Visiting the great Gatsby

We have a friend named Gatsby. Gatsby lives in an apartment near Montmartre in Paris. He lives there with some humans, but when they are away on vacation, Gatsby enjoys the apartment all by himself. Although he likes the peace of mind (i.e. not being tugged at by a near one year old) he ever so kindly invited Robert and me over for a visit. So we accepted, and took the Thalys to Paris to go see him. While we were there to catch up with Gatsby we took advantage of the beautiful weather to stroll around Paris and reacquaint ourselves with a city we last visited about 5 or 6 years ago in the icy-cold wintery season. It was wonderful. I share some pictures with you all without too many comments. Paris doesn't need comments. The Seine, the markets, Montmartre and Notre Dame, les cafés, les crepes Nutella,le Jardin des Tuilleries, ... none of that needs words.



































































































































Gatsby's apartment was wonderful! We so enjoyed the hospitality. From the 5th floor we had a wonderful view of the Rue Eugene Carriere as well as the rooftops and the sky. On my way back I read a little book written by an Australian about the trials and tribulations of buying her "own piece of Paris" (i.e. an apartment) and I learned that the 4th and 5th floors are the most desirable since you can see both the street and the sky from here. I woke up staring at the rooftops across the street as I do here in Antwerp, in our own bedroom. Upon waking up in Paris, I smiled. That only a rooftop can tell you where you are.














Robert and I accidentally had un café and une noissette at the Deux Moulins, the café where the movie Amelie was shot. We only realized it as we sat down. It is very remarkable to me how a movie, a fictional story with no reference to any reality, can transform a previously existing location into a near-shrine. People walked in just to take photographs, standing cluelessly right in the path of the servers. People stopped outside staring into the building as if the movie was still taking place right inside. So I too took some photographs to share with you all, but they are not any different from the pictures I would take (and have done often ) at any other place. Except the one of the Asians on the street, peering in...





























































This was our first out of town visit since we moved here (no, the trip to Holland doesn't count, that is 15 minutes away...) and we were amazed at the convenience of the train. It took us from Antwerp Central to Paris Nord in about two hours, the time split between one lag from Antwerp to Brussels, and the second from Brussels to Paris. The trip is short enough to be able to make a day-trip. And I think I will try that out sometime... to just go to Paris for the day.

While we were there, our painter here in Antwerp was working on getting a bathroom painted and the kitchen walls prepped for their final color. It was great to be able to away while he was working, and to return to another room (albeit a small one) finished and usable, but there was white dust from sanding the drywall all over the house! I suppose it would have been too perfect otherwise, being in Paris while our house is being worked on and not finding any dirt... so together with my darling mother and her helpful cleaning lady, I cleaned house all Saturday upon our return.

Getting ready for guests! Yesterday Robert's sister, Rachel and her son, Rush arrived from London, and on Sunday Robert's mother arrives. A few days later, her partner, Dale will get here too. Bummer is that I will be working during that time as I start another course tomorrow. This time I am giving a speed course in Academic English to six people (from Congo, Indonesia, Brazil, and Vietnam) who will be starting a Masters in Globalisation and Development at the University's Institute of Development Policy and Management. I am also still tutoring the two Korean high-school students twice a week. I am learning from these experiences but I am also very ready to get back to my own chosen field.

Evelina is so far thrilled that her aunt and cousin are here! She is so fascinated by Rush that I am sure he will be glad to return home after two weeks of being followed around by a 2-year old! She will not know what to do with herself when soon her grandmother will be here too. I promise some pictures!

For now, groetjes from Antwerp with love. I will add one more picture. A self-portrait taken while in Paris. Reflecting.

the dailies

While the electrician is installing light fixtures and the painter is painting the parent-bathroom, I will quickly post some pictures from the last few weeks. Picnics, a day at the beach, and visiting Antwerp's large en plein air sculpture garden, with Evelina. For a variety of reasons we have decided to keep Evelina at home with us, full-time. She is not upset about not having to go to day care anymore. In November she will start attending kindergarden. Time has flown by, she is growing up so damn fast that we want to have her with us for a few months before she is off to "school" with schedules etc. So, we do stuff with her around the house and out. She loves helping in the kitchen (never mind that everything takes twice as long). With her papa she has taken up doing puzzles. His mother tells me that as a 3 year old he could sit with his puzzles for hours. Evelina puts a 75-piece floor together in a few minutes and exclaims it was not difficult. So give her a few more months and she might do the same.























We also went to the beach for a day. Evelina had been reading some stories about the beach and wanted to see for herself (again, as she did not seem to remember that we had gone before... strange for a kid who talks about her pre-18 month daycare care-givers still and knows exactly which objects in the house came with us from Austin and which ones did not -- and I don't mean big things like furniture but plastic storage containers and the like...) The Belgian beach is well, a bit blah. It was crowded and we saw way too many pink people in tiny bathingsuits than Robert and I care for, but Evelina had a good time. So, we might do it again, but hit another and nicer spot on the coast next time.















Apart from trying to get work done in the house we have also started adding some green to its exterior. My mother made us planters with lavender for the front of the house, which now Evelina needs to water (whenever it doesn't rain -- she's only had to do it twice!) and Evelina and I planted some plants for the back. We still have to finish this projects as we have more plants than pots, but we hope to finish this by next week. We don't have much outside space behind the house but what we have we cherish and we have big plans for. It is amazing what a little bit of green and some flowering plants can do to one's state of mind. Evelina was very patient and helpful as she had had much practice planting flowers at Moeke's house. We even planted a little Texas-garden with cacti. Seeing the flowers at the front and back of the house is one of those little things in life that thoroughly makes me happy inside.

Hope you enjoyed the pics. More to come!

Ravelling is the loss of aggregates...

I am reading about asphalt, computational fluid dynamics, and bio-fuel. Among other topics. I am back at work. Editing. Not exactly what I have spent all these years in gradschool for but it is work at the moment. The language institute wants me, the museums here seem not to. So this is what I do, as it pays and I can do it at home in whichever room I want to and whenever I want to, as long as I make the deadline. So far, I always have. I could argue that I am learning new things... but to be honest I don't really care one computational parametric bit about this stuff. Although I of course hope that the asphalt on which I drive is strong and doesn't tear or ravel beneath my tires and I hope to God that the bio-fuel produced from waste will take the place of Bush's oil, but still I don't really care. The point is that all these professors and engineers and scientists cannot (some not for the life of them) write decently in English. So I get to fix it and rewrite it and make sure an English-speaking/reading audience will not raise too many eyebrows at the Dutch-isms in the texts. I get to do the eyebrow-raising, the difference is that I do know where the Denglish is coming from, and mostly I actually know what they really want to say in English (and when I am not sure, they inadvertently end up saying what I think they wanted to say...)

Since I am not too interested in the actual topics I try to get interested in the Denglish and I feel that I now would be prepared to teach a course on it. And by the sound of it, they (the University's Language Institute) is actually planning to do so and are thinking about asking me to teach it. The point of the course would be of course, to teach these academics how NOT to use the Denglish, and how to take the D(utch) out of it. Should be an interesting experience?

Other than the varying forms of Denglish I AM however learning quite some new (to me) vocabulary and terminology. I am just not so sure, given that the topics don't really strike me as of vital importance in my life, when I will ever be able to use the new stuff like turbulent flow, laser ablation, and biosurfactants. Oh well. We can never know, right. Once in a while a line strikes me, like "ravelling is the loss of aggregates." Now what could be more true than that! In the past few months I myself seem to have lost some aggregates and am feeling a bit "ravelled" or is it "unravelled?" Can I feel both? (And interestingly enough, going back to the Denglish, this is actually an English word derived from the Dutch). Enough of the babble. I might be boring you, my reader.

Or am I? And should I care? This is MY blog, isn't it? And why are you reading it anyway? Who is my audience and what does it want? To check in and see that we are all fine? To see whether the house is moving along or still in chaos? Now that this blog is "open" and available without log-in, I no longer have a readers-list. By making it easier to all of you (who are you?) I have made it a black hole for myself. But as one of my friends and readers (!) said, "I completely understand your conundrum regarding public/private blogs. However, from MY standpoint as an interested observer, I don't need another username and password in my life, so I'm game for keeping it public." And well, she is right of course!

I used to think that whoever REALLY wanted to read this blog, wouldn't mind logging in, and it would keep all the others out. Now that mine is open, I have done a little bit of browsing myself into other people's blogs and the hesitation I used to have about being out in the open has slightly vanished. Mainly because, honestly, I find that I myself am not that interested in other blogs anyway (exceptions are those in my list) and certainly not those written by people I have never even heard of. I can barely find the time to write my own, or read the musings of the blogs listed, let alone get engrossed in the blog-lives of others. So why would anyone be interested in mine? That allows me to sleep for the moment. Yet maybe not for long...as I can think of quite some people of whom I feel that they have absolutely no business at all peering into the snippet of my life I reveal inhere. (Okay, now that I think of that, I might lock it up again! Ha.)

Blog-life. Blog-self. That is all it is, isn't it? I asked my sister-in-law (the fencing bear) whether she doesn't make herself feel too vulnerable or naked after writing her often insightful but (seemingly) very personal and diary-like posts (see previous post). She answered that it isn't her but fencing-bear writing. The alter ego thus, or who and what she would like to be? And yet,don't we all do that, whether we call it something or not? Isn't this what this is about? A modern and convenient "good-letter-home" without a stamp and with the world as our mailing address. Whoever picks up the envelope can read the letter within. A wishful self-image? Or a carefully selected amalgamate of specific parts (Ha! aggregates) of who we are in truth. Yes, I think so. And that is fine. Look at www.willworkforplay.blogspot.com and who do YOU see? A sprightly, canine-loving woman who is into acrobatics and living life to the fullest, wearing perfume while inverted atop a horse? Yes. But she is much more than that. This is who she chooses to be, right now, for the world. I am fine with that. Brassai is still on my mind. Maybe he would have liked blogs -- the appearance of the truth, but in fact, all merely staged. But I still manage to let you all know my story, and that of the house with us in it. Even with the loss of aggregates.

From Antwerp with love.