Midterm review

We're nearing the halfway point of our overseas tour, so this seems like an appropriate time to take stock of our cultural experiences and see what we like about life in Belgium. One of the advantages to living somewhere, as opposed to visiting, is that you have time to sort out what you really like and don't like. We miss many things from home--especially friends and stores that are open past 6 PM--and tons of things annoy us about living here--like stores that don't stay open past 6 PM. But we also realize that we're going to miss much of what we've come to take for granted here. So with apologizes to Mandy, who was the impetus for this and has already seen much of it, here, in no order other than the one in which these items came to me, is what we like about being here:

We like being able to have a beer at nine in the morning (or nine at night for that matter) without anyone thinking you're going to hell. We like Belgian coffee. We like going to cafes to drink the coffee. We like being served that coffee in crockery instead of paper. We like drinking our beer and our coffee out of doors. We like greeting the staff and patrons and being greeted by them when we arrive at or leave a restaurant or cafe. We like saying bon appétit to total strangers when their food arrives. We like seeing jobs in food service and housecleaning and gardening, and any number of other fields, viewed as respectable, living-wage careers, not as a place to park ex-cons, future cons, and misfits. We like summer when it stays light until 11 PM. We like the way people drive here (most of the time). I like not having people try to kill me just because I'm on that weird communist bicycle contraption. We like diesel cars. We like poppies, either springing up on the edge of a path or growing in whole fields. We like window boxes overflowing with geraniums. We like bakeries. We like that every village still commemorates, invariably by name, the men killed in the Great War. We like that every town square in all of Belgium is named the Grand' Place (Grote Markt in Flanders). We love chocolate shops and trying them all to decide which brand is our favorite. We like doing the same for beer. We like being able to walk on sparsely traveled country roads. We like being able to drive fast. We like trains. We actually do like cool summers. We like French doors and tile floors and separate toilet rooms. We like the way there's no traffic on Sunday afternoon because everyone is at Grandma's eating themselves comatose (it's basically Thanksgiving every week). We like having a specific glass for every beer or soft drink or water. We like seeing little old ladies and couples who celebrated their 50th anniversary long ago drinking beer (yes, sometimes at 9 AM). We like the religious shrines and chapels scattered all over--and they're still building them--though it makes us wonder why the churches are empty.

Like I said, there's a lot we'll miss.