My First Week

So let’s be honest.  Like really honest.

My first week in Brussels has been a rollercoaster of getting lost, eating delicious food, consistently missing my tram, drinking beer, stumbling (or falling) out of my bed at odd hours, making new friends, battling homesickness, and dealing with “the good, the bad, and the ugly” that is the locals. 

There were times during this past week that I looked back on my decision to come abroad, stay for a year, and work in a different language… and thought, It seemed like a good idea at the time.  Because realistically, I have been submerged in a whole other language, culture, and city, and it can feel like a sinking ship—particularly when you are jet-lagged, sitting in class for 6+ hours, and forced to speak, think, breathe French.  It’s exhausting.  I mean exhausting in a way that you cannot fathom.  Mentally.  Physically.  Psychologically.  You buck against it all like every day is a series of hoops to jump through and 70% of the time you miss.  That is my first week abroad in a nutshell.

Of course there is a good 30% of the time that life abroad is sublime.  It’s the beautiful, glistening cobblestone streets beneath your feet, the mélange of languages humming around you on the metro, the ridiculously strong and amazingly rich beer at dinner, the French student who tells you in passing that you speak French well, the adorable Belgian toddlers who sing nursery rhymes outside your classroom, the cafes sprawling around street corners… Ok maybe it’s a 60/40 ratio of bad against good.  But somehow it doesn’t matter how exhausted you are, how many times you’ve gotten lost in the past hour, how many locals have given you that unforgettably frozen and  judgmental look, or how late you are to everything because when it’s good, like really good, you remember why you did this.  There are moments that the stars align, and you get it.  Yes, during the first week, these moments have been few and far between, but they’re there.  They’re the light at the end of the tunnel that tells me to keep pushing and working and trying because I’m going to get it.

 Unfortunately, last Monday was not one of those days.  Monday was our orientation meeting where we met up at the IFE classroom, discussed cultural differences, where to get our metro passes, how to start the process for our Belgian ID cards, and all those minute yet incredibly important other details.  It began at 1:45.  At 1:54, we were wandering up and down the adjoining streets trying to figure out where exactly this elusive classroom lies.  I mean it’s comical how many times and how often we get lost.  We actually make time for out it in our schedules: “Ok let’s meet up at 1:30 so that we have time to get lost and find the classroom,” we all decided collectively the Sunday before.  And yet even giving ourselves 15 minutes of leeway and knowing that we’re within five blocks of the classroom and having a map in our possession, we are lost.

Where is number 1000?  Around us the buildings are labeled in the tens.  There is a very big difference between number 7 and 1000.  How could we be that far off?  The address we were given says 1000.  I notice a deliveryman leaving a package nearby and suggest that we ask him.  He’ll know where everything is.

“This is 1000,” he tells us.

“This building?” we ask.

“No, this is 1000,” he repeats and points toward the street.

The street is called 1000?  You see why we get lost.

Upon discovering that 1000 was not the building number but the street, we circle back around to the square where we originally started and realize it’s right there.  A café in on the ground level with chairs and tables quaintly littered across the outside.  We are in a small classroom two levels above it.  We jog up the three flights of stairs and stumble into the classroom out of breath, wide-eyed, and a little pissed off.  There is a table, eight chairs, and a dry erase board, and there is Madame Caenen calmly scanning her iPad and waiting for us.

“You’re the first group to make it before 2 o’clock,” she tells us.

I’m sorry, say what?  You knew this was going to happen?

“It’s part of the adventure.”

Somehow I don’t categorize getting lost with the clock ticking away and a meeting to make an adventure.

We keep our thoughts to ourselves and proceed to scatter around the table, unload our various packs and jackets, and flop down into our chairs.  In the courtyard below, little Belgian toddlers have day camp.  It’s hard to remember why you’re annoyed when you can hear their shrill screams, laughter, and singing filtering through the open windows.

Madame Caenen proceeds to give us a crash course in Belgian culture, faux-pas, and how to generally avoid pick-pocketing, dangerous situations, and daily embarrassment.  I received the abridged version Saturday at my foyer, but I still listen intently and make notes in my spiral.  When she discusses what not to wear, I notice a couple of my female colleagues discreetly tugging at their blue jean shorts under the table.  Once she’s finished, hours have passed by, and Co-directors Timothy Carlson and Thomas Roman peek through the door to say hello.

I met Mr. Carlson when he visited UT to discuss the program, but Mr. Roman has primarily been my liaison for the program, sending me multiple e-mails weekly about my application, then my acceptance, then my internship, and then my journey to Brussels.  It’s nice to truly meet the men behind the program.  Furthermore, it shows what I’ve told multiple people since I first contacted IFE: I’m consistently (and pleasantly) surprised by how involved Mr. Carlson and Mr. Roman are in the program.  They literally answer you e-mails.  They telephone you.  They know their students up and down, having hand-picked each of them, and they almost seem more excited than we do.  They speak with us for a while about the program, the internship, the classes, etc. And then, they take us downstairs for drinks and pre-dinner snacks.  Yes, I had a beer with Mr. Carlson, Mr. Roman, and Madame Caenen in a café in Brussels beneath my classroom.

This is my life.

Being that we are students, we devour the free food like we haven’t eaten in weeks, and still, afterwards, we’re asking Madame for suggestions for dinner.  She recommends a Vietnamese place (I know) nearby, so that after our drinks and snacks, we saddle up and depart for dinner.  Maybe I should mention now a little bit about Belgian beer.  It is what you imagine it would be: delicious, rich, and oh my Lord is it strong.  I mean the majority are 7% alcohol and above.  Inevitably, my one glass of beer mixed with my grace ruined my Belgian cool.  As I was getting out of my seat to stand up, I didn’t realize there was a bar under the chair I was sitting it, my foot caught on it, I stumbled, and I nearly fell on my face.  I’m too flustered and embarrassed to formulate how to explain what just happened to Mr. Carlson and Mr. Roman in French, so I flee.  Yes, I smiled and turned and walked away.  What would you have done?

I’m sure they were shaking their heads behind me and thinking what a drunk little American girl.  I’m not drunk.  I’m clumsy.  There’s a difference:  The latter doesn’t require alcohol at all to do stupid stuff like trip down the metro stairs or fall out of your bunk bed or slip in the shower… Oh wait, I’m getting ahead of myself.

Right, so I left that adorable little café and my two Co-directors in my dust while I stormed away (in a very straight and normal line I might add) to these Vietnamese restaurant.  Trisdon, having been in Brussels longer than the rest of us, being the oldest, and being a soldier in the Air Force, is our guide.  He knows how to get places.  I mean he’s in the military.  They teach you that stuff in boot camp, right?  He gets us lost 90% of the time (I feel like this will be the one blog post of mine that he actually reads, and he will bitch at me tomorrow for saying this… Sorry, Trisdon).  No really.  It’s the blind leading the blind, and we’re just a herd of little American sheep tripping over Trisdon’s heels.  Tell us where to go, Trisdon.  There?  Baaahhhhh yes!  Let’s go there!  No?  Over there?  Baaaahhhh ok!

Of course after 15 minutes of mindless wandering, this soon turns into, “Give me the damn map, Trisdon!” Baaaaahh yourself!

He shows me the map and explains our location to me.

“We need to go this way,” I tell him.

“We already tried that.”

“No, we’re going to take this street because Sainte-Catherine is there, and we are here, and we must there.”

“Ok.  I’ll give you ten minutes to find it, and then we give up and go somewhere else,” he tells me and throws his hands in the air in a gesture that says, There’s no way in hell you’re going to find this place.

Watch me. 

Map in hand, I set off.  The group lags behind, but I’m a woman with a mission.  I’m going to find this Vietnamese restaurant come hell or high water.  Within five minutes, we turn a corner, and there it is.

BOOM goes the dynamite!  “You were right,” Trisdon admits.

“I’m sorry what did you say?” I ask.  Give me slack.  It’s very rare that I actually find something, so I have to milk the moment.

He just shakes his head.

It’s a small, unassuming, hole-in-the-wall sort of restaurant with 80’s American music playing and an odd bright green light show dancing on the back wall.  We proceed to search the some 10 pages of dishes, wadding through the Dutch to find the French explanations and then consulting each other to be sure we understand what it says correctly.  You don’t really want to order blindly at Asian restaurants.  You honestly don’t know what you’ll get.  Trisdon, Hayley, and me get stir-fried noodles with beef and vegetables while Ned orders some sort of dish with frog legs (don’t ask), and Becca gets a vegetarian curry. 

It’s delicious.  I mean amazing.  I’m so happy Madame Caenen told us about this spot!

We eat as much as we can fit in alongside the beer and our pre-dinner snacks, and then we part ways to head back to our respective lodgings.  It’s been a long day.  Heck, it’s been a long three days.  We’re still jetlagged; we’ve had to listen and speak French all day long; we just want to sleep.  This is a recurring theme the entire week: We are exhausted.  We are lost.  We are hungry.  We cannot compute any more French.  We just want to sleep.

This went a lot differently in my head.  I envisioned cobblestone streets, long chats with my European housemates, craning my neck in front of Gothic cathedrals, eating bread and cheese in Belgian gardens, dancing in a mob at a Euro discotheque… Yeah.  I guess you could say it was my delusion and naivety that brought me here.  Stupid American.

The truth is my housemates are nice.  My Spanish housemate (whose name I still have not figured out-merde) is the kindest to me and goes out of her way to show my how the trash system words (there’s a whole color-coding system and recycling is required by law), talk to me about my day, and just smile at me when we cross paths every now and again.  I recently met one of my other housemates Alice who is French.  I knew this the moment I met her.

“I can tell you’re French because you give two bis,” I tell her, to which she laughs.

She asks about me—my name, nationality, why I’m in Brussels, etc.

“You speak French well,” she tells me.

I blush.  I’m sure I’m butchering her native language, but I’ve found that Europeans are generally so surprised to find an American who speaks another language that any level of French is acknowledged.

I have another housemate who I also believe to be French, but I don’t think she likes me.  Or she may just be one of those elusive, mysterious, distant European girls.  She’s not cold, but she just doesn’t feel the need to introduce herself or talk to me… ever.  Hm.

Sign for a dog park haha

Frites!

My professors, fortunately, are all extremely nice.  Monsieur Marcel Roelandts teaches us about Brussels and Belgium in Europe from a socio-urban perspective.  He speaks very clearly and slowly, and he makes an otherwise dull subject (geography and studying maps) somehow engaging and interesting—even if we are sitting in class for 4 hours.  Madame Caenen teaches us Belgian Literature, Belgian History, and Dutch (Mijn naam is Emily.  Hoe gaat het?).  I just generally adore her classes.  She is very energetic, which is necessary when you sit in her class for 5 hours.  I met Chantal Kesteloot at the Bibliotheque Royale in Brussels for the first time last Thursday.  As usual, we were supposed to meet her there to take a tour of the library, but I got lost, was running late, and had to call her cell phone for directions on how to find her (P.S. Did I mention I have a European phone?  And it’s in French!)  Even after all of this, I was the first one there.  Who’s bad a directions now?? Still me, I guess.  Chantal teaches Belgian History as well, but from a different perspective than Madame Caenen.  Friday we have class for 6 hours with Frederic Saenen, who teaches Belgian Literature and Arts.  He’s exuberant, he’s loud, and he’s funny.  He tells us to call him Fred.  Somehow he makes 6 hours of Belgian literature bearable.

The following Saturday we have a required excursion around Brussels with another of our teachers Martine Delsemme.  She meets us for lunch at El Metteko, a Cuban restaurant in Brussels, and speaks with us about our last week of classes.  

Of course today is the day we have to trek around Brussels, and it’s cold and raining.  Madame Delsemme teaches classes at a Belgian university to American students, so she tells us we will be taking the tour with one of her classes of American students.

“But they don’t speak French,” she warns us, “so the tour will be in English.”

We protest because yes, we are French nerds.  We even speak in French to each other, so we converse in French every single day, we take classes in French, we write to each other on Facebook in French, we text each other in French… You get the idea.  We are here to better our French, and we don’t take a day off.  Of course Madame Delsemme can’t do anything about that, though she appreciates our dedication.

When she introduces us to the group of American students after lunch, she explains, “They’re not supposed to speak English, but they have agreed to for the tour with you.”

The group of some twenty American students stares at the six of us with wide eyes like we’re the Delta Force Special Forces dropping in on their mission.  It’s hard not to smile.  Bonjour, bitches.

During the past week, our little group of six has quickly become tight-knit.  Being dropped into a foreign country tends to build that camaraderie.  While wandering around Brussels with this group of students, we’re rapidly speaking French to one another, laughing over inside jokes, taking stabs at one another, and making plans for the night.  Every once and a while, one of us mingles with the other group, switches to English, and talks to them.

We inevitably size up this group of American students because how can we not?  They are college level students, studying in a foreign country, yet they do not speak the language.  They are living with Belgian host families and speaking English.  That does not even compute for me!  We’re walking around the city, carrying on our little conversations in French, while many of them complain about the weather, about walking so far, about looking like “such tourists ugh!”  Um, girlfriend, maybe if you picked up the language and made an effort to learn about the culture and the history, you wouldn’t be such a tourist.  It must be so hard for you to deign to live in Brussels for a semester, speak English the entire time, and live in your little cultural bubble.  Go back to America!

Halfway through the tour, a huge storm is coming our way.  Half of the group of students runs off to get away before the storm hits.  Unsurprisingly our group is still standing.  Really, the other students must find us so obnoxious.  We’re not goody two shoes or kiss asses: This is what we live for.  This is what we love.  This is why we were chosen for this program.  Sure enough the rain hits, and it hits hard.  We take cover in an abandoned entrance to the metro that smells like piss.  There’s a small group of the other American students left over.

“Why don’t you invite them to go out with us tonight?” Trisdon suggests, in French of course.

“Me?”

“Yeah.  You’re from Texas.  Be our ambassador.”

Oh, right.  Because I’m Texan, I’m instantly more likeable.  I really have become an ambassador for Texas, but that’s for another blog post.  I wander over to their side of the tunnel and invite them out with us.

“I left my bedroom window open,” one tells me.

“Oh,” I say, really thinking, Huh?!

“It’s a long way back to my house,” another replies.

“You live in the suburbs outside of Brussels?”

“No, but it’s just really far away.”

Hm.  I guess y’all don’t want to be friends.  So much for trying out my Texan charm.

The rain lets up after a little while, and our group decides to make a run for an English pub.  There’s a soccer match on that the boys want to watch.  The girls just want to get out of piss-smelling, wet, cold rain.  We find an English pub called Churchill where we sit and drink our beers and chat about everything and nothing.  Hilariously, being an English pub, we discover a whole sub-culture of Brussels that is British.  Aha!  We are not alone!

After two glasses of beer and a match and a half of soccer, everyone but Ned decides to head to dinner.  Ned wants to watch the end of the match.  The rest of us are too hungry to bother watching men chase a ball for another hour.  We head to the Grand Place where a Belgian restaurant is beckoning.  The Honorary Consulate in Chicago recommended this place, and he told Trisdon that we must order the “stompe saucisses.”

I have no idea what a stompe is, let alone if I want to eat it, but I have to trust the Honorary Consulate and order it… Guys, let’s be real.  It’s quite possibly the best thing I’ve ever eaten in my entire life.  No really.  It’s homemade sausage browned in a pan and served over mashed potatoes.  Sounds pretty unexciting, but somehow it is seriously the best thing you will ever taste in your life.  The potatoes are cooked in stock with beer and butter and salt and pepper (and maybe fairy dust.  I don’t know!).    It melts in your mouth.  The sausage is ridiculously amazing.  I almost eat the entire thing.  It.  Is.  Ah-mazing! 

(Madame Caenen later told us that eating at a restaurant by the Grand Place is tourist-y and that stompe saucisses is a very normal, uninteresting winter dish that shouldn’t be served in a restaurant… I regret nothing!)

After dinner we decided to top off the night at Delirium which is a popular bar in the heart of Brussels.  It’s overflowing with all manner of young people.  The bar is so crowded that Becca and I have to wedge ourselves in there to wait to be served.  We eventually find a table in a back corner somewhere.  Half of us are forced to stand while the rest take a seat, but we don’t care.  Most of us are on our fourth beer by now, which in Belgian beer terms means we love Brussels and speaking French and everyytthhiinnngggg!

Too bad the cool kid Europeans give us the judgmental roll of their eyes.  Turns out they don’t really want to be our friends either.  Ah, my naivety and delusion.

But we have each other!  Fortunately I like these people.  Otherwise, I might be miserable and crying on the phone and telling my mom, “It’s scary, and there are weird people, and I don’t like it here.  Can you come pick me up?”

So my first week in Brussels ended much better than it began.  With a belly full of stompe saucisses and beer, I climb into bed and sleep the sleep of a very exhausted but optimistic American in Brussels.

At 3 AM, however, this dreamy American wakes up to use the bathroom, slides out of the bed, reaches her toes for the ladder to descend, slips, and busts her butt against the sink amid a flurry of loud English cussing.  Dammit.  I now have a black bruise on my thigh the size of a grapefruit.  I guess it’s a good thing they don’t wear shorts here.

So my first in Brussels really ended.

P.S. For those of you who have been kind enough to write me e-mails or poke me on Facebook—and particularly for my parents who tend to worry easily—I may not respond right away.  This is mostly because I leave my house at 10 AM (thereby leaving my wifi), am in class for 6+ hours not including lunch and breaks, run errands before the stores close at 6 PM, come home after 7, have dinner, usually do homework, and prepare for the next day.  Suffice it to say, I’m very busy, and while I always read your e-mails and appreciate them dearly, it takes me a while to respond.  Sorry!  Once I get a better handle on things, I’m sure I’ll figure out my schedule and be able to be swifter about it.  Thanks though and lots of love from Belgium <3