Gosh, I’m bad at blogging:-)

any thoughts on whether i should try to learn mandarin chinese, japanese, or spanish?

thankfully, the best party was saved for last! my fulbright friend steph had a winterzonnewende (winter solstice) party in antwerp, to which we were encouraged to bring 1) a friend, 2) a dish, 3) a candle, and 4) a talent (a song, a dance, or something simple like a joke…). the friends coming together made a great mix of people from all over the world (including quite a few students from steph’s dutch class). the dishes, as a result, were quite varied and tasty! the candles set a great atmosphere, and were welcome on a day when i had left the house at 8:20am and still seen street lamps on! (the sun also set at 5pm.) and finally, the talents were a fantastic way to get everybody laughing and dancing. we had a couple of singers, one who intentionally made us laugh and one who sang a beautiful czech song. we had a funny true story (in dutch and english), and a chill-inducing poem by a native american (in dutch, enlish, and sign language). steph, an american sign language interpreter, interpreted 3 songs and made me very sad that i gave up learning ASL a year after i started in 4th grade. someone brought a very cool-sounding song by the nigerian artist 9ice (“nice”), and we all got up and danced! it’s a little harder to start dancing with a group of total strangers, but once you realize that you may never see them again you can really let loose;-) after some more dancing (including to some of tristan’s and my favorite songs, which steph asked us about ahead of time and then got off of itunes), we had a group percussion experience (sounds from all the tables, chairs, and cups!) that led into an amazing belly dancing performance, followed by some pro-looking salsa dancers. every ethnomusicological molecule in my body was buzzing. as it got later, things quieted down and we saw a performance by a trio of a cellist, flautist, and bass clarinetist, who sounded sublime on a few pieces by telemann. and THEN the trio brought out the real magic– they turned off the lights and gave us a candlelight improvisation, which even contained some beautiful spoken quotations. it was so beautiful and well-coordinated that i thought it had to be pre-composed, but it really was improvised. they invited volunteers to join in with them, so i did with one other singer, but i think we put them off-kilter a little bit (they’ve apparently been improvising together for a long time, and it was hard, as a newcomer, to find a common vibe). then somebody let the cat out of the bag that i play cello, and the others insisted that i play something. it turns out the cello was *awesome*- as its owner put it, “a Jaguar” among cellos. it was so smooth and resonant, and actually much easier to play than my own cello. i even got to play an improvised number with the other instrumentalists, after which the cellist (who turned out to be a cello teacher) invited me to join in a performance by 40 of her students! i’ve never played with that many cellos before, so i’m going to try to make it work out. all in all a fantastic evening!

2. i found a new renter for my studio AND

3. i found a new place to live! i move in on january 5th. it is a house outside of the city center, which i will be sharing with 3 dudes. the problem is that it’s much farther from my job than my current place– however, i will be saving about 200 euros each month, it is right near a nature preserve, and i am super-excited to live with other people. the guys (2 belgians, 1 italian, all around age 27, all -randomly- musicians) seem really nice and i think i will have a chance to practice my dutch…

4. which is also going quite well! i just passed a test to get into the next class level, which starts after the new year. i also just had a 30-minute long phone conversation with my dutch aunt annet, mostly in dutch, although i gather i said some pretty funny things   annet, her husband kees, and their son remko are coming to visit ghent for new year’s, so i’ll be practicing even more dutch then. i just hope i don’t lose my budding flemish accent (soft and french-influenced) for the netherlandish one (the more stereotypical throat-clearing brand of dutch).

5. in other dutch-language news, they announced yesterday that the dutch word of the year is “swaffelen,” which i would define except i want to keep this a PG space! here you go:

http://www.expatica.com/nl/news/local_news/Dutch-word-of-the-year-is-swaffelen.html

6. i’m done teaching my first semester of classes! wow, time just flew by. i’ve learned a lot in a very short period of time. now, on to the corrections! (200 essays and 200 exams, thankfully to be shared with geert)

7. the next semester doesn’t start until february. but, with all this free time (okay, well, two whole dys so far) i’ve been going a little crazy! i don’t really know how to relax. but it’s something that i’m actually quite happy to learn. right now i’m going to watch as many episodes of het huis anubis (my new favorite show– a dutch one about teenagers in a creepy boarding school) as i want before i go to sleep without setting the alarm.

Well, I sucked it up and went, and I actually had fun. My cover was that I was an ethnomusicologist performing my usual research duties, but it turns out that even ethnomusicologists get to dance a little sometimes. It’s an obligatory part of our participant-observer methodology;-) The hardest part was starting to dance by myself, but eventually I found partners in the shape of one guy from Benin (didn’t catch his name amidst the pounding bass) and another from Sierra Leone (Abdul). It turns out it’s sort of awkward to be a single-appearing-but-not-actually-single female in a club, and I also would not repeat the walk home alone (even though, Mom and Dad, I chose very well-lit streets!!). So maybe next time I’ll wait until I have someone to go out with, but until then I can officially say that I had the guts to go out alone.

In other news, I passed my Dutch final! I’m starting to feel more and more comfortable in Dutch, although I still have a loooong way to go. Right now I’m investigating the possibility of moving in with some Flemish people so I can have more chances to practice speaking. We’ll see if I can worm my way out of my current lease…

1. OBAMAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Buoyed by the general European adoration of the president-elect, I’ve been walking on air for the past week. I stayed up all night to watch the election returns at a gathering in Brussels (the victory speech was made at 6AM). There were over 2000 people of various nationalities (even though the capacity of the room was 1200, and guess who got to try to turn people away from the entrance). Although it was crowded and I was exhausted, I was just sooo unbelievably happy. I cried several times. At an American-Embassy-hosted gathering the next morning (before going to sleep) I was interviewed by about 5 different TV and radio reporters, who seized upon the opportunity to talk to a real live American (the fact that I could speak French helped, too). I’m famous!

More pictures, as well as a fuller account of the evening, are recounted by my friend Steph: http://www.reflexivity.us/blog/archives/2008/11/the-place-to-be.html

2. Tristan and I went to France this past weekend to visit Charlotte, who’s teaching English in Lyon. It was fun! (For one thing, I am very jealous of French weather-it started to rain as soon as we crossed the border into Belgium). However, after a total of nearly 24 hours spent in transit where about 8 would have sufficed, I learned the important lesson of making reservations in advance. And then not leaving said reservations at home.

3. A formal way of closing a letter in Dutch is “met vriendelijke groeten”, which means “with friendly greetings.” However, be careful for typos or you could end up with “met vriendelijke groenten”, which means “with friendly vegetables.”

4. On the way back from Lyon we passed a giant leather store called “Cuir Center”. Or, according to the principle of half-translation… Queer Center!

With friendly vegetables,

Alyssa

today as i was leaving the university after class, i was approached by a tee-shirt-clad student holding a box of chocolates and offering me “een truffel voor een knuffel”– that is, a chocolate in exchange for a hug. the students are always doing weird things that i expect are related to hazing-type activities (yesterday a young man wearing a garbage bag over his shirt ceremoniously got down on his knees and begged me for change) so, a little suspicious, i refused. later, on the news, i actually saw those same people being interviewed about “knuffel dag”, which is supposedly a real thing in flanders. i even saw one of my students on tv, somewhat hesitantly receiving a hug from one of the official knuffelers. darn, now i sorta wish i had let myself get knuffeled.

P.S. I think that Tristan and I are going to Caitlin and Colin (our Fulbright friends)’s Halloween party as Barack Obama and Sarah Palin. I wonder if any of my co-workers could lend me a hunting rifle…?

http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=nl&u=http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knuffelbeest&sa=X&oi=translate&resnum=1&ct=result&prev=/search%3Fq%3Dknuffelbeest%26hl%3Den%26client%3Dfirefox-a%26rls%3Dorg.mozilla:en-US:official%26hs%3DNgQ%26sa%3DX)

and steph w just shared this – perhaps an approximate illustration of the above?

http://mfrost.typepad.com/.shared/image.html?/photos/uncategorized/2008/10/19/sn151057.jpg

life is quite good here. i’ve been treating myself well- getting lots of sleep, eating right, and even (thanks to some inspiration from serena and a fulbrighter friend named caitlin) adhering to a running routine! route options are limited as i’m in a city, but there is a really cute little park very close to my house. to get there i have to cross an elegant old bridge that goes over a canal/river, and in the park itself there are lots of trees and even a couple of ponds that are frequented by ducks, geese, doves, and… roosters? yes, it seems there are at least two roosters, each accompanied by a herd/flock of hens. they tend to congregate obliviously on the path and i’m always afraid that i’m accidentally going to step on one when i’m running by. perhaps they are there in honor of the Ghent Zoo, which existed on that site about 100 years ago.