Pukkelpop and recovery

I survived. I survived the 3-4 day craze that is Pukkelpop. This music festival in Kiewit, Belgium is one of the craziest things I have been to even though my new friends here assure me it is not that uncommon. I can only think of maybe 3 or 4 music festivals of this size in the US that happen every year, but Belgium and its fame for parying put on aroudn 20 festivals annually. Oh where to begin describing this...

I guess I´ll start on Wednesday... Stefanie and Lut and I went to do some provision purchasing for 3 days of camping and we stocked up on the essentials: chips, waffles, sausages, sangria, red wine, vodka, campari, etc. I dont exaggerate when I say that I doubt I have eaten a vegetable in the last 5 days. That night we stopped by Lut´s aunt´s surprise birthday party and left for Kiewit. We were the ones that would arrive early to set up everyone´s tent. And by set up I mean more "fight to get a space for eveyone´s tent". Here´s the stats to give you an idea...

"No less than 198 musical acts played at the festival, 41 of which were Belgian. Pukkelpop continues to promote Belgium’s musical pride. Each day Pukkelpop received more than 65,000 visitors of 51 different nationalities. Mainly Dutch, British, Irish and Swiss music lovers found their way to the Kiewit fields. Even Australia was amply represented.

We counted more than 54,000 campers. During the past three days, De Lijn transported 78,000 music lovers. About 30,000 people came to the festival by train, a rise by 20%, which caused NMBS to have two trains on stand-by in addition to the 15 extra trains on Sunday.
Between 8 a.m. and 2.30 p.m. on Sunday, trains with destination Hasselt will leave Kiewit station every fifteen minutes.

For the first time the festival was completely sold out with 62,500 paying visitors a day. The maximum waiting time for the identity control at the waiting desk was 11 minutes."

So, yeah it was crowded. My tent was stepped on numerous times over the 3 days, each time someone´s foot coming dangerously close to my skull. But I am unharmed! Anyways, that night Lut and I went to the preparty and then the next day the insanity began. I´m stoked I got to see so many bands -

Snow Patrol, The XX, Boys Noize, The Kooks, Groove Armada, Kele, Goldfrapp, Benny Benasi, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, Yeasayer, Kate Nash, Foals, Broken Bells, The Drums, Caribou, OK Go, Four Tet, Aeroplane Dj Set, Matt and Kim, Cymbals eat Guitar, DOMINIQUE YOUNG UNIQUE (one of my faves even thought she had to play at 11am saturday morning and no one was awake to go to her show), Broken Glass Heroes, and more... Sad story!! Ou est le Swimming Pool played at the festival and then that night after they performed the lead singer killed himself in the parking lot. Just sayin. Kind of crazy.

Also, my friends tought me a lot of Dutch and that´s pretty fun. I´ll write more later but for now I need to nap. the four days of sleeping on the ground in the middle of a refugee camp with alcohol have taken a toll on me. More to come!

Belgïe

Hi all!

I am in Europe once again. Currently I am residing in Dendermonde, Belgium and having many adventures with Lut Verhas. I arrived yesterday at 945am after losing 6 hours from US East Coast time (the same 6 hours in which I usually sleep). So, yes, I was extremely tired and had an entire day ahead of me. Fun part of this trip is that I speak pretty much no Dutch at all so today while Lut is at work my excursions into the city are pretty entertaining. I get accosted by people making foreign noises at me and I have to smile, shrug, and pretty much walk away. Most of the time the people turn to others around them and comment on what I imagine to be a commentary of my weirdness. BUT today I ordered a sandwich and I dont think they had much of idea that I was foriegn and frightened. Yay! Matt-1 Belgium-17,698. And tonight I am goign to eat dinner at Lut´s grandma´s house. She is making us Belgian fries.

Im about to go grab my camera and walk around a bit playing the tourist role. At least people might think twice about saying something to me, wondering if I really speak their language or not. One last thing, right now I am watching the Disney Channel in Dutch and wow. It´s still not funny. More updates to come.

Non-rhetorical question: Why am I here?

Hola blog world,

Once you read this blog entry you will get a pleasant Spanish language music video surprise at the bottom of the box...blog. Not box. Sorry, I´m thinking about how ravenously hungry I am and how amazing cereal would be right now.

So here is my pseudo existential crisis of the moment:

Two days ago I was leaving my creative writing class and sprinting to print out a poem we were going to discuss in my next class (which, of course, I hadn´t read) and while i was cursing under my breath at the snail-paced computers in the library my professor walked up to me, one Señor José Kozer, and he said hello and asked what my major was. I told him linguistics because I thought he would already know it was an M.A. in Spanish, just with a linguistics concentration, because everyone in my creative writing class is in the Spansih M.A. program. In fact, if you are not in that program you can´t even take the class... Anyways, he nodded his head and said "linguistics, interesting. Is it a B.A.? M.A.?" An M.A. I responded. "In...Spanish?" Yes.... This might be a good time to mention he is 70 years old. After that small confusing interaction he said that he thought I was a really good student and if I´d be in Middlebury next year he wants me to take another class he is going to be teaching. I told him I´m goign to Madrid and might not be back in Vermont so he said I need ot take the class on Quijote and he was going to tell the professor who teaches that class about me. I found this all very flattering and I walked away with my chest puffed out not really caring that I had forgotten to print the poem for class...

Later that day I realized that I hadn´t really done any work for my classes for about a week and a half. I had figured out how to coast in this program (which is actually not such a bad thing because I woudl go crazy if I didn´t slack off a bit). My other professors have also mentioned that I´m doing really well in their classes, in not such a direct way as Kozer. SO, given:

1. that I was nervous about not beaing able to do the Masters level work at first,

2. that I was nervous about attending an institution that is pretty much the best in the country for what I want to learn,

3. that my professors like my work and really believe in me -

-is it an abuse of that respect that I hadn´t done any work for their classes? I feel like I should buckle down and work my ass off for the next 3 weeks. It´s not a super long time and why am I even here if I´m not going to take this program as seriously as I can, right?

So naturally we got shwastey last night and went to a dance party. I don´t regret it even a little bit. Of course I had a blast, as I always do with music and alcoholic influences, but depressing moment of the night: I bought a bottle of Red Stag because it was the cheapest whiskey I could find that didn´t seem like it would cause internal hemorrhaging. When I got back to the suite my friend informed me that none other than the illustrious KID ROCK was the spokesperson for Red Stag. On second thought that whiskey might be capable of causing internal bleeding... Again, in my style of defying my moralistic decisions (i.e. work hard at school vs. drink at a dance party), I drank the Red Stag.

Ok, as promised, your Spanish language treat! And I am off to gorge myself on greasy foods and caffiene. Hasta la pasta! sorry, im hungry...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBXx1pPXjds

if you liked it continue with...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZepwVXqiewo&feature=channel

I got really drunk and got stuck in an elevator. (separate occasions)

I know, the title is kind of a tease, but I just thought it was really humorous. It´s all true, I hope you know. Here´s the recap...

Saturday - A group of us went to Burlington which turned out to be a pretty cool town. It is the smallest biggest town of a state in all of the US. Super confusing, I know. Here´s how it breaks down - so every state has it´s largest city, right? Well Vermont´s largest city is Burlington (smaller than Santa Cruz, just for a point of reference), and so out of all those largest cities in all the states in the US, Burlington is the smallest. Go Vermont. Quaint, yeah. Low key, pretty much. But fun nonetheless. We found a really kitchy clothing store which was perfect for the costume party that the Spanish school was hosting that night. I bought a sailor hat for $6 (cuz I´m a big spenda´) and drew an anchor tattoo on y arm with a sharpee. This all sounds really fun, right? Well it was except that I got BELIGERENT. Me + that much vodka = NEVER AGAIN. Sunday I was having flashbacks of all the embarrassing things I did (por ejemplo, dancing on stage with two other people in front of all the professors, getting DOWN with some guy on the dancefloor with pretty much everyone watching, tripping up and down stairs all night and trying to enter the closed Juice Bar while a group of people watched me tug pathetically at the door). Wow.

Sunday - Recovery and homework.

Monday - Classes again, but here comes the interesting part of this story... I was talking to some friends who I saw for like 2 seconds at the dance. One asked me, "so how was Sunday?" I said it was fine though I had a headache, I figured he saw me extremely drunk and naturally knew I had the world's worst hangover. And so I asked "Did you see me Saturday?" He said only few those few seconds but he had a suspicion of something. "A suspicion of what?" I inquired. "Well, I heard you were dancing..." Pause. Analyse. If he didn't see me dancing but heard from someone else I was dancing, and then thought there was something goign down afterwards - that means like everyone saw my mortifyingly embarrassing moment AND THEY ARE TALKING ABOUT IT. Fml.

Monday part 2 - I was studying in BiHall (I know how that sounds, it's not important) and all of a suddent there was the most intense downpour I have ever seen in my life. There were insane bolts of lightning and thunder that shook you when it clapped. I don't think I can do it justice in writing, but it was insane. So my friends and I thought it would be cool to go up to one of the higher floors of the building and watch this storm from one of the giant windows. We get in the elevator and we are on our way up to the 6th floor... 4 *ding* 5 *ding* 6 *WHAM* and the elevator stops. The doors don't open. We were trapped in the elevator uring a lightning storm. No, in retrospect I do not consider it a good idea to have taken an elevator in a lightning storm, but it is what it is. I was about two seconds away from whipping out my cell phone and calling a friend to say "oh hey, what's up? Can you do me a solid and call campus security and maybe the fire department? I'm trapped 6 stories up in an elevator. Thanks." But before I could do that a friend actually tried pushing a button for the 5th floor and the elevator went down and the doors opened. We took the stairs back to the 1st floor when we were done watching the storm.

I shared a poem with my class....AND THEY LIKED IT!

Dear blog readers,

As you have read before I am in a creative writing class and all we do is write poetry. The prof is awesome, the class is really chill, but writing poetry is as difficult for me as is having successful interactions with men. You know how that goes... Needless to say I was slightly terrified when it was my day to share a poem with the class. Whatever cosmic power is out there must have had it´s mojo working the day I wrote the poem because everyone thought it was really good! I still don´t think I´m any good at writing poetry, but it´s comforting to know that it isn´t completely out of the question to have momentary stokes of luck and inspiration. Anyways, since I´m kinda proud of this guy, I want to be self-published in my own blog. Here you all go...

LA CIUDAD

Por este puente dorado llegamos,

los Hendrixianos cenan en el césped

tocan

y se ríen a carcajadas.

Las casitas victorianas comprimidas

suben la loma

marrón, salmón, crema, turquesa, amarilla…

... es ésa más pajiza o áurea?

Desde la cumbre se despliega todo,

un sintonizador

salta en el centro

el pulso, energía –

Es verdad, sí rascan el cielo.

Intoxicado hubiera podido perderme allí.

ninguna persona sabe quien soy,

las luces

las ventanas más altas…

Seguimos bajando a la jungla,

vallas, bares, basura, cerveza, cigarrillos, humo taxis

taxistas roqueros punks junkies pijos artistas

banderas bandas vagabundos

burguesía Banana Republic,

Valentino.

Jo´er k caló.

Hola a todos!

I'm going to break the "Language Pledge" for this blog entry because I want all y'alls to know what's up and because I AM DYING. Due to the insane heat wave over here in Vermont. It is humid as all get out and really really hot. Get this, classes were cancelled today because of it. This program is only 6 weeks long and we as students fail if we miss 3 classes - so if the administration OK'd us to miss a class, I'm assuming it is because they don't want us all dead in a classroom on the 6th floor of Warner hall that doesn't have AC. Last night I carried a case of beer about 100 yards (you know, since we didn't have class today everyone figured that getting crunkcrunk was our best option) and I had to take a shower afterwards.

Aside form all that, I have been here for one week. It feels like so much longer because I am carrying around the nagging fact that I'm not allowed to communicate with all you Angloparlantes. So far the classes are good. I neglect my homework as usual, I still can't write poetry to save my life, and the reading assignments seem not all that crucial for me to complete, but seeing as how I don't want to be a grad school drop-out it all gets done.

Also, I went to a lake for sort of the first time. I'm not counting Lake Renee in Montana since there is no..."beach" as people here call it. I describe it more as a rough pseudosandy perimiter of the lake the extends about 3 feet from the water's edge, but it's just semantics, right?

And so far there are no interesting stories of boys that I can gossip to all of you about, it would just be normal stuff, not like cornfields, Russian pirates or puppy euthanization.

Two last things I will mention is that I rediscovered the Baile Chikichiki (It's on my facebook and you should all watch it if you are not familiar) AND my friend Leah finally taught me how to say 'dog' and 'horse' correctly in Chinese - the former of the two has been eluding me since high school. YAY!