A blonde, Abroad: an excerpt of the early days
13 August 2005
(This is a rough sketch of what I felt like back in winter of 1999...)
There I was, sitting in a large apartment in Brussels, Belgium. Its size was not as pleasant as I would have imagined after living in a studio apartment off of Fifth Avenue. It became common for me to misplace my mobile phone, cup of coffee or journal. I had never had so many rooms to wander through since I had left my parents house over a decade ago.
The grey, drizzly days were spent in front of my computer experimenting with the sound recording software I had discovered on my Mac. This new discovery lent moments of private pleasure, recording my voice over obscure 80's new wave tracks that I could bring into Flash movies that I animated to the beats and vocals.
It was February and the following week the kitchen was about to be torn out. Until then my goal was to create little widgets in Flash and make portfolio type web pages with which to look for work in a web agency. Luc was not concerned that I didn't work. Without work after a decade of building a career was a major concern, especially not earning my own keep. In one respect he was verbally expressive about leaving me alone all day and encouraged me to get to know his oldest sister, of two, that lived in Brussels. I was so full of doubt and hesitation about everything (already) I avoided the contact. ((Eventually I would spend every Tuesday with her in Uccle for 'cooking' classes among the type of ladies who 'lunch'. Those classes should have been called 'saucing' classes. We would spend an hour at best learning how to create specific, yet Belgian-basic dishes. After ward we would spend 3 hours eating and drinking wine and discussing – everything. The youngest student by 10 years I was comforted by the clutch of privileged, compassionate women. Each week featured a divulgence about something heavy happening in someone's marriage or family.)) I never specifically revealed that these classes were more about ladies who drink in the afternoon. During these times Luc liked that my life was so limited. He could find me there when he returned home which was usually not before 7.30 or even 8.00. We never ate our dinner before 9.30, a practice I didn't like as it further disturbed my erratic sleeping patterns.
In moments of complete phase out I would stare out the window at the Belgacom tower. At the time the logo was a face, a strange futuristic yet not very well design semi profile of an androgynous human.
Some mornings it was so dark I needed to switch on the lamp on the desk in 'my' office. The room that would soon house crates filled with the contents of the kitchen. On the days that I had agreed to go to the Delhaize it took me hours – unbeknownst to Luc – to prepare for what would seem to be a task that requires minimum effort. I didn't like driving, unskilled after years of being car-less in Manhattan, and driving a stick shift in the tunnels was frustrating. Being a person who rarely gets lost, even in a new place while on foot, the layout of Brussels was difficult to master. I wasn't 'permitted' to shop at the GB (a cultural dissent I learned), which I could walk to, I would explain. Luc didn't see why I WANTED to walk home with the purchases and he didn't seem to understand that that was how I had shopped for the past 11 years in New York. It was my way. But I had a car, a silver Volvo that his best friend who lives in South Africa had lent to me until his return for the annual summer visit home.
My French was barely high school level even after a year of private courses from my friend Cecile, a Parisian in Manhattan. She didn't want me to end up speaking French like a Belgian. French assignments after each lesson were standard but practicing the roll of my R's was mandatory and each week she expected progress. I was not diligent with my written assignments but I aimed to please with the rolling. When I arrived in Belgium I had that consonant down pat.
Shopping days occupied the entire afternoon. While it was only a 10-minute ride it took me 20 minutes or more. The 'right has the right' rule made me nervous and so I drove like a Floridian senior citizen, frustrating the motorists behind me. The trick was to look to the right quickly for oncoming cars and race past the intersection, an unnerving feat since most drivers barreled onto the main road to enforce their right of the right. Even a car exiting tiny road leading into a thoroughfare could race into the flow of a two-lane road. The expression, "it's not how you carefully you drive it's the OTHER person" had never seemed so literal.
After many stalls coming out of first gear in tunnel traffic – never venturing out before 4pm, high time for civil functionaries traffic – I would park the car below the Delhaize, privately renamed HellDaze. Each new word or name I learned was a color of sound that interpreted at face value.
Inside the super 'marché' the second challenge of my mission began – perusing labels in endless aisles of unknown and strange products and brands. I quickly found the solace of selecting the wine first. Having an overly keen photographic memory I recognized labels of bottles we liked. Then with trepidation I would continue to fill and cart with items from my list. A list! A new development, in my new life, in my new country. Where were all the brands that had comforted me – I realized – like Mc Cormick, Uncle Ben's, Campbell's, Heinz, Hellman's, …? Then there were the prices to figure out with this strange money in blue, pink, and yellow, and all those extra coins. Two hundred Belgian francs or BEF was too much for my math-challenged skills; it was not worth two dollars, but five. Five hundred BEF, nine-something, …
By the time I had paid with my bancontact card – smiling nervously for the cashier to tell me when to enter my pin code that I invariably miss-keyed, packed the trunk with the 'whatever' purchases and replaced the cart to retrieve the 20 BEF coin, which on occasion I would not bother to do – I couldn't remember what that coin meant in REAL money – and drove 'home', rush hour traffic was at its peak. Drained from the odyssey of unrecognizable words, brands, currency calculation and language, I would be disoriented and even less skilled to maneuver the stick shift to return home. More first gear stalling, right of right fear and then parallel parking expended the remainder of my already challenged energy. Helldaze, barely or too much sleeping at night, French, no Seinfeld, awake until 2am to call a friend who finally had the time for a 'nice' chat was my existence.
It felt like a film. The opening frame, an overhead shot that zooms into a window to reveal a youngish woman, blue-faced from the light of her Mac, yellow-haired from the lamp light at 11 am, staring at the Belgacom tower and the never-ending precipitation avoiding the thought of food shopping. And wondering which way her life would unravel.
A few years later, in my own apartment, and managing my own existence in Belgium, I continued to meet new people. Two in particular amazed me (the friends of a Frenchman I was dating) to the point of feeling as if my life had some strange prophetic coding of a journey: Nicholas Delhaize of the Delhaize 'dynasty' and Philippe Jaspers, son of the famed Belgian architect who built the Belgacom tower. Fateful or otherwise, I felt as if the tumult I had already endured had a purpose – that life as an ex pat was an odyssey that was continually unfolding…
There I was, sitting in a large apartment in Brussels, Belgium. Its size was not as pleasant as I would have imagined after living in a studio apartment off of Fifth Avenue. It became common for me to misplace my mobile phone, cup of coffee or journal. I had never had so many rooms to wander through since I had left my parents house over a decade ago.
The grey, drizzly days were spent in front of my computer experimenting with the sound recording software I had discovered on my Mac. This new discovery lent moments of private pleasure, recording my voice over obscure 80's new wave tracks that I could bring into Flash movies that I animated to the beats and vocals.
It was February and the following week the kitchen was about to be torn out. Until then my goal was to create little widgets in Flash and make portfolio type web pages with which to look for work in a web agency. Luc was not concerned that I didn't work. Without work after a decade of building a career was a major concern, especially not earning my own keep. In one respect he was verbally expressive about leaving me alone all day and encouraged me to get to know his oldest sister, of two, that lived in Brussels. I was so full of doubt and hesitation about everything (already) I avoided the contact. ((Eventually I would spend every Tuesday with her in Uccle for 'cooking' classes among the type of ladies who 'lunch'. Those classes should have been called 'saucing' classes. We would spend an hour at best learning how to create specific, yet Belgian-basic dishes. After ward we would spend 3 hours eating and drinking wine and discussing – everything. The youngest student by 10 years I was comforted by the clutch of privileged, compassionate women. Each week featured a divulgence about something heavy happening in someone's marriage or family.)) I never specifically revealed that these classes were more about ladies who drink in the afternoon. During these times Luc liked that my life was so limited. He could find me there when he returned home which was usually not before 7.30 or even 8.00. We never ate our dinner before 9.30, a practice I didn't like as it further disturbed my erratic sleeping patterns.
In moments of complete phase out I would stare out the window at the Belgacom tower. At the time the logo was a face, a strange futuristic yet not very well design semi profile of an androgynous human.
Some mornings it was so dark I needed to switch on the lamp on the desk in 'my' office. The room that would soon house crates filled with the contents of the kitchen. On the days that I had agreed to go to the Delhaize it took me hours – unbeknownst to Luc – to prepare for what would seem to be a task that requires minimum effort. I didn't like driving, unskilled after years of being car-less in Manhattan, and driving a stick shift in the tunnels was frustrating. Being a person who rarely gets lost, even in a new place while on foot, the layout of Brussels was difficult to master. I wasn't 'permitted' to shop at the GB (a cultural dissent I learned), which I could walk to, I would explain. Luc didn't see why I WANTED to walk home with the purchases and he didn't seem to understand that that was how I had shopped for the past 11 years in New York. It was my way. But I had a car, a silver Volvo that his best friend who lives in South Africa had lent to me until his return for the annual summer visit home.
My French was barely high school level even after a year of private courses from my friend Cecile, a Parisian in Manhattan. She didn't want me to end up speaking French like a Belgian. French assignments after each lesson were standard but practicing the roll of my R's was mandatory and each week she expected progress. I was not diligent with my written assignments but I aimed to please with the rolling. When I arrived in Belgium I had that consonant down pat.
Shopping days occupied the entire afternoon. While it was only a 10-minute ride it took me 20 minutes or more. The 'right has the right' rule made me nervous and so I drove like a Floridian senior citizen, frustrating the motorists behind me. The trick was to look to the right quickly for oncoming cars and race past the intersection, an unnerving feat since most drivers barreled onto the main road to enforce their right of the right. Even a car exiting tiny road leading into a thoroughfare could race into the flow of a two-lane road. The expression, "it's not how you carefully you drive it's the OTHER person" had never seemed so literal.
After many stalls coming out of first gear in tunnel traffic – never venturing out before 4pm, high time for civil functionaries traffic – I would park the car below the Delhaize, privately renamed HellDaze. Each new word or name I learned was a color of sound that interpreted at face value.
Inside the super 'marché' the second challenge of my mission began – perusing labels in endless aisles of unknown and strange products and brands. I quickly found the solace of selecting the wine first. Having an overly keen photographic memory I recognized labels of bottles we liked. Then with trepidation I would continue to fill and cart with items from my list. A list! A new development, in my new life, in my new country. Where were all the brands that had comforted me – I realized – like Mc Cormick, Uncle Ben's, Campbell's, Heinz, Hellman's, …? Then there were the prices to figure out with this strange money in blue, pink, and yellow, and all those extra coins. Two hundred Belgian francs or BEF was too much for my math-challenged skills; it was not worth two dollars, but five. Five hundred BEF, nine-something, …
By the time I had paid with my bancontact card – smiling nervously for the cashier to tell me when to enter my pin code that I invariably miss-keyed, packed the trunk with the 'whatever' purchases and replaced the cart to retrieve the 20 BEF coin, which on occasion I would not bother to do – I couldn't remember what that coin meant in REAL money – and drove 'home', rush hour traffic was at its peak. Drained from the odyssey of unrecognizable words, brands, currency calculation and language, I would be disoriented and even less skilled to maneuver the stick shift to return home. More first gear stalling, right of right fear and then parallel parking expended the remainder of my already challenged energy. Helldaze, barely or too much sleeping at night, French, no Seinfeld, awake until 2am to call a friend who finally had the time for a 'nice' chat was my existence.
It felt like a film. The opening frame, an overhead shot that zooms into a window to reveal a youngish woman, blue-faced from the light of her Mac, yellow-haired from the lamp light at 11 am, staring at the Belgacom tower and the never-ending precipitation avoiding the thought of food shopping. And wondering which way her life would unravel.
A few years later, in my own apartment, and managing my own existence in Belgium, I continued to meet new people. Two in particular amazed me (the friends of a Frenchman I was dating) to the point of feeling as if my life had some strange prophetic coding of a journey: Nicholas Delhaize of the Delhaize 'dynasty' and Philippe Jaspers, son of the famed Belgian architect who built the Belgacom tower. Fateful or otherwise, I felt as if the tumult I had already endured had a purpose – that life as an ex pat was an odyssey that was continually unfolding…
