Spotted in Antwerp

5:45 p.m., Keyserlei, in front of Media Mart: a tall, grey haired, frowning middle-eastern man skips down the street. At full speed. And somehow manages to smoke a cigarette at the same time. Heads turn, incredulous at how it is possible to skip so joylessly.

6:09 p.m., intersection of Astridplein and Carnotstraat: a businessman's bike gets caught in the tram tracks. It wheels around and smacks right into another bike. Both riders flail their arms uselessly and the tram track man is launched head over handlebars in slow motion, his briefcase flung into the air. Five people, all different ages and races, immediately rush to his aid - no losing faith in humanity in this town.

LEKKERRRR

There is nothing like the sound of chainsaws and blood curdling screams to remind me of home. Changing leaves, ripening pumpkins, fake blood: you know it must be fall!

I spent this weekend hanging with this dude, and others like him. The undead brides. The axe murderers. The rando monsters with extra eyeballs for no apparent reason. Also a carful of Canadians I came with, who were joyful with anticipation of the horror yet to come. So was I, despite my German friend Uli assuring me that they don't actually celebrate Halloween in Germany.

I have to admit that the production value is far superior at Universal Orlando's Halloween Horror Nights - it's more about the entertainment than fear, and I'm guessing this is only because they have a larger budget. They have a new theme or character every year - there are even entire backstories written about them. I remember "the Director" from when I went in high school - he's a crazy snuff film director and his next victim is YOU.

But low budget or no, I really have to hand it to Movie Park. They may have been smaller than Universal, with fewer roller coasters, but it was a hell of a lot creepier. When push comes to shove, Germans can just pull off scary monster better than the average family-friendly American "cast member". Plus, with the amount of punk- and gothic- dressed locals it was sometimes hard to tell apart the mortal souls and the vengeful undead. In any case they had one thing in common: when there was a sudden downpour of rain, both ran for cover to prevent their makeup from running.

Here's the real reason the Movie Park monsters are scarier: they are allowed to touch you. In one of the haunted houses, an undead bride even pulled my hair, moaning "lekkerrrrrrr" [tasty] in a scary ghost voice. At Halloween Horror Nights, I guess you could probably sue them if they touched you. Or maybe they are more afraid of people attacking the characters and them suing the park.

Well, no matter. Germany was still way scarier.

harvest

Just like spring is a season of colors, fall is all about smells and tastes. For those of you like myself whose lives already revolve around food, fall is perfect. And since I never got to experience this season growing up in a swamp, there isn't a crunchy leaf I leave untrod.

In Antwerp, I like fall because the cozy pubs finally fit in with the nasty weather (it was annoyingly perfect all summer). Because of the wind, rain and cold, Petra and I have declared winter already here and have started making hot wine for ourselves. More importantly, we buy bushels of exotic (at least to me) fruit at the weekend market...plums, dates, pomegranates, figs, and these giant Belgian nuts that I think are some kind of pecans. Not only that, I have eaten at least two proper steaks in the past week.

Other than eating as usual here, I was lucky enough to spend some time of the turn of season in Madrid, which this time of year is not as tropical as you might expect. But it is definitely more awesome than you might expect - thanks mostly to the company. But you know me - I'm going to talk about the food.

One distinctive taste of Madrid was that of Andres' dinosaur cookies (best when dipped into coffee). I hadn't tasted them since my childhood. Although I'm pretty sure it's a different brand in Spain, they are still the Best. Cookies. Ever. I was sad to learn that apparently in the US they are apparently now extinct!

My taste buds also remember the never ending plates of finger food - sausages, salami, cheese, croquettes and mini-hot dogs - from the standing only, working-class bar in the outskirts of the city. The amazing thing about this place was that if you buy a beer, the food is completely free. And it just keeps comin'. The catch? There wasn't one.

Andres told me that the owners were four childhood friends (now about 60) who had worked every day in shifts for the last twenty years as barmen together. Any time any one of them got a tip, a cheer went up from the crowd, the barman rang a bell and a stuffed parakeet started chirping. The mood was so loud and frenetic that I forgot to stop eating and gave myself a stomachache. Maybe that was the catch...

OK, I'm off now because...um. This post is making me kinda hungry.

quarantine

Being sick is no fun. The coughing, sneezing and low grade fever are small potatoes compared to the excruciating boredom. Hell, today I even did the dishes before they got disgusting! With my nonexistent attention span nowadays, cooped up at home, sniffling, with nothing but rain and wind outside, I had to find some way to entertain myself....

So I spent long minutes in considerably deep thought about where - no - when would be the best time to be a time travel tourist. After much deliberation, I think it would be really cool to live in 16th century Japan and be a samurai (yes, girls were samurai too back then. With sword skills and everything. Plus they practiced basic hygeine and didn't have the plague like in Europe).

Then I tried to spy on our scandalously dressed neighbor who likes to parade around (no luck). Maybe witnessing a murder, Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window style, would be more realistic in my neighborhood.

After that, I started to wonder if sometimes God really can pick a side (just ask Tim Tebow)! I mean, if I were God, I would certainly reward people who believed in me. But maybe it's exactly this sort of nepotism that makes me not God.

Later, I started on my game plan for becoming a supercool Asian lady novelist when I grow up. After watching Amy Tan's talk, I think that my writerly dreams might eventually falter because I had too happy of a childhood.

Upon this thought, I gave up my dreams for the time being and ate a shameful amount of squares of Cote d'Or Noir Mousse Intense. It's dark chocolate with this truffley mousse inside, and since it's from the grocery store it only costs two euros!

Pray for my speedy recovery, y'all. Because soon enough, I will have watched every single talk on Ted.com and won't be able to fit into my jeans any more.

battle of the aRRdennes

I know pirates aren't cool anymore. They are sooooo 2003. I mean, I made pirate movies with friends back in high school, which was the last time it was cool. We rode around with a hobie cat attached to a jeep and marooned ourselves on the island in the middle of Lake Maitland. It was epic, not to mention Oscar worthy. Now, one of the original land pirates of the Pirates of Edgewater is currently in the US Navy. About as anti-pirate as you can get.

But avast! I digress.

Last weekend, 13 lucky landlubbers voyaged to the rough seas of the Ardennes, and dressed up as pirates anyway. And here lies the Tale of the 13 Pirates of the Ardennes.

Yo ho, yo ho....abandon all hope, ye who read this...

It all began on a beautiful, not dark, not stormy night. The pirates had been merrily kayaking along a river, accompanied by their pet crocodile. They already had found some treasure, but were quickly running out because they kept stealing it from one another.

This caused a mutiny, which happened when the pirates had docked their boats and were busy drinking some more of their treasure. The mutiny started because all of a sudden, random pirates started dying, one by one! Shiver me timbers, what's a pirate captain to do?

Why, accuse Jing the superdeadly Chinese pirate of murder and make her walk the plank, of course! I mean, she just looked guilty, come on, everyone knew it. The only problem was, she wasn't.

Before Jing could come back from the dead and get her otherworldly revenge, the pirates saw a ghost!

They were surprised because dead men, as it turns out, do tell tales. Really long ones, in fact. But only in French. Also, dead men can't do very much - mostly they just raise their arms on different parts of a castle. And look vaguely like Klansmen.

The pirates were pretty disappointed because they had already hoisted the colors, savvy? They had gotten all ready for an epic pirate battle with the ghost of a Klansman just to see him disappear in a cloud of smoke and fireworks...

"What a no good lily livered scalawag!" the 13 pirates said, vowing to return to the ghostly forest some other weekend and get the vengeance that was rightfully theirs. And drink some more grog. Because it was a pretty sweet weekend.

To be continued?

Illegal!

This post is for all of you back home who imagine my life on the continent as a carefree blur of sitting in cafes looking European, smoking cigarettes with a gold cigarette holder, spending a few hours pretending to work, drinking some wine, reading some Sartre, eating some stinky cheese, and then treating myself to some Belgian beer to celebrate a long day of work accomplished.

Well. I have some news for you.

So, I've now officially been an illegal immigrant in Belgium for a full week. (I feel for you, Elian.)

It's not that I dislike living on the edge - in fact, I love it! Just ask those of you in the know about my semi-legal status in Poland. But this time, I am not illegal by choice and convenience. I am illegal because the Antwerp registration office has lost all of my paperwork not once, but twice.

Here's the deal for newbies to the Alice-in-Wonderland rabbit hole that is European immigration policy. Everyone gets a three month visa when they arrive, which is supposed to be plenty of time to get a residence card. This card is important because it allows you to travel outside of the country (the visas are single entry).

I applied for the card within hours of my arrival on May 11th. The registration office assures me that "it's normal" that my paperwork was lost and that I will have to wait until October to be registered because "we are on vacation."

Unfortunately, I can't use my normal tactics from America to get what I want - that is, asking to speak to the manager and yelling at someone until I get free stuff. (Customer service, baby.)

So, I'm trying to be creative with some alternative solutions. Any other bright ideas y'all can think of?

- Kidnap the mean registration lady's bicycle (Belgians LOVE bicycles). Cut out magazine letters and make a ransom note. Price for return: one registration card.

- Call them using a disguised voice machine and tell them "Mijn noncle Salvatore langskommen met en paar zware jongens" if they don't give me my card.

- Call up my BFF Jean Claude, better known as "The muscles from Brussels", to show 'em what's up. It might involve a roundhouse kick to the face, but that's just guessin'.

Give me the splendid silent sun

Do you ever feel like you spend all day waiting for something interesting to come into your inbox? I don't have a crackberry or another one of those newfangled creations that makes you take your work home with you and allows your boss to email you while you're asleep at night, but I still sometimes find myself compulsively checking my devices to see if something new came in. And then neglecting other things that aren't new, just because they have already been read.

I read recently that something like 70% of people admit that they connect to work using their PDAs or laptops while they are on vacation. What do we expect, an email saying we won the lottery? A call from the big boss that he will give us a raise if we do a task during our vacations? A text telling us that our secret true love has felt the same way, all this time?

I don't know. But I do know that the whole thing really makes me want to unplug myself before facebook figures out how to put a chip in our heads. Or before google installs ads that pop up when I open my refrigerator. Last Friday, I unplugged myself by going to a concert in the middle of the Rivierenhof park right outside of Antwerp. If I could always hear some tasty funksoul music out in nature with 30 foot tall trees all around me, I would move to the countryside tomorrow. (check out Moiano)

It does make me wonder, though, if there will ever be a backlash from all this technologizin' that seems to rule people's lives. A former coworker once told me I had socialist tendencies because my ideas to improve the workplace involved a vegetable garden and a bike rack. The ideas might have been a little facetious at the time, but he's right: I could see myself doing just like Ryan Adams in this video, moving to Jamaica, playing bongo drums all day and feeding rum to my donkey.

And Ryan Adams himself wouldn't be too bad of an addition either...