December 28, 2010

I woke up at about 4 am this morning (stupid jet lag) and stared at the ceiling a good long while. Well, exactly two hours. I know this because my aunt has one of those clocks that projects the time on the ceiling. I got the howling fantods thinking about forgetting to take my soup and frozen cookies out of the freezer at my old place and about Ghana, and, and, and... You know how grave things seem at pre-dawn.

Things got a bit better after I fell back asleep and woke up again.  I got up for school and prepared a  face to meet other faces. 

I saw something quite fantastic; I was witness to all the city's street lights turning off. The whole world changed shade as the grid of streetlights powered off. 

I fell again on the way to school; I fear I'm going to be all battered and bruised by the end of this! Class was fine, we learned to ask more questions about how we were doing, how to spell our names, the names of countries and so forth. The radiators were broken in the building and we all sat there shivering and drinking hot water out of plastic cups that were all warped and squishy from holding hot liquid. I'm going to be taking some additional lessons to make up for the fact that I am a little more advanced than my classmates, so I arranged them after class.

I walked home for lunch and on the way I saw a charming snowman with a carrot for a nose. How come kids don't do the carrot nose thing anymore?

We had some soup for lunch with these giant black beans in it and chunks of Slovak sausage. It was delicious, just the thing for a damp Belgian day.

After lunch we went to town. We took the subway in and went to the touristy part of town to inhale waffles and see the Grand Place (a big square). Brussels smells so good, waffles and chocolate and French fries everywhere. Instead of poo and litter in the garbage cans, they overflow with wrappers and discarded waffle trays dripping with leftover condiments like strawberry sauce and caramel. Wholesome.  We went for ice cream and talked about writing our wills. Then, we went to visit Mannekin Pis (a statue of a little boy pissing) and caught the laser light show.

We were going to go bowling and then sing some Karaoke, but all out ambitions faded once we got too cold and too hungry, so we headed home on the Metro. Did I ever tell you that the thing I like the most about the subway here is that they play good music? Yes, well, they do. Tonight we heard "Changes" by David Bowie, among other favourites.