Lessons learned after 2 days in Brussels:

1. Belgians REALLY want people to know they invented french fries. They have little shops called friterie. It would be funny if there was a Belgian law that every time you bought fries in a friterie, you had to say “Belgians invented frites and also the Dutch language is real and not made up to make people sound hilarious”.

it’s a funny irony that i like taking pictures of the outsides of churches so much, and yet dislike any activities that go on in the insides of churches

2. Everything is photogenic in Brussels. I took the picture above on 30 hours of no sleep and a French lunch. (French lunch, or in France, lunch, is when you have wine with lunch.)

3. Airbnb is better than hotels by an indescribably huge margin. The other morning we were visited by a little gray kitten who came wandering up the stairs. (6 flights of stairs. In the listing for one of the Airbnb places we stayed in, it says ‘note to Americans: it is 6 floors up and there is no lift’. As though of all the people in the world who might stay here, Americans are the ONLY ONES who complained about the lack of elevator. To compensate for this, I only complained about the stairs approximately half as much as I wanted to.)

4. Belgians are so cultured! This morning Nic and I went out bright and early to find coffee and pastries (thanks, jet lag). In the coffee shop we chose, we went to the end of the line where a dude was standing sort of in line, sort of against the refrigerated area where there was bottles of juice and water and desserts and lunchy items in little containers. He chivalrously gestured us to go ahead of him in line, which I thought was nice. And then he picked up a bottle of carrot juice from the shelf and walked out of the shop without paying for it. He stole a bottle of CARROT JUICE. Belgium: Where everyone makes good choices, even the criminals!

5. There are many opportunities to buy hats. Nic’s reaction to each hat I tried on was an enthusiastic “hmm!” Like, he knew it was horrible but he isn’t a liar so the only thing he could honestly say while not being a jerk was a neutral “hmm”with a sort of exclamation point on the “hmm” so my feelings wouldn’t be hurt. I like to think I’m the kind of person who can successfully wear a hat, but instead I believe this picture accurately depicts how good I look in hats.

i feel as though this photo encapsulates so much of my personality

Working title of my next post: I Have Packed All Wrong, Again

– C

I’ve never cared for the word “engaged”. It makes it sound like, for some length of time, you’re just too busy for anything.

“Want to grab a drink after work at that new place that got written up in that thing?”

“Nah, I’m engaged.”

“Hey I was thinking we should go to a spa and have all our body hair rubbed off with sugar or river rocks or tiny fragments of BBQ potato chip or whatever it is they use now. Friday?”

“No can do. Engaged.”

But we are!  Engaged, that is. Nic and I are getting married next summer. Here are the decisions we’ve made about it so far:

– We’re going to have a wedding.

– Probably in the Pacific Northwest.

– There will definitely be hot dogs there.

– I might sing my vows, ideally while wearing a gold sequined bow tie. Maybe red sequins. Either way there’ll be jazz hands. (When I told this to Nic, he didn’t immediately see the genius in it, so I said “UMM…SHOW CHOIR???” as though that would explain everything, but instead he gave me a look identical to the look I give him when he talks to me about computer games.)

this is a picture nic took of me in gig harbor. you can clearly see that i am sleeping, and you can clearly see that i am in the middle of the bed. as we have an ongoing disagreement about JUST WHO is always taking up all the room, this was damning evidence. also, we don’t have any cute pictures of us together as a couple that would be appropriate to post with the news that we’re getting married because we only take pictures of things like jars of pickles, weird art and sneaky pictures of the other one WHILE SHE IS SLEEPING LIKE AN ANGEL.

Cat has officially taken her longest vacation in over half a decade. Yes, it’s only been a week. Her work ethic is the kind of thing Europeans furrow brows and shake heads at. You can tell she was nearing burnout by this picture I snapped of her during a work videoconference just before our break:

Business up top, party down below.

In an effort to help recharge her batteries, I’ve been a most gentlemanly traveling companion. I’ve been doing all the ordering, asking, talking, paying. I mean, I speak French. She doesn’t. She’s been making up for that by repeating that she speaks some Spanish from the SEVEN YEARS she studied it.

I’ve even been mostly carrying all the heavy shit. With ice cream as fuel, of course.

So we arrived in España after a beautiful few days in Collioure, maybe my favorite town in the world. We had a couple hour layover until the next train left. That’s when I realized that in her seven years of Spanish, she learned how to conjugate dozens of irregular verbs, but not how to ask for the bill at a bar. We ended up with an extra round of beers, which in hindsight wasn’t such a bad thing.

It reminds me of the month I spent traveling around Mexico with my dear friend, Matt Acosta. Matt is mustachioed and half-Mexican, but never learned a lick of Spanish. Every single person we met would go off on tirades of Spanish toward my unsuspecting comrade, after which he would awkwardly point to me and somehow nonverbally communicate that my Franco-American ass was their best chance at getting a few words across.

It goes to show that a bit of conversational spanish followed by practice can be a lot more helpful than years of rote learning and testing. I found this reddit AMA from last year about learning languages fascinating. Alas, I digress. We made it to the Teatro-Museo Dalì in Figueras, where we saw some wonderful art.

Fairly tame, but a bit weird.

Getting weirder…

As we walked through the museum, as the weirdness reached a mind boggling crescendo, Cat stopped and asked me seriously, “Do you get it?”

“I don’t think I ever ‘get’ art, but I like it.” I replied. This turned out to be the best joke I’d ever told, as Cat actually laughed out loud. The best I’d ever gotten before was slightly a stronger exhale through her nose. I can’t express how gratifying that was.

Weirdest. Seriously. What the fuck.

Thankfully, after a couple days here in Spain, Cat’s Spanish has been coming back, and mine is even improving a bit. People actually smile at our efforts before immediately reverting to English!

Get it?

So, Nic is bilingual. As in, he is a fluent French speaker. He went to high school and college in France. He has introduced me to many people in France who say “you don’t speak ANY French?”, like the unfortunate affliction it is; akin to watching reality television, or not liking seafood . “Not unless you’d like to come to bed with me tonight”, is the joke I’d say if there were anyone to laugh at my jokes.

I defended my lack of speaking any French by saying to people, who, by the way, mostly speak pretty good English* “I took SPANISH in school, if you can believe all the rotten luck! If only I’d met a handsome half-SPANISH American, but I guess there aren’t as many of them in database development.”

*Point you, schools in Europe. America is still too upset over losing to Asia at math to worry about teaching kids languages, I think.

But then Nic and I came to Spain, upon which time he said “ok, we’re in Spain. Now you be in charge of talking.” AS THOUGH THE THINGS I HAD SAID ABOUT TAKING SPANISH IN SCHOOL INDICATED THAT I SPEAK SPANISH.

this is a picture of nic every time i don’t speak spanish.*
*actually i made him stand in a grotto at parc guell so i could take pictures of him and THEN i made him take his sunglasses off and his eyes burned out of his head because it was so bright. but isn’t the first version funnier?

As it turns out, I don’t speak Spanish. At all. Today I remembered how to say “can I pay the bill, please” and it felt like discovering fucking penicillin. Also, after thinking about it with as much concentration as I’ve ever used in my life, I remembered that the word for ice is hielo. I felt like I’d birthed a child.

Unfortunately, speaking a language does not just consist of vocabulary. Sí, EL HELADO. Sí! LA ABUELA! Not good enough. Rarely, if ever, when traveling in a country, do you get to reference both ice cream and someone’s grandmother in one sentence.

Not never, but rarely.

seeing as this post isn’t really about anything, here is a picture of the ceiling at parc guell for some actual content. the place needs to be this epic and huge to hold up the weight of 12810 fat tourists. sorry, 12812.

My dad asked for more posts. HERE YOU GO, BRYAN. (I love you!)

We are in Domme, a fortified village in southwest France. I will not say anything about it, because I am now living here permanently. I’m never leaving ever.

So here is a picture of Nic cutting off the cast of a guy who lives in the village, who came by this morning to say hello and invite us to dinner. They did end up getting the cast off.

After this we did a blood letting