Since the time I wrote you last it's been fairly action-packed! Let's dig right in!
we begin our story in the year 2009. It's the last day of that year. I went to a party organized by my hosting Rotary club. It was not a district event, but a club event, so that means that most of the aprticipants were either Rotarians or their wives (there happen to be no women in this particular club). It was a bit bizarre because each participant was asked to bring a plate, glasses, silverware, and a bottle of wine, as well as a small gift to be ransomly distributed to a member of the opposite sex. Apparently, this diminished the costs significantly, but it's all the same to me, who was treated to the event by the club. Thank you, Ocquier en Condroz Rotary club. It was a typical soiree, meaning that the only planned activity was eating. The food was good. Shellfish are served in the shell here (think Mr. Bean's Holiday if you've seen it), and I'm at a loss as to how to eat shrimp and such when it stares back at me. Apparently, you pinch off the head and pull out the guts, or something like that, but I do not have the knack. So the party was fine. People kept on asking me if I wouldn't be happier going to a party with more young people, and my answer was and is "No. The young peopple would be doing more or less the same thing, but the music would be louder and people would be drinking more recklessly." It's true. I sat a lot, and ate sometimes, and talked a bit with the people around me. Towards midnight, noisemakers were distributed. Nobody sang "Auld Lang Syne," and I missed the traditional Garton Band in that capacity. I sang it for a few people, though, to demonstrate my holiday tradition, and everyone knew what it was. IT seems that New Year's here is a slightly devisive holiday. All three children here went to different parties while the parents stayed behind and threw their own party. It seems that each generation is left to look to itself make its own good time. When kids around here want to have a good time, it's to their own that they tend to look, so that's no different than usual. I don't know where my re-gifted Neuhaus chocolates ended up, but I hope they managed to make some woman happy. For my part, I got a shoe-shine kit. Polish, polish pad, rag, and shoehorn, all in a convenient little case. I've never shined a shoe in my life, but maybe I will now. We'll have to see. So there's New Year's. That was good.
Then, on the second, I visited Bruge, sometimes called "The Venise of the North." That's probably a bit of an exaggeration, but it is a really pretty town with canals running through it and a Michelangelo in one of the chrunches. Apparently, at one point, it constituted, along with some town in Spain, the cultural capital of Europe, but that was a long time ago. Oh! Bruge is in Flanders, which means that it's a Dutch(Flemish, if you like)-speaking town. Oh, and I took pictures. I'll go find my camera. So! Everywhere you went in Bruge, the same facade was prominent: a kind of thin facade ending in a traingular roof, frequently staggered, as is in evidence in this photo. I'm told that it's a quintessentially Flemish stly of architecture. It really was everywhere. There was some plaza that evidenced every major epoch of European architecture since like the Middle Ages, but I don't have any pictures of that. The "Modern" epoch was represented by a large sculpture designed by a Japanese artist, and consisted of an open-ended, floorless rectangular prism of hexagonal grid and opaque oblongs, such that one might walk under and through it. The tour guide said that it would be moved somewhere else soon, and that he wasn't sad to see it go, because it blocked the view when there were musical performances in the plaza. I also got the feeling that he felt hesitant to accept it as a sculpture. During the guided tour, I was also shown this house, which is one of the two remaining original, wooden houses in Bruge from the 1400s or something. There was a wall dating to the 21th of 13th (I don't remember which) century, and that's the oldest Brugeish building, but I don't have a picture of that. Our tour ended what I think was the town's Grand'place, where I bought some fries. They were delicious. They were really great. Totally worth it. The Grand'place had this view of the town's two most prominent churches. I believe the one in the distance is the one with the Michelangelo in it. That Michelangelo, by the way, bears the distinction of being the only sculpture of his to have left Italy during Michelangeo's life. He wasn't very happy about it, but it happened anyway. The story goes that during the occupation in WWII, the Germans stole the Michelangelo from the church and hid it in an old mine somewhere, and the Allies liberated the place just in time to stop the Nazis from blowing the mine sky high with an enormous dynamite charge. The church in the foreground of that picture, I learned, is prominently featured in the movie In Bruge, which was subsequently praised my many of my fellow exchange students. I've never seen it.
Also connected the the Bruge trip is my first exposure to a new adjective: "debauch." It's the adjective backformation of "debauchery." This one kid, George from Texas, kept using it to describe parties he's been to. It's usage is mainly thus: "It was pretty debauch. ... Yeah, I geuss it was pretty debauch...not as debauch as that other time, though." MY commenting on how amusing I found his usage of this adjective eventually led to George's story of how he became such a party animal. Basically, he just went to one party that was kind of debauch, and things went from there. I told him, "George, what you're telling me right now would be described by most people as a 'descent,' or a 'fall,' or a 'downward spiral.'" He laughed at that, mostly, I think, because it's true. Don't get me wrong, George actually has his head on pretty straight, he just likes to unscrew it a lot at parties. He says that his primary occupations at parties are talking and danceing, and that getting massively wasted is just incidental, but I wonder. Still, in civillian life, it's true, he seems to comport himself very well. Nothing against the guy, his idea of a good time is just radically different from mine. I would not have fun going to a prarty that's considerably "debauch." George loves it. I'm also a bit hesitant about his use of the word "debauch." I'm not entirely sure if I should tolerate it or not; in general, I'm in favor of creating words and subsequently using them, but I'm not sure I like this one. One thing is that debauchery has a generally negative connotation for me; it has a connotation of Evil, like Satan is present at scenes of debauchery. Using it as a positive adjective seems a bit like a betrayal of the word "debauchery" to me. Still, what George is describing as "debauch" probably could be justifiably labled as such. I guess that if the word was used differently, I wouldn't have so much of a problem with it. I dislike the attitude behind the word more that I dislike the word itself. Well, I think I'll come down against this one, because speech and language help pattern each other, and I don't want the pattern of thought that "debauch" facilitates to spread. I also once saw the word "rape"< used as a positive adjective, as in, "dude, that's rape." I'm strongly against that usage because rape is not good, as that usage would seem to imply. I guess this is kind of the same thing. And also, I would kind of like "debauchery" to maintain its "evil orgy/black sabbath/Hieronymus Bosch" connotation. In short, Geroge's "debauch" is too pedeestrain, too terrestrial, to merit the word. Probably. I hope.
In other news, I've gone back to school. I'm in much better science classes now. I've moved from one hour of Physic, Biology, and Chemistry a week to two hours of Biology and Chemistry, and three of Physics. This is a huge difference. The students in the one-hour classes never understood anything, it's like they were expecting not to understand and didn't want to fall short of expectation, they didn't understand even when there wasn't anything not to understand. In my new classes, the students are understanding the material and asking question about its consequenses! This is great! It's adifference of direction: the students in the one-hour classes were waiting for the material to be put up on the board and shot at them; the students in the new classes are going to the board and getting the information. I'm also now in Catholicism class instead of Ethics. Right now, our theme is "Voyage Into the Conscious," and it's enjoyable. Now, istead of not getting wnywhere because the students won't sit still becasue they don't give their left buttcheek about school, we don't get anywhere becasue the students are asking so many questions. The results may be the same, but it makes a heck of a lot of difference how we get there. I still don't liek my French or Math classes, though. My teachers there both have funny waays of dealing with questions: my Math teacher asks questions only rhetorically, and asnwers them immediately afterwads herself, never waiting for the students to coem up with an answer; my French teach typically asks a question, gets one a reponse, proceeds to say that it's wrong, and then give the answer herself. In either case, the students aren't very enagaged. It's very didactic.
This paragraph will concern Math and Math Pedagogy. If you aren't interested in either, you should probably skip it. So. We recently started work on the "ln" function. It was introduced as being the "napierian logarithm," "definedas the function 'y= ln X,' being defined and derivable in the set (0,infinity) and having values for {real} such that(ln x)`= 1/x and ln 1 = 0." We've gone on from there. This seemed totally backwards to me, to whom the funcion ln was introduced as, simply, "log base e." So I asked the teacher after class, "why didn't you define it as the natural log and go from there?" My thinking was that it's easier to start with derive the properties of a function from that function than to start with the properties of the fuction and work backwards. My discussion with the math teacher lasted longer than it probably should have due to mutual miscomprehension. She kept saying that the approach she was taking was the "mathmatical approach" opposed to the approach I was proposing, which was the "practical approach." It finally came out that these kids weren't properly inroduced to logarithms--but that's a bit confusing, too, because the MAth teacher says that this year the log base 10 was introduced in Chemistry, but the students knew it only as the exponent that you had to raise the base to to get the number. I thought, "Well, yeah, that's what a logarithm is, it's the inverse function for exponentiation," and told the teacher that much: she then went on to say that the problem was when an irrational number was the base, which is more or less the same problem as when an irrational number in an exponent. I had never really thought of this as a problem, because I've always been able to punch 2^π into a calculator and get a response. I never considered how to do 2^π by hand, but it must have been a problem at some point in mathematical history. I learned that irrational numbers are never exponents, but are extensions of exponential functions. Okay. At this point, I felt like we were getting a bit far from the point we had started upon. Maybe we were, maybe not. The point was that the students, never having been properly introduced to exponential functions, were unprepared to understand logarithms in terms of exponential functions as I was suggesting. Now, I am a champion of theory and understanding what you're doing. But I think that this is a bit much. I think that the logarithm as function can be understood and used reasonalby without having to know about the problems resulting from irrational numbers, basically because I managed to get through AP BC Calculus with a decent grade in the class and a 4 on the AP test without knowing about them. I think that it's a bit overkill to do everything that the teacher suggested. True, Math here is more theoretical, and there are pure theoretical recall questions on tests here, like "Write Kolmogoroff's Axioms." They have something to do with probablility. I'd never heard about them, but had managed to do probability problems just fine at Central. One thing worth noting is the calculator difference; at Central, people had calculators; here, they don't. It's math without calculator, more or less. That explains some things, but I don't think that calculators are impossible. You don't need a TI-8X for this stuff, just a respectable scientific calculator. Also, the question of defining e came up; I suggested defining it as the summation from zero to infinity of 1/n!, but the teacher nixed that because it's an infinite series, and the kids don't know infinite series. It could be re-written as a limit, which are known, however, so I might try that. The teacher also told me that the reason the function "ln" exists is that mathemeticians were looking for something that they could use as the derivative of 1/x, so they actually did start by describing the function and then working backwards in order to figure it out. The name "natural log," she says, was a name that the mathemeticians chose randomly, and they could have called it just as easily the "Kevin function." That soudned kind of bogus to me; they called an unknown function a logarithm and it just happened to be one? That would make sense only if logarithms were totally unknown before the natural log, so the first one, of course, would be natural. None of this is the case, actually; Logarithms were "discovered" in 16XX by a scottish mathemetician named John Napier, who oricinally concieved of them as a way to calculate sines and cosines more easily, and he difined them very geometrically. The constant e was discovered by Bernoulli when he was doing work of compound intrest problems (which are exponential functions, and natural logs existed in theory before they were first called that in relation to the area under some sort of conic section. So like everything historically that my math teacher told me was wrong. I can kind of see where she's coming from, but am still convinced that it would be better to come at it my way. But now, get this: I did my research on Wikipedia and resulting links, and I compared the French and English Wikipedia pages on Natural Logs and the constant e, and they manifested the same differences as my and my math teachers approaches! The French Wikipedia page all talks about how it's the primitive of 1/x defined and derivable on all that stuff, but the English Wikipedia page mentions that in passing later and focuses on other stuff up front. I find this really fascinating. Also, the Neperian Logarithm is different than the Natural Logarithm in English, but in French the two are synonymous. Far Out. Bottom line, I'm still not happy with my Math class.
Okay, we're done with school now. I went back to Liege to play some more music with Serge and his pals, but...it wasn't as cool this time around. There was some kid on the piano and Serge's Clarinette teacher on the drums, and they were rookies. The piano wasn't so bad; the kid was hitting basically all the cords, which is essential; his playing lacked style or delicacy, though; he was mostly banging out the chords in the same rhythmic patters over and over (say, clave patterns or on 1, 2, 3, and 4), not really paying attention to the soloists. I guess that's his next step. The drums were a real problem, though. Whenever the drummer stops to get the time from the horns, confusion ensues. That happened a few times per song in this case. WE got kind of used to it, but it's really hard to play when your heartbeat keeps jumping around all over the place (well, mostly it got slower) ans sometimes stops for a little while. So, it was Rookie night at the Jazz club, and that wasn't as fun as the other time, when I was clearly the worst player there. Having a solid Rythym section can make all the difference; heck, having a solid drummer can make all the difference. The difference between bands can be as simple as a difference of drummers. I want to mention one last thing: there was this kid at school, a boy, who suggested that it was my masculin duty to seek out sex. I didn't get to hear his full explination because the bell rang, but it had something to do with having a lot of passion. He said something like, "You're a man, so you have this...this...passion, right? [he was speaking English at the time] And you can't satisfy it by yourself, can you?" The bell rang. I told him, "I don't htink it's my masculin duty to have sex with as many girls as possible. I don't even think that it's my masculin duty to have sex as many times as possible." He said, "Well, I don't agree with you." Good luck man. I think that your philosophy is corrupt and acutally kind of hilarious; have fun with that, I guess. Let's just see hot that works for you.
And that's all for now. Peace.
Hey, folks. Not much has really happened to me since the previous update, so you're gonna get a general culture update. I might end up repeating myself a bit. We'll see.
One important event that has happened to me is that I got the stuff I left at my previous family back. This means that I have my third pair of pants, my anime posters (which I have actually posted in my new sleeping area, and are totally awesome), and the package my parents sent me for Christmas. This means I've been enjoying some good old mass-produced candy bars, the Franck Symphony, and The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks, which is probably a contributing factor to this update's tardiness. I just beat it today, in fact. I have plenty of opinions on it, but I won't say all of them. It was a very pleasent experience; thank you very much, Mimi. Thanks, folks, too.
So, as you know, one of my big intrests is comics, and one of my objectives in coming to Europe was to be able to read European comics, which form, along with American and Japanese comics, the three major styles of Comics on the Earth, each with their own subdivisions. I once read that there are three major regions of comics in the world: the US, which includes the whole North American continent and pasrts of South America; France and Beglium, which includes all of Europe, and Japan, which includes all of Asia. Japanese and American comics are easy to come into contact with in the US; Asterix and Tintin are more or less the only European thing you can find in the average bookstore. I've seen Some more underground stuff like Marjane Satrapi (Persepolis is her most famous work) and David B. is starting to show up in the US, but that stuff is almost a direct reflection of the American underground movement (black and white, autobiographical; compare Persepolis and Epileptic to Speigalman's Maus), so it kind of already has its niche in the American market. Anyways, you've already heard a bit about how I've been reading comics here in Belgium. I think I've decided that I don't like the European style all that much. I think it has to do mostly with the misconception that comcis is a primarily visual and not a primarily narrative art. Many people, writers and illustrators included, seem to think that if a comic has great pictures, it's good, even if the story is subpar. This results in many good-looking comcis with weak plots and underdeveloped characters. But see, a while ago I was wondering if maybe it just seemed that way to me because they were all in French. I thought that maybe my reading in French was halting enough that it chopped up the story, made panel transitions more abrupt, and kept me from appreciating them. I had my two volumes of Fullmetal Alchemist in French here, and I was able to check my theory against them: Fullmetal Alchemist stayed as awesome as ever even though it was in French. Also, I recently came across a marvelous comic, I forget what it's called except for the subtitle, "La Femme Nue," or "The Nude Woman," at the library in Huy. Intrestlingly enough, though it has the phrase "The Nude Woman" in it, it is one of the few European comics I've come across that didn't actually have at least one drawing of a naked woman in it. Europeans seem to really like naked women in their comics. REsidue from Ancient Grece, I suppose. (All the same, there aren't half as many naked men as Ancient Grecian art produced. How to figure that?) At any rate, it was an absolutely marvelous story of how a housewife who was feeling depressed by the rut she was in ends up leaving her family for an impromptu vacation on a whim, essentially, and her adventure there. Oh, it was great. The only problem was that it's two vollumes long, and the library didn't have the second. Argh, I really hope I'll find the second. I think I've found the biggest missing link between the comics I like and the comics I don't like: CHARACTERS. If the characters are weak, the comic has virtually no chance of success. There are always exceptions, like some experimental comics that are about the sun rising, or that one in which every panel transition was a jump through time but not space, so you were looking at the same absolute location in every panel, but the time period changed, but in general, if your comic has a plot based around people, you need interesting people to hold it together. I don't mean to deny the importance of the visuals; if your comic doesn't tell the story well, then there's no way you can communicate how interesting the characters are. You need good layout, composition, and choice of visual style. Many European comics have good quality pictures, I would even say choice of visual style, but lack good characters and composition. I don't care about the people in the comic and it's too hard to read. And you know what? I think this is moslty the influence of Herge and Tintin. Tintin, you might recall my saying, has really fluffy characters. The main character exhibits personality maybe two or three times in all the 20-odd Tintin albums; not a very stunning record. He serves mostly as someone to be there to catch the adventures that fall in bewteen his hands. He doesn't even go looking for adventure, it knocks on his door. It looks good, thouhg, there's no denying it. It's been the first comic for a tremendous number uf Europeans; it's kind of like Looney Toons in the US. Everyone's seen it, and pretty much everyone agrees that it's good. Also, because Tintin goes everywhere in the world, it was really neat for a lot of young kids to read the books and realy go globetrotting. I can understand that. Unfortunately, unlike Looney Toons, Tintin is not that great. Comics in Europe, to this day, seem to have retained the "pictures first, story(?) second" and "souless characters" elements that Tintin ascribes to (by and large, anyway), and I find that unfortunate. Still, it might just be what I'm reading. I don't think I've read a single album published by L'Association since my arrival. Well, maybe that one by David B. and somebody else, but I think that's it. L'Association is, essentially, the underground publisher here in Europe. They're a commercial powerhouse, so maybe they're not as underground as is possible, but aesthetically, they tend towards the more underground style, like David B. and company. BUT! That means that there's not terribly much popular demand for this stuff, which is why it's harder to find in, say, a library. that wouldn't explain L'Association's financial success, though; maybe it's a difference betweeen France and Belgium. Maybe Belgium is clinging harder to Herge, who was Belgian, than to David B. and Marjane Satrapi, who are French (well, Marjane Satrapi is Iraniasn, but she's published in France). Now that I think of it, L'Association is a French company. Hmm. In short, I don;t like most European comics, but there are always exceptions. OHHHH, dude, I almost forgot. I found an album intitled "Mon Annee;" what really caught my eye was the name "J. Taniguchi" on the cover. Jiro Taniguchi is a mangaka that, I think acutally has more market penetration in Europe than he does in the US. When I entered "Taniguchi, Jiro" in the Champaign Library's search engine, his name didn't even show up on the list. Anyway, he's good, I've read some of his stuff here in Belgium. Now, there was another name besides Taniguchi-sensei's on the cover on "Mon Annee;" this intrigued me, as I didn't know him to do collaborations. Also, it wasa a european-style album, not a Japanese-style tankoubon book. I took a look inside, and it was in all color, which is the European standard, not black and white, as is the Japanese standard. I did some research, and this in Jiro Taniguchi DRAWING AN ALBUM. I must own this. I read a bit of it in the bookstore, I can verify that it's good. The only problem is that it's a work in four albums, one for each season of the year, and the first just hit shelves this January ninth. This means I am pracitcally guanteed not to be in Europe when the last probably three albums are published. I'll have to buy them from Amazon Europe or something. This is basically the most direct fusion possible of styles: A mangaka illustrating something written by a European. I must have it.
In other cultural news, perception of life. "Get a life" is a common insult in the US, cast about by people who can't accept that life can exist in more than one form. Now, I read a lot of comics and play a lot of video games. I feel much more comfortable here in the Prignon House than I did in the Pirard House becasue here, playing video games isn't a sin. I told you about how my host sister reacted to Fire Emblem as though it were a rape scene; that's kind of how the whole house was. Video Games were looked upon as kind of a pure waste of time, which is an opinion I do NOT agree with. Nevertheless, here, video games and comics are considered kind of ancillary to life. Life is hanging around with other people. Solitary activities, like reading and playing video games by yourself, are considered as a kind of extra-life activity. I think that Belgian society is a sort of pack society. People like to be around other people because they liek to be around other people. Being around other people is in itself comforting. Being in a group feels very natural to most Belgians (or at least, that's what I percieve). I've never been all that in to being in a group. I like to spend time by myself or with a few other people. Being with a ton of other people is not necessarily fun for me. I prefer to actually know everybody in a given group. I like to have spent time with each person individually. Here, people are good. It seems kind of like a pack, like I said: being with other people feels good. This has secondary implications, such as the fact that Belgians tend not to be too pushy with their opinions. Declaring one's opinion is a very common practice in the United States. If someone says something, it's typical for somebody else to say what he or she thinks about it. Example: AP English. In most of my AP English classes, the teacher would say something like, "Okay, we've been talking about this book lately, and today I want to talk about this one thing." At this point, some student would say, "Well, I think X." another would say, "Well, no, it's Y, becasue of this." And a debate would ensue, the teacher moderating and trying not to leet the conversation stray too far off base. That would not happen in the Belgian classes I know. They're very much teacher-oriented; the teacher talks and tell the students what they need to know (for, example, the test). My math teacher answers almost all of her own questions and solves basically all the problems with minimal to no assistance from the students. My French teacher ususally waits for one wrong response to a given question before then providing the "proper" one. But I just don't like French class at all. We never do any real analysis, it's just the teacher telling us what's important or what the central idea is af the various paragraphs that are transcfribed on our photocopied handouts. We've had to read two books so far; one was never discussed in class but was the subject of an in-class essay, and the other had some questions about it asked on the final, similarly with no prior discussion. At any rate, I was recently informed that I, perhaps, hold too tightly to my own ideas; as in, all my ideas are right, and everybody else can go munch a can. This may come as no surprise to those of you who know me, because you know full well that all my ideas are right. Anyways, I think that this is classic cross-cultural misunderstanding. Because I am more ready to offer my own opinion and defend it, that's percieved as an unwillingness to listen and to accept the validity of other ideas. That's wrong; I want to hear your ideas, but I'll respond to them but asking you questions about why you believe that and what your ideas would dictate in particular circumstances, hypothetical or otherwise. This is because I'm interested in what your ideas are, and I want to have the most complete picture of them possible. I think the etiquette here is more to listen and say, "Oh, okay." Questions about ideas and beliefs are supposed to be non-threatening. "Know and Defend" is my newly-adopted motto: Know what you like, know it well, and be ready to defend it. There is one thing I want to add: of course all my ideas are right! Why would I believe in something if it was wrong? "Yeah, that's wrong, but I believe it anyway." That's a stupid idea. Given a choice between ideas, beliefs, and philosophies, I'm gonna choose the one that's right. This is what everybody does. Nobody picks the one that's "wrong." The interesting thing is that peopel always end up picking different right answers. This is what make the world not boring. The fact that when two peopel choose the right answer to a quesiton, their answers are not necessarily the same. If your right answer is different than mine, tell me why yours is right and I'll tell you why mine is right. Maybe we can come to some sort of cultural understanding.
Also notable is Belgium's seeming lack of subcultures. Here, there seems to be more or less one culture: Walloon Culture. I've already told some of you about the LCS, or the Lunchtable Classiftcation System of subcultural division and taxonomy. Here, there are no lables separating people with certain sets of interests from others. The culture, in general, is much more homogenous. This means, however, that in order to get along, people are less pushy about their ideas, or at least advertise them less.
Also, education: public school syllabi are all standardised by Community, which is the governmental level just below the federal level, which is the highest. There are three, each corresponding to a linguistic community: Dutch/Flemish, French, and German. This means that every student in Flanders is getting taught more or less the same thing, with some variance depending on the options he or she has chosen. Also, Universities are rather socialized; a year of university here costs around 800-1000 Euros here, which is like ten times less than it does in the US, becasue they're backed by the state. Universities cannot refuse applicants. If they can pay, then they can study. I'm guessing this is a consequence of socialized universities. Everyone's money get spread around to the Universities, so everyone get's a chance to use the facilities that they pay for. After high school, your academic record up to that point means nothing. You get a completely fresh slate startign with University. Of course, if you didn't work hard in High School and before, your chances of having to repeat years in Univerisisty go way up, as you won't be used to working, and you'll know substantially fewer things. There are also schools after High school that are, I gather, roughly equivalent to Junior colleges, which issue degrees that are less prestegious than a university degree but can still secure you a decent-paying job. this seemed a bit bizarre to me, because in the US, the application system tends to place students with students of similar capacities, so tthe resulting pedagogy can be better suited to a larger number of people. In the Belgian system, it seems like the level of student would be and probably is all over the charts. But, since the Belgian pedagogy is typically more didactic and less student-oriented, I can see how this would be less of a problem.
I think that's it for me for today. Peace out, y'all.
