I want to be Belgian

Which brings me to the next two check-marks on my facebook map.
When I got back from Tunis, Meagan was already in Paris waiting for me. She and I met a couple years ago on the internet on a soccer forum. About a month later, I drove up to Quincy, MA and picked her up. Instead of driving her into the woods and killing her with an axe, I took her to a Revs game. We did that all season. And now, a couple years later, we're traveling Europe together. Good thing I didn't own an axe back then!
After a couple of days in Paris, we hopped a train to Brussels. If I'd known how close it was, I'd have gone for a lunch before now. I could! It's less than an hour on the TGV and the city is little and easy to navigate. It's also suddenly one of my favorites ever visited. "Don't try to be cool here," warned a handy text box on the map our hostel supplied. "People are polite and won't smirk at your low-riders or your swagger, but they're having a good laugh at your expense on the inside."
The ideal in Brussels is to be chill.
I think a lot of people say that, but this is the first time I've really seen a whole city, a whole people show that off. Evidence is everywhere. Meagan and I can't so much as stop and look at a street sign without somebody stopping to offer directions in their friendly Belgian accents, but we see many people strolling at a leisurely pace down streets only to stop at the intersection, turn around, and stroll back in the direction they'd come as if they're thinking, "Right well, enough of that. How about another beer?"
Which brings me to the fact that the Belgians are HUGE foodies. It seems to be the only thing besides soccer that they are avidly concerned about, and everything from the mussels in vegetable broth that one eats standing at outdoor bars in pretty squares before dinner to the fries, which are generally accepted as the best in the world, are prepared with meticulous care.
Meagan and I didn't really notice because we were too full of beer.
Beer is everywhere and it is amazing. We met up with a group of Belgian hashers at the Delerium Bar, which has a beer menu with over 2,000 choices. I'm not making this up. Their menu looked like a phone book. EZ Over, their GM, explained that it was a favorite bar for them because the Brussels hashers have a degree-program based on the number of beers tasted. Two others, a really cute couple, smiled proudly and admitted they'd just gotten their Masters' in May.
This made reason 902 I want to live in Brussels for a while.
The ever-helpful and friendly Brussels hashers -- Belgians through and through -- were perfectly cheerful about helping Meagan and me get home after beer number 9, when I would have been perfectly happy sleeping in, say, a nearby pond.
Except for a very nice hotel de ville, Brussels doesn't really have must-see tourist landmarks per se. No gotheic cathedrals or ancient structures. Apparently in their typical Belgian "meh, whatever" attitude, Brussels inhabitants decked a number of nice buildings in the 70's because they were, you know, in the way or something. It's not uncommon to see neat art-nouveau houses next to dingy convenience stores here. Belgians really don't care if things are ugly, just like they don't care if people are stylin'. The result isn't graffiti and litter, it's little street markets everywhere and a complete lack of zoning. I rather like it.
Brussels also doesn't have much by way of art or museums, so we spent most of our days (pre-beer) walking and enjoying what the city is famous for... chocolate. I know you've had good chocolate. Godiva or Ghirardelli or Leonidas or Lark-you-don't-understand-there's-this-place- in-my-home-town-and-they-make-it-from-scratch-and-it-is-so-good, and I am telling you right now that you've never had chocolate if you've never been to Belgium.
Have I mentioned you should go to Belgium? I'm going back as soon as I can. This time I want to see Brugge. And buy more beer.

Lifeplan and an adventure in Tunisia

My God am I overdue for an update. If you only knew...

Relaxing with a bottle of wine from the hotel bar and sunburned a bit from Tunisian sun, I report! I suppose my emails of late have given an impression that these few months of my epistolary silence have been full of soul-searching and important decisions. First of all, I should say that this is FALSE. My summer job thus far has been to run a youth hostel, and time spent on enabling my future self to, you know, eat... has been squeezed in between piracy, laundry, and the occasional museum visit. 20 visitors since the end of May. That's a lot of people. More importantly, that's a lot of laundry. You know, when its wrapped in a bedsheet, carrying thirty pounds of your sodden clothes down the street to the dryer isn't as hard as you'd think.

So around a month ago I left from my last day of work. The computer Cheniere gave me tucked under my arm, I took the bus home, made myself a stiff G&T and sat down to consider my options. Among other things, I knew at that time : a) I wasn't ready to leave Paris and its blessedly cheap wine b) Cheniere had screwed up royally in my whole visa process c) no company in France was going to hire me without the visa and d) pillows are cheap at IKEA. So I decided that I'd focus on the latter point – the onslaught of visitors. In free time, I could brush up the resume, send some emails and buy plane tickets. ...Because I would never forgive myself for living in France on salary with all the budget airlines and not getting to a couple key countries. I've wanted to go to North Africa since I started taking French in middle school, and the Czech Republic with its family ties, extremely attractive soccer team and infamous nightclubs also beckoned.

So, to sum up, I have hosted ChristinaMattJimmySaraKaraJordanJonathanBlancheWoozySplinterEyeAliRebeccaPatrickPhilMagdaAlecandMeagan this summer. To recap? Heck, the fall would arrive before I finished the stories. Asleep in my twin-sized guest bed amongst IKEA's finest pillows have been a total anywhere between 1-6 depending on what movie is playing on Cheniere's finest computer screen facing us. But we didn't spend most evenings in front of a movie. No, these were more the bottle (or three) and music (or not) on the town kinds of guests. Adventures included gladiator afternoons at the Roman arena on my street, evenings singing on the Seine, many Your Mom jokes, cultural expeditions to the museums, chest thumping competitions (don't ask), less cultural expeditions to the discount wine rack at Champion, ever popular fondue, a couple of HHH adventures including a NAMING, and this one time (NEVER again) when I took Jonathan and Harry to the Egyptian exhibit at the Louvre and they attempted to use what they'd learned from Brown University's infamous EG 101 to decipher everything in the goddamn exhibit. Blanche and I finally dragged them out, but before we did, they did manage to find something that seemed to say, “Cannon's Mom.” I'm not making this up. (I also learned over the course of the visit that SplinterEye's “real” name is Harry. Who knew?)*

>>>

Ok, so I started this email a week ago. It's pretty blathery, so I'll recap. I'm going to stay in France until roughly next spring, living off of my severance package and a bartending gig and spending whatever is left over traveling. This means that you, faithful Life Distribution List, are probably only going to get the odd travel blog or maybe a “Hey I got a job!” kind of an email. If you want off the list, now's your chance. I won't be offended.

If you are looking for a good place to stop reading, this is it. The rest is only BRILLIANT and WITTY and INSIGHTFUL commentary about INTERESTING and EXOTIC locations.

Tunisia

The first thing that you notice about Tunisia is that it is hot. Like, the air-conditioned airplane touches down and you think, “Oh man it's gonna suck when they open that door” kind of hot. Almost all of Tunisia is a massive Death-by-August, Lawrence of Arabia kind of desert, except for the only part of the country that I actually saw. Despite the air, which is clearly 110° dry desert air, grass and tress and lush lawns and botanical gardens all grow happily along a green coast-line in complete defiance, as far as I can tell, of all known laws of climate and botany.

As far as the people, warmth is something different entirely. Everyone at my hotel and the majority of the people I buy water bottles from are terse and rude to me. This is hard for me to stomach because a) I hate it when people don't like me and really try to avoid that, and b) I am buying a lot of water bottles. I carry giant, awkward 2 litre things around with me everywhere and finish them within an hour and have to go buy another. It is SO hot and so dry that I go for stretches of like 36 hours without having to pee. Which is very weird for me. My cab-driver, on the other hand, is so talkative and eager to show and share Tunisia, that I hire him to show me around the old city and even let him rip me off a bit when he takes me to the airport. (That was an “on the other hand” to the rude Tunisians, not that bit about bathrooms.) Najla's family too is gracious and friendly almost to a fault as I try to sneak into Najla's pocket when she's not looking, the 11 dinars they bartered down for a soccer jersey I wanted.

I spent a day and a half with Team Jamoussi, wandering through covered medinas where Mariam helped me act more Arabic so that I'd stop screwing up their bartering abilities, through smaller cities and towns around Tunis with their ornate bright blue doors, blinding against the whitewash of the walls, and through the ruins of old Carthage.

Guide: Here are some Phoenician ruins. Then the Romans destroyed them. Here are some Roman ruins. Then they were destroyed. Here are Byzantine ruins. Then they were destroyed. And there are the Tunisian houses!

Lucy: (to Anouar) So be VERY careful.

This left me a couple days to tool around by myself, which is VERY STRONGLY RECOMMENDED AGAINST IN CAPITAL LETTERS AND MAYBE EVEN AN ITALLICS by my guidebook. It's not dangerous, exactly, the guidebook hastens to add, just... there aren't many women who walk by themselves here, and men are much more forward in North Africa.

I raise an eyebrow. “Look, guidebook,” I say, “I live in Paris. I've been clubbing in ROME for Chrissakes. I can handle forward guys.”

Guidebook is offended and hides under a table so that I will not be able to find him the next day and will almost certainly get lost without his handy map.

Guidebook also recommends that I dress conservatively, but since it is 110°, jeans would mean death, so it's big, baggy calf-length pants and a black zip-up shirt with the sleeves cut off but that still covers my shoulders. Men ARE forward, but they aren't gross, and it's kind of fun to hear them guess where I'm from if I don't respond when they speak French to me. Based on my tally, I look Portuguese more than anything else. Who knew? Rob, I think, will get a kick out of this.

Women do not talk to me, but they smile and look at me with great curiosity as I tramp by in my dykie outfits, lugging my awkward water bottle and clearly very lost. Not too many women wear the head-scarf in Tunis – 30% maybe? That's more than it used to be, according to Najla because it's currently... in style.

I'd buy it. As I walked down to my hotel one night from a festival in Sidi-Bou Saīd, I passed two girls in black skirt-top outfits. One was wearing a bright yellow hijab that matched perfectly the collar on her tank-top, the cuff on her skirt, and her heels. The other girl had the same outfit in red. To my eye, it made them look a little like crayons, but not necessarily in an unsexy way... which I thought was the whole point.

Mum was really curious about the food when we spoke, and I'm sure I made up something, but the truth is that I only ate one “Tunisian” meal while there. Mariam explained to me that everyone in Tunis looses weight during the summer because on days where 120° isn't uncommon, the only thing you can imagine stomaching is fruit, ice cream, and ohmygodIneedanotherwaterbottle. This isn't necessarily bad as the fruit is AMAZING. I bought a peach and a bag of figs from a vendor in an orchard, and that fruit was so good that if it game me worms, I'd still call it worth it.

I say “if” because as I finish this, I am currently on a train from Amsterdam back to Paris, and I've had stomach problems since we got to Belgium 5 days ago...

*Grown-ups and others unfamiliar with my stint as a pirate in college, most of us go by our pirate-names and don't really learn until later what our compatriot's real names are. This drives my less nerdy friends crazy. “Your name,” they yell at my answering machine, “is LUCY! Get a life! Get a job!” **

** Ok, most of the time that last bit is somebody else entirely leaving me voicemails.