First work day

It was just a work day ... I probably won’t have much chance to start exploring the city til the weekend. But here are some tidbits to go on with.

The apartment where I’m staying is pretty nice -- not even just a studio, but with a separate bedroom and a separate if very tiny kitchen. But it doesn’t have a working clock, and though my computer and my watch tell the time, I brought nothing that would serve as an alarm clock.

Running on the empty of no more than 6 or 7 hours of broken sleep from Sunday night to last night, I still managed to fail to get to bed before midnight. When I woke up, it felt like it was 7 or 8 a.m. at the latest, and I thought maybe I could go back to sleep for an hour without getting to the office too unacceptably late. It was indeed 7 or 8 a.m., actually 6 a.m., in the time zone my body was still functioning in. Here in Brussels, it was actually noon.

I scurried through a quick shower, skipped breakfast -- easy because there was no food in the apartment -- and went to work. There’s a little grocery store nearby where I went to pick up some basic supplies and something for lunch and had my first adventure with a person who didn’t know a word of English. (Yesterday the immigration man at the airport, the taxi driver, and the waitress at dinner all knew plenty.)

The check-out lady said something to me and I said, “Je ne parle pas francais” (I don’t speak French) -- coherently enough so that she understood. She then said, “Anglais?” “Oui,” said I. She laughed and indicated that she didn’t know a word of English herself. We then had a little adventure in which I reached for a bag to put my groceries in, and she told me that a bag would cost something. I understood the gist, but not exactly how much she had said. I had removed all the American coins from my pocket, but not the British ones I acquired at Heathrow yesterday. I tried handing her a 1 euro coin, but she didn’t want to give me change for that, so I just held out my handful of money and let her take back one of the small coins she had just given me for change.

I will try to be less shy about trying out the few French words and phrases I know. But being here where I walk around hearing nothing but French (except at the office) makes even more amazing what Jamie undertook to do last summer when he traveled all over China by himself. Here, many many people speak at least some English, the alphabet is the same as ours, and it’s possible to puzzle out quite a bit of signage because of the echoes between English and French and for that matter English and Dutch/Flemish. For Jamie in China, there was none of that. I doubt I’d have the courage to try it!

Language echo example: As in parts of Canada -- e.g. Ottawa, which I visited for a couple of days about 15 years ago -- lots of signs are in both local languages. The street where I’m staying is called “Rue de la Vallee” in French (literally “street of the valley”) and “Dalstraat” in Flemish. My unconfirmed guess is that “Dal” is related to English “dale” -- valley.