November 4, 2008: a day that will live in history

I was going through my economie notes the other day, and I came across a set that had this written at the top: "Nov. 4: a day that will live in________". Being the history buff that I am, this was obviously a reference to FDR's "Day in Infamy" speech, given after the bombings at Pearl Harbor. If I remember correctly, I wrote that when it looked like it would be a close race, and I was genuinely concerned about the outcome of the election. That was all during the pre-election excitement. And now that the most exciting and historical election of the past several elections is over, it feels a little bit like the day after Christmas.

Election Day 2008: Because of the time difference (9 hours ahead of California, 6 ahead of New York), none of the results started coming in until 1 or 2 in the morning, so despite my best efforts, I was asleep.

November 5, 2008: I got up early to watch the results come in (around 5:30 am). When I turned the TV on downstairs, I saw Obama standing in front of a row of American flags just about to start his acceptance speech. I almost screamed. I spent the next 45 minutes or so watching his speech and by the time my host mom came downstairs, I was curled in a blanket on the couch, crying while the whole family waved to the crowd (I wasn't the only one, Jesse Jackson cried too). Funnily enough, it didn't really sink in until a few days later that we had just elected a new president. I think its because the last two elections (the ones when I was actually old enough to understand what was going on) were a) an ordeal- the Florida recount took forever, and didn't really allow for the immediate celebrations of a normal election; and b) we voted in the incumbent. So this election was really the first that I remember that went as it was supposed to. That whole day, everyone was congratulating me and I got several emails from other AFS students around the country saying how happy they were etc. Its funny, the entire world seems to be celebrating Obama's election.
Unfortunately, the California ballot propositions took a while longer to be counted, so I was constantly checking online to see if all the precincts had reported. Needless to say, I'm very happy that Prop 4 failed, and very upset that Prop 8 passed. Nevertheless, I'm proud of what our country has accomplished this election, and I know that California's gay rights activists will not rest until gay marriage becomes legal, so I am hopeful too for the future.

And then there were the speeches. Wow. As usual, Obama gave me shivers with his Acceptance Speech. I thought he blended the right amount of celebration and hope with a call for responsibility on the part of the American public and a reminder of the challenges we face and the changes that will need to be made, not only by the government and those in power, but also by each person. And of course there was the typical Obama amazingness with his strong oratorial skills and almost call-and-response with the audience: "Yes We Can!".

Even more meaningful, I thought, was John McCain's speech. I don't think he could have endorsed Obama any more graciously. Despite all the nastiness during his campaign, I felt like his speech was the true call for bi-partisianship, and a reminder of what it means to be an American citizen. So while Sarah Palin has left me with a little bit of fear for the direction the Republican Party might be going, Senator McCain impressed me with his humility and dedication to the well-being of the country, even when he was not the victor. There is hope after all...

the front page of De Morgen on November 6

10 little things that make me extraordinarily happy...

1. when it has just rained and there's still water in between the glass of bus windows. When the bus moves, it makes waves and looks like those science experiments at the Exploratorium in San Francisco.
2. when my train is a double-decker one and I can choose between upstairs or downstairs and it's never crowded so I can read my Metro (the Dutch version, not French) in peace and not have to share the table.
3. when the people under 19 get in free at cool places like Gravensteen or Rubens' house. Or when zoos offer free entrance for students with bananas.
4. the clear, crisp smell of the air after a few days of rain.
5. playing Jungle Speed. It's really fun when I win, but also fun to have a good story afterward of the fight for the totem pole thing.
6. wandering around Leuven with spoons and jars of speculoos
7. watching the presidential debates on my iPod on the train
8. eating baked apples with cinnamon and ice cream and hot chocolate sauce for dessert
9. climbing castle towers
10. wearing mismatched or white socks (even though they don't do either here in Belgium)

politics! cont. (Amerikaans verkiezing 2008)

so this isn't about Belgium. or at least not this part. But the US election is in 4 days, and I have a few things to say. I'll try and keep it appropriate, so that in the event that I ever decide to run for public office I won't have a Blogger-gate to do me in. So anyway, my thoughts on the election:

1) I am obviously an Obama supporter. This is not just because he is the Democratic candidate. I have been incredibly impressed by the organization and effectiveness of his campaign. While we were hearing news about the fighting within McCain's campaign, and the $150,000 spent on clothes/ accessories for the hockey mom and her family, I received an email from the Obama campaign with a subject line of "how Maria can change America". I think that's the way we should be looking right now, not pointing fingers and placing labels.

2) Fear: it is what seems to drive the McCain/ Palin rallys (again, this was never going to be a subjective post. I realize it's biased). There's fear of change, fear of terrorists, fear of differences, fear of Obama etc. And the main battle-cry? (aside from calling Obama a socialist, saying that he "pals around with terrorists", that he's Muslim, or that he's inexperienced) They're concerned because "we don't really know who Barack Obama is". Excuse me? He's spent the last 2 years in the public eye campaigning, plus he has two autobiographical books in bookstores. And we supposedly don't know who he is? Right, because Sarah Palin and her family don't have any secrets/suspicious activities and they've been campaigning for a lot longer than 2 months...not.

3) The debates. They're best seen (in my opinion) on one's iPod on the train to Brussel/ Leuven/ Antwerpen. They're also best seen if one is an Obama supporter. Otherwise, one would most likely spend the entire time cringing while watching McCain flounder (I was disappointed by his performance, I remember him as being more forceful and put together). My favorite was the 3rd, because it was really the only one that included interaction between the candidates. However, that whole "Joe-the-Plumber" business bothered (and still bothers) me. We're not voting on Joe the Plumber, we're voting on a candidate who hopefully has views/ policies about the issues we should be hearing about during the debate. And to be fair, Obama also addressed Mr. Plumber...

4) I feel like this election has gotten too partisan. I realize that that's what happenes during elections, but when you have a campaign that distinguishes between "Real America" and "Fake America" then I think you have bigger problems. I also feel like a lot of the election has gotten to be too personal- with one candidate calling the other on their history or something they've done. I think it should be about what they will do, about the state of the country and the world and about the American people and the issues and policies that affect us. That's what ultimately matters. I am, however, very pleased with Colin Powell and the Chicago Tribune's endorsement of Obama. It certainly means something to have two major Republican or Republican-leaning voices endorse a Democratic candidate. Maybe our country can pull together and pull through after all...

we komen aan in Brussel-Centraal

traveling in Belgium could read somewhat like a MasterCard commercial:

1 GoPass (10 one-way train fares to anywhere in Belgium)= 46 EUR
1 BuzzyPass (unlimited bus and tram as long as it's a DeLijn bus/tram)= 162 EUR
1 waffle from Panos for the train ride= 1,60 EUR
the ability to travel anywhere in Belgium within an hour= priceless

Belgium is a country with about 10 million people (that's 3 million more than the San Francisco Bay Area) and has just a little bit more land. Therefore, everything is compact- cars, travel times, houses, supermarkets etc. When I first got here, I was told that Brugge was a nice day trip, but that Brussels is a little farther, and might not be as easy. Coming from California, where you can drive for 9 hours and still be stuck in LA traffic, I imagined a 2 or 3 hour train ride. But no, from Gent-Sint-Pieters (a gorgeous train station, btw) to Brussel-Centraal, it is approximately a 30-45 minute train ride.
So now take Belgium (little bigger than the Bay Area) and divide it in fifths. 3/5s are Wallonia and 2/5s are Flanders. Now take Flanders and add approximately 150 AFS students. As you can see, the population density of AFSers is very high. This makes for lots of fun outings/ chance encounters with everyone else.
A few days ago, I went to Brussel with Bryan (AFSer from Cincinnati) after school (we get out at 12 on Wednesdays). While walking around, we saw a ton of police officers in front of some royal/ official building, so we stopped and waited to see what would happen. We ended up waiting for about 30 minutes in the rain under some tree in the park across the street, but all we saw were a few guys in business suits give us strange looks as they walked back and forth from the cars parked in front to the building. But I do think it was something important- probably something to do with the king. It's little things like this that make wandering in Belgium so much fun: being surrounded by Spaniards all decked out and already celebrating for the Spain/ Belgium World Cup Qualifying Game (Spain won, 2-1), finding some random Roman ruin next to the economic department building in Brussel, buying a bunch of bananas in Antwerp so we could get in to the zoo free and then being on TV as we gave them to a Belgian actress, running into all the Brazilians at the kathedral in Antwerp, listening to a mariachi band in Brugge and then getting lost for an hour on our way to the chocolate museum etc...this is what makes being an AFSer so much fun.

welcome to The Great Language Barrier...

So I babysat my neighbor last night, she's three and absolutely adorable. And I honestly think I may have learned more Dutch in the 6 hours spent with her than at all my Dutch lessons combined. We read books most of the time, which was great for my Dutch, but once you've read Ivo gaan boodschaapen doen about 7 times, you've had enough with Ivo and Mama and Tante Rosa and Paultje. It was an interesting night, seeing as she doesn't speak English, my Dutch is rather limited at this point and she speaks with a mixture of French and Dutch because her mom speaks French and dad speaks Dutch. So I was running on intuition a lot of the time while trying to decipher what she was saying. But despite all that, we had a great time, and it was actually surprisingly easy after a while to communicate. And all the effort was worth it when she woke me up in the morning (I spent the night because her parents were out late) with a big kiss and another book to read. Maybe that language barrier isn't so big after all...

In other news, I made scones yesterday- the ones my mom always makes for everything. It was pretty amusing, because I had my laptop at the kitchen table since I had to keep checking the internet for temperature conversions, ingredient translations and such. They actually turned out just as they always do, only a little bit tough- I think I got over excited during the kneading process. But anyway, Annelies and Frederik (my host-brother and his girlfriend who live in Leuven) were here and we ate them for breakfast. It's interesting, because in Belgium, they don't have scones, so it was a very new experience for everyone- something that I hadn't really expected, although I guess scones are more from England, but I'm a little surprised they haven't traveled over here, seeing as Belgium is only about an hour away from England.

Enough about my scones- here's a picture of me, Annelies and Frederik that Laura took a few weeks ago at the Graslei:

politics!

So first off, Belgium is really split into two (technically 3, but for all intensive purposes, I'll leave Brussel out) groups: the Walloons- from Wallonia, they French-speaking south, and the Flemish- from Flanders, the Dutch-speaking north (ie. where I am). Despite both being a part of the Kingdom of Belgium (the official name for Belgium), a country that is only about 4000 square miles larger than the Bay Area, these two groups not only have their own political parties, news stations and languages, they also have separate Parliaments. But they are both part of Belgium and therefore both participate in national elections/ decisions etc.
Secondly, Belgium is a multi-party system. Granted, my opionions may be (read: are) biased, but I think that the way the multi-party system works, the parties spend too much time making what we call a kartel in Dutch (basically a block) against other parties by working to get enough people/ parties to out-vote another. This in turn seems to take time away from other issues at hand.

I may have a skewed view of the political interests of teens in the VS (JSA can do that sometimes), but overall, they are much more involved/ interested in politics than teens here- everyone is actually. At risk of sounding cliché, the government of the United States really is the people's government (relatively speaking at least).  It's amazing to me how little Belgians feel connected to their government.  There is really an "us" and a "them" attitude about their elected officials and what they're doing.  This is especially apparent amongst teenagers.  While they are pretty much aware of the main parties and some key current events, we never talk about current events or politics or philosophy etc either in or out of class.  I think a lot of this difference is that in the US, it's a cool thing to be aware of what's going on in the government, to have opinions about decisions or ideas and to discuss/ debate them with peers.  So far, I haven't found that here.  So while we learn about the political parties (of which there are many) in history, we don't discuss their party platform, or the decisions that are currently being made.  

I'm sure this will be a constant discussion here, but I actually want to post this and stop sitting around, thinking about what else to say.  So for now, I guess it will have to end with a to be continued...

this is what happens when you stare out the window during class...

The other day, I was staring out the window in Godsdienst (Religion) and I saw something that I think is worth sharing, although sadly I didn't have my camera with me at the time to document it. From the window, I can see the tower (or is it steeple? do Catholic churches have steeples?) of Sint-Baafskathedral, which is currently under renovation, so there's scaffolding almost to the top and a big crane next to it. For the past few weeks, there has been a porta-potty on one of the upper levels of the scaffolding. At first I thought it was funny that there was such a contrast in old, fancy church-ness and a dark green plastic supersize porta-potty, but it makes sense, no?
Anyway, the other day, I looked out the window and saw the crane lowering the porta-potty back down. This makes sense too, except it was really funny to see a porta-potty spinning around about 200 feet up in air next to Sint-Baafskathedral. I'm sure none of you find it quite as amusing as I do (it's one of those "you had to be there" moments I think), but it makes me laugh to think about it, so I thought I'd share it. For reference, here's a picture of Sint-Baafskathedral (which btw is the namesake of our school. St. Bavo's feast day was yesterday, 1 Oktober.)