TURNS OUT I DON’T HAVE TUBERCULOSIS

       In order to work and live longterm in France, part of the deal is that you have to go through a medical exam and get your lungs x-rayed. As you might imagine, the immigration office for Paris’s district sees hundreds of foreigners a day. Their system is set up like a medical visit factory. 
A slow moving factory, but a factory nonetheless. 
All the foreign people get pushed through the rigmarole like cattle. Each individual step only takes 5 minutes, but the whole thing takes hours because of at least 30 minutes of waiting between each step.

         When I arrived at the office, I handed my very official pieces of paper to the desk lady. Then I had to sit and wait for a while until she called my name and some other people’s names and led us to go wait in another room where even more people were waiting. This second waiting room was surrounded by doors that would occasionally open to reveal white coat people in little rooms. They would call some waiting people inside and then shut the door. Eventually my name got called and a woman in the little room asked me to hide one eye and read off some letters and then to hide the other eye and do the same. Then I was ushered back into the big room to do some more waiting.

         A long while later my name was called again. This time a different white coat lady showed me into a closet with a door on either side. She told me to take off all my clothes from the waist up and then walk through the opposite door. OK.

         On the other side of the door was a big room with two women and a bunch of equipment. One woman asked me if I was pregnant while the other slapped a heavy black vest around my guts. They pressed me up against the x-ray machine and ordered me to inhale deeply. Then I was ushered back into the closet to redress and go do some more waiting.

         Another long while later, yet another white coat woman called me into a different little room. She had my x-ray up on a screen. I said “that’s strange,” meaning that it was strange to see my insides. She said no, actually, my x-ray is of normal healthy lungs. Well, this was good news.

         We talked about general health and she gave me some advice about prescriptions and how to find clinics around Paris. Then she handed me my x-ray print and let me go.

my insides

         So, now I’m a legit foreign worker in France and I have all my stamps and everything! I hung my x-ray from my ceiling as a sort of trophy. 

Welcome to Brussels/Bienvenue à Bruxelles/Welkom in Brussel/Willkommen in Brüssel

THAT TIME I FORGOT MY PASSPORT

The icon of Brussels,
Manneken pis (aka little boy peeing),
sculpted out of Belgian chocolate

         Emma and I went to Belgium for a weekend! I had to work the morning of our departure, so I had just enough time to cram some stuff in my bag and cram some lunch in my mouth before we ran to the train station. With all of the moving parts, I managed to forget my passport. Oops.

         I realized this after we had already arrived at Gare du Nord and had maybe 30 minutes until departure. Just enough time to build up dangerous levels of stress, but not enough time to go back for it. So I just crossed my fingers and begged the universe to go my way.

         The conductor’s welcoming announcement was in French first, then English, then Flemish. In the French version he said that the controllers would be coming around shortly to check our “titre de transport.” To the best of my knowledge, this was a fancy way of saying ticket. I waited for the English announcement to clarify things.

         Unfortunately, this conductor’s English was not exactly intelligible. I’m sure he convinces non-English speakers, but it seemed like he was reciting a schpeel he had memorized without really understanding the words. The result was a jumble of more or less English words strung together quickly, as if the faster he talked, the more convincing he would be.

         I could only make out half of every sentence, but I heard him say that the controllers would be around shortly and that we should have our passports ready.

         This just about gave me a heart attack. 

I tried not to panic, but I’m sure that I alarmed my neighbor with all of the sweating and fidgeting and looking around nervously. I wondered if I should go find a controller straight away and come clean in hopes that he’d take pity on me? Or run to the bathroom as soon as they entered the car? Or wait it out and play dumb when they got to my seat? I decided that the latter was my best option.

         For the next 30 minutes, I hyperventilated and imagined worst case scenarios. I’d probably get deported. Or at least spend the night in detainment. How would I contact my school to tell them I was never coming back?

         After what seemed like an eternity, the controllers entered at the back of the car and started working their way forward. This meant I couldn’t see what they were asking people for. When they finally got to me, I handed over my ticket with all of the nonchalance that I could muster. The guy looked at me a little suspiciously, probably because I was acting like a loony, but then he moved along. CRISIS AVERTED!

         I realized afterwards that what I’d heard wasn’t the conductor telling us to have our “blah blah passport ready,” but to have our “titles of transport ready,” a direct translation from the French. Whoopsy daisy. As it turned out, I never needed my passport because France and Belgium are both Schengen countries (members of the EU that allow people to travel freely between them).

WHY YOU SHOULD COUCHSURF

Brigitte

         When Emma and I had both arrived in Brussels, we went about tracking down our Couchsurfing host Brigitte. For those unfamiliar with Couchsurfing, it’s an online network that helps travelers connect with hosts around the world. When you join, you can search members all over the globe and request to stay with them for a couple of days for free. In exchange, you agree to let other people contact you about staying at your place. 


I know what you’re thinking, staying with a perfect stranger one meets on the internet is how one ends up cut into tiny pieces and shoved into a psycho’s freezer.

 I, too, had reservations the first time I heard about it. But, after my first experience, I became a believer. Members tend to be idealistic hippies who like to travel and also to show foreigners around their hometown. Most are between 20 and 35, but not exclusively (Brigitte, for example, is in her 50s). It’s ideal when you have a travel buddy, and find hosts you actually want to meet and hang out with. Couchsurfing takes some faith in humanity and flexibility about sleeping arrangements, but in return you get an intimate window into another culture. And it’s free.

         When we got to Brigitte’s building, she was running out to a party with a homemade tart she’d baked. She let us upstairs with a smile and told us her roommate Kinge would take care of us. Did she ever.

         Kinge was a 23 year old Dutch-speaking Belgian med student from Flanders (the Flemish side of Belgium). She had met Brigitte a couple months before while surfing her couch and had asked to move in permanently when the school year started. We ended up in the kitchen chatting with her for a couple hours, while nibbling on bread with tasty homemade spreads that Brigitte had concocted out of chickpeas and beets among other things. We discussed everything from French heart health to conjoined twins.

Croque-Monsieur

Fruit défendu

         We eventually realized it was late and decided to go explore Brussels a little bit. Kinge recommended a neighborhood downtown, so we went there and got some fruit beers (I got a tasty brune called Forbidden Fruit) and elaborate Croque-monsieurs with béchamel sauce (French grilled cheese sandwiches).

        The next day, we had breakfast with Brigitte and a pregnant French girl that was also couchsurfing with her. We learned a lot about Brigitte and also had a chance to discuss a host of cultural topics.

         Brigitte is a French speaking Belgian whose life has had a lot of rough patches, but seems to maintain a sunshiney outlook despite it all. She used to travel a lot, but a combination of life, illness and political convictions about fossil fuels have stopped her from leaving Belgium anymore. Instead, she hosts couchsurfers so that she can bring the world to her. She’s quite the hosting champion, taking in a seemingly endless stream of surfers (she had 4 of us with there that weekend).

         Both Emma and I had heard about the escalating cultural divisions in Belgium, so we took the opportunity to ask for a local's perspective on the conflicts between Flanders and Wallonia (the Flemish and French sides of the country, respectively). Brigitte explained how Flanders is generally wealthier than Wallonia and how they don’t want to pay for the Wallonian social services anymore because they feel that the exchange is unequal. The government compromised by redistributing funds. This means, for example, that a single mother living on the Flemish side of Belgium receives more aid from the government than a single mother living on the French side. At this point, the divisions don't seem to be violent, but it’s becoming less and less logical to maintain one government for the two sides. It's hard to say how much longer they’ll be able to keep the country together for.

         Brigitte is die-hard into the Green movement, so the four of us ended up talking about how it plays out in each of our countries. Both Brigitte and the pregnant French girl were pretty surprised to hear us say that America actually has a green movement. I found that funny because Brigitte was citing parts of Food, Inc., which is an American film. She remembered the American problems, but not that it was Americans condemning them. I often run into Europeans who have trouble believing that such conflicting ideologies are coming from the same country.

         After a while we realized it was almost noon and we should probably go explore.

A STRANGE MIX/UN MELANGE ETRANGE/EEN VREEMDE MIX/EINE SELSAME MISCHUNG

         Although Brussels is technically on the Flemish side of Belgium, the population has become mostly French speaking over the last couple centuries. This makes it an island of language confusion. Most signs are in French, Flemish, German and English. In a restaurant, you’ll hear all of the above and then some. I had trouble knowing what language to order in.

My pot of mussels

Now that's a Belgian waffle

         Despite these difficulties, we managed to order all sorts of food all weekend long. We consumed mountains of chocolate, fries, waffles, mussels and Belgian beer.

HIGHLIGHTS

Barrel of gueuze oozing as it ages

         We found a traditional brewery called Cantillon that brews lambic in basically the same way it has for the last hundred years. They specialize in a kind of beer called Gueuze that is aged in a barrel for years (like a wine), until it’s no longer carbonated.

Hand-making chocolate

         The pregnant French girl at Brigitte’s told us about a chocolate factory where you can watch and learn about making handmade chocolates. This, of course, included samples, so we had to go check it out. The process was surprisingly simple and I plan on trying it out when I get back to the states.

         Emma and I weren’t able to get on the same train back to Paris on Sunday, so she left a couple hours earlier and I wandered around exploring some parts of town we hadn’t made it to yet. I found a movie theater doing a showing of the French film Les Miserables from 1957. It was a hoot. Unfortunately, it was 3 hours long and I had to leave before it was over to catch my train. Bummer. I actually still don’t know how it ends.

TEAM BUILDING EXERCISE

         When I got back home late that night, I was getting ready for bed and I dropped the cap to my contact lense case down the drain of my bathroom sink. It fell too far down to grab and fit perfectly in the drain so that there wasn’t room to hook anything around it. Emma and I spent a looooong time brainstorming and trying to finesse it out with various combinations of “tools” we had on hand. After an hour of frustration and failed attempts, guess what we finally succeeded with:

was it…

a) 2 disassembled coat hangers?

b) a butter knife and scotch tape?

c) a pencil and a piece of doublemint gum?

…It was the doublemint! I’ve never been so grateful for gum in my life. For the record, we also tried using the coat hangers, the knives and the scotch tape in various schemes, but without any success.

The next day I had to go to the immigration people to get my lungs x-rayed. I’ll write about that one next time. 

à la prochaine!