For the love of hygiene.
On Wednesday it happened. The last straw was placed on the delicate little camel’s back and my toes crept right up to the very end of the ledge of sanity. I was washing my hands in one of the women’s restrooms in my faculty building and as I rinsed away the soap bubbles a girl exited a bathroom stall and came up to the sink.
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Testosterone Terrier
I regularly take the tram to and from the city center of Ghent and I’ve found that there is a pattern involving the occurrence of unusual events and my presence on the tram. The other day I was just on my way home after a long day of classes at Ghent University and I was allowing my brain a few moments of relaxation while I enjoyed the warmth of the tram car, watching people going about their day on the other side of the glass. We went slowly past the Kouter and that was when I saw something unusual.
Read MoreNow on Pinterest
I’ve been working on building a Pinterest board for OppositeOcean for a while. At first I was using my personal Pinterest account and had created just one board for OppositeOcean but I experienced a lot of limitations with this. Therefore, I’ve created a separate Pinterest account just for OppositeOcean where I will only pin things related to Belgium. I wanted to be able to create more boards so that the links would be more useful and organized. I think it will be a fun and easy way to organize different restaurants, museums, stores, attractions, videos or anything else that I find interesting that is relevant for the blog.
Check it out if you would like to see some of my favorite Belgian things!
Click the photo to go directly to the Pinterest boards for OppositeOcean
Do you have any suggestions about how I could make the Pinterest boards more functional? Don’t hesitate to suggest!
Read More5 Things to Eliminate Wintertime Woefulness
If my second winter here has made anything clear about the relationship that Belgium and I have with each other, it is that she often does little to cheer me up during this time of year. The combination of gray and drizzly skies, permanently statically-charged hair, and an aching brain brimming with language and terminology combined with the stress of approaching exams in multiple languages has made me realize that during this time of year it is more important than ever to see the things I love about this place and to cling to them, allowing them to warm up my thoughts and inspire me to treat Belgium a little kinder until she starts to return the kind thoughts in spring.
Here are five things I can say that I appreciate about Belgium:
Read MoreHow to trick a Belgian
One of the things I reveled in when I first moved to Ghent was the often-underrated ability to blend in. I had just spent a year living and studying in Spain and often found myself an anomaly in that culture; it was always obvious to Spanish people that I was from somewhere else. It was such a relief to venture out in Ghent and mix in seamlessly with the rest of the crowd. In fact, I seem to have perfected the art of blending in so well that I’m quite often stopped on the street and asked for directions.
My idea for this post came to me a couple of weeks ago, when I was trudging around Ghent, impeded by construction on the tram route, trying to reach a rather out-of-the-way copy shop in which I could purchase a course manual. I had just come from an English literature lecture in which the Belgian girl sitting next to me asked me a question in Dutch about the lecture.
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