Lilac Colored Glasses

The hearty green liquid was bubbling and roiling in the pot in a satisfying “double double toil and trouble” sort of way this afternoon as I prepared my laaaate breakfast/lunch of split pea soup with a slice of multigrain bread and a pat of butter. I was feeling pretty crappy, to be honest (still am), as we’d stayed out much later than usual last night despite my sore throat and gushing sinuses (summer head colds are the yuck). And all for the sake of seeing Eddy Wally, a septegenarian Flemish shlager, perform in the Sint Baafsplein for the Gentse Feesten. And trust me, he definitely wasn’t the fantastic discovery I mentioned in the title.

But let’s back track a bit, shall we?

CB and I decided to go to the Feesten yesterday evening for a few hours, but first we tried to go for some take out Chinese (I admit, the self pity from Friday hasn’t totally worn off yet so I’m occasionally making crappy food choices). After discovering that the Chinese place as well as the nearby Turkish place, and also the neighborhood grocery store were all closed (stupid we rioted in Brussels and created a totally dysfunctional country that no one is particularly proud of Belgium Independance Day), we decided to eat at the Feesten. We biked to the center, parked our bikes along the water and headed off towards the Sint Jakobsplein. It started to rain so we went a bit out of the way to the Patershol to seek shelter that wasn’t jammed by festival goers and ended up stopping in a crowded bar for a Rodenbach (my favorite Belgian beer).

After the rain stopped CB and I headed towards the Sint Jakobsplein from another direction. I was totally intent by now on hitting the Senegalese stand for some African food (still not the fantastic discovery, although the kuku na nazi was pretty awesome) and was caught totally by surprise when I heard someone calling my name from across the street. I looked at the woman who was calling me and waving as she crossed the street. She was smiling, stropke swinging, as she approached us.

I had no idea who she was.

Until she said, “I’m Felicia. I read your blog! Lilacspecs! I’ve commented a couple times. I was hoping I’d see you out on the street some day”

And I was like “…”

Cause how cool is that!!! Someone who reads actually recognized me on the street! And it’s a fellow American expat who moved to Gent to be with the man she loves. I was pretty gobsmacked, let me tell you! So Felicia told us that she was on her way to Bataclan (we were too after we ate) so we said we’d meet up with her there, which we did (after I got my African food and CB got some vegetarian non-hotdog and non-hamburger with a mojito cupcake…which had some of the best frosting ever, by the way).

And yay! What fun! It was so nice to talk to someone who is…well…basically in my exact situation (except that I think she’ll be more likely to find work faster when she wants to). This is Felicia’s first Gentse Feesten so her boyfriend Yves is making sure she drinks her fair share of beer and sees plenty of the different sites, including…you guessed it, Eddy Wally.
Which is how we ended up neck deep in drunken schlager lovers swaying their arms and chanting along to all the oh-so copmlicated “la la la la la la” lyrics that make up the refrains of shlager music. And the music? Okay, soooo not my thing? But the companionship and the rare discovery of a fellow American in Gent? That, my followers, was a real treasure!

Oh, and Felicia, if you get to reading this post before you travel, here’s a few links of my past posts with some Dutch music that is well known (including that finishing number that Marina covered last night) as well as one of the first Dutch songs I actually understood some of the words to. Enjoy!:

Vandaag is rood – Marco Borsato

I took a few days off from blogging, mostly to let you all bask in the beauty of my last post because it’s been dreary and rainy and I have been less than inspired following what I wrote last. Sometimes I manage to write something that surpasses my own expectations and then I seem to stall out and it takes a few days to rev back up. I don’t know if it’s because I know the next thing I write won’t equal what I just wrote, or if writing that quality of material just sucks the writing juice out of my head and I have to give my author gland (you didn’t know about the author gland?) some recovery time. Either way, I still don’t have much to say today, but I did want to tell you that I got a bloggy award this week from Jientje, and here it is:

“The Humane Award is in order to honor certain bloggers that I feel are kindhearted individuals. They regularly take part in my blog and always leave the sweetest comments. If it wasn’t for them, my site would just be an ordinary blog. Their blogs are also amazing and are tastefully done on a daily basis. I thank them and look forward to our growing friendships through the blog world.” Recipients of this award should write a post about it, linking to the person gifted the award, along with ten of their own nominees.”

I want to award this to any of you who leave comments here. It’s so hard to try to choose ten people when so many people stop by and read and leave their mark here, so if you’ve commented on my blog, please feel free to take this award for your own blog (or print it out and make a badge for yourself if you don’t blog).

Now, the crux of this post: Jientje says in her post that “it’s because I “met”her I started blogging in English in the first place!”
It was this comment that got me out of my procrastinating rut and inspired me to finally harass CB into installing a whole new sub blog so that I could start blogging in Dutch.

If you have the time, especially my Dutch speaking readers, I would appreciate it if you stop by my shiny new Dutch only (I can translate for you if you’re English speaking and still interested) blog, Komkommertijd, and feel free to make any suggestions/corrections. I need all the help I can get!

Okay, so.

Things have been sort of quiet over here the past few days and I’m just not finding anything good to write about. There will be some things coming up next week but the only thing really happening this week is my language proficiency test in Brussels on Monday.

Thinking about it makes me want to vomit.

So let’s not talk about that until after I make it through the day.

Anywho, I read a few other Anglo-expat in Belgium blogs and recently one of them asked her readers to comment with any questions they had about her moving/living abroad experience.

Have I done that yet? And if so, it had to have been a long time ago cause I know my archives pretty well and I can’t recall asking that.

Therefore, I’m asking you all for your questions. I know I have a mixed bag of readers here so I’m sure there will be a lot of variety when I say that I want you to leave a question for me in the comment section. Any question you want. It can be about expatriation, life in Belgium, learning Dutch, questions about the US.

Anything you want, just ask away. This weeks posts are yours to command!

It’s alive!

My blog lives!

My handsome, wonderful boyfriend seems to have been able to successfully restore my blog from the netherworld of hackdom!

So, now that we’re speaking of reincarnation (albeit in bloggy form), I had a thought today about my previous lives.  And I have already covered my beliefs in the hereafter and yes in a very abstract way I do believe in reincarnation. Anyway, here was my thought:

I think I must have been a cat in a former life.

Seriously, not only am I perfectly happy lounging around lazily in dark rooms, I also have this inhuman love of canned fish. Really, it’s a pretty normal occurrence for my lunch to consist of a can of tuna or mackerel or sardines and maybe some fruit or a glass of milk.

And I was also probably Irish at some point too.

I have an endless fascination with Irish mythology and I was truly taken by the Irish country side while I was studying in Carlow. After living abroad and knowing what it feels like to be away from my birth home, I think the place that’s still closest to my heart is Ireland, more than anywhere else I’ve been.
And besides all of that I think I could live off of potatoes. I have yet to meet a form of potato that I don’t like.

And I love soup. That’s neither here nor there, it’s just another odd little quirk of mine. I seriously looove soup. In fact, if anyone has a recipe for breakfast type soup, please send it this way. So between my love of seafood and potatoes and soup you can imagine how New England clam chowder makes me swoon.

And now I’m hungry.

But how about you? Do you have any quirky traits or tastes that make you think you might have had a former life or two?

Yeah, so if you’ve been trying to read my blog for the past 2-3 days you’ll notice it wasn’t here.

I mean, it was here, but it was showing up as having a parsing error. I have no idea what that means but when it didn’t go away CB checked it out and found that I had been hacked.

Some sort of Chinese something or other and in the end, my wonderful, helpful, loving fiancè was able to restore everything but the theme and the plugins (all I used was the SEO, Akismet and Stat Counter anyway, and those are reinstalled).

In a way this is good as I was constantly griping about my anorexic sidebar and the desire to change themes.

In a way it sucks because I had 3 days worth of stuff I wanted to blog about but I played video games instead and now I have no recollection or desire to revisit the topics. And I was friggin hacked! I feel sort of virtuviolated.

But anyway, everything appears to be okay now and I’ll be back to my usual blathering very soon. If anyone has suggestions as far as a look for my blog, please let me know. I’m open to any and all suggestions.

Unless you’re a hacker.

Then I’ll kick you in the nuts.