from Antwerp with love: What happened to the rest of April?

In Austin the weather has been wonderful at times and wet and chilly at other times. Here are a few shots of a trip to one of Austin's landmarks, which now has a new bubble tea shop right next to it. Evelina loves to go here, though she is not so sure about sitting in a giant hand.

The weekend outings on nice days are someting to look forward to during the hectic weeks. But still, I think I blinked and suddenly April had slipped by. It is May. It is hard to believe. Another semester over. My students will be through with me after Friday's exam. I might be more happy about this even than they are. I enjoy teaching, very much, but teaching while a very big cloud called research is hovering above you is slightly less enjoyable. Then teaching seems to take up lots and lots of time. Although I do truly enjoy getting to know the students and yes, this semester again two of my students decided to "convert" and become art history majors. Yeah!

So other than finishing up this class of mine, we have been through some shifts regarding this house of ours (actually not yet!) in Belgium. Here is the short version of it: We found out that the neighborhood is protected as a historic monument and landscape. That was not a big surprise really, but of course with this come specific building codes etc. In order to be able to do our renovations we will need not only a regular building permit from the city of Antwerp, but also a permit from the government office regulating protected monuments. So we decided to have the house checked as it is now, before closing on the contract, to ensure that all previous changes had been done according to regulations. And there came the problem. They were not and no permit was ever requested, let alone obtained. Part of an addition is actual not within the allowed building code and will have to be taken down -- something we had not necessarily planned on doing. The seller's contract explicitely stipulated that there were no special regulations regarding protected monuments to take into account. So, we decided that the costs we will incur for changing this and bringing it back into the allowed standards will have to be covered by the seller. Well, he is not liking this idea. After his first completely unnegotiable negative reply, he is now having a bid made himself of what it maight cost to take down the addition. He also offered to do it himself, and we kindly declined that one! (Yeah, that is all we want, a disgruntled seller waiting for his money, tearing down a part of the house we want to buy! No thank you!) So, that is where we are at. We wait, I suppose.

So, apart from not even owning the place and not knowing really what this seller will agree to, we will have to get double building permits for our own changes to the place and each of these can take up to 6 months! Right now I try not to think about this. I try to focus only on our immediate plans. In a few days we leave for Belgium and we plan to pretend that all will go well with the closing and that at least some of the work can start relatively soon. And for this, materials will have to be chosen and purchased, and so we will focus on that. In any case we meet with the architect in person next Friday (gosh, I just realized how soon this is!) and hopefully that will bring back some of the excitement. 'Cause contracts and building permits and communicating with other people through lawyers have a way of killing some of that initial excitement, ha.

Our biggest daily excitement is of course Evelina! She is such a joy. I will post some pictures of her below. On earthday we went to her school where all kinds of activities were scheduled. Evelina's favorite was the live music and watching the live-bug show. (Two separate shows actually, unfortunately no lizards with guitars, or giant spiders with drums.) I will post the picture of the giant roach. Yes, she touched it. (No, mama did not.) For all those of you reading in Belgium, yes, je hebt het goed verstaan, een kakkerlak! There was also a tarantula but she was quite upset because it was actually a very cold day. Oh and speaking of ugly big things, I will also post this picture my dad took while he was here of a Ford pick-up truck. My friends here in Texas will think nothing of it, but for the Europeans this might actually be a visual treat. (Or they may be even more repelled by the car than the kakkerlak.)