me so happy before!

I made cornbread last night for supper and it was marvelous. Cécile came too and I got to introduce this All-American dish to them. I told them that this is what cowboys would eat sometimes, and they got a kick out of that and called it cowboy bread. Yay for American cuisine!

Finale of the Architect Game

      I realized I never related how Marianne finished paying her architect. She did use a jar of olives, but she added some additional flare. She put a pickle in the jar of olives and then wrote a note to the effect of "careful, some of us have hard centers" and gave it to him. Then she sent his one cent in the mail. HA!
  

3 Months

This otherwise insignificant, ordinary date marks the third month since I left Alaska. I’ve been here in Belgium for basically a quarter of a year. 8 months remain. Please allow me a little of reflection, even if it seems a bit ridiculous.  These things seem bigger when you are halfway across the world and are prone to homesickness and accomplishing adventures.

I am a little surprised at myself, but I miss snow. Snow is pretty and cozy and also much less WET than rain! Plus it’s so weeeird to see flowers blooming in November! Yet it feels super cold and wet here. Hooray for long johns!

Time seems to be chugging along; the first couple weeks I was here time passed “like a snail dragging a history book” (Sleeping Freshmen Never Lie---hilarious book. Read it.) but now things feel more normal and are going lot faster. All kinds of school projects and trips and tests are whizzing right along!

For instance, today we had our first animation in the field. STRESS. The first hour or so went like clockwork. We had stations set up and divided the young boys into small groups; easy to manage and everyone had a good time. Then we had some larger games that weren’t prepared very well: basically a massacre. Carnage. Anarchy. I was responsible for one of the larger games in between two others--- envision trying to calm and get the attention of 20 screaming, running 8 year olds when you don’t speak their language. Heuh. Luckily our teacher intervened for me and told them that I was American and that they had to be really nice to me because it was hard for me to speak French. Phewf. I made some goofs, there was a bit of brouhaha, but we all survived my animation without absolute carnage. Hopefully this gets easier with practice, because next time I have to do this alone instead of in a group with 11 other students!

I also learned about another Belgian holiday today. In art class we made St. Nicholas out of empty toilet paper rolls and someone asked me if we had St. Nicholas in the US. I thought it was the same thing as Santa Claus, but it turns out that St. Nicholas has his own holiday here. He is kind of similar to Santa Claus (Father Christmas=Père Noel); he brings toys for good children and has a big white beard and wears red. He carries his presents on a donkey and carries a shepherd’s crook. For girls however, St. Catherine is the one who brings the presents. I don’t really understand all the details here. The holiday is December 6, so there are lots of chocolate St. Nicholases and special pastries and candies in the stores now. I guess this is a good replacement for Thanksgiving!

  Some notes on Belgian culture I have forgotten to mention:

Belgians say they are punctual, but they’re not.  If they say that they’re going to do something at a certain time, often they start 5 or 10 minutes later. In school, it’s no big deal if you’re a couple minutes late to class so long as one of the other students can tell the teacher where you are during roll call.

Saying ‘you’re welcome’ isn’t used as much as it is in English. Every now and then someone will say ‘it’s nothing’ or ‘with pleasure’ but a response is not drilled into everyday etiquette like it is in English.

Also:

Tomorrow I am going to make cornbread (for real!) and gravy for dinner with some of the cornmeal my church sent me. Oh boy!

I recently learned a nickname for American Field Service (AFS): Another Fat Student. Ha. Unfortunately, it is based on the truth. Almost everyone gains weight on their exchange. Potential exchangers, ye be warned.

OH, I almost forgot, I have to announce that I finished the entire 100 page play we had to read for French class! With two dictionaries and a pencil, I understood the entire thing! The ENTIRE THING. Just wanted to share that very exciting fact.