July 12, 2002 : tapas fridays

Weekends are great. They are moments of rest. This week as been a hard week because not only did it start off with water splashing all over the computer, but because it ended with us getting the apartment.

But Fridays are over days. Eva hurried home and we headed to the apartment place and signed our lives away. Not exactly, of course, but close enough. Gelezen en goedgekeurd and our signature. Read and approved. Something like 5 times apiece. The lady had a stamp for her bit of writing, but we had to struggle. At least I did. It’s not that I can’t read and copy Dutch, it’s that the handwriting wasn’t the best. I should have looked at the stamp I guess…but hindsight is always 20/20.

So it’s official. We’ve got a new apartment. A huge apartment with a mural in the bathroom with will be transformed into a different mural. (at least those are my plans.)

We headed to Pablo’s, a Mexican restaurant with great guacamole and crappy service, to celebrate. From our outdoor table we watched a group of children (just friends for the moment, having met because parents and grandparents were finishing up meals and the children were bored) playing next to the KNS, a large arts theater. One of the boys had a silver gun, and though I grew up in a generation where guns were still cool, the older I get the more inappropriate guns seem for little kids. Fake guns that look real. Cap guns that come with holsters. Squirt guns are different, but metallic play guns pointed in the direction of other people are never cool.

Little did we know what the entire night had in store for us. Lu’s Paragraph (where Eva works) decided to have an employee gathering at a tapas restaurant. I had never eaten tapas. It’s Spanish. Not Mexican like the food we associate with the word Spanish, but Spanish as in Spain. Tapas are assortments of finger food on a grand scale. Spanish tortilla (not the Mexican version) but the potato omelet variety, octopus, garlic chicken legs, cheeses, olives, potatoes with spicy toppings, sardines well-cooked peppers, and bread. The sort of things you can pile on a large plate and serve to friends pre-meal but this is the meal. I wasn’t crazy about the concept until it seemed to work. It’s a friendly sort of thing. How can people not get along when you have to reach and send plates around? It was really great.

For most of the meal I was in a slight state of panic about the bottom line. When 15+ people get together at a restaurant the tendencies are to divide the bill across the board. Back home it’s much easier to simply say, "separate checks" and then you struggle to group yourselves into 4s. The wine started flowing as soon as the last people arrived. This gorgeous lightly colored stuff in blue bottles. So faint a flavor that it could have been watered down Clearly Canadian. (Once a very popular thing to get on youth-group trips along with IBC rootbeer in little brown bottles on youth group spring break trips because we thought they looked like wine coolers and beer bottles respectively.) At any rate, the wine flowed the entire night. Not enough to make you tipsy, but enough to make my mind blur for the cost. Not only did it flow along with a red variety, but at the other end of the table a couple of guys were getting their fill of the expensive imported Corona’s and lime. My mind was spinning. I should have asked for steak tapas or something. I should have asked for my own bottle of non-sparkling water which would have been just as extravagant as the coronas because it would be the bottled water variety, and we seldom splurge for something I can just get out of the tap.

It was great to go. The night was a mostly Flemish evening (to be expected) but it was great to be able to match face to name. No longer will the people in Eva’s nightly work-stories be faceless…now they are real people.

By the time we are on desert (the worst crepe I’ve ever eaten) I’m thinking that we’ve all easily racked up a bill for around 40 bucks a person. When the check arrives I am waiting for the damage when I realize that the boss is going to pick up the tab. Having not expected this, we were both relieved and alarmed. It was one of those uncomfortable situations where all of the employees start squirming in their seats. Just as soon as the check came it was gone and all paid for just like that. What can you say except thank you.

We definitely said thank you. And the money that we would have spent will probably last us the rest of the weekend. Tapas are great, but nothing is as great as an extra 80 Euros in your pocket when you just signed for an 85 Euro more a month apartment and you’re headed to Italy in 4 days. Yes, we definitely said thank you, and maybe they’ll even get a postcard from Italy.

But the night was still young. I’m ready to head home, but Eva wants to spend more quality outside-of-the-office time with her coworkers. I understand this and they seem ok people, so we all head to a far off (not in the direction of our house café) at Eva’s suggestion. It’s the same bar we always end up leaving 5 hours later, and this was no exception. By the time we left, it was after 4 in the morning. There were only 6 other people left and two of them worked there. I can’t recall what we talked about for the time span, but it was a good half-English half-Flemish time. (always a welcome treat.) ;)

So we’re headed out the door (the 6 of us) and Eva has pre-arranged that we are going to escort one of the girls to her car with is a 20 minute walk away. (not in the direction of our house) I don’t mind this at all. It’s 4 something in the morning, and no matter how safe a female feels in her own city at night, she shouldn’t be on foot alone. Sometimes Eva and I, at a distance, even follow women who are walking alone at night…just to make sure they are in the proper state of mind.

So here comes one of those, "I’m obviously living in Belgium" sort of instances. We escort this girl all the way to her car in the center of town, completely out of our way, and she just thanks us, gets in her car, and drives off. I couldn’t believe it. I don’t care WHERE she lived in respect to the car. Whatever direction it was, it couldn’t have been more out of her way that it was for us to take her to her car. It’s just not something people think about here. Unless it somehow comes up in conversation, you are not going to get a ride. Unless it is pre-planned somewhere earlier in the evening, no one is going to offer. It’s not like they are mean about it, like she didn’t want to mention it because she didn’t want to offer, it’s just that she didn’t even think about it. I was thinking about it as soon as she saw her car and said, "That’s it." I was in shock. When we started walking our 20+ minute walk home at now almost 5 in the morning Eva knew exactly what I was going to say. "I know," she said before I could even get in a word, "she didn’t even think about it. That’s just Belgium for you."

So I guess cars are not an extension of the home like they are back home. I know fuel is more expensive, and distances are qualified and quantified in such a different relation to the distances back home. I thought nothing of traveling an hour and a half with a car full of friends to go out dancing until the club closed at 1:30 and we headed back the same route, a carload of sleeping danced-out friends and the driver sleepy-eyed and the person in the passenger-seat attempting to stay awake to be co-pilot. I did know this about Belgium to a certain extent. Whereas I would always offer friends rides to and from airports 30 minutes to 3 hours away (in one direction) at the drop of a hat or rides home when they’ve had too much to drink and I’m already dead asleep…people just asked, or just called, or it was just expected. Oh, you’re coming in at what time? You need a ride?

No, dear Belgian friends who will read this, I am not commenting on anyone or anything. I’m talking about the relation of this particular evening and comparing it with previous experiences. Yes, I have had a pick ups and drops off since I’ve been here in Belgium. It’s just different, that’s all.

By the time we ended up in front of our street, we were exhausted, I was convinced I was going to have a bout of diarrhea from sheer exhaustion, and the sky was turning a lighter shade of blue with every step.