Not In Bruges: September 2011

Backlog

I published a few things I have written earlier but haven't been able to post since we don't have internet at home right now and I haven't been to work much in the past week. I am actually sitting in the lobby of my office building uploading stuff on some random internet signal.

I did go to the doctor on Tuesday and they say my knee is broken. Not shattered, per say, but there is some kind of fragmentation at the bottom of the femur. I got an xray and CT scan but I didn't see them. The hospital system is a bit different here than in the States. For instance, in the States you are sitting in an exam room and the doctor comes in with the xrays and shows you were the problems are. In Belgium, I was sitting in a wheelchair in the hallway with black socks and no pants on, and the doctor came over and drew a little stick figure on the back of an envelope. "Uh, that's great Doc. Can I have my pants back? It's drafty in this hallway and old women are leering at me." Her English wasn't so great but she sounded like she knew what she was talking about. The whole hospital experience was quite interesting, for instance getting an xray while an xray tech who didn't speak English barked commands at me that I didn't understand. But I have private insurance, and I am eligible (and have almost finished paperwork) for the Belgium insurance plan, and these tests only cost 10 Euros in these communist countries anyway. I ended up with a full cast on my leg, and I see a specialist next Thursday.

Speaking of communists, in order to get on the Belgium insurance I needed a document from the commune. Andy, my German coworker, was kind enough to drive me there yesterday. I hobbled to the basement on my crutches, and saw that there was a 45-minute line. I am not able to stand for 45 minutes, and didn't want to make Andy wait that long, so dejectedly I hobbled back to the car and told him the line was too long and that I will just go another time. He asked me if they had handicapped access and I said there wasn't, that the "take a ticket" machine was broken and there was just a line. "This is not acceptable. I'll be right back," he said sternly, and thus the second German invasion of Belgium was launched.

He returned 5 minutes later. "I've found someone who will help you. Some were helpful, and some were not." We hobbled past the receptionist with her piles of pamphlets. "Like this one, who is ONLY GOOD FOR DISTRIBUTING MAGAZINES!" She pretended to be busy. We reached the basement and went around the corner to a back office, where Andy knocked on the door. A woman nervously pushed her head outside. "She is the one who will help you." She took my documents and I could hear the employees chattering amongst each other about Germans and handicapped access as she closed the door. But a few minutes later she returned with my documents. It was the fastest and friendliest experience I have had at the commune yet.

So, I'm bored but things are going OK. My internship was set to end next week anyways, so I'm not missing a lot. Orientation for new students is the following week, which being part of the student government I will have to help with, but won't be too taxing. School starts the week after. This might be a good time to get my knee and ACL fully repaired. I've actually had a damaged knee for more of my life than it was healthy, and to tell you the truth it always hurt. It hurt if I exercised it a lot, and it hurt if I didn't. So this might be the perfect time to get that piece of housekeeping out of the way.

I really had a great summer playing basketball twice a week. I lost most of the fat on my stomach without doing any situps. When we started playing in May, I could only play for about half an hour before getting winded. Last week we had an extended session of about 3 hours, with only a handful of 5 minute water breaks. When my wallet was stolen I was able to run a mile home without being winded to start cancelling my cards. And I had a lot of fun getting better at the game and meeting Belgians on the court. If somebody asked me at the beginning of the summer if I would still want to play knowing I would end up with a broken knee, I think I would say that I would do it all over again.

A Bad Weekend

6 September, 2011

I had my wallet stolen on Saturday night. I was walking home from a friends house, and was pickpocketed by a young man. I chased him but was unable to catch him. Left without an ID or cash cards (I luckily have a backup credit card that was not stolen) I was fuming. I went to play basketball on Sunday. The game was uncharacteristicly physical and I badly injured my knee again as I landed from attempting to block a shot. It was worse then that time I injured it playing soccer a few months ago.

So last night I was lying crippled on my couch, alone. The internet was in my roommate’s name and was shut off when he left, so I didn’t have the ability to contact anyone via Skype or make long distance calls, or even kill time on Facebook. I almost never watch movies, but I found a random DVD that had been left by someone, and wanting to distract myself began to watch it. The movie turned out to be about people whose parents get cancer and whose friends die in car accidents, and it depressed me so much that I had to shut it off. I felt the urge to call home, but could not.

Last night, without money, ID or the ability to walk I felt homesick for the first time in a long time. And it was a terrible feeling. I hobbled to bed early, and thought of how miserable I was. And I thought about how much worse things could be. I was not injured when my wallet was taken. Much worse happens to people in Brussels, and had I been stabbed the lost wallet would have been the least of my concerns. I was safe, warm, and dry. There was cheese and grapes in the fridge. My parents and friends weren’t dying like in that horrid movie. But there was an unmistakable sadness, probably the bitter combination of the anger and frustration of being victimized and the helplessness of being injured.

I woke up today and called in sick to work. It was too bad. I had a meeting scheduled at NATO for my current internship. It was a big opportunity, but hobbling interns are not very useful. Then things began to turn around. My German coworker Andy brought over some anti-inflamitories. My friend Fahim brought his guitar over and we played for awhile, and he offered to drive me to the doctor and to the bank, which we will do tomorrow. My Romanian friend Alexandra came over for awhile, and offered to make me dinner tomorrow. Amerian-via-Belarus Yulia explained how the medical insurance works over here (herself having similar misfortune). Fahim’s Greek girlfiend Naya drove me home from basketball last night.

And maybe that’s the Brussels experience. Expats taking care of expats. Fellow wanderers and lone wolves, none of us having family here, becoming family. And maybe that’s what hurts so much as I watch them go, one by one, back to their country of origin or on to the next big challenge. And it’s maybe a little frustrating having this love and kindness bestowed on me with little chance that I will be able to pay it back. But I am beyond grateful that I have the love and support that I feel from my real family manifest itself in their kindness.

Berlin, or How I Spent My Summer Vacation

For my internship, I was given two weeks off, which seems a bit silly since the internship is unpaid, and maybe I could just not come in whenever I want. But fine. For the vacation, Heather came to visit me. We still Skype, and she is maybe my best friend.

For the first week, we did little day trips around Belgium and the area. We took a train to the Belgian coast to a town called Oostende. This is where the Belgian aristocrats have their second (third? eighth?) home. It was a beautiful day and we went swimming in the sea twice (also getting kicked out of the sea twice, by some guy on a jetski who had a walkie talkie but didn’t speak much English). The water was warm and very swimmable, at least by Oregonian standards. On our way back we stopped in Brugge, which I did just to show her how horrible it was. Heather agreed that it was horrible, although we did have a very nice pasta dinner there.

Next we went north to the southern part of the Netherlands to a city called Maastricht. It was nice. The Netherlands are quite livable, what with their bikes and flawless English and tall people (so that I could buy clothes there, something I’m not really able to do in the Land o’ Hobbits that I currently live in). We got their via the famous Belgian city of Liege, which is famous for something or other but all we saw was the train station.

Anyway, the real headliner was the trip to Berlin. We had arranged with my German coworker Andy that one of his friends had accomidation for us for 2 out of the three nights we were there. Andy actually happened to be on our flight out (he goes to Berlin maybe 2 weekends a month). But for the first night we needed to get a hostel. Except that Heather informed me that she doesn’t do hostels, because she doesn’t know how awesome and cheap they are. So we got a hotel room for the first night. It was in the East part of Berlin in a neighborhood called Mitte, and the hotel was East Berlin to the core. (As a reminder, East Berlin was communist and West Berlin was capitalist.) The building was made of concrete, as pretty much every building older than 20 years in East Berlin is. The fixtures were like some kind of futuristic 60’s deco, like Star Trek meets Mad Men. It was pretty great. Two thumbs up.

Andy showed us around town. He seemed to really like showing us the city. Berlin is cheap but not dodgy. We saw the Berlin wall, the Holocaust memorial (both are quite cool) and Andy gave us a tour of West Berlin (the “lame” Berlin) for the highlights, although we didn’t get out of his car on that side.

That night we had dinner in a restaurant that had an open-air courtyard for eating. (I had a delicious plate of gormet ostrich for slightly more than a hamburger costs in Brussles.) The building was not designed to be open-air, but was “redecorated” by Allied bombs during WWII. Actually, Berlin still shows many scars of war. There are bullet holes in the Roman columns of government buildings. Neighborhoods are pockmarked with newish buildings built from the rubble standing side by side with older buildings that were somehow spared. Even the museum had entire floors missing from its original construction, and the interior stone walls show scars of bomb shrapnel.

That night we stayed at Andy’s friend’s house. It was also concrete, but he had decorated the place to make it quite livable as kind of a post-Commie chic seen around East Berlin. The next day, Heather had to work on schoolwork for awhile, so I went in search of Hansa studios.

When I visited Dublin a decade ago, I went to all of U2’s recording studios. One I entered by pretending to be part of a maintenance crew going in the front door. The receptionist was very nice as she kicked me out, and allowed me to take pictures of the platinum records on the walls (Google “U2 studios” and somewhere there is a website that shows all of the studios and their location. I gave them my photo and they put it up on their site). Another studio was open, so I went inside past a room full of amplifiers and up a flight of stairs. The engineer asked me how the hell I got in there, and I told him the door was open, and then he escorted me off of the premises (no pictures this time). The other two I was not able to get inside of. However! The recording of U2’s classic Achtung Baby (itself being rereleased this fall on its 20^th aniversary) was not started in Dublin. The first sessions were held in Berlin in a place called Hansa studios, where David Bowie and other famous people had worked before.

I googled the location and headed over via subway. When I got to there I was vaguely disappointed. It was an office-type entry with buzzers for various Hansa and non-Hansa entities. I pressed the button for the main Hansa studios. Nothing happened. It was Saturday, so I wasn’t surprised. I didn’t know what to do, so I just stood there for a couple of minutes. As I was starting to feel a bit pathetic I began to head out just as a group of people arrived at the door. “Do you, uh, work at Hansa?” I asked them. One of them nodded his head. “Do you, uh, give tours?” He told me that there is a tour given in September, information was on the website blah blah blah. “I don’t, uh, suppose that I can see the studio?” He shook his head. It was, afterall, his place of work. “OK.” But as I was leaving, I looked at the back gate and saw the parking lot. The VERY SAME (I think) parking lot that appears in a photo in the albumn notes. So the Hansa mission was a resounding success and I can finally say that I finished what I started ten years ago. Four thumbs up!

Anyway, the rest of the trip was hanging out in Berlin with Heather and Andy and Andy’s friends and drinking beers by the river. I think the earliest we went to bed was 3am. It was a good trip. The end.

Train station at Liege, designed by George Jetson

In Maastrich

Heather makes a new friend

Sunset in Maastricht, Netherlands

Some guy. Everybody gets a status nowadays.

Hawaii, no wait, Oostende!

There was nowhere to change into swimming suits on the beach, so we used my coat to wrap around ourselves to provide some modesty. Heather was trying to discretely change when I yelled "Surprise!" and she turned around, and it ended up being a pretty good picture.

I rather like Oostende.

D'oh!

And then Heather took another one, which caught me off guard.

Brugge swans

Brugge people

Brugge building

East German Trabants. They run on a 2-cycle engine, like a weed whacker. (You have to put oil inside the gas.) When the wall came down thousands of these were discarded at the border.