België!

Only 6 weeks left in Spain, wooooah. The time has really gone super fast, it's crazy. Packing my life up for 8 months last September seemed kind of daunting, but I'm glad that I went to talk to one of my Spanish professors on a whim and ended up applying and getting my position here. It's been a "trip" ...hardy har.

Speaking of trips, I spent half of my spring break in Belgium. The last time I was there was for a week and I came over while I was doing my study abroad in Italy.

First, let's do a little more background story about my Belgian ancestors (I already did a bit in an earlier post, but now I have pictures of them):
Those are my great grandma and great grandpa Adam(s) with my great uncle Rene and great Aunt Irene, circa 1918. How cool is that? My dad's cousin Marilyn DeFauw Digdo, Rene's daughter, just uploaded that picture online and I just saw it for the first time the other day. Sidenote: my great grandma Martha Adams married my great grandpa Adolph Adams after her first husband, Michele DeFauw, died at the end of World War I, so the kids in the picture are actually his stepchildren. So it turns out that if Martha DeFauw Adams' first husband survived, I would never have been born, not to mention my grandma or my dad or everybody else. Which also means Rene and Irene were half siblings of my grandma, even though she never referred to them as half siblings since she grew up with them from the beginning, along with her "full" sibling, my great uncle Aime, who was born in 1923. My grandma was born in 1925, by the way, in Illinois. My grandma is the member of the Adams/DeFauw family still alive -- Rene died about 10 years ago, Irene died about 5 years ago, and Aime just died in the past year. Another factoid: The Adams family had the "s" added to their name when they emigrated to the US, for reasons I don't really know.
Here's a picture of my grandma Darlene Adams Boberg in the early '40s, with my great grandparents:
My great g'pa developed ALS (Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis) later in life, so that's why he's in the wheelchair in the picture.

My grandma, great grandfather and great aunt Irene

Anyway, I'm a bit foggy about why Martha and Adolph decided to leave Belgium. I wonder how their siblings reacted, too, when they must have known they would never see them again after they took the long boatride over to the states.

OK, now that I got the little snippet of history out of the way, onto the story about my last trip to Flanders (fields, where the poppies blow)...!

I arrived at the Brussels Airport during the evening of Wednesday, April 8th and was picked up by my dad's second cousin, Marlene DeClercq, and her husband Dirk VanLancker and their daughter Sophie. During my trip, I stayed at the VanLancker's home in Nazareth. Here I am with Marlene and Dirk:
My dad and Marlenes' mothers are first cousins, and my dad's grandfather and Marlene's grandfather were brothers, so the common ancestor is their great grandparents...whew, that's weird to explain. Anyway, we were off Dirk and Marlene's home in Nazareth in East Flanders for a low-key evening in. I tried a new Belgian beer -- Leffe. Oh so yummy, oh so potent. I'm sure the Belgians think I'm a cheap date what with my getting tipsy after a few beers.

The next morning, I went off to the Vanderbauwhede home. Darlien, Hans' Vanderbauwhede's wife, is my dad's second cousin, too. While I was there, I got to hang out with the kids -- their names are Bert, Anneleen and Lotte. They are 17, 15 and 13, respectively.

Anneleen and Lotte with the horse

There was a pretty somber mood in their house, because their grandfather had passed away from cancer only 2 days earlier, so the timing was really bad, but it still ended up being not a totally doom and gloom visit. We watched some movies and played with their horse, a 3 year old haflinger mare named Naveena. I got to ride her, and it was the first time I'd been on a horse with virtually no training whatsoever, so that was interesting.
How cute is Naveena? She would never be used for the kind of riding I did/do (show jumping), but riding is riding. I'd love to have a project horse like that that I could train and maybe use for showing. The bonus to buying young, untrained horses is that they are much cheaper than the ones who have already been trained and won crazy championships and such, already. Horse tangent....Moving on!
Later in the day, I headed over to another relatives' house, the Schaubroeck home (also a second cousin of my dad's -- sensing a pattern here?). They invited over a friend of theirs to translate, since Christian and his wife don't speak English. The funny part is that their friend was a Economics professor at Iowa State a few years back. Small world, y'know? After we ate dinner and talking with the Schaubroeck's daughters, I went to Ghent with everybody for a little bit. We went around the city and had some Genever at a famous little bar.

The next morning -- we're up to Friday, now -- I went out with the VanLancker girls, Stephanie and Sophie. They are a bit older than my brothers, about 6 and 8 years older than I am. We went to Kortrijk for the morning + afternoon and walked around, got coffee, shopped, and looked at the sights. Kortrijk is one of those little, well-preserved medieval towns.

Stephanie and Sophie

Me and Stephanie

Me, by a famous bridge, Broeltorens, + towers in Kortrijk

That's what it looks like at night...thank you Wikipedia, for the picture.

Beguinage, which is protected by UNESCO

OK I am going to leave this post at that, seeing how it's already pretty long. Also, I'm feeling like death with my cold + ear infection, so I'm looking forward to faceplanting in my pillows. I'll write about the rest of it in the next post!

Actually, before I go faceplant, I want to post a list of the books I've read since September. I have become a reading machine, no foolin':

• When You are Engulfed in Flames, David Sedaris
• The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold
• The Almost Moon, Alice Sebold
• An Unquiet Mind, Kay Redfield Jamison
  
• Running with Scissors, Augusten Burroughs
  
• Dry, Augusten Burroughs
• Frankly, My Dear, Molly Haskell
• Twilight, Stephenie Meyer
• The Gravedigger's Daughter, Joyce Carol Oates
• Rape: A Love Story, Joyce Carole Oates
• Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell
  
• The Pact, Jodi Picoult
• Keeping Faith, Jodi Picoult
• On the Road, Jack Kerouac
  
• Salem Falls, Jodi Picoult
• Change of Heart, Jodi Picoult
  
• My Sister's Keeper, Jodi Picoult
  
• Lucky, Alice Sebold
• My Sister, My Love, Joyce Carole Oates
• The Witch of Portobello, Paulo Coehlo
• The Bean Trees, Barbara Kingsolver

...I think that's it, but I'm just listing them from what I remember reading month by month, so there might be another one or two I'm forgetting. Right now I'm starting to read The Laws of the Spirit by Daniel Millman.
So, 21 books in 6.5 months = a little over 3 books a month, so I average a little over a week for all my books. Go me.