Lilac Colored Glasses

The Gentse Feesten is almost over and I admit I didn’t have much to say about it this year. I did post pictures of the opening parade over on Komkommertijd, but with the 2 blogs sometimes I forget who’s seen what and what I wrote where. I have a few more pictures from last week and a fun post about meeting yet another blogger/comedienne who lives in Gent (it’s been an American expat laden Gentse Feesten), but that can wait until tomorrow.

Today is what I want to talk about in this post and that’s because today something a bit weird occured. See, I woke up pretty early, putzed on the computer for a bit, started feeling sort of cooped up and cagey and decided to go to the city center to walk around and get a coffee. So I set off on my bike, went to the bookstore, browsed the English book section and found absolutely nothing that I wanted to read.  You have no idea how rare it is for me not to see at least one book title that catches my eye, but today there was nothing.
And for as much as I know I should:

1. Go to the library instead of an overpriced book store
2. Start reading Dutch books instead of English books

I still prefer to look at the nice, shiny fresh books in the English section of FNAC.

But not finding anything interesting put me in sort of a foul mood and I began to ruminate as I meandered down the Veldstraat towards The Foodmaker. Here it was, Monday, and I was wandering around jobless in the same boring old city (when you live in a city with a real castle for over a year the awe tends to ebb away…I mean Disney is plastic but they have daily fireworks) with nothing to do except clean the house and finish up the laundry when I got home (still haven’t gotten to that yet). So I went to The Foodmaker, ordered my coffee and sat down at a table, brooding in silence, trying not to let my mood become too toxic. There was one of those table toppers advertising Evian so I pulled it closer to me and began absent mindedly reading about the natural richness of bicarbonates in the soda water until halfway through the add I suddenly got stuck and couldn’t read any farther.

That was odd. It’s been a  long time since I struggled to read something as simple as an advertisement in Dutch. I blinked a few times and tried starting over from the beginning when I realized that I’d been reading the French part of the add. I haven’t taken a French class since I was about 20 years old and I only passed because the prof was an old perv who liked to look down my shirt.

So I guess Garfield was right all along; you really can learn through osmosis!