Productivity
In highschool I went on a trip for some sort of marine-biology based class type thingy, to Wallops Island, Virginia with three or four other classmates/friends. While we were there we walked through the marshes, often ankle deep in peat, loam and other scrumptious smelling stuff and our guide, I can’t recall his name, gave us a lecture on the processes going on to make the soil break down and how active the micro organisms were within the peat at Wallops Island. Then he lifted up a handful of the muck, smeared it on his cheek and said, “Smells like productivity!”
That has absolutely nothing to do with this post, but when I was typing the title the memory totally came back to me after I don’t know how many years, so I had to write it down. Anyway, my post from early this morning was so long that I thought I’d break it up and give you this, the later half of the morning, which was by far more productive than the part where I wandered lonely as a cloud through the halls of 44 Rozier.
Anyway, after that enormous amount of non-fun in which I decided one thing and noticed another, I wound up in the mall drinking a bitter coffee (Belgium is to coffee as Korie is to bike riding) and writing my first post.
But wait you say, what did you decide and notice during your walk down to the library Korie? We’re all dying to know!
I don’t want to leave you hanging, so I’ll tell you. First I decided that the UTC (Ugent Language Center) ought to provide a friggin map to its foreign students who are so unnaccustomed to Belgium that they have to take an intensive immersion in Dutch class in the first place! Gawd! Seriously? How are you going to send a group of foreigners wandering through the halls of a building where the employees still get lost and expect them to find their classroom? I’m thinking someone in the administration had an ancestor that designed buildings or labelled classrooms.
What I noticed is that, while buildings in Gent are not particularly tall (except the really old ones like St. Niklaaskerk and St. Baff’s and the belfry)they are however, massive in area. Seriously, some building are literally the size of a medium city block in lenth and width.
Okay, so after the coffee I went to Blokker looking for a food scale and got a cheap fleece before heading to Hema and finding a cheap scale, which I bought. Then I found a Pearle Vision center and asked about replacing the earpieces on my glasses. I noticed the day after I got here that the ends of mine have pretty much disintegrated/rotted through, probably because I shower in them and never thought to dry the earpieces.
And yes, I do shower in my glasses.
I need to see.
Shut up.
Anywho, the guy there said they could replace them for free if I come back next week. Sounded like a good deal to me so I said ok and headed across the street to the library where I found 3 good travel books on Scotland and 1 good one on Ireland. This is for a trip that CB and I are hopefully planning for July. Scotland was pretty cheap, but he’d already been to Glasgow, so I recommended Edinburgh and we decided that that looks fairly promising for a 4 day vacation. We’ve both been to Dublin and I’ve been to Carlow, county Carlow and Monasterevin, county Kildare (both in Leinster) so we originally weren’t looking at Ireland, but I have a passion for Ireland and Irish mythology, so we started looking first at Belfast, and then at Shannon and the surrounding areas.
So I got my travellers books and decided to walk back to the city centre, which I did, caught the #3 back home, rode the bike down a safe street and back (I decided that while I’m waiting to be insured and not taking the bike to class, I’ll still ride it, even if its just the length of the street I rode today and back. It was still enough to tire my legs out and wind me a bit, so I’ll do that every day, just to build up even a miniscule amount of wherewithal on that damn thing), did the dishes and the laundry, ate my fiber filled lunch (yeah still having problems in that department), and headed upstairs to record all that has happened thusfar. Now I have to catch up on my blog reading and other nerdery whilst I await the return of my illustrious CB.
Adieu
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I think numbering college classrooms in mysterious ways is universal.
Sounds like you’re having a good time over there.
Ha! Finding your way around the city sounds like a complete adventure in the making!
Just dropping in to say, welcome to the expat life and welcome to expat blogging. Let the culture shock begin, indeed!
Ok, perhaps I’m just going off on a tangent here, but yeah, I shower with my glasses too. I mean, how the heck is one supposed to shave if one can’t see ones own legs? lol
Oh yeah, and sorry about the bad coffee. Me thinks you need a travel mug and a cup holder on your bike.