what i've learned

here is a video from a belgian sketch comdey show. they're making fun of the west-flemmish dialect. no one else from the country can understand it because they talk like cave men, yet i've lived here for only 3 years (come february) and I can already understand it (most of it. give me a break.)

anyway, i'm pretty proud that i'm able to understand their crazy talk so i thought i'd show you this video of a computer teacher teaching foreigners the west-flemmish terminology for using computers.



translation:

computer teacher gives introduction
"first and foremost, the computer is your friend. you will learn how to navigate this computer in west-flemmish dialect"

"windows 98 also has a specific language: RUUTE 98" (you can clearly hear the difference between the proper way to say 98 and the west flemmish shit way)

ok ok, everyone stand up
-everyone trys it for a bit-
teacher says: west-flemmish comes from within, let everything out
then he picks on gilbert and tells him he needs to let it out a little looser
the video cuts to another term word but they dont say the actual english word for it, but for reference they're talking about turning on the computer "start"

underline: onderstreeepen
exit
login
log out
backspace

video cuts to the teacher helping a student while gilbert hits his computer
teacher: whoa whoa, gilbert, please!
-turns to other student- whats he doing?
you never hit the computer

if you want to print:
print
hard disk
floppy disk
shut down

then gilbert asks a question regarding something not working properly on his computer and he needs to transfer files to his floppy disk, what does he need to do?
and the teacher answers: thats simple gilbert, you turn it on, stick it in, log in log back out and be done with it
gilbert: ahhhh...now i understand
(mind you gilbert is also speaking west flemmish so the whole foreigner thing doesnt really fit there)

chapels

there are many road-side chapels here in Belgium. i've always found them all very beautiful and unique. i've wanted to do a project around them (i know exactly what the project is but i'm not saying here in case any lurkers try to steal my awesomely awesome ideas). last weekend the rain had finally let up so gregory and i thought it a perfect idea to go snap some photos of the road-side chapels. he did the driving, i did the snapping. here are the photos from last weekend:




















All roads lead to Belgium





Taken today:
gregory and roxy take many naps, here is one captured

November 1, belated

November 1 and 2 are holidays in these parts.
All souls day; the day to cry because your loved one is dead, and all saints day; the day to be happy because they're in heaven (hopefully, right?!)
its tradition to go to the graveyard on november 1 and put flowers down. i think its a beautiful tradition. not only does it make you NOT forget about those who you've burried but it also makes the cemetary look so beautiful, pleasant, welcoming and ALIVE.

this is my third all souls day experience yet only my first time taking pictures. every year i asked gregory to take me to a cemetary and every year he was too afraid of..i dont know, mortality, death, looking like a freakazoid because his girlfriend is treating the cemetary like a tourist attraction?
i guess he's learning to live with me better, or just growing up because we FINALLY went to one. and he did feel a little weird with me taking pictures but i told him they show pictures in the paper so its not that crazy and he let me do my thing...while staying 200 feet away at all times as to not look associated with me ;)











a herpoel and her husband that we didnt know exisited.
(funny story. gregory and janne are related by marriage. but the husband burried here isnt part of janne's family.)

the mystery that is my hair

heres a crazy little story that i may have told before; every time my hair grows people ask me if i've cut it. nope. it just falls differently i've come to tell people. what other explaination is there for people thinking that my longer hair is shorter?
In september i explained this rather poorly to a college of mine. she got the message and too, found it strange. a few weeks ago some else asked me again if my hair had been cut. nope, not cut. blown dried, surely, a little poofier than normal, certainly, but definetly not cut.
but i went to get my hair cut last night. and i was eager for all the oos and ahhs that come with cutting your hair (whether its sincere or not doesnt matter) but there were no oos and ahhs. someone commented on it firs tthing in the morning only because i rode the bus home with her and told her i was going directly to the hair dressers, so she had an obligation to say something. no one commented until the middle of the day! thats a long time for someone not to notice! and i cut a good 3-4 inches off!
how can people notice the minute changes in my hair while its growing but not the drastic change of chopping inches off?
the world may never know.

granted its nothing special. i was only looking for a simple cut anyway, but STILL!
jerks.

BEFORE



SILLY




AFTER




SILLY

Day of the dog/ around town

Dog




"the flash is so bright!"


itchy


after getting into muck. she looks bummed that i wouldnt let her inside


pretty puppy


jumping over the bushes



jumping back over the bushes

Around town:





wagon thingie



barbed wire




berries

forgot

i forgot to post 2 other photos from saturday, mainly because they have nothing to do with pumpkin carving.

here you will see the first photo ever taken with this particular Nikon D40, and a picture from the end of the night:




roxy and gregory like to kiss




they start them early here in Belgium, how else do you think they get the reputation for having the best beer?
baby Daan on quality control in the kitchen

new camera/pumpkin night

i got a new camera Saturday! its the Nikon d40! we got it on sale at a local store. apparently it normally comes with 2 lenses but this one only came with 1, hence the sale. but i still find it a good deal because i went into a camera shop a couple of weeks ago and asked how much it was and for 1 lens with it it was still a hundred euros more than this one. yay!

so last night there was a pumpkin carving thing going on at a church in Kortrijk. (Halloween is really picking up here more and more each year) they brought in 4 tons of pumpkins and gourds and you were encouraged to use your creativity to carve a pumpkin and they even had wooden dowels so you could make creatures out of you pumpkins. it was a blast! i had to hand over my new camera to Gregory because i was covered in pumpkin goo. here are some photos he took from the evening:


Pumpkins


gourds


my nearly finished product



happy to be carving



giving people looks while carving



janne and me with our finished pumpkins



goblin kids!



more kids dressed up



pieter-jan and thomas NOT carving, but drinking beer

Halloween survey thingie

HALLOWEEN QUESTIONS:

What were you last year for Halloween?: dead bride because gregory wussed out and wouldnt be the beetlejuice to my lydia.
What are you going to be this year?: a fat drunk on the couch?
Favorite costume you have ever worn?: umm.. my pin-up costume that i made?
How do you spend your Halloween?: its different every year. i try to do something fun though
Are you or are you not going trick or treating this year?: HA! NO
Did or do you pull Halloween pranks?: nope
Do you believe in ghosts? I do
Are you superstitious? yes
Do you like caramel popcorn?: eww gross
Have you ever gone in the country to look for pumpkins? YES!!
Have you ever been on a hayride? yes!
Do you decorate your home for Halloween?: uh heck YES
Have you ever been to a haunted house?: plenty of made up haunted houses and the lizzie borden bed n breakfast which was def haunted. my old dorm building was also haunted as it was general shaw's estate (the duded that lead the 54th regiment in the civil war. theres your history lesson for today.)
Have you ever been to a graveyard on Halloween? yeah
Have you ever attended a Halloween party?: yepp
Do you watch scary movies on Halloween? I always watch scary movies
Have you ever had your candy stolen from you?: no
Did you ever steal any ones candy? probably my brothers
Has anyone ever gotten hurt due to your prank?: no pranks
Have you ever dressed as a witch/warlock?: I've NEVER been a witch
Are your parents into Halloween?: not really
Do you know someone who was born on Halloween? don't think so
HAVE YOU EVER:Passed out candy?: yep
Bobbed for apples?: yeah, its messy
Gone to a pumpkin patch?: yes!
Hosted a Halloween Party? yes!!
Attended a Halloween Party?: of course!!
Made pumpkin pie?: yes
Raked leaves?: yeah for fun and not for fun
Watched the Travel Channel with the Halloween specials?: wait..what? i didnt know they had that!
HAVE YOU SEEN:
Amityville Horror?: yes
Halloween?: no
Last House On The Left? no
House Of Wax?: yes
Tales From The Crypt? yes
The Exorcist?: yes
Texas Chainsaw Massacre?: yes
Pumpkinhead?: no
The Sixth Sense?: yes
All or any of the Nightmare On Elm Street?: all!
Practical Magic?: pffft yeah!
Any or all of The Simpsons Halloween episodes?: yep
The Munsters?: love em
The Adams Family?: love em
Elvira?: heck yes!
The Lost Boys?: no
Contact?: no
Hocus Pocus?: yes
Edward Scissorhands?: *swoon* yes
Friday the 13th?: actually- no
Childs Play?: yes
The Shining?: yes
Salems Lot?: yes
Fright Night?: no

double dose of crazy

one of the old ladies that lives at my work has been particularly crazy the past 2 days. she's normally one of the normal ones that make you question how she landed herself on the dementia floor in the first place.

Now i know why.

yesterday, as i was making bed rounds, she stopped me before moving past her room and asked for a small, dark, plastic bag. i was pretty confused because we don't use such bags anywhere in the building. I asked her why she needed a bag and she said, as a matter of factly, that she needs the bag for when she wets herself. she needs someplace to put the wet pad.
OK then....
Like i said before, we don't use dark bags in the building so i began looking on my linen cart for something that could be used. i found a small plastic sack that had been holding such pads that she was referring to. it wasn't exactly dark, but certainly an opaque white with blue in it. so i handed it to her and she shook her head.
"no no no." it has to be a brown or khaki color, the color of my shit.

i blinked.
did i seriously hear her correctly?
i had a college with me and by her cracking it i think i did. mmmhmmmm...."the color of shit"
i had to disappoint her by saying i don't have any shit colored bags.

fast forward to today. i thought she was having a momentary laps of craziness but apparently it overflowed into today. i got through my entire bed making rounds, even talked to her at her room and all was normal, until i was putting everything away and she flagged me down and asked if i had a girdle for her.
WHAT?!
she's never worn a girdle since I've been there. and she's skinny!

i think its just going to keep getting better.

cleaning class

today i had to stay longer at work because a representative from the company where we buy our cleaning products came in to teach us the proper method in which we should be cleaning. (tomorrow I'll e learning how to serve people and even though i don't serve people at my cleaning job, and the fact that I'm suppose to leave at 12 because I'm working the weekend, i still have to be there from 1-4. yay.)

turns out i already clean pretty much in the acceptable manner whereas other ladies admitted they didn't. i was so surprised because Belgian ladies are always cleaning<; turns out, their point of view is "if the floor is clean then the room is clean!" which i already gathered from observing_____.i noticed before she spends SO much time cleaning the floor yet her house still looks dingy. its because she doesn't have time to bother with anything else after washing floors for hours.

while in the class the rep asked our previous working backgrounds. she wanted to know if we cleaned for a living in the past. i gave my answer and the head cleaning lady told the rep that "i don't speak dutch that good" i was furious! i hate when people feel the need to excuse me or apologise for me. other people aren't stupid. they can obviously tell that I'm speaking text book dutch and not a regional dialect which, by process of elimination, would make me a person not from Belgium.
i should be the only one who apologises or gets to lean on the excuse that its not my first language. but i wasn't in trouble. i answered correctly. the woman understood me perfectly. there was no need to point fingers at me.
its at times like that when i just want to smack the person. or yell at them. or just get up and leave. if my dutch is so damn bad for her to have to let the other person know then why was i in the class?
then i had to be the "special" one through out the class and be asked if i was following OK. like I'm a retard.
yeah. i felt good.

spooooooooky

is it too early to start talking about Halloween?

i didn't think so.

i came across a book that i just HAVE to have!

by the creator of the infamous "puking pumpkin" and website extremepumpkins.com, Tom Nardone has a new book out also titled Extreme Pumpkins

only 5left in stock. anyone feeling generous should buy it for me now ;)

I don't plan on having a party this year either, and instead really want to go here:

http://www.magichalloween.com/index.html#UK

tickets are only 29 euros per person and if you ask me that's not toooooo expensive. i want to go for the big Halloween party on the 31st but i don't know if we can get the day off. I'll have to discuss it with Gregory but regardless i need to go! its not like anything else halloweeny is going on around here.

I ZOO do YOU?!

Monday Gregory and i went to the zoo, as we both had a day off. it was awesome! the weather turned out in our favor for the most part; can't ask too much more than that from Belgium.

we took lots of pictures, so here are some of us for your viewing pleasure.

enjoy!

Gregory on the train to Antwerp

Me on the train to Antwerp

Antwerp station. it was built before the Eiffel tower! its so beautiful and exactly how i would picture a train station in the 1800s--only in black and white.

with the warm penguins

with the cold penguins

telling Gregory the camera is crooked..or am i calling him a loser?? you decide.

Its Belgium! explanation enough.

Gregory with a warthog

me with an elephant.

This was actually a garden with all red flowers and red benches and i wanted a picture in it because i too was dressed in all red, but Gregory didn't get the flowers in the photo. instead he got a trash can.

I found Nemo:

DIRTY PICTURES AHEAD: