Lilac Colored Glasses

Today was fantastically perfectly gorgeous. Last night CB and I went out on the town for a night of revelry and a slightly early celebration of me living here for a month and us being together, in person, and still being just as smitten as we’ve been for over a year now, if not more so. He brought chocolate covered cherries (my absolute favorite), creme brulee (eating that probably in an hour or so), and Pecheresse, a really good peach beer that tastes like champagne. We made tandoori chicken and sauteéd zuchini, eggplant and mushrooms for dinner, put a serious dent in the chocolates and headed out to the city centre. We went to the Dreupelkot for some jenever and then to Trefpunt for a few beers. We stopped at a pita place (translation- greasy meat carved off a skewer accompanied by a side of fries and often topped with some sort of mayonnaise based sauce… I know, I know, but after 2 jenevers and 3 Belgian beers I am easily persuaded to stray from my healthy eating habits) and then headed home. Obviously that left little time to blog, but that’s what I was up to yesterday.

Today CB’s dad came over to work some more on the heating system and CB was helping so I headed to the city centre to run some errands and do a little personal shopping (woohoo). I stepped outside and into the most perfect almost-spring day I have experienced in quite some time. The sky was a water color shade of clear blue and the breeze was blowing just enough to keep the air fresh and cool. Everything was bright and cheerful and I strolled down to the bus stop smiling to myself and sorry that CB and his dad were spending the day inside covered in dust and paint fumes.

Once at the centre I stopped into Hema and got some household items then headed over to Yak & Yeti, a very very cool store with sort of a Nepalese kind of theme and got a new hat, earrings (I can wear those now, no kids around to yank them out) and a cool leather bag. I finished up with some groceries at Colruyt and GB and did some chores. All in all it was a nice, relaxing, beautiful Saturday. Much needed as I have an oral presentation this upcoming Thursday.

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

I decided to do a trial run this morning to see how long it takes to get from our house in the north west to my class in the south (Gent Zuid). This means walking to the bus stop around the corner, taking the #3 bus to Sint Jacobs(Saint Jacob’s Square), catching the #5 bus to the south and walking around the corner to my class in 44 Rozier. It’s really not complicated; until you get into 44 Rozier and try to find your classroom.

The actual bus trip only took about 40 minutes. I left at 8:25 and got to Rozier at 9:02, and this is good. It means I should be able to leave at 8:10 and get there with plenty of time to spare, and I like getting to places early. This has been hard in the mornings. Having someone to cuddle is still pretty novel for both CB and myself, so we hit snooze a lot before actually getting up. For someone who had no problem waking up at 6 a.m. three weeks ago, I’m struggling to be up by 8 right now, let alone 7, which is when I ought to be getting up so I can leave on time. CB bikes to work and can sometimes work from home, but I can do neither so I have to get up on time…I digress.

I got to 44 Rozier at 9:02, entered the building and looked around.
Well shit.
I was looking for C018. Every room was marked D. None of the languages listed on the directory even resembled Nederlands (that’s Dutch for Dutch) and nowhere anywhere did I see the letter C.
Hrm.
If I were in the US I might think, “Well, here on the ground floor everything is D, and C comes before D, so C is the basement level.” In the US I’d probably even be correct in that line of thinking. But alas, I am in Belgium and sometimes Belgian building designers/classroom labelers are mildly retarded. There were no stairs in sight, so I wandered across a little outdoor courtyard and over to another wing.

Goody! Stairs! Going up! That could be level C!

So I went up and to my dismay, it was still D only now with an extra digit; and the classroom for Swedish I think.

Dammit.

I shuffled back downstairs and headed back across the courtyard when lo! From this angle I saw a small lit room with competent looking people in front of computers. Who cares that the sign by the door said Aquatek Library?? It was grownups (35+ type people)! Yay! I found the steps that took me down half a level (yes, half a level, like I said, retarded) and tentatively entered the Aquatek Library. A very bald, very nice man saw me.
“C-can you help me?”(I get very Oliver Twist-ish when I’m lost and alone)
“What do you need?”
“I’m looking for C018 and all I can find is D.” or you can give me a shot of whiskey and a joint so I can think like the architects who built this place and actually figure out how to get around
“You’re here for what language is it?”
“Dutch please.”
“Oh, good, then follow me.”
“Thank you so much” ahem…WOOOT and many many songs of praise, oh blessed bald librarian!
As we walked right back where I’d originally come from and through a door marked D and “Afrikaanse” my hero, bald librarian, was saying, “Don’t worry, this building is so big and has so many rooms, people working here for years still don’t always know how to get around it. It’s very confusing if you don’t know the system.”
See, even Belgians agree with my designer/labeler retardation theory. Finally, in a wing labelled D, somwhere in the African languages area, the rooms changed to C and I found C018.
I thanked bald librarian and headed for the Biblioteek (or the Gent Public Library, which is down the hill from my class), a ten minute walk. I walked up the steps at 9:30 and it opens at 10:00 so I came to the mall. Nothing opens till 10:00 in ‘t Zuid apparently(everywhere else it’s 9:00). So I sat in a little café area with a coffee and wrote this down. Now it’s 10:15 and I’m headed for Hema, the library and the city centre before returning home to practice biking for a bit.