Life with “The Others”

I just had to drop another perplexed word from Belgium. I swear this country seems more illogical every day.

I am in quite an immigration quandary. Skipping the long version of the story, I have applied for residency on two counts. One with a lawyer on a special grounds, “rush” application, and one on my own on a regular cohabitation basis. (The Belgians allow for residency on basis of live-in couple. Nevermind the horrifying fact that the French call the latter an application for “concubinage”!) Both of these were done back in September. I’m on a deadline: I have until the end of this year to acquire said residency card, or my Belgian health insurance will be asking for its 200,000 euros ($270,000) back, thank you very much.

I have done everything I am supposed to. It is only a matter of Belgian bureaucracy wading through the backlog and getting to my file in time. (This assumes that they will ever get it done at all.) I have a friend who has been waiting for 18 months! I don’t have 18 months.

I cannot begin to describe how bad Belgian bureaucracy is. I won’t ramble on with stories (cause there are a lot!), but suffice it to say that if you take your worst experience with bureaucracy ever, multiply x2 and add a year’s worth of time you’ll have to invest in going through that experience…you’ll have an idea of what it’s like to accomplish anything official here. Now, I have decided that the “patiently waiting” routine isn’t going to work. I just don’t have the time. So I’m going to a new immigration lawyer. Next probem? Good luck finding one!

In the country with the highest simultaneous rates of bureaucratic foul-ups and education, you’d think some brilliant lawyers were cashing in on all us lost and helpless expats. But no. Even a google search turns up nothing useful. NOTHING. I’ve even searched the expat discussion boards. There are plenty of people begging for referrals to good immigration lawyers, but there are never any responses! Tell me, where are all the opportunistic lawyers when you need them? It’s like I’m in the Twilight Zone. If you know any immigration lawyers, please, fire away. I guarantee s/he’ll have the most lucrative gig in town.

Meanwhile, here’s the only good news in all this: the system here is so malfunctioning, that even if I am charged the 200,000 euros, by the time Belgium gets around to collecting I’ll be 80 years old. Three cheers for reflecting their evil-super powers back at them!

I’m going to occasionally start with observations that are short and sweet about things that just make no sense to me. I’ll call it the “BSOM” series.

Today my musing is this: To anyone who has a blog of their own, what’s with the “Search Engine Terms” listed in the blog stats? To anyone who doesn’t have a blog: there is a page that the owners of a blog can access which tell you all sorts of information, like how many hits you’ve gotten and what web pages have made links to your site, etc. There’s also a section that tells how people have come to find your site. If someone found it via a search engine, the stats page will tell you what search words were used to find the page.

Now, I love this. I am thrilled when I can tell that someone was specifically searching to find my site. But I get some of the craziest results. Who found my site by searching for “Brasenose fondue”, “undress Jess” or – get this – “boy gay hot .com”?! WTF? And why aren’t these people pissed when they wind up here? I mean, you can barely find my page if you are looking for it. How do you find it when you’re definitely not? Is my website secretly linked to some underground kink ring? (Oh, goody!) Or is it somewhere creating a mob of pitchfork carrying cyber-perverts, who feel they’ve been duped when they’re looking for hot pictures of “sexy animals” and end up with a rambling about the Czech Opera? (Though I do have some photos of sun-drenched cow fields now…)

Well, I’ll let you know if I ever find out. Meanwhile, all I can say is “BSOM”.

(P.S. In case you didn’t work it out yet, it’s: Beats the Shit Outta Me)

Yes, there is such a place! Even I didn’t know this until my weekend in Friesland a few weeks back (which I’ve been promising to write about but have not yet).

I have always wanted to go to Friesland. I know that first of all many of you will say “where?!” Friesland. It’s a region in the the Netherlands, found in the northeast. Friesland is what one would consider the countryside of Holland, inhabited more by farm animals and crops than by people. Certainly there aren’t many non-Dutch tourists up there.

Why would I have always wanted to go there? Initially it was because of the ethno-lingua-geek in me. In what comes as a surprise to many, Dutch is not the only official language of Holland. Frisian is as well, and it survives in this little known region of the Netherlands. I find it interesting because the most closely related language to modern English is not Dutch or German or a Nordic. It is Frisian. Upon hearing the language you probably wouldn’t believe me that it’s the closest to English, but if you talk to a Friesian about the fact, they will quickly be able to point out some convincing examples, most likely by telling you the name of whatever happens to be sitting in front of them. On this trip, that happened to be tsis (pronounced “tchis“….or…can you guess it? Cheese!) The old Frisian barometer on the wall had pressure readings that indicated “stoarmy weer” and “wyn” (stormy weather and wind).*

I was also interested in Friesland as a general lover of the Netherlands. Holland is a country that never ceases to amaze me, and is in fact the place I’d most surely nominate as best place to live and raise a family (for me anyway; Scandinavia coming in second). I have seen a fair amount of the country, which is chock full of interesting and beautiful things to investigate for such a small nation. (Nope, soft drugs and prostitution aren’t even on that list!)  Now, upon invitation by my friend Ilse to visit her uncle’s dairy farm in a place called Sneek or Snitch (depending on whether it’s the Dutch or Friesian name, pronounced sneak and snitch in English) I had the perfect opportunity to see this little visited region.

The weekend started off with an early Saturday morning trip to the Keukenhof – perhaps the most famous flower garden park in the world. In fact, our whole weekend had been planned for months and it started around my determination to see the famous Dutch tulips in bloom. I had missed the sight for three years running now. (I even lived amongst the flower fields one year, but it was out of season, of course.) I was determined to catch them this year, and was prepared for a photo-taking frenzy of the millions of flowers, floral sculptures and displays. Colors, colors, colors! One is promised a huge park full of stuff like this:

Aside from the plain old endless tulip fields, of course.

But guess what? What we got precisely was a entry fee for $20 a head, plus parking, for this:

As you can imagine, I was thrilled that I had planned an entire weekend around and paid a good bit of money to see a million stems.

After, we basically took a little road trip up the west coast. We passed over and ate lunch on the coast of one of Holland’s many marine wonders – a man-made sea made by enclosing an area of the ocean. It’s not a place to sunbathe, but it is a lovely spot to sit and look out over the water. We proceeded northward and stopped of at the Eise Eisinger planetarium: the oldest working planetarium in the world, made in the living room of it’s name-bearer in a town called Franeker in the 1774-81. A small, personable museum with local flavor and a legitimate cultural/historical gem, it is well worth a visit.

After, we advanced to the farm. I found our hosts to be very kind, though I will admit they struck me as being more like Mythical Dutch people than any I have met before. While I won’t say they fit all the cliches, they came closer than any I’ve met. I was most charmed to see that they do still wear wooden clogs in the fields. (They thought I was an idiot for wanting a photo of their old farm shoes!) Otherwise, I will simply say that I think Friesians do not host as many outsiders as their regional Dutch neighbors. Some of the standard rituals of interacting with unknown hosts were more awkward than usual, which is actually quite charming in its own way. (i.e. we bought a bottle of Bailey’s for the Mrs. as we were told she quite likes it. We presented it all gift wrapped, she opened, they started at the bottle a moment, she put it on the floor next to the sofa and continued on the conversation as if nothing had happened. Urm…okay. )
The rest of the tale is not much for story-telling, though it was so nice to live it. We spent Sat. night exploring the farm, seeing the barn, petting the cows and calves, visiting some of them in the field as well. Learning how easy it is to make them stampede. I also got one of my incapacitating allergy attacks which sent me to bed early, completely wrecked.

The next morning we borrowed our hosts’ bikes and took to the paths which wind through the fields and run along the gazillion canals. I’ve always wanted to take such a proper bike ride in Holland and it was so fantastic. We rode to the shore where there was a little island reachable only by boat. We jumped on and made our way to the waterfront restaurants to have a hearty brunch. Oh I was in love with the weekend!

I told you. It doesn’t make for an exciting story, but it was so relaxing and refreshing and beautiful, only making me fall more in love with perhaps my favorite country. I will leave you with some photos so you can see for yourself! (as always, there are more on Flickr). I wouldn’t usually admit it, but perhaps I am a country girl at heart after all!

Clogs and bicycles – does it get more Dutch?

*Just a note to say if I have somehow gotten something slightly wrong, feel free to let me know. But those examples are correct to my memory. If they are a little off, then still – you get the point!

That is JK Rowling’s secret. I say this because I went to Oxford, England this past weekend for the occasion of my boyfriend’s graduation ceremony for his MA. Mind you, he hasn’t done anymore work than he did for his BA from there. But apparently if you go to university at Oxford for your BA, if you wait 3 or 4 years your degree has the right to get automatically upgraded to an MA.

Did you know this? Word is that three universities in the British Aisles do this. Oxford, Cambridge and one other school in Ireland. While I am very happy for my bf, and I would certainly take up the opportunity, I must admit I find this pretty high and mighty of them (particularly considering I don’t even know the 3rd school in Ireland – so much for it’s famous education). While the idea is that these schools are among the best worldwide and, as such, the students had to work that much harder than students at most universities, I think this is total…oh, what’s the word?… Ah, yes: “crap”.

Firstly, I went to quite a good school and I would challenge how much “easier” my BA education work actually was. Secondly, I had to work for 4 years to get my BA. Graduates form these schools most often only have to work for 3 years (the classic European standard for BAs). Lastly, if one’s school has such a high educational reputation, than isn’t that the extra award one gets for going there? That everyone knows you completed an extra difficult educational program? Students from the Ivy Leagues don’t get an automatic upgrade to MA after a time and they are certainly famously difficult programs (if I am wrong, please correct me).

Anyhow, I don’t actually care, I just think it’s silly. I will add, in defense of the people that get these upgrades, that this type of MA does have a special name. My bf’s is called an “OxMA” or something like that, which indicates that it was an upgrade MA, not a traditional one. I doubt that employers in the US would know this, however. I would like my “ChaHillMA” please!

Regardless, I did terribly enjoy seeing Oxford and I have great respect for the school. It’s a beautiful little city. What I didn’t know before meeting my bf is that Oxford isn’t actually a university like we usually think of it. It is a collection of individual colleges under the “umbrella” name of “Oxford”. When you apply, you apply to individual colleges, and the college you get into is where you will live, eat and take classes. (This seems a terribly inefficient way to run a university, but then again no one says efficiency is the ultimate goal. I suppose it preserves small class size and individual attention, which may be what keeps it at the top of the rankings.)

The college situation is the first thing that reminded me of Harry Potter, outside of the generally beautiful, old, Gothic buildings that make up the city. During the graduation ceremony, this image became comical in dimension. Namely, the service is held in Latin. Ever heard people pretend to speak Spanish by putting an “o” on the end of every word? Speakingus Latinus is apparentlyus justus like thisus. Add the English accent to the language and the comparison is inescapable. The officials of the commencement could well have been spouting Harry Potter spells for all I know.

Of course, this is amplified by the complex assortment of robes worn by the participants. Sure, all university commencements feature particular dress. But these are old school “robes” (no $20 one color poly/nylon blend graduation “gowns” here!), slightly different for men and women, featuring colored hoods, where every particular status merits a decorative variation on the hood and/or robe. There were far more varieties than I have witnessed before in one place. What’s more, students do not only wear robes for graduation, but also for exams and the nightly formal dinner service in each college (if one chooses to go to formal dinner, and not informal). They are not one-wear graduation clothes. They are part of the university student wardrobe, so to speak.
In the ceremony, the graduates are called forward, grouped by discipline as well as college. (“Brasenose”? C’mon! It might as well be Hufflepuff…) In the main aisle they bow to the officials several times while their representative formally announces them in Latin. The MAs also go forward by fours and kneel in front of the officials, the leader of which taps them each on the head with a book.

I felt silly for thinking of Harry Potter, until after the ceremony when the entire (English/Irish) family said the exact same thing. I suppose if Oxford ever runs short of funds, it could make a lot of money by selling itself to the parents of HP obsessed children. As serious an educational institution a sit is, it is now forever a sort of Disneyland of universities in my mind. Just like the hotel workers in Turkey that reminded us of Disneyland because of their traditional costume, and we had to remind ourselves that Disney copied Turkish traditions, not the other way around. The same goes for Oxford with regards to Harry Potter. Go and check it out. You’ll be tempted to credit JK Rowling for 750 years of university traditions.