Life with “The Others”

I love Europe. But it’s financially veeeery painful to live here right now. I had some euros for a while, but now they’re gone. I just brought over half of my savings, and I have to tell you, the result after exchange is breaking my heart.

Particularly as I lose more money by the day. You see, it takes a couple of weeks for my money to get transferred. When I made the order, it was hard enough with each euro costing me $1.37. Now, ONE WEEK later, my money has not come through yet. And now each euro will cost me $1.40! I’ve lost 3-4 cents for every dollar that I had! In one week! Booo hooo hooo hooo….

Did any of you guys see this headline yesterday?

“Someone Tries to Sell Belgium on ebay“Ha! Brilliant.

How very Belgian humor of them. It’s true, this government situation in Belgium is weird. And it did deserve some outside press. As a matter of fact, I found out in a visit to an immigration lawyer last week that the government malaise is the probably reason for my delayed residence filing. It doesn’t help me, but it does make me feel better to have an explanation. I left his office feeling a little embarrassed. I was thinking: Belgium doesn’t have a government? How is it that I live here, and I didn’t know that?!

Well, I had known it. I knew that a new PM had been elected in June and that he now had to work out coalitions with all the other represented parties before anything could proceed. But I had just assumed that all got arranged and I promptly forgot about it. But no. And it is very hard to understand for someone who comes form a two party system. Not only because it’s complicated, but because I just cannot fathom that the government is allowed to be in limbo for this long while they squibble!

Here’s the deal as I understand it: the PM who was elected is Flemish. He got elected by promising the Flemish all sorts of new autonomies. And he really believes in that. But there are goodness-knows how many other parties. here, you’re party doesn’t simply win or lose. One wins by getting the largest percentile, but the other parties still have to be represented according to the percentile they received.
So, now the winning PM has to make agreements with enough of these other parties to gain a majority big enough to get things done. (Someone correct me if I have any of this wrong.) Apparently, the Walloon government peeps don’t like the Flemish PM’s plans, so there aren’t enough people agreeing on anything to get the numbers needed to get a move on.

I see ebay took down the auction, but perhaps they should rethink it. If Belgium is not careful, it will not even fetch the bid of 10 million that was offered! The record for Belgium going without government is 300 days. I wonder if there’s an office pool I can get in on…

Bus-ride photo: I call this one “Sweet Misery in Image”.

So we get on the bus and situate ourselves in the stuffy back row as much as possible. After a good while of laughing at our predicament we settle down and try to sleep. What do we discover about this us trip next?

That they don’t come around with “sodas and juice and coffee and water”. They do come around with coffee and water, so at least there’s that. It comes in the form of instant powder in a plastic dixie cup, which melts when the boiling hot carafe of water comes around. The melting stops just short of the cup disintegrating and we hoard our cups to stack them against the burning heat on our fingers. Then again, since there’s no toilet it’s a gamble to drink it.

This bus service, that “goes straight to Cappadocia”? Yeah. It goes”straight” there after stopping in every little podunk place in Turkey! Several times we stop in the middle of the highway and drop people off! Literally, we look out the window onto a guardrail and just black fields beyond, wondering what the hell someone is doing getting of there.

We also stop where there’s a toilet every 1-2 hours. Of course, they all cost money even though they are nothing more than piss-soaked holes in the ground (often no toilet paper even). Why are we paying? No idea, but after 2 cups of melty-cupped coffee we’re in need.

As the night goes on…long and miserable…our lack of sleep becomes torturous. We were already exhausted, but that doesn’t seem to help us sleep. Eventually my sister comes up with an idea: newspaper is sterile. (A little trivia for you.) So we’ll buy a bunch of papers and coat the back. Two of us can sit on the paper-covered ground and two of us can then spread out on the seats. We are so desperate that we finally agree and get some papers at one of the convenience stops.

So we coat our area in the back, not caring if it looks obnoxious, and I get on the ground. I am after all the youngest. I’m not going to make my father get on the ground! But as the others all say “I don’t care who goes down on the other side. We’ll take turns of course,” my sister decides that the two 60 year olds can figure it out between them. She puts on her eyemask, ear plugs and curls up in the seats.

The other three of us do our best to get comfortable, switching around all night long. I think my sister has been tricky. I think she is selfish, and while it’s fine at first I am angry by the morning, when we’re all trying to get off the floor but she won’t even move to make room for us on the seats! She just lies there, covered and sleeping away. At one point, after dad has been wanting to sit like a human being for a good long while I decide to get assertive. There’s no way she can be sleeping that soundly, and if she is, well I’m pissed about that too!

I sit beside her, call her name, put my hand on her leg, rub her leg, shake her. She doesn’t move. It takes several minutes and I have to get less than gentle before she bothers to raise her eye mask and ask irritatedly, “WHAT?”

….We all get resituated in our proper seats now and we watch the early morning go by as we pass a salt lake that’s the size of Texas. We have a tour arranged at 9am; we were supposed to arrive in Urgup at 6:45. It’s now already 7 and there’s no civilization in sight. As we watch and wait and feel the grit of fatigue in our eyes, my sister has another suggestion.

“You know, if someone wants to get back on the floor, the rest of us can lift our feet up and give them some room.”

My dad, my friend and I look at her, the only one who has not once gotten off the civilized comfort of her chairs and note her wording: “…the rest of us can lift our feet.” What a piece of work! The rest of us simply groan at her. She, of course, does not volunteer to get on the floor herself. I actually want to strangle her. I refrain.

In the end, the journey lasted not the dreaded 11 hours, but 13! And even more typically, we arrive in one town’s bus station only to have them yell out a different destination. I speak up that we’re going to Urgup and, after some yelling to other drivers across the parking lot, they order us to get off! We have to catch another bus to our town, which was not supposed to happen, and now they’re yelling, “Hurry up! Hurry up! Hurry up!” Needless to say we’re completely unprepared to jump off but somehow we manage not to leave anything behind, partially thanks to our decision to laugh at them when they yell, “Hurry up!” and take our time to gather our belongings.

We arrive at our hotel at 10. The tour operator calls while we’re in the hotel van in route from the final station to tell us we must go immediately. I negotiate for 30 minutes to freshen up. In pure Turkish style, the hotel knows the situation but insists on giving us the grand tour of the hotel right now. I say, “well – as you know – we’ve only 30 minutes to shower and settle in. Can we see it on our return?”

“But we need to give you the tour. It will only take a few minutes.”

We oblige the cultural norms, understanding they are just being hospitable, smiling and “um hmm” -ing as they show off the place they are so proud of. The end of the story is that we make it to the tour, stay awake, have a wonderful day, and even manage not to try and take advantage of the extra floor space in the tour van. It would be big enough to sleep on, you know….

Well, finally back from sis’s wedding and all that jazz, with not one proper story told about the travels. Well, just for Frankie, here’s bus story.**

The scene is: Turkey. Istanbul. We finally made it. Myself, my dad, one of my sisters, and a friend of mine. Istanbul is stunning. I’m in love with it. it’s chock full of the coolest crap you ever saw. The Muslim aspect makes it exotic. The moderate part of that scene makes it, I think, a rare and shining and beautiful example (comments on that later).

I’ve been planning this trip for 6 months. Reading the books, searching the internet. Doing the TripAdvisor thing, doing the TurkeyTravePlanner thing, doing the Virtual Tourist thing, etc etc. And I’ve come up with a rough plan, subject to change: Istanbul for several days, overnight train to Ankara, Ankara for an afternoon, car driving/busing to Cappadocia, on to a Konya for a night, hitting Catalhoyuk on the way out to Pamukkale. From there the days are open, in order to build some flexibility into the schedule for us to go slower or faster as we like. We have several days left and only one other must see after Pamukkale: Ephesus. If there’s time I’d like to hit a number of other ruins, but we’ll see how it goes. Note that, because I’ve had the time to be in charge of planning and research, none of the other three has much of a clue about anything vis a vis traveling Turkey.

Now. My friend, we’ll call her B, gets to Istanbul 12 hours ahead of my family and I. We arrive at the hotel at midnight to find her not there. We three ohh and ahh at the vision of the Blue Mosque and the AyaSophia from our rooftop terrace. (Progress on the photo upload to Flickr coming today as well.) Eventually, as we make our way to bed, B arrives. She met a nice Turkish gentleman, whom she went to dinner with. This is quite adventurous for her first day in an extremely foreign country (well, anyone actually). Good for her!

But this causes a slight problem: in telling our plans to Turkish Gentleman, he says, “no no, you don’t want to take the train. The trains in Turkey are awful. You want to take an overnight bus directly to Cappadocia. [something something] 2007.”

Here’s what I knew about Turkish buses and trains from my 6 months of investigation: the bus system is smashingly detailed and (supposedly) impressively nice. The train system is only months away from the first of many long-awaited and huge upgrades. Meanwhile, the tracks are crazy-windy and thus it takes forever to get anywhere. The conclusion of everyone I’ve talked to: you want the bus, unless you’re going overnight. Cause who wants to sit up on a bus all night when you can get quite nice sleeper cars?

Well, B was convinced by what this man said to her, to the point that she was claiming there were beds on the bus. When we expressed doubt over this she relented on that fact a bit, but in general, over the days in Istanbul there grew a tension among us whenever this topic came up. She was pushing for the bus. Honestly, I think she wanted to believe him because she only had a week in Turkey and wanted to get right to Cappadocia, and she was not willing to split from us for a day. She said again and again that he was a local and that “2007″ meant there were special new buses (maybe even with beds). Although she kept saying “but I’ll do whatever you want”, she kept pushing here and there. She said things like, “The train…yuck…stops everywhere and will be so uncomfortable. But, that’s okay. I think I’m the one who has the most difficulty sleeping. But…if you want to take the train, it’ll be okay if I don’t sleep.” And one day she said, “why are you so…close-minded about changing the plans?”

Looking back (of course) I should have just put my foot down. But I had not traveled in Turkey yet either, and in no way did I want my planning to be mistaken for “controlling”. The train did have the down side of us having to hassle with dragging bags around and changing transport in the morning in Ankara. So – even though it has what was awarded “Europe’s best Archeology Museum” (= catnip for the family, particularly Jen) – we agreed to the bus, promised by B to be a more comfortable choice.

We got our tickets for the 11 hour trip arranged. Stepped on the bus with our bags….(drum roll!)…and wanted to shoot B ourselves in the face. Reflecting back, I realized that the “2007″ quote from B’s friend must’ve referred to the not-yet opened big train project, not the busses. Not only was the bus not particularly nice, we were all 4 across the back row of the bus (worst seats in the house I’d read, as being above the engine makes it stifling), and one of the seats didn’t even recline. Oh, AND there was NO TOILET! Now we all know that bus toilets are foul and you don’t want to use them. But for 11 hours, I want the insurance.

So, off we went, being the best sports we could. This involved picking on B while she rightfully hid her face, laughing at the absurdity of it all, and generally (luckily) able to frame it as a future good travel story. Or, from the Turkish passengers point of view: we were being loud, laughing, ugly Americans.

It wasn’t our intention to be loud or obnoxious! Simply, the situation was just such a bomb to the expectations we’d been given that it required lots of laughing to avoid the crying. Our desperate hopes for B to be right had been dashed against the the sides of this crappy bus. (We knew we should have trusted our own 6 months of research!) And we were stuck. For a veeeeery long time. And I hope we were not deemed disruptive. I hope we were not taken to be uppity or disparaging of the way that the other passengers traveled. But we probably were. So be it. It was a survival skill.

Tune in tomorrow for Part II of the Bus Ride from Hell.

** Note: this story is told with nothing but love for our dear frined B.

Some positivity, and stories from all these travels I’ve been teasing you with… (I promise!)

I have something to confess.

Out of all the complaints I have about Belgium, the one most people would expect is not on there. As a matter of fact it may be in my “plus” category. I’m speaking about the the weather. The thing all Low Landers (and vistors of) just love to complain about. I mean, sure it rains a lot. But I like rain most of the time. Sure it can be short on sun and warm days. But my favorite clothes are jeans and sweaters. Sure it’s only the 4th of September and I’m already wearing a knit skull-cap to keep warm (and I’m not even bald this year!), but I don’t mind!

Particularly after the long nastiness that was last summer. A constant hot and sticky 90-something degrees, I began to feel that if Belgium is going to jump on the global warming bandwagon, it’s going to have to get hip to the air-conditioning thing. Personally, I don’t even really like a/c. I like just enough to remove the humidity from the air. As a matter of fact I spend the sweaty summers of my native North Carolina carting around a sweater or jacket at all times. Every movie theater, restaurant and store feels cold enough to ski in. I hate it. Stores – both here and in the US – are the worst offenders. When it’s 100 degrees outside, you can always find relief walking down the shopping streets, as every store attempts to lure you in with blasts of cool air aimed directly out of their open doors. While I enjoy the efforts of every Zara, Hema, GB, etc. to cool the streets by blowing their a/c into to the street, it’s a ridiculous habit. I bet if we prohibited stores from blowing a/c onto the street we’d cut emissions by half!

But I’m digressing. I was admitting the thing that might officially make me an outcast here. I like the dreary weather. I’m not saying it’s perfect. If I were God I’d make it the same temperature and rainfall, but with a sunnier sky. Yeah. Sun would be good. But I’ll take curling up indoors with a blanket over loitering in the doorway to Zara anyday.

And just TRY to find the god damned list of translators that they say you have to use. I dare you. Just try to do it without wishing you had a magical button that you could push to send an electric shock to every “official” person who wasted your time, who gave you a completely useless answer. Your finger would hurt from hitting that button. And the city would be littered with people with smoke pouring out their ears.

I told you that the papers say you have to use one of their official translators. They say something like “list available from the commune”. I’ve now asked at 5 different offices and called 3 different people. All I get is the run around. I’ve made it to the point of knowing that the list is available from the Palais de Justice. The commune told me to go to the PdJ website. Ha! Good luck finding it! I called them directly and the woman didn’t have the list, nor did she tell me where to get it. She said call back later and see if someone else knows!!! I asked for the website. She acted like she’d never heard of the internet.  Finally she said there IS a site, “something like ‘palaisdejusticebruxelles’”. I attempted to get a more specific answer than “something like”, but every time I asked she’d say “yes”. I’d offer a variation on the website address, hoping to hit on something that jogged her memory more, but she just kept saying “yes”. Of course, none of those suggestions worked. So I called the commune back and asked for the address. You know what she said? “Call the palais. They’ll know.”

Oh my God there aren’t curse words bad enough for what I’m feeling.

If you can indulge me for a bit more bureaucratic ranting (I know it gets dull quickly but I so can’t help it!), let me just tell you what’s happened since the last rant. In short: I got to speak to the people I wanted, they gave me a list of new documents to get. Of course the requested documents don’t exist for Americans, so I go to the US Embassy and get something sufficient drawn up in about 30 minutes. “Wow! Easy,” I think.

Ah ha! Not so fast. My documents have to be translated by a “sworn” translator in Belgium. If I use my own, I must go an extra 1,000,000 steps to get their signature verified. That’s a pain, but understandable. But there’s more. My shiny new stamped, signed and re-stamped US documents are accompanied by a little index card with the website and phone number of an other Belgian office (like they are ever going to answer the phone…yes, I tried.) where “all documents issued by the US Embassy” have to be taken for another “legalization”. And to my great pleasure (add sarcasm to voice) there is a note: “10 euros per document. We are generally quite busy and the waiting times can be quite long.” Beautiful.

There a page on the Belgian diplomatic website where you can double check whether this is necessary. Handy right? But you have to find your country name from among a list of about 180, which are not even alphabetized. (It’s a joke right?! They can’t expect us to think anyone but kindergartners did this.) You scroll forever, squinting to find your country name, click on it, and…wait for it…the relevant information is not there. I’ll just have to go and wait in line to see for myself.

On my boyfriend’s side, he went to his embassy and they gave him his forms. But!…they won’t act as witness to his filling out the papers. “We don’t do that,” they said. Never mind that the form clearly says “signature to be witnessed by any counselor officer”. So we had to take them to an official notaire. (Notaires here can be quite different from US notaries.) Where to find that? A call to the commune house (they answered!) said that we go to office X from 7-9pm. I knew this sounded fishy, but I now accept that anything doing with Belgian bureaucracy requires at least 3 visits to gain access to what you need. So we went, of course to find that the entire place is closed at 5. (There mere idea that a civil servant here would do anything 7-9pm is downright absurd. I don’t know what the fellow on the phone was smoking.)

Today we get up early and go back to the commune house to window X, and they say that it is not a document that exists in Belgian government, so they also won’t witness the signature. I argued that the document itself is not in question, merely the signing of it. They refuse. They say we have to find a private notary.

At this point, that much has now been accomplished. Mind you, for all this, I’ve no idea if it will help my residency case or not. That’s what really gets me. But I have no choice but to try, as desperate as I am. I’m sure there will be one more rant once I go to get my docs “legalized”. I mean, who doesn’t like to spend a day waiting in line to have someone stamp an already official document as being “official”? I’m happy to have matters that affect my life gravely used in an excuse to run an extra bureaucratic office and a way for the government to make money. Makes me feel all warm and tingly towards them. Course…I’m not sure if that’s patriotism or a seizure. I’ll let you know how that turns out.