Lilac Colored Glasses

Hi out there. This happened on Monday and I was going to let it go but it just keeps popping up in my head as being blog-worthy so, here it is. You’ve all seen my pictures from various locations here in Belgium and I think we can all agree that there is a definite color scheme to Flanders in general. The colors on the palette mainly consist of brown, black, navy, brownish green, grey, dark grey, and brown-have I mentioned brown? Cause there’s a lot of brown. I took a few more pictures on a random trip to the grocery store today to illustrate my assertion here:

Behold, the drab that is Belgium

Well, I guess blue jeans can be considered an exception to the rule

Here in the centre they add some gilt to some of the buildings, so at least it’s a shiny brown

But on to the real meat of the story here.
Anyway, before I came to live with CB he was very very concerned that I be sure to get a waterproof coat as the norm in Belgium is rain, rain and more rain. My mother and I took a look in some catalogs for plus sizes, cause that’s what I am currently (even if I was a normal size, my boobs would still strand me way out in the land of the large) and we found a reasonably priced, warm-looking, water-resistant coat. The options for colors in my size were fuschia or lilac. Well, if you look up there at the title of this blog you should be able to guess which color I opted to go with.

TaDaaaaa!!!!!

After about a month of wearing this coat I decided that it was sort of puffy and made it hard for me to squeeze between tight places in the house and also into cramped spaces between people on the bus. Also (and dammit, this should have been a red (lilac?) flag) I was getting a bit tired of being the classroom example for learning/practicing to say and use the word for purple (paars…see, now you know some Dutch).
So on Monday I switched over to my non-water resistant coat along with my new hat and went to class. Afterwards CB and I planned on having lunch together at the student restaurant. I headed towards the restaurant and saw my illustrious Belgian standing there waiting for me. I was pretty close to him before I saw any recognition and as he leaned in to give me a kiss he blurted out, “Oh, you look much better….”
pause
“…um, in that jacket…”
pause
“I mean, I meant to say you look more Belgian.”

The Mentionably More “Belgian” Korie

So I’ve been thinking here that this means I’ve been walking around Gent looking like a total reject (or a bloated grape, you decide) and my boyfriend has either been too afraid to hurt my feelings to clue me in or he has just been watching me walk out the door and into the city of no color, all the while chuckling to himself and hoping for the day when I’d finally put my black jacket on so he could tell me how much more “Belgian” I looked.

I’ll go with the first one….for his sake.

I seem to be on some odd Star Trek referencing kick this week, I know not why, but since there was such a resounding (yeah, I consider more than 4 comments “resounding”) interest in it, here’s the answer:

As stated by Jientje, “Graag = love to.
For example : Wanna go to the restaurant with me? Yes, I’d LOVE TO!
What will you drink? I’d LOVE TO have some tea please?
Korie loves to eat chocolate!”

CB and MM translated it to “gladly,” which also works.

And when I said “ik hou niet van graag” I was trying to say “I don’t like graag”, as in, I don’t like that word. I still don’t, as it is hard for me to say…imagine swallowing your tongue…it kinda sounds like that to me.

Ah, en Mama, ik studeer elke dag Nederlands . Ik heb mijn blog voor engels. Ik mis engels.

And in other news, CB has a dinner with colleagues tonight in Leuven. His boss is cooking dinner for all of them. I, in the meantime, will be here alone for the first time in almost a month.
*cue piteous wailing*
This means first, I’m cooking for myself, meh. I read recently how you can hide veggies by pureeing them and putting them in sauce. We just got some yellow carrots and spinach from our organic, domestically grown vegetable order, so I plan on pureeing some of those and putting it in some tomato sauce over whole wheat spaghetti. With my new favorite non-meat, quorn!
I ♥ quorn!
It also means I will be afraid to go up and down the stairs because it’s dark and drafty and creepy in this house at night. More than once I’ve had the most terrifying feeling that something is going to slither out of the basement and grab my ankle on my way up the stairs…and this is when CB is home, let alone by myself. Thusly, the plan is to get my butt downstairs around 5, have dinner, shower and get back upstairs before 7, which is about when my dad gets home from work. He’s going to skype with me for a little bit and then the rest of the evening I’ll have for myself pretty much. We rented some DVDs last night, so I’ll watch one of those maybe, and CB gets home somewhere around 10 or 11 probably. That’s pretty much the evening summarized.

Now…on to Google Reader!

Three questions I pose to you today, noble following, but before I do so I would just like to thank all of you for your comments on the past several posts of mine. Frends, family, and other bloggers who I read but sometimes don’t realize that you read me too; it means so much to me that you read and care and supply me with your words of encouragement, advice and humor. I’m not so great at replying personally to all my commenters because frankly, I’m not used to having that many!

My first question is, have you ever noticed that many of the bloggers out there with very strong religious convictions are often also people who are on their second (or more) marriage, or that have somewhat of a troubled past? I’m not, by any means, judging these people, it is just a trend that I noticed today. It’s not specific to bloggers even. I know several people who turn to religion after something bad happens. I suppose I just answered my own musing just now, but then, how about the non religious types who lead perfectly happy lives without turning to religion following tragedy? Makes me want to conduct some sort of study on personality types and classify what personality types tend to turn to relgion int imes of crisis versus those that do not. Hrm, I wonder what psychology topic that falls under at Ugent…

My second question is, why the crap are there so many Mormon bloggers?? Again, I have no problem with Mormons. I actually kind of like them. They say I can still go to heaven, even if I don’t believe in Jesus. Usually Christians just damn me to Hell right off the bat…can’t even get a word in edgewise. Muslims don’t take a shining to me either, typically. Granted, I am Jewish, so most other monotheistic religions as well as dictatorship-run communistic societies put on the auto-hate when it comes to me and my culture of birth (I say culture because I’m sort of an atheistic Buddhist when it comes to my faith in the spiritual…I actually wrote a pretty good post about this topic for a guest spot on another blog and it has never appeared. I also have no access to it, as it is on the other blogger’s blog, which I only had access to for the one post), but still, if you prick us do we not bleed and all that good stuff?
But, so, yeah, I’ve definitely noticed a ton of Mormon bloggers out there. Is there a coven of atheistic Buddhist Jew bloggers that I’m missing out on? Really, I’m trying to find a niche here people! I fell in with Mommy Bloggers while I was working in daycare and could relate to the anecdotes and emotions; despite not being a parent myself. And I’ve found some awesome bloggers, definitely (yes, even the Mormon ones). I’ve also recently started reading some expat bloggers since I guess I seem to be one now as well. Which reminds me, I have to update my blogroll….

And my third and final question; the one that inspired the title, though I can see how all of these questions might fit in their own ways, is this:
What the hell is “graag”?
I know I have at least 4 readers, possibly 5 or 6, that speak some form of Dutch. Seriously, graag is used everywhere, and from what I can tell can mean virtually anything, so long as it is a positive thing.
Par example (yes, I know that’s French):
Wanna go with me to the restaurant?
Ja, graag!

What will you have to drink Miss?
Een thee, graag.

Does Korie like chocolate?
Ja, Korie eet graag chocolade.

See?! Three different meanings, three different contexts, but no real definition of the word. I asked the teacher today what part of speech graag is and she looked at me like I might be slightly challenged, so I just nodded and pretended I understood, but I don’t.

Ik hou niet van graag.

That one where Khan puts the slimy little wormies that he harvests from the armadillo-looking thing in the ears of the Enterprise crewmen and the worms turn into ginormo earwigs that burrow into the crewmen’s brains?

Yeah, I have a headache just like that right now. The past couple days I’ve been getting nauseous, especially on buses and sometimes just randomly throughout the day. Today I figured it was motion sickness from the bus and then being really hungry after class (I slept in and just had time to dump a yogurt cup down my throat before leaving the house). Now I have this very painful headache. I don’t feel ill otherwise, but it’s not making for a comfortable day.

Oh and get this, there’s a guy in my class. He’s my age and he is fluent in 5 languages, three of which are Portugese, Italian and English. He took the first two levels of this class just as preparation for the actual class. He told me today that it gets a lot harder. He barely passed the test for level 2 (that should happen sometime in March) and said that people who had lived in Belgium for over a year failed it.

I am officially horrified.

Well, I popped out of bed at 7 a.m. sharp this morning, no hesitation, no cuddling. Really, I sort of hurled my self out from under the nice warm blankets and collected all my things to bring downstairs while I cleared the sleep fog out of my brain. Fired up the Nestor Martin, hopped in the shower and tried to shave as best I could; not an easy task for a zaftig(and as I use this more complimentary word for the current state of my figure, I am struck by the fact that zaftig sounds an awful lot like safganiot, the Hebrew word for donuts. Coincidence? *raise eyebrow enigmatically*) woman in a smallish shower with nowhere to really put a foot and no solid thing to hold on to – in this shower you are surrounded by a relatively fragile, though disturbingly orange shower curtain; a slip or fall could means utter destruction of bathing facillities as we know it…or at least the rod/curtain part. But with the cold I tend to get sandpaper legs, so I was diligently shaving (as opposed to when I was single and sometimes just opted not to shave my legs all winter). CB came downstairs and sort of puttered around the kitchen while I dressed, made breakfast and threw all my stuff together.

I’m sure he was hovering out of concern, and I was probably pretty distant this morning seeing as I counted 50 people on the mailing list for my language course and was trying to picture the total zoo that I anticipated in my classroom. I am not a nice person when I’m nervous/stressed and the middle of this week will mark the longest I’ve ever spent away from my family and/or the state of Pennsylvania (at one time, that is). Everything is completely unfamiliar and that’s novel for a week or two. That’s all part of a vacation. Now it’s coming down to “this is how I am going to be living life for quite some time,” and frankly, it’s not making me a very easy person to be around. Mostly I get aggravated quickly, and I’ve been crying a lot about my cat the past few days.

But anyway, I caught the bus around 8:00 and got to Rozier around 8:30, so I think I can leave a little later in the morning. There were a few people already waiting outside of class, although in the end 50 people did not show up. It was maybe 35 or 40 and we’re split into two classes, so it is certainly manageable. This split was done after several people had registered, however, so it took a good 20 minutes just to figure out who should be in what class. The girl to my right spoke almost no English and the woman to my left spoke plenty of it but with a heavy African (sorry dunno the dialect) accent. Fortunately, the instructor spoke mostly in English. Unfortunately she was a substitute instructor that was only there for the first day of class. Tomorrow we meet the actual instructor. Oh, and y’know how I said they ought to provide a map for us? They did! In the lesson book that we got when we registered in the main building. If you were like me and registered online, you were totally unaware of this and arrived without a lesson book. So after the roster reorganization 4 of us had to leave class and walk down to the main UCT building to get lesson books. Yay.

After all of that we got to learning vowel pronunciations (English speakers, in my opinion this is one of the harder things about Dutch…some of the vowel combinations are sounds that we just don’t have and that makes it very hard to hear/reproduce them)and some trickier consonants (I have trouble with R, I can do G I just tend to forget to make the switch and the other differences I have no probem with). I think most of the English and French speakers were ok, although some others were struggling a bit. So 2 hours a day will be spent in class and one hour will be spent in the language lab. CB is going to help me practice my vowels tonight…and he’s making dinner.