Moliere and Matonge

A play, in three acts.


Act I. A bedroom in Ixelles; and, the Chausee d'Ixelles.

You are standing in the middle of your room. It is a little chilly, because heating is expensive, the ceiling is high and thus the room is drafty, and because you're only going to be here a little while longer so turning on the heat isn't worth it. You look at your dress in the mirror. It is a commonplace, everyday black knit dress. You slant your eyes critically. It is not theater-appropriate attire, you think. The Theater, for you, is an Event, a reason to get dressed up in a pretty dress, to invest in an overpriced coffee or wine beforehand, to take senseless photos of yourself and your friend before and after the play. Never mind that your ticket cost less than a movie ticket. You should wear your new black dress, the fancy one you bought for orchestra concerts and holiday fetes.

Yes, that's more like it.

You are bundled up. You leave, intending on taking your scooter. You realize that it is raining rather hard and could ice. You think better of it. You realize you do not have your umbrella. You return. You realize you do not have your ticket. You return again, mentally kicking yourself. You are now, officially, running late. You text your theater-going friend. Pre-theater photos are not happening. Dommage.

The 71 bus is nonexistant. Mais qu'est qu'il se passe?
Fellow frustrated passenger 1: Mais il y a les petites fleches, il devrait etre ici, merde!
Fellow frustrated passenger 2: Mais c'est quoi cette histoire du transport en commun? Il sert a rien ici a Bruxelles!
FFP 3: Mais c'est fou! Moi je dirai qu'il serait mieux de marcher meme jusqu'au Porte de Namur!

You agree with FFP 3. Since you are late, you begin running up Chausee d'Ixelles in the rain, in your dress. You soon realize why the bus is nonexistant. A car is flipped upside down in the middle of the Chausee, its wheels spinning helplessly, its underbelly charred. Burnt cars mean one thing: les manifs. And, indeed, just ahead are the Storm Trooperesque riot cops, round shields in hand. You are secretly glad to see them, and secretly really angry at the manifesteurs, who you somewhat irrationally blame for your lateness (since they, after all, were not responsible for your dress, the rain, your forgotten umbrella, or your forgotten tickets). When you realize that these are the same manifesteurs protesting the same Congolese elections with the same tired chants, you become irritable. When you realize that their rowdy behavior and spontaneous bonfires have closed your metro stop, sealing the Porte de Namur entrances tight, you become positively livid. Trudging through the rain to Trone, you realize that this is a wild night; not only are several storefronts smashed on Chausee d'Ixelles, manifesteurs also attacked stores on the way to the European Quarter.
You would be a little frightened, but you're more worried about missing the play.


Act II. Theatre Le Public, Quartier Saint Josse. Salle des Voutees. You are sitting in a chair on the front row of a black box theater.

The play begins. It is called "Georges Dandin en Afrika." It is confusing at first; youtube videos mingle with blogs mingle with Belgians in African dress and Africans in Louis XIV-era costumes. Moliere is dense, and the added breaking-of-the-fourth-wall element they're trying to introduce makes it harder. You almost regret deciding to watch this.

Then something clicks. You realize that this is about a group of Belgian actors, funded by some sort of humanitarian grant, who are trying to put on the Moliere play Georges Dandin in central Africa (probably Congo, definitely a former Belgian colony, they never specify which). There is a scene- a rather moving one- where the handsome black man playing Georges Dandin, a servant, refuses to kneel before M. Clitandre, a nobleman, to pray his forgiveness for something he did not do. The actor insists that this action, required by the script, forces him to look subservient, and brings back baggage about colonialism and slavery. This causes a row in which the white director finally yells "Yes, I'm white, and I'm Belgian, but I wasn't even born when we liberated the colonies in 1960!" Later, another black actor proclaims, "The next terrorist will be from sub-Saharan Africa. Forget the Belgians; I want a bomb on the Paris metro. The French women should know what it is to lose a son, to weep for senseless violence!" And, later, a middle-aged Belgian actress mourns, "I don't know what I'm doing here in Africa. Everywhere poverty, big dirty eyes, flies swarming. All I know are images. I don't have names."

The play is very good. You are conflicted about the end, though, in which Georges Dandin is face down, supposedly frustrated and conquered by his cheating, devious, intelligent wife. At this point Georges Dandin has become a clear metaphor for Africa; the wife, for a West who gives token aid with one hand and requires interest on debt with the other. The play makes Africa's situation look hopeless. You don't like this.

You leave, and are on the metro, and sigh. Is Porte de Namur closed? If so, you'll have to get off at Louise and walk 15 more minutes in the rain. You are kind of sick and this will make your cold worse.

 Darn manifesteurs.


Act III. Chausee d'Ixelles, three hours later.

Porte de Namur is not closed, thank heavens. You get out of the metro, reveling at the sight of the wacky Hector Chicken sign which signals a short walk home. It's then that you smell the remnants of burning rubber. The place is still lurid with blue police light, but almost no one is there. Instead, a huge blue sign hangs on one metro entrance. It is written half in French, half in Lingala. You gather than the Matonge manifesteurs are angry, still, about Kabila. You feel tired and sad, reading it. No one is standing by the sign except a few policemen. The party, such as it was, is over.

You start walking home. You then notice that almost every store front has a hole punched in its window. The street is littered with small, round, clear-green balls of shatterproof glass. You realize that you were here, in this sports store, two days ago, buying much-needed thick socks. You were in this Zara looking at dresses a few weeks ago. Today, this afternoon, you walked by Maison Doree, whose doors are now nonexistant.

It is frightening to see this commercial artery crippled, quite literally shattered. You think, sadly, that their "ouverture exceptionnelle" (they will be open Sunday for perhaps the only day of the year to accommodate procrastinating gift-buyers like you) will be very difficult.

You trip on something. It is a soggy cardboard sign. On it is written this: 800,000 dead. 5 million raped or homeless. Didier Reynerds (the Belgian Secretary of State), why will you put up with Kabila?

This, too, is sad.

You pick up the sign, thinking about taking it home. You are not sure why. You do not think about the fact that the police might look askance at a wool-coated girl carrying a sign associated with the violent manifs of this evening. You do not think about the reaction of the few manifesteurs who still wander the streets. What you do realize, though, is that the sign has no place in your room, with the black dresses, and the books, and the duvet from Ikea. You realize that you do not wholly agree with Reynerds, but you don't agree with the smashed windows, either.


You realize that the reason the end of the play bothered you was that it felt too little like a play, and too much like real life.

Protests, blue Christmases, and that elusive peace on earth

It is time to write about manifs, again.

For the past five days, there's been a helicopter humming over my apartment here in Ixelles. It's been pretty annoying, and I've been wondering why it insists on staying over Flagey. Since it's Christmas, and since I'm profoundly obsessed by European Christmas markets, I assumed it was covering preparations for the Flagey Christmas market, which happened this weekend.

At the same time, I've been reading about the elections in Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), which took place last week. The elections were the second since DRC was established after the fall of Mobutu and since Zaire became DRC. I'd been receiving flyers since mid-November advertising and campaigning for Tshsedeki, the opposition candidate and the most viable competition for Kabila, the current president. I found it charming (and fascinating) that my Congolese neighbors in Matonge were handing out flyers for their pre-election manifs and distributing fact sheets about candidates to the white students wandering down their street; clearly we couldn't vote and knew little about the election, but they wanted their voice to be heard.
I took the flyers, read them, and folded them nicely in a stack of research on Congo, thinking nothing more of the interactions.

Last week, I started hearing reports from the RMCA's monitoring team, which had gone to Kinshasa to monitor the election procedure in DRC's capitol. Things were, unsurprisingly, not going well; there had already been multiple accusations of election fraud, several injuries from violent clashes between protestors and Kabila's guards, and a sinking realization that, whether he deserved to or not, Kabila would be reelected. The reports from the RMCA team and in the news worsened as the week went on. My hopes of going to consult archives and interview elderly Congolese about their experiences in the Belgian colony were dashed; and what was worse, things didn't look good for Kinshasa at all.

This Friday, some friends and I went to a movie in Bozar, the pretty little independent cinema in the whitewashed neobaroque world that is Leo II's Mont des Arts. To get there, we walked up Chausee d'Ixelles, a broad street filled with H and M's, C et A's, sports equipment stores, oversized banks, and one three-story Leonidas outlet. Normally the Chausee is bustling around 8 pm, full of shoppers struggling with bags, working sorts headed out for cocktails, pairs of young expats awkwardly venturing on first dates, and bands of students passing extra-large cans of Jupiler back and forth. Friday, however, it was almost silent. A few people walked purposefully. Most stores had turned off their lights.

We hypothesized that perhaps all the Christmas lights on the Chausee (Belgians love Christmas lights, and string their streets with them) had blown a power fuse.

By the time we saw the abstract metal claws of the sculpture at Porte de Namur, however, we realized that this was no festive power outage. Storefronts were singed; the streets were fluffy with bizarre white foam; the huge ING bank glowed an eerie blue. Police with the round clear riot shields I'd seen at Steenerkozzel stood shoulder-to-shoulder across the Chausee. Behind them, huge white police wagons rolled slowly. Rows upon rows of silhouetted heads moved inside. I turned, and saw a sign; I didn't pick it up to read it but saw the word "KABILA" scrawled in angry red.

That's when I realized that the helicopter, the news articles, and the RMCA reports had come home, to my home, to Porte de Namur and the Chausee and pretty little Ixelles. We asked the police what was going on; they mumbled something about "sans papiers" (illegal immigrants) and told us to go around the long way to get to Bozar. We did, and saw car upon car with smashed rearview mirrors, countless shattered bottles, and more of the weird foam that looks like Christmas tree flocking but definitely isn't.

I later learned that Matonge, the Congolese quarter not far from my house, has been in uproar since Wednesday. The Congolese who so hopefully handed out pamphlets on Tshisedeki are now angry; they want Belgium to divest from Congo, to refuse to recognize the new Kabila government; to send Belgian soldiers to oust a man they see as dishonest, fraudulent, and directly responsible for many of the horrors that have gone on in eastern Congo for the past half-decade (not to mention the almost complete lack of infrastructure that persists in his big, wealthy, profoundly underdeveloped country). They are bitter at a country that they believe (and somewhat rightfully so) colonized, reorganized, brutalized, and abandoned them; they are frustrated that the Belgians (and the Americans; they protested at the US embassy, prompting the US to respond with reinforced concrete barriers and a few razor wire barricades. American hospitality at its finest) seem largely unconcerned with the election results and are doing little or nothing to prevent Kabila from remaining in power.

I've admired these protestors; have agreed with them (I would like to see Kablia gone, and potentially extradited to the Hague for war crimes); have wanted, like them, to see a new president and maybe (tho doubtfully) a new era for DRC. It wasn't until today, however, that I realized that ideological solidarity is not enough. Today, I walked home from a conference about the ethics of neurological enhancement down Chausee d'Ixelles. The tinsel-covered shops were glowing blue again from the lights of the police cars lined up. (This, I suppose, means it's currently a blue Christmas in Ixelles.) A small group of Congolese protestors were standing around a little bonfire they'd made near the metro station; they were singing, banging on some drums (or trashcans?) they brought, and periodically throwing something that popped like a gunshot into the fire. Curious, I watched them, hiding in the shadow of the metro station. Fascinated by their song, which had something to do with Kabila, I took out my iTouch, hoping to record it so I could figure out the lyrics once I got home. One of the singers looked over and saw the quiet glow; he walked over to me and said none too politely "Why are you filming this?" I responded that I actually hadn't started filming, and that I was curious; I wanted to know what the lyrics of the song were. "No," he said, "you don't, you will use it to hurt us." No, I reassured him, I wouldn't; I was a student, and not even Belgian (couldn't he hear my American accent? I asked smilingly), and was doing research on Congo. I wouldn't film him, I reassured him, putting the iTouch back; but could I watch to learn more?

No. He promptly informed that the Congolese didn't need any more whites researching their country, adding that Americans were as bad as Belgians, and that the proper place for me was across the street by the H and M. He wasn't violent or even hostile, but he wasn't exactly polite, either. Sheepish, I retreated across the street, watched for a bit more, and walked home. I felt a bit stupid about the interaction, and a bit resentful of his gloves-off handling of the situation. As I kept walking, however, I realized that deep down part of me agrees with him. I don't know that we need more YouTube videos of the manifs (they're easy to find); I don't know that we need more scandalous photos of burning cars showing up in Le Soir (Brussels' biggest newspaper); I don't know that we need more broadcasts of violence in Kinshasa. All it does is reinforce our stereotypes: those Africans, they can't be peaceable, they can't get democracy right, they can't protest the right way, they just become violent and irrational and messy and rude to student researchers.

The reality, of course, is much messier. In Kinshasa, people are protesting out of hunger as much as out of anger. In Matonge, they are advocating for families that could easily die of post-election violence or starvation. Both groups protest violently because they've tried the democratic option (voting) and they've tried the diplomatic option (contacting diplomacies) and gotten no response. They know that they'll be a side show until something dramatic happens; and they know they need something dramatic to happen if their country is ever going to improve from its close-to-or-actually-last-place spot on world development and democracy indices. The protestors in Matonge are brave souls; many of them are sans papiers themselves, which means that if arrested they are not only jailed for a few nights but quite possibly deported back to a country in turmoil. And they're out there anyway.

I was going to write something about how context matters and is vital, but I think I'll just say this. There's more to any story- whether a helicopter over your house, white flocking on your street, or riots on Porte de Namur- than meets the eye. And no one's going to understand any story beyond the stereotypes they already have if they don't make the intellectual (and, sometimes, actual) leap into others' shoes. That's one of the most beautiful things about Christmas and the Christmas story: it's fundamentally a story about radically seeing life from another perspective, about giving up power, position, and privilege in order to fundamentally change one's perspective, about expanding one's capacity to advocate and care by quite literally seeing life through others' eyes.

That's the goal, anyway. For now, I'll be watching the Matonge protestors from the other side of the street.

Tintin au pays de stresse

So, I recently had one of those great epiphanies. You know, the kind when you look at your calendar and/or your to-do list and it dawns on you: it is only half filled! You did not write everything down from one calendar to another! "Wash laundry" is not the only thing you have to do all week!
After you euphorically write down the new list of tasks (I like making to-do lists, like all typical type A personalities), you look at it. And then your belly sinks and your head gets all foggy and you can only whisper "zuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuut."

Because that is an elephant's worth of stuff to do.

On the topic of elephants: I just finished Tintin au Congo last night. There are many distressing things in it, including the length of Tintin's shorts (waay too much knee, boy reporter! down boy! you are not a Rockette), and the fact that apparently Herge couldn't get any real Congolese to pose for him so he found a bunch of twelve year old Belgian boys and put them in blackface instead. It also occurred to me that while I really liked the Spielberg movie, Tintin himself is a bit of a priggish jerk, not to mention fanatically racist. And his relationship with Milou/Snowy the dog borders on the bizarre. They talk to each other? In French? That is worse than Lassie. The fact that Tintin is Belgium's national hero/icon is making me think very long and hard about this country again. And has made me more aware of the hemlines of men's shorts than ever before.

Back to the to-do list. The grim reality that EXAMS are coming, and coming quickly (okay, after Christmas, but still pretty soon), and that they're getting added to the papers, presentations, Christmas markets (!), holiday concerts, internship applications, and travel plans we've already got dotting our calendars has thudded among us all like the aforementioned elephant. Since we are decidedly lacking in Tintins at ULB, it continues to live and prod us with its scary ivory tusks. Exams are coming, and since we don't get evaluated basically at all during the semester that means that our entire academic fortune is on the line come January 7th. Yay. Merry Christmas to us, and a happy new year.

I like how Belgians handle stress though. There is the moment of blood-draining panic; "zut, l'examen/l'expose, il vient vite, quoi!" Then there is the glance at the others: "ben, oui." Then, a short discussion: will it be difficult? will it be different than last time? will we need to read that bibliography he handed out at the beginning of the year? This is all done very calmly, however; and the conclusion is always that it will be challenging but, "benh, ca va, ca va aller." Perhaps we will photocopy a few more articles; perhaps we will discuss this a bit more later over a beer; but ultimately, everything will be okay. I don't see the same existential stress on my classmates' faces here that I saw at Davidson or Sciences Po. This may be because I'm hanging out with philosophers and ethics majors, who spend so much time thinking about the meaning of life and death that everything else seems of relative unimportance. This may also be because I'm at a huge state school, where yearly tuition is about the same price as my school books for one semester at Davidson (if you're Belgian), so retaking a year isn't a big deal. But I think it's also pretty darn Belgian: things will be hard, and, hey, you may not be the best at them, but you'll probably get through them. And if you don't, you'll still survive. Chill out.

Makes sense, I guess, for a country that's survived the carnage of two world wars fought on its soil; that constantly fights internally with itself; that's only gotten breaks by breaking its colonies; and that remains an afterthought, a passing-through point from Paris to Berlin, a city and a country presumed to be grey, soulless, messy, bureaucratic, bizarre. Brussels knows it's never going to be beautiful enough to compete with Paris; will never have enough financial force to compete with London or even Antwerp or Amsterdam; will never be punctual enough to give Berlin or Munich a run for their money; will never have rich enough history to rival Rome or Madrid. But, that said, it is also confident it will survive; it will  remain intact, a hodgepodge of colonial-era excess, bullet-pitted suffering, crumbly industrial ghosts, sterile bureaucratic infrastructure, and postmodern architectural essays, long after the factory smog, the red rubber, the mustard gas, the Nazi tanks, and the diplomatic eco-exhaust have dissipated. Brussels has survived since the Roman empire was still jangling swords around Europe; and while it's probably never gotten an A (and never made it on Rick Steve's must-see list for sure), it's still around. Like Tintin, whose gun never seems to work, whose outfits are always tragic, and whose hairstyle is dubious on good days, it's kind of a misfit; it will probably get cornered by a scary bearded man; and it will probably say stupid culturally insensitive things on a regular basis; but when there's an elephant's worth of work or danger charging, it will probably take care of it (maybe by having a monkey shoot it, as Tintin does in the comic book, inexplicably).

As someone born and raised in America's can-do, must-do workaholic society, a funny mix of Calvinist work ethic and suburban overachiever culture, I don't understand the type-B mindset towards work, stress, and achievement. Thriving and exceeding, not surviving and existing, have always been standard to me and my peers. But it's nice to see people who don't collapse into bundles of nerves and stress and coffee when exams roll around; who are quietly confident that things will be okay even if they're not; who afford themselves and their professors the "quart d'heure academique" in which one is on time as long as one is not more than fifteen minutes late. While I don't know this for sure, I get the sense that not everyone at ULB is doing everything they do (drinking beer after class?) for their resumes, or to build a network, or connections (though they are often doing just that). I think sometimes they do it just to chill. Just for fun. And they do it even when there's an elephant in the corner, staring them down with trunks of stress.

That's something I didn't see at Davidson. It's a special breed of courage or at least insouciance.

Final thought on Tinitn: He is a journalist. Apparently people are clamoring to give him tons of money for his stories. But he doesn't take it. He stays with his little Belgian newspaper. And he never seems to worry about deadlines. He just goes on the adventure, says some racist stuff, makes some poor sartorial life choices, gets saved by an airplane (lots of deus ex machina, and that machina is always an airplane, for some reason), and comes up with a great story. He probably spends an hour writing in the whole story each time. He never stresses about work, just about giant cobras.

And while little about Tintin is realistic, and most about him is not worth emulating, there's something to that: to letting the adventure happen to you, to letting the present preoccupy you, to letting the story come to you, rather than stalking it like a great white hunter. It probably will: that great epiphany when the research clicks, the problem makes sense, the thesis statement solidifies, will swoop down on you like a prop plane driven by cheery Brits. Just hope it's before the water buffalos get you.


Okay, that's enough. Tintin's metaphorical possibilities are well worn out now. And I have got some elephants to tame (or, perhaps, some prop planes to hail).


Tintin and Milou being nice and racist (in scandalous shorts):

Les changements

It has come to my attention that I have not blogged in quite some time. This is thanks to some very good things: parents and a good friend visiting from the US, and moving. That's right: I am now a resident of the commune of Ixelles, near gritty-but-artsy Place Flagey, in a quirky, sunny apartment haunted by a refrigerator ghost named Terrence. I couldn't be happier; I'm closer to ULB, to student life, and to Matonge, where Congolese immigrants and pretentious Avenue Louisistas meet, mingle, and regard each other with bemusement.

Moving is challenging; I've learned about shopping at IKEA (it always takes at least an hour more than you think); about constructing a European-style bed (there is no such thing as a box spring, just a sommier, a thing with slats that look like balsa wood but are mercifully a little sturdier); about putting curtains on a stubborn curtain rod (scrap fabric is our friend); about whether or not your Vespa poster not matching your duvet is a problem (it is not). It's disorienting to change addresses, commutes, grocery stores, routines. Disorienting, but good; the challenge forces you to think about how you divide time, about where your priorities lie, about how you want to invest the always-limited resources at your disposal. Moving, like having company for dinner, forces you to clean, to rearrange, to reconsider the things you've accepted as inevitable in your daily life. You see things as an outsider, because for a brief moment you are an outsider; and your life invariably changes as your perspective shifts.

Outsider-vision and its incipient, almost-imperceptible life changes happened yesterday morning during the VUB-ULB concert du St. V, an orchestra concert to celebrate Paul Verhaegen, the founding father of both universities, the first non-Catholic-affiliated schools in Belgium. St. V's day is a joke, a mock saint's day for the man who declared that the Church should not dictate what and who was taught in this fledgling country. This concert, however, was not really a joke: though VUB, the Flemish-speaking university, and ULB, the Francophone university where I study, are about 15 minutes away from each other on foot, this concert was one of the only opportunities French and Flemish students have to collaborate with one another. Most courses in the Flemish language at ULB are, incredibly, taught by Francophone professors with a background in Flemish studies; likewise, most French courses at VUB are taught by Flemish speakers who minored in French. Though both universities conduct high-level research in law, business, and the social sciences, their efforts are almost always divided; there is little dialogue between the two vibrant academic communities who are quite literally a stone's throw away from one another. In many ways, VUB and ULB embody the redundancy that results from the politico-linguistic divisions that hamstring Belgium in so many ways. They spend double on resources, facilities, faculty, when they could easily accommodate their students and research and more in a shared, bilingual campus.

Thus it was particularly special to have the opportunity to play alongside VUB's orchestra as part of ULB's orchestra yesterday. Most of the concert was divided; VUB played Broadway standards, we played a Bizet overture. However, the last piece was a symphonic suite from the movie The Prince of Egypt. Each stand contained a VUB and a ULB musician, playing side by side; the ULB conductor directed, as ULB students translated for their stand partners when necessary. Halfway through the piece, Zofia, our director, stepped down, grabbed the VUB conductor, and let him finish conducting the piece. The two joined hands and bowed together on the podium at the end, as the swells of the oh-so-metaphorically-powerful piece "(There Can Be Miracles) When You Believe" died away in the auditorium. The music was schmaltzy and the execution good but not extraordinary; the fact that the crowd leapt to their feet in the loudest standing ovation I've ever received as a member of a symphony had much more to do with political symbolism than with musicality. They demanded encore after encore; they took photo after photo. This concert, coming just over a week after Belgian politicians finally signed a (hopefully) working political accord and formed a (hopefully) stable parliamentary coalition with a (hopefully) mutually agreeable prime minister, was in many ways a metaphor for changements: for learning to see things as an outsider; for stumbling through a second or third language in order to communicate with one's neighbor; for laughing as one shared power; for universal things, like music or national identity (or the ever-present beer served after the concert :) , that unite otherwise disparate people.

In other words, the concert was pretty cool.

I am now on a mission to understand more about Belgian history. Most of what I know about Belgium comes from colonial history; I've learned the bare minimum about Leopold II in order to understand what happened in Congo. But I think the secret to some of the seemingly incomprehensible acts Belgium committed in its colonies may lie in its own, complicated, divided identity and history. The more I see of this country, the more complex, convoluted, and fascinating it seems. It's a strange, interesting mix of North African immigrants, Central African refugees, Eurocrats, left-leaning students, stodgy Flemish, droll Walloons, and a decorative monarchy; a place where trilingualism is expected and five languages is nothing extraordinary; a place where Egyptian wraps coexist peacefully with traditional moules-frites; a place where there is little definition of "normal," because everyone is profoundly, fascinatingly different. A place constantly struggling with "changements," constantly shifting boundaries and identities and perspectives; a place blessed and cursed with perpetual outsider vision.

The finale of the VUB/ULB concert, filmed by one of the ULB parents.

So you say you want a revolution....

It's been a busy weekend. Huzzah for a few minutes to sit down and enjoy the fall weather and the Amelie soundtrack and a fresh-brewed espresso and blog.

So, what's new in Brussels land? Well, first of all, Leo the Scooter is alive and well. After a veritable manhunt to find a tow truck that tows scooters, and another to find a scooter store that would accept poor Leo before the end of November, Leo found a doctor (who gushed, "He's so cute!" the instant Leo wheeled in the door, making his owner happy), got his oil changed, got a new tire, and is better than ever before. He's been purring happily around Brussels all weekend, handling interstates, cobblestone streets, and roundabouts like a pro. His owner, on the other hand, has learned quite a bit about one-way streets, Belgian street signs (x's mean go, o's mean don't go), and about how bumpy cobblestones are when you ride a vehicle with limited shock absorption. That said, Leo, now that he's well, is a complete joy to drive, and the independence that he (and his ironic name) are giving me is a beautiful thing.

Independence means the ability to go out in Brussels after the metro closes, which is what I did. I saw a lovely, disturbing film about les maisons closes in Paris at the turn of the last century, experienced Oktoberfest Brussels style, had a picnic in Parc Royale, listened to jazz at the historic club l'Archiduc (which, I am informed, is as famous for its crowds of slightly besotted, unemployed artists as for the fact that Djengo Reinhardt played there back in the day), did some English tutoring, got Leo a rain jacket and myself some motorcycle gloves (complete with flower embroidery, of course), and went to a protest. I also got lost approximately six times, and almost ended up in Liege with Leo. This is what happens when you decide that Mapquest is overrated and/or that the way you got to a place will work to get back home (Lies. Everything in Brussels is a one-way street. The sooner you learn this, the less lost/frustrated you will be. Also, assume you will encounter cobblestones at least half of your drive, and remember not to clench your teeth when you do.)

I now want to pause and talk about another kind of independence, one that's not related to two-wheeled motoring around a historic European city. I went yesterday to the "Portes ouvertes" protest at Steenerkozzel Detention Center, a "centre fermé" where illegal immigrants are placed after they are apprehended. As I got lost with Leo, I missed the train out to Nossengem and thus had to take another train out into Flemish country, passing through Leuven, a charming university town, and chugging through potato fields and warehouses. I assumed that since Nossengem housed a detention center, it was probably an industrial wasteland; but as I watched warehouses fade again into quaint cottages and hedgerows I realized I was wrong. I stepped out of the train and into the kind of quiet country town one sees in Irish coffee table books, or in Disney's Beauty and the Beast: pretty, newly-painted houses; trimmed rosebushes; elderly gentlemen walking dogs; families on bicycles. I stopped to ask one older man for directions to the centre ferme, and felt myself blushing as I did so. It seemed almost profane to mention Steenerkozzel, whose name to me echoes the dull thud of more sinister detention centers from an earlier Europe, to the inhabitants of this picture-perfect town. The man was perfectly nice, however; he smiled and told me that it was a ways off. "Where the road dips down and gets shadowy," he said in poetic French, "turn right, and you'll see it."

When I travel alone, I notice little things and endow them with deep significance. I saw an antique Spanish ship in a window, its sails painted with Columbus crosses. It seemed fitting. So, too, did the travel store a little further down, stocked with shining sturdy suitcases that gleamed with the potential of new journeys under a Western passport. As I descended into the "shadowy" part of the road, I realized that I was right by an airport. Jet liners roared, their takeoffs echoing through the valley. I turned, and saw the huddled grey blocks that make up the centre ferme, hidden behind a double layer of green fencing. Centres fermes are not prisons, though they serve a similar purpose; since their "residents" are illegal but not dangerous, they have open windows with thin metal bars across them. I could see faces at the windows, faces which if all went according to Belgian bureaucratic plans would be sent home to conflict in DRC or unrest in Libya within a few weeks. Planes, which like train stations usually make something in me tingle with excitement at the idea of new potential places to go and things to see, suddenly seemed sad.

As I got closer to the centre ferme, I saw a news truck and, closer to the green mesh fence, a group of 100 or 150 protesters, complete with a makeshift band who banged on drums and cowbells at random intervals. The crowd looked largely like the sort that roam from festival to festival in the states; if not for the big grey building behind them, I couldn't have said whether they were going to Bonnaroo or to protest deportations. Most roamed around, greeting friends, snapping photos, or just staring glumly at the centre ferme. A few yelled out to the inmates, reading off the numbers of help lines in Arabic, English, French, and Dutch (no one spoke Lingala). Periodically, some would chant "No borders, no nations, stop deportation!" or similar things in French. Eventually, a few got wound up and started throwing themselves at the fence with wire clippers. This apparently alarmed the police, who had been hiding out nearby. They came out in full force, riot cops with bulletproof exoskeletons and round riot shields. The crowd obligingly started singing the Darth Vader march from Star Wars. Hanging out in the back of the crowd with my newly-brushed hair, my equestrian boots, and my neocon leather bag, I felt like an onlooker. In all honesty, the closest I've ever gotten to riot cops was good seats at Billy Elliot in London. (That sentence is entirely absurd, and shows how out of my element I was). That said, I also realized I was hopelessly trendy; aren't many white, privelidged Americans my age getting their first taste of riot cops and protests in New York and all around the States?

All of this, plus the fact that I hadn't eaten since noon, made me grumpy. I watched the guys flinging themselves at the fence; saw the still, almost sarcastic faces of the riot cops. They were wholly ineffective; you could tell the riot cops were also hungry, and found it ridiculous that they'd been called away from Sunday mussels for a protest this small. Protesters started picking corn from a nearby field and throwing it over the fence; one riot cop moved his shield to bounce away a cob. His fellow officer looked at him and rolled his eyes, as if to say, "Seriously, man? It's corn." And, at the end of the day, that's all it was: noise, corn, a few well-placed stickers courtesy of Anarchists International (yes, I was a little alarmed they were there, but they seemed to be more interested in autocollants than revolution), a few grammatically questionable English profanities, and a lot of very wordy handouts about future opportunities to do the same thing. Part of me was excited to be part of something that was part Kent State, part Les Amis d'ABC from Les Mis, part Wall Street protest; part of me was angry at myself for how absurd and anachronistic that excitement and those references were; part of me was irritated at my fellow protesters for their fence-flinging and lack of showers; and part of me was frustrated at myself for refusing to fence-fling, for taking photos and taking notes rather than refusing to shower or fill my scooter up because that was funding the state that was sending these people away.

I left early, propelled partially by the time (I had to meet a friend later that night), partially by the cold (Brussels becomes frigid once the sun goes down), partially by hunger, and partially by my conflicting feelings. Did I want to join the protest earnestly, call the riot cops Storm Troopers, paste anarchist stickers, bang on a drum? Did I want to ignore it, to regret the inconvenience of going out to Nossengem, to make sure that no photos of my presence at such a thing ever got posted on Facebook for law schools to see? As I walked back out of the shadows, past the Storm Troopers that looked like regular family guys and gals, past the impromptu protestor campsites and the prim blue collar cottages, I thought about privelidge, and freedom. These kids, with their intentionally-worn clothes and studiously unbrushed hair, were privelidged; they had the freedom to go out, to spend hours protesting and lounging around with their friends; to make radical statements with little consequences for their current occupation as students. As long as you're a student, you don't have to curb your speech for fear your employer will find out; you don't have a job that starts at 8 or 9 am; you don't have a family and a stack of bills to pay. You can protest, you can be passionate: and I realized that that kind of passionate protest is a luxury, a gift, something that no one in the centre ferme at Stennerkozzel or the closed centers we call office buildings really has. And, like all luxuries, that kind of protest is largely self-serving; I am under no illusions that any inmate at Stennerkozzel was helped by the cowbell-banging crowd outside the gates. As I walked back, painfully aware of not only that luxury but also the luxury of being a legal immigrant funded by one of the most generous postgrad grants around, I thought about what could actually make a difference for those immigrants; about how sound immigration policy could be made; about how human rights could actually be defended. I remembered why I wanted to be a lawyer, and wondered if I could combine the fence-flinging zeal of my fellow protestors with the smooth hair and polished suits of an attorney. I thought about how far was too far: how passionate you could be before you became dangerous or counterproductive; how integrated into a system you could become before selling out entirely; how you could avoid throwing corncobs; how you could avoid living peacefully on the hill above the shadow.

Today, I went to the commune in prissy Woluwe-Saint-Lambert, took a number, and sat beside my fellow immigrants. I paid sixteen euros cash and received an invaluable paper, stamped with the seal of the Belgian king and the commune burgomeister. The office attendant handed it to me with a smile, informed me that if I were stopped in the street I should produce this paper and no one would bother me, and then said "Welcome in Belgium. We are glad to have you." In fairness, I've been through quite a few bureaucratic headaches for this little piece of paper; I've sent countless documents to the commune, the consulate in Atlanta, to ULB, and to the police precinct. Immigration is never easy. But as I walked out the door, paper and even more invaluable navy US passport in hand, I realized that for many in this and other countries, it's impossible. As they struggle to escape unrest, turmoil, or even genocide in their homelands, they encounter the impersonal, inhuman face of a bureaucracy that attempts to remove personal responsibility for their fate. They are stopped for their skin color (please note that I've never been asked to produce papers, while several of my fellow classmates of African or Middle Eastern descent are asked at least twice a week); detained often because they don't understand French or English or Dutch well enough to explain their situations; and deported back to their homelands with the fatal stamp that forbids them return to Europe for ten years due to their immigration delinquency. And while I can always call my embassy and bring US wrath on bureaucratic heads, these people's embassies often hold less clout than I as a single US citizen do.

I don't have answers on immigration, on social inequality, or on the best way to protest. But I've got more questions, which is where all revolutions, no matter how big or small, start.

Leo est malade, or, You Can't Get a Southern Girl Down (but you can get her bike out of commission)

Okay, so this was my first officially frustrating day in Brussels.

My new scooter Leo has been sick for several days. I originally thought that he had a minor oil problem, changed the oil myself (a first for me), and tried to ride it again. No such luck; the evil red eye of oil death came back on. I don't drive anything that glares at me with red light, so I decided to leave it in the garage over the weekend (no one repairs anything in Europe on the weekends, let's get real) and to take it to the scooter doctor today. When you're unwilling to drive your bike because it's got an attitude problem/oil leak (in my world cars and bikes and computers are all personified because I think they are as unpredictable and difficult as people), taking your bike to the scooter doctor means walking it. Please note that this is not a bicycle bike, or even a cute little moped; it's a 100 cc scooter, which weighs quite a bit. And, of course, the scooter shop is uphill. So, 45 sweaty minutes later, I finally reached the shop, locked my scooter, and went inside with my Big Sad Southern Belle Eyes. (These usually work at the Volvo store at home).

No such luck. I knew I probably had a problem when I saw that the store basically only sold brand-new Vespas (read: only sold overpriced scooters to Eurocrats.) I had a bigger problem when I realized that I was the only one including the mechanic not in some form of suit. And when I told my tale of woe to the mechanic and he responded by laughing, I knew I had Big Problems. Apparently, asking him to even look at a Sym scooter was a deep insult and I should know that They Who Work On Vespas do not work on Syms, or anything coming from anywhere but Italy. Not even Hondas. Duh. Apparently.

After being informed that I was an idiot for buying Asian (yes, me, and every student at ULB, okay), and informing me that "I could sue the guy who sold me the scooter except no I'm foreign so forget that I'm screwed," I left. Usually tears work well with mechanics, but I refused to give High And Mighty Suit Mechanic the pleasure of letting him know he had made me upset/angry. It was a sore blow to my Big Sad Southern Belle Eyes, however. This is their first loss in the world of mechanics, oil, and unspecified dohickeys that make engines run.

I locked my bike up, ran off to tutor a French girl in English, and then came back to retrieve my bike. And that's when I noticed something: I have been longingly gazing at scooters since January, or maybe even before, when I decided that a scooter was the best way to get to my internship (it still is, provided said scooter does not glare at you with red eyes and spit oil at you when you try to make it feel better). Seeing a scooter made me simultaneously happy and jealous. Today everything had changed, however. Today, as I watched people riding scooters on the street while I wheeled my hamstrung scooter home, I felt like people do when watching slap-happy-in-love couples after they've just gone through a bad breakup. I resented every scooter-and-rider-couple on the road. I growled with every cute little rumbly acceleration. I shot angry eyes at every leather-clad rider swinging their leg easily over their perfect little bikes. I felt like informing each of them that their scooter, too, would probably deeply disappoint them before they knew it. "Just you wait," I wanted to say, "someday you'll wake up and your pretty little Vespa will be a nasty thing spitting oil at you and you'll be walking it home like a misbehaved preschooler."

Fortunately, the walk back home was downhill, which helped me calm down. A cathartic beer and several calls to AAA later, I am over my bitterness toward Leo and toward the rest of the Belgian scooter community. We can all still be friends. I'll still take Leo to a doctor (albeit one who's not elitist about scooter brands). Now that my arms feel a little less like over-stretched rubber bands, I can admit that while this whole scooter-being-sick thing is no fun, it's teaching me valuable lessons about vehicle ownership, about buying something used about which you know very little, and, potentially, about the grace-under-pressure necessary to be a real Southern belle. (Who knew that this grant would teach me such relevant Life Skills?)

You can't get this Southern girl down. I will ride again. And, hopefully, Leo will, too.

Museums, memory, and marketing: or, selling chocolate and staying dry in Brussels

So it's a grey, cold, drizzly Sunday; I'm sitting here watching the sky spit fitfully while sipping Mariage Freres tea (quite possibly the best tea on the Continent) and listening to the Bach Mass in B minor, a holdover from similar rainy Sundays in Dublin four years and many ages ago. Brussels is finally living up to its reputation as a rainy, dreary city; the past two days have been chilly and wet, the sort of weather that eventually soaks your trench coat and sends you inside in search of hot drinks or just a warm fire.
This weather is perfect for museum-going, however, which is exactly what I've been doing. I signed my internship contract with the Africa museum Friday, which basically means that I can access Henry Morton Stanley's papers, most of the colonial archive, the permanent collection, and the library. This is extremely exciting; I am itching to get my hands on some old maps, problematic diaries, and intriguing photos. I also rode Leo out to the museum, which was equally exciting; I got up to 90 km/hr (around 55-60 mph), which is actually pretty fast when you're not enclosed in a car, I learned. Leo has unfortunately come down with something, however, so he's going to the doctor tomorrow. Cross your fingers for his speedy recovery. (For those of you who missed it, Leo is my scooter. Just realized that might be confusing :)

Saturday (yesterday) I went to the Magritte museum with a fellow grantee studying Belgian symbolist literature. I loved everything about this museum; from the big echoey elevator to the disorienting floor plan to the artful way it wove together Magritte's paintings, sketches, letters, biography, quotations, and photos of him dressing up as an extraterrestrial (complete with tinfoil hat. The man had a sense of humor.) Magritte's famous works, such as "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" and "The Son of Man," aren't in the museum. As a veteran of many many trips to the Louvre, I actually liked that the famous stuff wasn't in the museum; it kept the hordes of tourists at bay and meant that I and everyone else had time to focus on the rest of the paintings, many of which are just as good/interesting/frustratingly enigmatic as Magritte's more famous stuff.  This also meant that curators were more chill than in Musee d'Orsay or the Louvre; you could get up close to the paintings and see that the seemingly-smooth surface of Magritte's creepy works is actually made of thick paint. It became really easy to envision Magritte (who looked more like a handsome banker than a skinny painter) daubing paint onto his pipe-faced, bowler-hatted men in suits, which made his paintings somehow more human and more approachable. Finding the human side of these paintings is good, since I would have otherwise spend two hours getting progressively more and more creeped out by his girls eating magpies and sliced billiard balls. Another good, human thing was the price: two euros for hours of artsy entertainment (and warm shelter from the incessant drizzle). Being a less-than-twenty-six-year-old student in Europe is the best.

Today, I went to mass at Notre-Dame au Sablon, one of the old Gothic cathedrals in the city center. Gothic cathedrals, especially ones in Belgium, have had a hard time of it; their soaring spires and rich decorations have made them targets for raids since they were constructed in the Middle Ages. This continued up until modern times; Brussels was largely decimated during World War I and II, and most of the cathedrals lost their priceless stained glass windows to bomb blasts. Most cathedrals here now have pretty but plain replacement windows. Notre-Dame au Sablon is one of the only exceptions to that rule. I'm not sure if the stained glass is original (kind of doubt it), but if it's a replacement it's stunning; beautiful (if anachronistic) portraits of Mary, Joseph, Jesus, most saints, and some random Brussels burgomeister meisterburghers (portly, but terribly pious). There is also nothing like a chanted mass in a medieval cathedral; no matter how much I struggle with the politics and precepts of the Catholic Church (I'm Protestant), I'll never be able to deny the visceral, spine-tingling beauty of voice and organ echoing off stone. There's something about the fact that people have been singing the same way in the same place for centuries that is really beautiful and humbling.

Afterwards, I wandered out of mass and into the brocante at Petit Sablon, an open-air antique market full of red-and-green-striped tents where elderly Flemish and Walloon merchants sell Depression glass, silver teapots, gemstones, woodcuts, crucifixes, comic books (of course), and real-croc-skin purses. There's something for everyone, and something that will creep everyone out. For me, it was the "Achat du Congo" booth, which teemed with knockoff sculptures, masks, cowrie-shell purses, kinte cloth, and (oh, yes, Brussels) cream colored helmets, complete with netting. The lady running the booth was very pleasant, had spent many years in Congo, and clearly saw nothing ironic in her very retro wares. I chalked up the booth to her age and walked on, only to be confronted by the most beautiful chocolate shops ever. The displays were decadent; delicate high heels in dark chocolate, wedding cakes made of different colors of macaroons; a willow tree whose delicate, curling branches were made of dark, light, and white chocolate. And then there was the last window, Planete Chocolat, where the display featured huge cacao beans made of chocolate, large earthen pots made of bitter chocolate, masks made of white chocolate painted different colors, statues of various heights and chocolate composition, and a whole scene featuring dark chocolate figurines in various states of undress gesturing wildly at a pot of chocolate. A tiny chocolate sign in the corner read "Le chocolat au Congo." So, basically, unless these figures were made approximately fifty years ago, marketing based on the good ol' colonial past isn't  just something that outdated colonial subjects do. That said, how many times has Atlanta used good ol' racially dubious Gone With the Wind to try to jumpstart its tourism industry? Is Brooks Brothers obliged to stop gushing about the exotic refinement of the Indian and Egyptian cotton it uses to sew its legendary shirts? Should everyone re-upholster their British colonial palm-tree-and-monkey chairs? (Actually, yes; from what I hear, that fabric is out of style, and sitting on monkeys is really just creepy). Do we whitewash our past? Ignore it? Re-upholster it? Do we lay it out for everyone to see? Do we capitalize on it? Is that ethically wrong, or just in poor taste?

(Potential answers on this to come.)

For now, I am done with my tea and moving on to neuhaus pralines (which, despite their lack of authentic Congo-themed marketing, are as perfectly Belgian as you can get). The drizzle has calmed down and the sun is trying really really hard to come out. Yay surprising, unpredictable Belgium.

Birthdays, bizarre art, and two Leos

Okay, so it's been quite a while since I updated. This is the problem with blogs: when you're busy, you don't update, because you're doing so much. Then, you realize you have to update, and when you think over all you've done you don't know where to start. But enough of my first world problems. Here we go.

I first want to thank my incredible family/extended family, who managed to figure out how to send birthday cards and, in one case, monster cookies (!!) to my address in Brussels just days after I learned how to properly write it. You all rock.

My birthday was a week ago; I turned 23 and celebrated my full entry into the twenty-something era by eathing a chocolate cake on the way to the Africa Museum, finding my scooter, eating scrumptious moules and homemade frites with a Belgian friend of mine, and then going for drinks. Brussels people like birthdays; these new friends, who I've known less than three weeks, were so generous, sweet, and celebratory. I am impressed by the Belgians, I must say.

Belgian university schedules, on the other hand, are not quite as impressive. Or perhaps they're impressive in a different way. It's kind of exciting to have to wake up and check GeHol (the scheduling software) every morning to see if your class just might have changed time, location, date, or professor. The suspense (and the alarm clock) is excruciating. The good side of this is that I believe I've seen every building on ULB's Solbosch campus, including the recently-completed business school on the far side of the parking lot, because I've either 1) had class there; 2) had class moved there; 3) had GeHol tell me class was moved there but had class in the original location; 4) had class somewhere else, been unable to find it, and have a friendly-but-mistaken ULB classmate send me elsewhere. So that's been a fun way to see the campus.
That said, classes themselves (if/when you find them) have been very interesting; while two hours of Kant in French at 5 pm can induce either sleepiness or intense, grumbly hunger, the classes on bioethics (and the ways in which bioethical deliberations are slowed in Belgium due to linguistic competition between the Flemish and French communities), business leadership (complete with classmates from the Royal Military Academy and several officers from East African countries), and the ethics of communication (which basically confirms all your icky creepy feelings about Facebook) are fascinating. What's sometimes more fascinating are the Belgian/other international students' reactions to debates and discussions; for instance, while I sat silently outraged that the Belgian Committee on Bioethics only meets twice or three times a year due to the fact that they must have an equal balance of French and Flemish speakers every time they meet, my classmates either rolled their eyes or smiled sadly or didn't react at all. The level of linguistic politics and division in this tiny country is amazing. Perhaps they looked abroad to big, problematic Congo because exploration could distract them from the gargantuan task of getting these two proud regions to coalesce into one tiny nation.

Things to think about. I'm signing paperwork at the Museum today, hopefully, which means that there will be much more to come on colonialism and Belgium and history and memory and all those good depressing but interesting things that I do so like to study and research (and that, in all seriousness, I think are vitally important, too)

Friday was "La Nocturne de l'ULB," a big student-run music festival. While it was run with ULB's signature style (long lines, inefficient ticketing system, completely irrational way to pay for beers), the variety of bands and the number of students there was really quite fun. My favorite band was a Congolese group whose electric thumb piano player (!!) blew me away. They were also the only band of the night that got their mostly-white crowd to change from the European techno hop or the American white man's shuffle to a dance that involved much more hip movement and swaying. They were really fun (I would like to insert the video I took here, but I haven't figured out how yet. So check back later when I successfully battle my technological ineptitude).

Saturday was Nuit Blanche, which goes from 7 pm to 7 am the next morning and is a city-wide public art exhibit. There were funky glow-in-the-dark flowers, electro-dance-party lightshows in old cathedrals, a really interesting series of wax figures that gradually melted as the night went on, revealing all-wired skeletons underneath (again, the creepiness of Facebook), a really frustrating exhibit with mirrors that I never quite understood, a woman contorting herself in a box, a large series of head-scratching films, an enormous soap machine blowing bubbles to the crowd, and a klezmer band complete with unicyclists. I loved Nuit Blanche in Paris, but had even more fun in Brussels; the art wasn't quite as top-notch, perhaps, but the weather was infinitely better (oh, irony!) and the Belgians know how to throw a block party. Everyone was out, nibbling on falafel and (of course) drinking beer, snapping photos of art and relaxing on terraces (all the restaurants and cafes stayed open late and had drink/food specials). Good times.

I have spent the past few days picking up my scooter and desperately searching for insurance for it. I've finally succeeded, drawn up international contract number 3 (or 4? At this point in time that class in international contract law next year is going to be a piece of cake), and am off to get my "plaque" (license plate) in just a minute. I'm dying to ride Leo (for Leopold II, originally, but it also rhymes: "Leo the Mio," a rejected children's book about a European moped) around Brussels; he is beautiful, black-and-silver, and what's best, he runs when the Brussels metro does not/decides not to (which happens more than is quite necessary). This means that I will be able to get to ULB with time to spare to hunt down the new location of my elusive class, and that I will be able to get to Tervuren without feeling like I actually went to Africa instead (due to the tram delays and transit times :) Before you worry, I have an oh-so-impossibly-European cream helmet, so the Brown Cloud (my ever-unruly hair) will be flatter but will stay intact.

There are more, reflective things I ought to write, and I promise they are coming soon; the weather is getting greyer and colder and drizzlier so I'm much less likely to be taking walks and picnicking in the gorgeous parks here and much more likely to hole up and read and think and get curmudgeonly about the winter. But for now, suffice it to say that Belgium has impressed, bemused, frustrated, challenged, and, on some heartwarming occasions embraced me, and I'm happy (for now :) to embrace it back. We'll see how I feel after chasing Leo(pold's, not the scooter's) ghost around Tervuren for a while.

Small succeses: parks and scooters, bureaucracy and rehearsals

So, I'm in my apartment waiting for my first load of laundry to wash and celebrating this great accomplishment with some espresso and a new blog post. (It took me about twenty minutes to figure out the washer...it's allegedly "universal," which means it uses incomprehensible line drawings to explain "this button is for cold wash." It would have been easier in French, or, for that matter, Flemish) Huzzah for me and my clean clothes.

This has been a busy week, which I guess isn't surprising. After all, it is the first week of classes. I've learned that 1) you should check your ULB schedule obsessively (like we checked email at Davidson) because classes have a sneaky tendency to change locations at the very last minute; 2) you should always have a backup plan just in case the professor doesn't show up (two of my classes were no-shows); 3) you wait a polite "quart d'heure academique" before you escape to freedom; and 4) under no circumstances whatsoever should you ever have your student card mailed to the Bureau d'Inscriptions rather than to your home address. Worst. Decision. Ever. Three and a half hours of standing in line in the temperamental weather, alternately sweltering in my trench coat and freezing in the sudden grey Belgian gloom, listening to the faux-sirens of the baptemes (read: hazing/hell month for new "pledges" into ULB's "academic clubs"), while learning all sorts of new creative ways to mash French swear words together from my fellow line-waiters. If the DMV and the post office had a temperamental, punch-drunk child, the line at the Bureau d'Inscriptions would probably look something like it. But, three and a half very hungry hours later, I got my student card and my attestations and celebrated with a cone full of pasta (all food in belgium apparently comes in cones.)

I also continued the party by getting my student MOBIB card, which means I can now ride the metro and it not cost me as much as a European Diet Coke each time. This is a big victory. It also means I can swipe into the metro rather than using the dinky little paper punching thing. This means I won't keep missing the metro at Gribaumont, which means my commute just got so much better. (Those of you who don't use the STIB, which is probably most of my readers, may not appreciate this; let's just say that I'm not a morning person so anything that makes a morning easier is a Godsend.)

Yesterday morning, I also tried out my first scooter. I am currently on a much-talked-about hunt for a scooter, because it really is the best way to get from where I live to anywhere in Brussels, especially at night (I learned the hard way that the last metro I can take leaves at 12:25 am. That was a long walk home) While I have calmed down, quieted my Roman Holiday impulses, and moved on from insisting that I drive a Vespa in Europe, I am still looking for a scooter that is both practical (aka, it works, preferably without that picky weird thing called a clutch) and pretty. This one was decidedly the former, less of the latter. That said, scooters are not as complicated to drive as I thought. The hunt is intensifying next week, so more on this later. 

Earlier this week, I explored the Parc de Woluwe, which is near my house. It's stunning, huge, and hilly, the perfect place for an easily-distracted used-to-run-cross-country runner. There are pretty cottages that look like the Seven Dwarfs should live there, swans on a lake, lush forests with rocky paths, a full set of tennis courts (random), a tree stump cut into a seat, a suspension bridge which swings over an avenue (gulp!), and miles of rolling, lush, green hills. (It felt like miles, at least; I've evidently not been running a ton :) The day couldn't have been more perfect, and I couldn't have been happier. I think this park and I are going to be seeing a lot more of each other. 

On Wednesday I also went out to the museum. It's always surreal to take the 44 out through the beautiful forests of Tervuren, which is a sleepy Flemish suburb of French Brussels, and to get off, walk past a gas station, and then run into this gorgeous palace that seriously looks like a little Versailles. Knowing who Leopold II was and how he got the money to build this piece of architectural confection makes it all the creepier. That said, the folks at the museum were anything but creepy. They gave me good coffee and laid out internship options while, sadly, informing me that the renovation project I'd hoped to work on is on hold because the architect is apparently befuddle about how to redesign this problematic palace so that the taxidermied lions can fit in more ethically, or something. I'm a little bummed, but am looking into other cool things that they do (and they do a lot). So more on this once I know more. I can already say, though, that I'm going to like working there. The people are friendly and whip-smart, the workspaces are big and full of light, and the coffee is particularly black and strong. 

Last night (okay, so my chronology is all over the place, sorry! bad historian bad), I went to the first rehearsal for the ULB orchestra. I was again pleasantly surprised. Not only did they give us dinner (cheese sandwiches, but oh, what cheese!) and beer (of course :), the musicians were also really friendly and surprisingly sociable. That's not to say that orchestras aren't sociable in general (oh, my DCSO friends, I have not forgotten orchestra tours :), but the one I played in at Sciences Po in Paris was made up of a rather quiet bunch that certainly wouldn't have all barreled off to the local pub after practice. These guys seem slightly raucous but very fun, and they clearly love music just as much if not more than they love Jupiler. This is a good thing.

The sun is shining and my laundry is just about dry. Time to celebrate small successes again. :)

On se met tout à nouveau

Well, it's been a busy few days. I officially moved into my new apartment Saturday. It's in Woluwe Saint Lambert, a nicer suburb slightly east of Brussels center. I'm living with a retired Panamanian diplomat, whose active life at 65 is putting mine at 22 to shame. She's fluent in three languages, a veteran expat, and a dynamic, opinionated person who stays abreast of the news minute-by-minute and keeps me on my toes. She's also a very good cook. I'm pleased, to say the least.

I was agonizing over my choice of apartment this weekend because, to be honest, I've never had full control over my housing choices before. Sure, I had some lodging choices to make at Davidson (subfree or not? F or Hart? Not F. Bad choices), but I always knew I would be living on campus. In college, negotiated roommate pairings (which could be sticky), but never read a contract or signed a lease. While in Paris, Middlebury took care of leases and contracts for me. Surfing apartment websites, visiting buildings, and negotiating rents are thus all new things to me, and I can assure you doing them in Brussels was extra "fun". That said, apartment stalking was an excellent transcultural experience; not only did my contract-related French (and sometimes English) vocabulary expand exponentially, I also garnered a life skill and met some potential new friends. I even wrote my first international housing contract. Perhaps we can consider the apartment stalking process my first lesson in international contract law.

That sounds very professional. Do not be deceived, however; when I moved in on Saturday I was feeling super insecure about my housing choice. The insecurity became soon became an existential crisis. Here's how it went: "Oh no! The apartment's not in the buzzy city center! I'll never ever go to a cool cultural event in Brussels EVER! (Lies. I have been to two already)." Then: "Oh no! It's not near ULB and so I won't EVER make it to class!" (Lies. See below). Then: "I am living with old people and babies! I will meet NO ONE my age!" (Lies. See below). This is, unfortunately, what happens when my slightly melodramatic inner voice goes apartment hunting for the first time in a city outside of its country where it knows no one.

With my inner voice clammering about its potentially friendless, culture-less existence, I went out to buy groceries at the local supermarket. This supermarket happens to overlook a cobblestone plaza called Place du Roi Chevalier (the King-Knight Square), which on Saturday was full of blue-and-white tents and thoughtful-looking people. Intrigued, I investigated. It turns out that I moved into my apartment on the day of the annual book festival, where brocantiers (antiquers) bring out their old comic books, used novels, and rare first-editions. I saw first-run Tintin comics (not, sadly, Tintin au Congo), a French translation of the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy, a gorgeously illustrated Around the World in Eighty Days from 1910 (in French, of course: Autour du monde en quatre-vignt jours), and some witty (if poignant) guides about how to speak to a Flemand (a Flemish speaker from the north of Belgium) if you're a Walloon (a French speaker from the south). A hopeless bibliophile, I was instantly hooked. I browsed for at least an hour and a half, talking to the wrinkled monsieurs who watched over their books carefully while laughing with fellow shoppers eager to introduce me to the impressively vast world of the Belgian BD (bande desinee; the Belgians love comic books). And that's about the time when my inner voice shut up about the apartment and recognized that it had found a good home.
(It didn't hurt, of course, that in addition to the book fair there is a great bakery and a scarily good friterie, or fry shop, within two minutes of my apartment :)

Sunday was la journee sans autos, in which all cars are forbidden from entering the city center. Most people thus take bikes into the city; and, as it was nice, the old beautiful medieval Grande Place was brimming with people in traditional Belgian costume and Belgian boy and girl scouts in uniform (not sure why they were there actually). The Place, historically reserved as a meeting space for the ancient trade guilds upon which the city's financial security was built, was full of tents selling Belgian sausages, fries, waffles, and, of course, the ubiquitous beer. Since it was unseasonably warm and sunny, everyone was in a fantastic mood. There were traditional Belgian dances, huge puppets that were nearly double my height (still not sure the story on those), accordian and fiddle music, and roast corn. Apparently roast corn is the epitome of festival food in Brussels; they take corn on the cob, swath it in butter, then barbeque it. It's good.


Yesterday was my first day of class; I went in early for an Amnesty International meeting, and ended up meeting some wonderful ULB students who are still idealistic about human rights. Apparently AI at ULB focuses mostly on les sans-papiers, the hordes of undocumented workers and immigrants who cluster to the north and south of Brussels and who come mostly from North Africa and the Middle East. It was fascinating to watch Belgians discuss (and sometimes squirm) about the ways in which their country interacts with (or refuses to interact with) these illegal newcomers. The links to our own challenges with immigration were blatant. More on this in a later post, I promise.
My first class (and most of my classes) was at 5 pm, which is late for me. I had heard stories of six hundred person lectures at ULB where one feels invisible, and expected much the same thing out of this class, Questions d'actualité en éthique appliquée. But ULB never ceases to surprise me. I instead arrived at a class with six people, all girls, and all (except me) Belgian. I only had two classes that small at Davidson, a college of 1900 students; and yet here I sat at ULB, a university of 40,000 some students, and was as far from invisible as possible. Note-taking and lecture-listening in French (because yes, of course, even in a class of six the professor lectures) was kind of exhausting, but I kept up. It helped that apparently applied ethics was born out of the counter-cultural movement in 1960s America, so a lot of his references were US-based.

After class, two students invited those of us they didn't know for drinks, since we're apparently going to be a small group and, as they said, we had better get to know each other fast. I found this so surprising, frankly; I am used to Sciences Po, where most of my Parisian classmates wouldn't deign to prendre un pot with an American classmate even if she were the only other person in a class. But Belgians are different; the ones I've met have been open, laid back, friendly, helpful, and largely appreciative of a French-speaking American despite her accent. I'm really grateful that this is the case. And I have to say, I can deal with the fact that one meets for beer rather than coffee after class in this quirky country.

So there's that; on se met tout a nouveau. New apartment, new school, new social injustices, new academic setting, new cultural experiences, and new potential friends. It's challenging, but I have to admit it's been fun so far too. Hooray for moving into a new home and a new life.

Vive le bazaar

Well, it's been three days since I arrived in Brussels. I've just now had a chance to sit down, rest my blistered feet (Europe=walking, which I forgot), and update the blog. I'm currently in apartment stalking mode. This goes far beyond simple hunting; I am not just sitting on apartment websites quietly waiting to shoot emails at unsuspecting landlords. Oh, no. I am stalking the streets of Brussels, calling each and every number on every orange-and-black "A Louer" sign on every Art Deco door in this city. (This can be very amusing, as sometimes the room for rent isn't really specified. I've been offered a garage, a four-bedroom penthouse, and an entire floor of offices "perfect for bureaucrats.")

While apartment stalking is often frustrating and sometimes funny, it's also been a fabulous way to meet Belgians in Brussels. This is harder than it sounds; Brussels is a city of immigrants, a melting pot that rivals New York. It's a strange mix of suit-as-uniform European Union bureaucrats, kinte-clad Central African refugees, headscarf-and-kaftan-sporting north Africans, somberly stylish (and usually disdainful) Parisian expats, bike-riding Dutch, and a handful of hipster-esque exchange students, mostly Erasmus (I am fast learning how unusual it is to be an American who 1) speaks French passably and 2) is studying at ULB). As one of my potential landlords told me yesterday, "Bruxelles est un bazaar," a strange, barely-organized mix of newly-immigrated people and cultures loosely fenced in by a relatively new city who can agree on neither language nor cultural heritage nor political power (Belgium still lacks a functioning government, incredibly). This bazaar is becoming more and more international, to the point that many expats spend years in Brussels without ever meeting a real Belgian. To many Brussels-dwellers, whether in heels or a hijab, a real, native Belgian is like an endangered animal, once native to an area but now pushed into hiding by new predators and competitors.

I feel lucky, therefore, to have sighted, spoken with, and apartment-stalked several real Belgians in the past few days. I've met a retired public health worker who after years of working in Somalia now illustrates children's books, a schoolteacher who transports, advocates for, and teaches refugees from central and north Africa, an entrepreneur moving to Latin America to start a fast food pasta chain, a diplomat's wife (and an entrepreneur in her own right, as she owned an impressive number of apartments in a very desirable area), an amateur painter who idolizes Matisse and Magritte (so, vaguely tropical surrealism), and a professional violist who is also an expert cyclist. Most were warm, unassuming people; I would have never guessed that they were so passionate, and so quirky.

I have yet to make my final decision on an apartment, but I am already quite happy with the results of my stalking. I've learned quite a bit about Belgians in the bazaar within the past three days, and am eager to get to interact more with at least one of these people in the future. I'm also thrilled that Belgians, at least at this point, seem very forgiving of slipups and accents in French; while Parisian waiters and shopkeepers would as often as not sneer and start speaking in English as soon as they detected an accent, the Belgians either ignore my accent or ask politely, "Where are you from?" in French. This makes getting back into la Francophonie much, much easier. I am also pleased that people wear colors besides grey and black here, and that heels are decidedly optional. And while their bureaucracy does make me (and many others standing in line with me today) want to cry, their bureaucrats do know how to apologize and soothe their edgy clients.

All in all, three days into apartment stalking I'm happy and tired and still hotel-bound and thus technically homeless. Belgium is pleasantly surprising me.

Of course, this may be all due to the chocolate: Belgians serve all coffee with a bar of either milk or dark chocolate, and when I used my "Find Chocolate" app (yes, there's an app for that) to see how many chocolate stores were within walking distance of my hotel I found 15 within a five-minute-walking-distance radius. Vive le bazaar, indeed :)

Packing, tape

I'm five days away from leaving.

That statement is incredible to me for several reasons, not least of which is the fact that this time last week I was still hoping and praying and willing my visa into existence. Now, the visa is safely tucked away in my passport; the infamous Orange Monster (my oversized and oh-so-florescent suitcase) is nearly packed; my viola has been repaired, restrung, and re-housed. Good raincoats and new work dresses have been bought, tailored, stacked, and rolled. Documents are still being gathered and notarized. Flights, rebooked. Friends, phoned for the last time Stateside. Contacts lenses, rush shipped (oops).

None of this is terribly new. After all, this is not the first time I've moved overseas, and I'm fairly certain it won't be the last. I'm familiar with the combination of excitement and stress and anticipation and worry of international travel. I recognize that dull nagging fear that I'll forget my boarding pass, my wallet, or my viola somewhere between home, the car, Hartsfield-Jackson, and my Belgian residence (still to be determined; life is nothing but a grand, last-minute adventure).

I feel the way I always before I go abroad: that sense that everything matters, that everything is a last: last case of Coke Zero, last dinner at the hole-in-the-wall Mexican restaurant around the corner, last soggy bike ride to Starbucks, last scotch-and-ice-cream night watching The Good Wife, last perfectly-cooked culinary masterpiece, last stroll around Little Five Points, last movie at the high school movie theater, last run on the cracking sidewalks that line the buzzy suburban streets near my house. If this summer of pleasure reading and sleeping in and pastimes to pass the time was a dreamy haze, all these lasts are a caffeine shot to the brain: colors leap out, textures linger, smells haunt, words exchanged matter more than ever before. Temporal context changes everything's relative importance. You don't know what you've got 'till it's gone.

And yet, it's the gone-ness that makes everything fascinating. It's like gifts: I've never decided whether it's more fun to put Scotch tape on a present, watching it become whole and secure and stuck, or to watch tape slowly unpeel, losing its stickiness, upsetting and maybe tearing the wrapping, and revealing an unknown, exciting-but-potentially-disappointing gift. Regardless of my preference, however, now it's time to un-adhere again, to pull off and pull up and nervously anticipate what I'll find when I pull Belgium's wrapping back.

I don't know where I'll be living this time next week, and I don't know how I'm going to procure a scooter, and I don't know how my classes at ULB will be (hopefully better than my interactions with mes chers fonctionnaires at the Admissions Office), and I don't know what my internship will look like, if it looks like anything. Nevertheless, I am five days away from leaving and I am twenty-two days away from turning twenty-three. It's time to wake up, smell the coffee, and start unwrapping this new, incredible present.

Irony/joy

Okay, so, less than twenty-four hours after my rant against Belgian bureaucracy, the old bureaucratic machine creaked into astonishing action.

Several panicked phone calls, email debates, and amazing feats of bureaucratic strength later, my visa application is submitted and I am much closer to touching down in Brussels. I should be able to arrive before September 15th (aka the first day of class).



Believe me, there is much rejoicing in the ATL tonight :)

That obligatory awkward introductory message

Setting up a blog is a convoluted process.

First, you've got to pick a title. You try several. They are all taken. You mutter under your breath about everyone fancying themselves an author these days. You then listen to yourself muttering. You are being hypocritical. Also, you sound like you are a grumpy old man.

You decide that people probably haven't used Belgian quotes as blog titles before. You consider a quote by Magritte. Too obscure. No one wants to read an essay explaining what your title means. A quote from Henry Morton Stanley? You conclude Stanley was a pretentious pain in the derriere, the Donald Trump of 19th century Africa. You wonder if he had fake hair too. What about something from a modern Belgian? All you can find are things from EU diplomats about how the Euro isn't going to last much longer than Mr. Trump's presidential bid did. How cheery.

Well, so much for that. How about alliteration? King Leopold's always good for a tongue-in-cheek laugh. Or, at least, you think so, having just re-read the book King Leopold's Ghost. What about Heart of Darkness? That's another good book about colonialism in the Congo. Darkness makes you think of chocolate. Oh, right, that's the other reason you're in Belgium. Chocolate. Can't get better than Brussels' own Leonidas chocolate. Haha. Leo and Leonidas.

You hope everyone else will find the Leopold/Leonidas joke just as funny. You fear that the only reason you think that's a joke is because you just read about Western debt and colonial corruption for forty-five minutes. Typical.

Then you've got to pick a background. Unless you're one of those gifted computer-types (and you are not) you must decide between hipster-tastic bookshelves, antique maps, and dandelions. The maps look serious. Up they go.

Then, descriptions. How on earth are you going to describe yourself? If you were to be accurate, you'd say: slightly-sweaty twenty-two year old who bikes around an Atlanta suburb like the Wicked Witch of the West, haunts her local Starbucks, and scares high schoolers with LSAT prep books and big tomes about the Congo Free State. But no one wants to read that. So, plaster the titles back up. You are not terribly impressed with these titles. You know that you had a lot of help from a lot of people better than you.

Now it is time to press the publish button. You can't find it. You just changed your computer's language to French in a desperate attempt to reawaken the slumbering and rather out-of-shape Francophone beast you know lurks somewhere in your brain. Now you can't understand anything on Blogger. Let's be honest: you didn't really understand it in English. Hrm. Homepage= tableau de bord. Who knew? Now you do.

Ah. There it is. It's in bright, obvious orange. Figures. Click/sigh.

No blog posts! Well, that won't do. What if someone stumbles across your blog while googling "the ethics of public memory"? What if a wayward grandparent looks for your blog and thinks you've disappeared in Europe because it's blank? (Sounds unlikely, but it's happened). This will not do. You must write something.

What about: "Howdy, y'all, welcome to my little blog about colonialism!"?
Too Andy Griffith. Doesn't go with the antique maps at all.

Or: "Welcome to my riveting expose of corruption and denial in European museums"?
No. You are neither Woodward nor Bernstein, and the museum where you'll be working is in many ways the exact opposite of Nixon's White House.

Or: "Yummmmmmmmmchocolatechocolatechocolate"?
Well, that is actually what you are thinking, having just run across a lovely series of pictures of Belgian truffles in your hunt for Magritte quotes. But no one really wants to read a blog written by the Cookie Monster's sister, do they?

Resigned, you come up with this:

 Hi, everyone. I'm a recent graduate of Davidson College who's studying law, ethics, and public memory as a master's student at Universite Libre de Bruxelles in 2011-2012. I'll also be assisting with a landmark renovation of the Royal Museum of Central Africa's permanent exhibit on Belgian colonialism in Central Africa. I'd be thrilled to have you along for what promises to be an unpredictable ride through Belgian bureaucracies, postcolonial conflicts, and (hopefuly) Brussels streets on a Vespa scooter.


You re-read your post. You are a little confused. You think you should probably stick with one narrative voice for your next blog post. For now, though, you are going to research Vespas.