Posts Tagged "American"

Broken Brain

Posted on Jun 17, 2013 | 4 comments

I had another broken brain moment the other day. Which is nothing new, really, but unfortunately this one happened during an exam. Usually this frustration arises when I have to write in Spanish or in Dutch but this time it happened while I was writing in English.

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Wine in the supermarket – help yourself!

Posted on Jun 5, 2013 | 0 comments

On late Saturday afternoons we always head to the supermarket and stock up on the weekly groceries. As we were taking the usual path through the aisles on a recent Saturday, I noticed there was a cart set up to try out a new beer that the store was selling. The guy manning the cart was washing the glasses and it seemed as if he had finished with his job for the day. Sometimes there are moments like this when I have to remind myself that I would have found this an unbelievably strange thing only 3 or 4 years ago.

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Oh no, not The Simpsons…again…

Posted on Nov 23, 2012 | 0 comments

There are many things about Belgium that I don’t always get, but I really do not get the obsession that Belgians seem to have with The Simpsons. In fact, I don’t understand why anyone would be obsessed with that show, but I can understand it even less when it seems to be a whole nation that is captivated by it. So many times during my lectures this semester a professor has made a reference to The Simpsons. Just yesterday, in one of my literature courses, a professor shared a clip of one of the episodes to elaborate on Edgar Allan Poe’s, The Raven. The lecture hall was filled with hundreds of students erupting in laughter, seemingly delighting in their common knowledge of every episode of The Simpsons that was ever produced.

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Second-hand Language

Posted on Sep 25, 2012 | 2 comments

To live is to learn, to learn is to grow, and to grow is to change.

Life is comprised of change. As children we grow and change physically; add more words, both beautiful and vulgar, to our vocabularies; learn what it is to love, what it is to be hurt. We grow older and we learn what it is to care for someone else even more than we care for ourselves. In some unfortunate cases, age brings with it the learned behavior to resist change. These are processes of life and sometimes change can be a scary and overwhelming thing. Beginning a life abroad can be described almost entirely through that word ‘change’.

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When the swear word loses its strength.

Posted on Apr 13, 2012 | 4 comments

Belgians are superior language learners. A week or so ago I was amazed again by their vast language capabilities. I was waiting for the tram around 10 in the morning so that I could make my English literature class lecture when an elderly man and woman made their way to the stop. As the tram was arriving the man asked me something in Dutch that I didn’t understand.

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