Carnaval!!!

My parents always had a magnet on the fridge that said, "Are we having fun yet?" I never really understood why it was so funny to them until I got older, but now I want one for myself. My dad has given me a wonderful gift/curse of always needing to be on the go. Part of the reason I stay so busy here is just because of the immense guilt I feel if I were to skip an activity. How could I be lucky enough to live in Europe and not take part of every parade, festival, tour, and exhibit possible?

So yesterday I begrudgingly forced myself to go to a Carnaval parade here in Belgium. Carnaval is just like Mardi Gras, with many of the same aspects of parades, parties and lots of drunk people. Last year I went to Binche, Belgium for Carnaval with my friend Kelly and her two kids. It was pure hell! The crowds and stroller just didn't work well together. Below is one of my favorite pictures because although Kelly and I are smiling, I think inside we both feel a lot more like what Poppy looks like.



But going to one Carnaval parade last year just wasn't enough to cure my guilt, so this year I went to Aalst for a different parade. It was 30 degrees and raining, but that didn't stop me! So as I was standing shivering in the rain watching cross dressed men dance their way through the streets I thought, "Am I having fun yet?"

Click below to see a few pictures from the parade:
http://www.kodakgallery.com/I.jsp?c=121a73ha.bws04t4i&x=0&y=-69az99

PS--I know the US way to spell carnival, but here they spell it carnaval.

Workout Warriors

As part of our New Year's resolution, Kyle and I joined a gym this year. Hopefully I will one day look like this :) We are pretty good about going, and it is always an experience when we do. Only in a European gym would you:
--see a guy lifting weights in Sebagos
--see a person smoking in the entrance area of the gym
--see a series of cubicles where every gym employee has his own computer and does...what exactly--they work at a gym?!?
--see a person take a coffee break in the middle of working out (and then resume lifting weights)
--see a person working out in combat boots and black jeans
--see a person drinking a (real) Coca-Cola in between situps (guess where he bought it--at the front desk, where they also sell Twix, Snickers, cookies and coffee).
--can rent a DVD so that after working out you can go home and be a couch potato
--see as many naked bodies as I do--these women LOVE to walk around naked in the locker room!

Adult Prom

Tonight Kyle and I will be attending our second Capitalist Ball. We went to the same event last year and had a great time. Who couldn't have fun with free drinks, dinner and a 22 piece band?!? I was looking over the pictures from last year's event and forgot how funny some of them were. In case you wondered what some Europeans look like...

The award for the most out dated dress and worst teeth goes to... (Note that this guys teeth were like this was in real life, it is not just a bad photo.)
http://www.cne.org/2005_capball/pages/800_20D271~1.htm

Nicole Kidman's (on not a good day) Belgian look alike: http://www.cne.org/2005_capball/pages/800_20FA7B~1.htm

Emily going back to her roots with a 'deer in headlights' look:
http://www.cne.org/2005_capball/pages/800_20E683~1.htm

Aalsmeer Flower Auction

The Free Spirits were on the move again this past Friday! For those of you who don't know, the Free Spirits are a group of women in the American Women's Club who are in a position similar to mine--unemployed, with either no children or grown children, and with a lot of free time on their hands. I was up at 4:15 a.m. in order to meet the bus at 5:15 a.m. so that we could make the three-hour drive up to Aalsmeer, the Netherlands. Once there, we toured the Aalsmeer Flower Auction where over 22 million flowers are sold for a total of 6 million euros--every day! After the flower auction, we went to Delft. The town is known for its blue china and also as the setting of the film "Girl With a Pearl Earring." Click on the link below to see pictures (and more descriptions) of the trip...

http://www.kodakgallery.com/I.jsp?c=121a73ha.aksyom8a&x=0&y=-vg9375

Fiddle dee dee

There is no real point to this post except to say that I love being Southern! I watched "Gone With the Wind" today and it made me really homesick. I just love the South--I love the accents, the gentlemen, the politeness, the ladies, the food, the names, and the landscape.

A joke on that note:
There was a man who decided to write a book about the different churches of the United States. He flies to San Francisco and begins taking photographs in the very large Grace Cathedral. Suddenly he spots a golden telephone on a wall. Above it a sign reads $10,000 a minute.
Intrigued, the writer seeks out the priest who explains that this golden phone is, in fact, a direct line to Heaven, and if he wants to use it, he can talk directly to God.
"Thank you very much," the man says and continues on his way.
His research takes him to churches in Milwaukee, Chicago and New York. Each time he notices the same type of phone with exactly the same sign. Each time he seeks out the parish priest, asks the same question, and gets the same answer: It is a direct line to God. He thanks the priest and continues on his way.
This continues through many other states until finally, he arrives in Texas. Upon entering a small rural church he is about to walk right by the standard golden telephone when the sign above it grabs his attention. This time the sign reads "Calls 25 cents." By now he is fascinated.

He finds the Pastor and says to him, "Sir, I have been in cities all across the country, and in each church I found this golden telephone and was told that it was a direct line to Heaven and that I could talk to God. But, in all of the other churches it was $10,000 a minute. Your sign reads 'Calls 25 cents.' Why?"

The Pastor smiles benignly and says, "Oh, my son, that's easy. You're in the South now, it's a local call."

Wwoof, Wwoof

Immediately after graduating from college, Kyle and I traveled to Australia for two months and then New Zealand. Kyle stayed in NZ for one month, and then went home to work. I, however, stayed there for another month solo. During that time, I lived with a family in a small town on the South Island. I found this family through a program called WWOOFing which stands for Willing Worker On an Organic Farm. Basically, you work three hours a day in exchange for your food and bed (which is in the family's house.)

In a twist of fate, the wife of the first family I contacted happened to be from Columbus, GA. She was 8 months pregnant and was more in need of some household help than any organic gardening. So for two weeks I stayed with this family doing dishes, cleaning up, collecting firewood and gathering eggs that the chickens laid. In that time, I got to meet her husband's grown children. At the time, his daughter Louise was just getting into a sport I had never heard of called skeleton racing. I was recently watching the Olympics and caught a bit of the skeleton races happening. While I didn't see Louise's name listed, I looked up her name and it seems that she has really achieved her dream! She is ranked #15 in the world in skeleton racing and is only improving. Check out her Web sites...

http://louisecorcoran.blogspot.com/

http://www.nzskeletonracer.com/index.htm

Prague

Although the trip was a month ago, we have just finally gotten around to labeling our Prague pictures. A very brief synopsis of the trip:

Saturday
We arrived in Prague by noon and were off and running. We walked up a huge hill to see Prague Castle, which consists of a series of old buildings you can tour. In one of them, we saw a crypt where King Charles had all four of his wives buried on top of each other! On the way back into town we walked on Charles Bridge, which has statues up and down each side of it.

Sunday
We walked through the Jewish area of town, including a synagogue that was built in 1270. Every building in Prague is so well kept and beautiful. Sad to say, but Kyle pointed out that Prague looks like a city that has been ruled by a democracy, and Brussels looks like a town that has been under Communist rule for 45 years. We took a tram up to the top of a huge hill and had great views of the city. All of the red roofs are breathtaking. Prague is known as the City of a Thousand Spires. I could never have imagined how many spires one city could have, but Prague definitely takes the cake and they are all just beautiful.

Monday
Kyle had to go to a conference on Monday (the whole reason for the trip), so I wandered through the city on my own. I shopped around for glass flowers which are a great memento that Prague is known for. Afterward, I packed up and headed back to Brussels rested, recharged and with great memories.

To view our pictures, click below. Note that Kyle added the photo titles instead of me, so you will get a very factual account of our trip!

http://www.kodakgallery.com/I.jsp?c=121a73ha.2smisd96&x=0&y=-nbdvaj

Au revoir

The great part about being an expat is all of the friends you meet, but the hard part is then having to say goodbye to them too. The biggest times for expats to move is in the summer and then again in January. Just as we have been having a big influx of people to Brussels this past month, others are also hearing the news that they will be transferred as of this summer. So far I know of nine women that will be moving by this summer. There are others that are assuming that even though they haven't heard anything yet, they will most likely be moving soon too.

We recently had to say goodbye to our good friends Jackie and Joe who are returning to Milwaukee. Luckily they knew from the beginning that they would only be in Brussels for six months, because Joe was on a training contract here. They were an inspiration to us all for the amount of travelling they did. We will miss you Jackie and Joe!!!

Happy Valentine's Day

Kyle and I had a nice, drawn-out Valentine's Day/Week. I was taking a tour of the Belgian Parliament with the American Women's Club on the night of the 14th and Kyle assumed he would end up working late, so we didn't think we would have time to actually celebrate on Valentine's Day. Instead, we exchanged gifts on Saturday night. Kyle gave me a cookbook I have really been wanting, along with a beautiful wine decanter (pictured below). I gave Kyle a book that I thought would be fun for him, considering all of the travelling he has done and all the travelling we hope to do in the future.

But a book wasn't enough. In a fit of crazy newlywed love and freetime that only a 26-year-old retiree has, I decided to make Kyle a cake. Now the only problem with this idea was that they don't really sell box cake mixes, at least the Betty Crocker kind we are used to. So I decided that I would make a chocolate cake completely from scratch. In case you have never done something like this, I highly recommend making a cake from scratch once in your life. This way, every time thereafter that you use a box mix you will fall to your knees in thanksgiving that your life is that easy. So after buttering, whipping, beating, mixing, folding and creaming what seemed like every ingredient in my entire kitchen, I finished the cake. And then I had to ice it... So five hours, yes, five hours and two trips to the grocery store later, I finished my masterpiece -- a two layer chocolate cake with pink icing on the bottom and white icing on the heart.

But before we ate the cake, we had salmon, creamed spinach, and garlic cheese grits for dinner.

Perspective

One of my favorite bloggers, Dooce, is currently on a trip to Amsterdam for a blogging conference. She has been writing about it for the past few days and is even uploading pictures while over there. Seeing her excitement and sense of awe for this country/place really reminded me of how lucky I am to be living over here. It is not that I take it for granted. It is just that since I am still living an everyday life of grocery shoping, cleaning, etc. I can become immune to the fact that I am living in Europe. In it nice to be reminded of how lucky we are once in awhile.

Just click and drag

You don't realize how many things you just assume people know, until you are the person that is not in the know. Recently, a friend of mine who is not very comfortable with computers got frustrated when I kept saying, "Just click and drag." As she pointed out, if you are not used to using computers then you have no clue what "click and drag" means.

After my friend pointed this fact out, I have noticed more and more things that people just assume you know. There is no where more prevalent than this assumed knowledge than in an American cookbook. In their defense, all of my cookbooks were most likely not written with the idea of someone not in America using them. However, try buying "a stick of butter" over here. Belgians butter comes in 250g blocks, so first you have to know how many oz. a US stick of butter is, and then change it to grams. That's not always so easy to do when you are standing in the grocery store aisle trying to figure all this out. Another common American cookbook problem is to just list something like, "a can of RoTel." First of all, if you don't know what RoTel is then you can't even attempt the recipe. Even if you do know what RoTel is, you have no idea what size the can in the US grocery store shelves is.

Another friend pointed out to me that an interesting way to see how much America has an "instant" culture is to look in a cookbook. You couldn't even attempt to make a completely 'from scratch' recipe when things like these are listed as the ingredients:
--1 package of Devil's Food Cake with pudding in it
--1 package Vigo Mexican Rice
--1 package (2 layer size) Duncan Hines yellow cake mix
--1 jar Cheez Whiz

Here's a challenge: Make something completely from scratch for dinner tonight!

FYI--A stick of butter is 4 ounces, which is a quarter of a pound, which is approximately 125 grams. So a Belgian block of butter is really 2 American sticks of butter.

Let it snow!

Maybe it is the fact that I am Southerner and not very used to this, but I love that every time I see snow I still get excited. This morning there were flurries and I woke Kyle up just to tell him about it. What a great way to start the morning!

Girlfriends

Since a Smith can't stand to not be organizing some type of social event, I have taken to gathering a group of women every month for a dinner here in Brussels. The only requirements are that 1. You speak English, 2. You don't have any children and, 3. I like you. These dinner have been happening for about five months now and the list of invitees are now up to 25. The funny part is that no matter how many are invited, about 14 end up RSVPing YES and 2 end up canceling at the last minute (and never the same two).

So tonight we had another one of our dinners and another great evening. Although the group was mostly Americans, we also had a Brit, Swede and Czech to round us out. It is amazing how without kids or men as a common topic (because a lot of these are single working women), we have such a wide range of topics to discuss. We talked about the Superbowl, our parents jobs, good places to go out in Brussels, Hollywood gossip, activities that interest us, travel tips and so many more things. Tonight was a good reminder that no matter how happy you are with your husband, girlfriends just fill a need that no man can be expected to understand.

Lazy Days

I spent the morning at the Women's Club and then headed over to see my friend Emily Lodge for lunch. We met up at the grocery store, picked up a few things and then walked back to her place for some soup. She is an inspiration for being a relaxed hostess, friend and mother. Although, I guess by the fourth child, you have to become relaxed or else you would go crazy. The interesting part is that by her not tidying up the house or fretting over me, I was so relaxed and felt like a closer friend than if I had known she had spent the morning dusting and moping for my arrival. Funny how we are embarrassed to let our friends see our homes messy, yet that is when they probably feel like a close friend.

I ended up staying at Emily's house from 1-4:30pm. Just hanging out at a friend's house all afternoon, eating lunch, seeing kids go down for naps and then back up again, other kids coming home from school and getting afternoon snacks, and then everyone starting to get ready for dinner reminded me of all the days I spent with Sam and the boys when I was first in Brussels. I miss you Carneys!!!

James, Aletheia and Luke

Brussels, February 2005

Don't even ask

Friday afternoon I started to get a really bad stomach ache and by Friday night I was throwing up. Now normally I might mention this to a few people in order to gain a little sympathy. However, now that I am a 26-year-old married woman, I am hesistant to ever mention that I have a headache or have thrown up because most often the next comment out of someone's mouth is, "Ooh, maybe you are pregnant."

I know some people in my shoes would be hopeful about this, but I am just not at that stage yet. The thought of being pregnant right now makes me feel faint, and even more nauseous. So the dreaded pregnancy question brought to mind a few other of the questions people dread being asked. Sad to say though, I am sure I have asked each of these questions to a variety of people in my lifetime. The trouble is that there are just certain times in one's life when these questions apply, and if you have nothing else to talk about, they just pop out of your mouth before you can stop yourself!

So next time you are with a person this age, don't ask:
--14-year-old, "So, do you have a boyfriend?"
--18-year-old, "So, where are you thinking of going to college?"
--20-year-old, "So, what is your major?"
--21-year-old, "So, where are you applying for a job after college?"
--unemployed person, "So, how is the job search going? Where are you applying?"
--a couple that is dating seriously, "So, when are you two going to get engaged?"
--a newlywed woman, "So, do you think you are pregnant? When are you going to start having kids?"
--a pregnant woman, "So, do you hope it's a boy or a girl?"
--a person who has just had a baby, "So, when are you going to have another one?"

Stick with waffles and lace

Belgium has many, many odd rules, regulations and customs. When people come to visit, I tell them that the easiest way to think of Brussels is to remember that no one wants to take your money. This rule applies to all aspects of living in Brussels:

--When riding on the tram or metro, you are on the honor system to stamp your ticket. There are no turn-styles to pass through or people validating your ticket so it is up to you to do it.
--In a restaurant, you can stay at the table as long as you want and the waiter will never bring you the bill. In fact, once the waiter puts down your food, you will have trouble ever making eye contact with him again. The waiter only brings you the bill when you ask for it.
--It is very common for a sales clerk to stay on the phone while you are waiting to be checked out. Only when he/she is ready to hang up and deal with you will you be able to purchase your product. Customer service is unheard of.
---Absolutely no stores are open on Sundays. Since the store might be open on Saturday, they make sure to take Monday off too, to make sure they have an ample amount of time off.
--You can just go on and assume that no ATM will have money in it on Monday, and sometimes even Tuesday. If it is a holiday weekend, then don't even try to get money out until the next Wednesday.
--A store will not let you through the door if it is within ten minutes before their closing time.

I often say that I would love to see what they teach in a college business class around here. I think a basic concept of business is supply and demand, however no one in Brussels seems to understand that one. In the summer, it can get up to 90 F and no one has air conditioning. However, if the hardware store runs out of fans in June, then you are out of luck -- they won't be getting any more in stock until next May. It is like that with everything around here. A store would rather be sold out of croissants by 9am and not be able to sell to the next 20 people that want one, rather than have to throw a few away at the end of the day.

But the Belgian business move that aggrevates me the most are the Sales. By Belgian law, a business is not allowed to have a sale except during the months of January and July. So everyone throughout Belgium knows that there will be huge sales during those months. Wouldn't you think that since every single person knows that every single store is having a sale, that you wouldn't need to advertise it too much? Oh no, not in Belgium. Rather than using their store window to show what items are on sale and at what great prices, instead every store plasters their maniquens and windows with huge SALE/SOLDEN signs. I guess it would just be too much to try and entice someone to come into your store and spend money.