A Most Splendid Dinner

Sabine drove me to the house and spoke in rapid French (definitely too fast for me to comprehend) to Clementine and Stephanie, two Belgian teenagers who live in this house. We shook hands and they both grabbed all my things and ran up four flights of stairs with them. Helene arrived shortly after and we met. She speaks significantly less English than her daughters, so most conversations I have with her are in French (slowly, and she repeats a lot of things).

The other two American girls who I'm sharing a floor with were asleep when I arrived, but I met them once they woke up. Neither speak French, so I translate some of what Helene says to them (I prefer when Clementine is around, though, because she does it much better than I).

I live on the fourth floor of this beautiful home and in Helene's son's old room (he now lives with his father). There's a giant poster (3'x5') of Will Smith in iRobot (the French version. The tag line says: Un seul homme avait compris). There's also a large poster of Poseidon (again, in French), and another of the Manhatten skyline pre-9/11, which I absolutely love. It reminds me what I work so hard at school for.

I don't know what that thing is behind the bed. I try not to look at it.

View out my window

(The loft and Kristen and Jamie's room)

I keep forgetting that I'm actually here to go to school. I start on Monday, and then there's national holidays all week. On Thursday, June 2nd, I'll be travelling to Dinant and Han-sur-Leese. Then, on the fourth, I'm going to Gent. I'll definitely be doing more traveling (depending on the price, I may be traveling to Amsterdam with some people I know here) but these are the ones that are the closest in date. I'm nervous about communication in Flanders. I speak decent French, so I've survived in Brussels (80% of Brussels speaks French), but the only thing I can say in Flemish is, "The girl eats an apple" (Het meische eaten een apple), which doesn't help much.

The shower here is so different from in America. The shower head and water all work the same, but there is no shower curtain, just a small panel that covers about half the tub. I was surprised that it kept most of the water off the floor. Once we are done showering, Helene told us to open the window to let the heat out. Apparently previous students didn't do that, and there's significant water damage in that room now.

A phone on our floor rang around 8:00PM. We all stared at it.

"What do we do?"
"I guess pick it up"
"Ok. Hello? Hello? There's nobody there"

The phone is used for a lot of things, but mostly the intercom to let people into the house. Helene pushes a button on it at dinner time to tell us to go downstairs.

We had spaghetti and red wine for dinner (I didn't partake of the wine tonight, I was too tired). It was very, very good. I was self-conscious about how I should eat around Belgians, so I asked them if there were any rules to follow that Americans might not know. Stephanie laughed and said, "Don't eat with your hands!" The family is very laid back, and not strict at all about table manners. They tried to teach Kristen how to twirl spaghetti with a spoon, to very funny results.

I had my first (well, not first, per say) drink without ice. It wasn't bad, but I'll definitely have to get used to it. Helene put a large jug of de l'eau (water) on the table and you helped yourself to pouring it.

We had this vanilla pudding for dessert, and I've never tasted anything like it. I don't know if I can even describe it. It was in the refrigerator, pre-packaged, so she didn't make it, but it's something not sold in the United States. Very delicious.

One thing that I noticed that I previously read about Belgian people is that the family wastes nothing. There's a couple meatballs and noodles left in your bowl? Feed it to Jack, the family dog. The toilet has two buttons: one uses much less water than the other. There's no air conditioning, there's windows to use (though it's quite cool here at the moment). The escalators at the metro don't run until they sense someone steps on them. Any leftover butter on your plate goes back into its container. If you recycle your beer bottle, you get reimbursed almost the entire cost. It's so very different than in America, where most people just throw away food and aren't concerned about recycling. It's difficult for me to remember to try to eat all of the food on my plate or to separate all of my trash into many different bins because I'm not used to doing it in America.

I'm a day behind in my blogging, so I'm going to try to update it all tonight.