here comes the sun
i had my first class yesterday - history of european dictators. dr. pribic seems like he'll be an interesting teacher. there are a lot of regular vesalius (non-lafayette) students in our class. everyone is an international affairs or politics major. dr. pribic decided there wouldn't be a midterm or final because "ve all vant to be friends heah, ohhkay?"
i walked up ch. de wavre and found a nice chocolate shop that gilbert and paquita had recommended to me. now i just have to figure out how to send stuff to people.
all in all, the day was pretty slow. i just walked around the neighborhood and campus, dropping in to the computer lab at veco (which apparently is the cool way to abbreviate vesalius college?). Right now about 300 students are trying to share 3 computers.. ha! once the VUB accounts get activated and we get our IDs it should be ok - then we can use the vub computers.
still, the interesting stuff from yesterday came at dinner. it was a big belgian meal. it was the three of us, gilbert & paquita, the one daughter and her boyfriend, and the other daughter and her son. we had some kind of dish that was noodles, ham, and cream. some of them put ketchup on it and got a kick out of the sounds when the bottle was almost empty. it's really entertaining how silly they get when they're all together; it's kind of neat.
there is a painting of paquita when she was 15 in the formal dining room. she told us the story about it:
(i think she was still in spain at the time) she was someplace and this painter came up to her and said that she had an interesting face and asked if he could paint her. the painter got permission from her dad, and paquita and her dad would go down together while this guy painted her. later, the painter was selling all of paintings to this one american man. but he wouldn't sell the one painting of paquita, because he said it was "the daughter of a friend". so eventually he gave the painting back to paquita's dad as a gift. paquita never wanted to ask for it directly, but her father gave it to gilbert for his 50th birthday.
i thought it was pretty interesting. gilbert joked about how the eyes follow you or it's one of those paintings where you poke out the eyes and somebody is there looking at you.
so when the ketchup was making the pbbtthh noises they were blaming it on the painting of paquita.
after the dinner we tried some belgian and french cheeses. they were pretty good.
then coffee and a little piece of some kind of apple dessert thing. they don't fool around with their coffee here. it's ridiculously strong - almost espresso, but a whole cup's worth.
the other night paquita and gilbert were also telling us about all the places they have been to. they've been to the US a lot (new york, atlanta, hawaii, florida, washington), mexico, france, germany, bankok, hong kong, morocco, tunisia, south africa, and more. i asked if they had been to luxembourg and paquita's reply was "ah, oui... c'est triste"... she called it sad there! ha! her explanation was that there isn't much to do there, but it is still very pretty, quiet, and full of small villages.
we also found out what gilbert's job was. he was a programmer for mainframes. he spent most of his working years with the belgian bank.
i found out that there is an american counterpart to lactaid that i can get at the pharmacy. i don't think they knew i spoke english until they saw the fact sheet for it (which is in english). so that was a plus. so they wanted to talk to me in english instead of french, and the main guy spoke it fluently. it's just nice to know if there's ever a problem and i can't remember the right french words.
no real plans for today. i was going to read for my dictators class and then try to go to one of the parks or something (but i think it is going to rain later today).
there are still tons of churches and museums that i'm looking forward to seeing. the churches are all so beautiful inside and actually feel holy. it's not like lafayette's colton chapel. there's still the comic strip museum and all the history & art museums in the city. i think i'll wait to get my student ID - gilbert said a lot of places will give you discounts.
i guess that's it for now. i'm going to go be productive and free up this computer.