Dirty Dirty Ghent (two completly seperate events)

Today was wonderful...I woke up early and Emma and I went to Ghent (see slide show in the right hand column of this page). The best thing about our day trip was A. it cost only 8 euros for the train ticket and B. it was a beautiful sunny day.

Ghent is probably the cutest town ever. It has old cathedrals and a canal, not to mention an H&M that looks as though it is from the 1800's (I bought some very cute sweaters).

HOWEVER, today's BIG triumph came later. (background). Emma and I love to go dancing. We enjoy a night out where we burn as many calories as we drink (maybe). We therefore found a dance club that we call "stumbling distance" from our apartments. It is called "Dirty Dancing" and it is the "hottest night club in Brussels". Now this purposed a problem, because as it was "hot stuff", it became super pretentious and decided not to let anyone in that did not know someone with an "Access Card", and the only way to get an "Access Card" was to know someone with an "Access Card". (It's sort of a catch 22 there, and sort of difficult to get around). So, Emma and I decide that we are GETTING IN to this club as it is so close to where we live, so we get dressed up in our very nice outfits and get there early.

Here's the truth: as beer is normally sold out of vending machines here, I don't believe that there is a drinking age, seriously, as long as you can punch in the number you can drink here. So Emma (who is an old woman at 26 years old) and I were honestly old ladies (I'm 22). So we go to the door of the club, and realized that THEY (as in the institution) did not want us in. There was just one problem, if you do not want mousy browned haired girls, with confidence disproportionate to their looks and skill entering your club, especially if their name is Philippa Wood, do NOT have a homosexual man as your bouncer.

Seriously.

Conversation: "Hi, we really wanted to get in to your club"

(Bouncer) "Yea, that is not possible tonight, we are full"
(us): "No, we REALLY want to dance and have some drinks and have a good time, ... please?"
(bouncer): "No"
(Us): "Look, we're two American girls who live nearby, and we want to dance...please let us in?"
(Bouncer): "Wait two minutes, I need to talk to my boss"
.....
(Bouncer, back from inside): " Look, I talked to my boss and the thing is, you may not like the people or the music, but, I really, really like your shoes (points at my ridiculous heels with a pointy tip)...so, I'm going to let you in"
(us)..."What's your name?.." (as in we have a new best friend)

...
Moral, if you open a club and you don't want to let old (by old I mean older than 19 years old) girls in who have AMAZING taste in shoes and who's confidence is once again completely disproportionate to their looks and ability (thank you Tina Fey), do NOT hire homosexual men as your bouncers.

Regardless, today was wonderful.

Free Concert Webcast

It could be entertaining if anyone is interested, just make sure you register online!
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What. 2008 Operation Kids Lifetime Acheivement Award Gala, honoring John Walsh. Hosted by Dennis Haysbert, featuring a FREE tribute performance by Collin Raye and Jim Brickman.

Watch. Collin Raye perform live at the 2008 Operation Kids Lifetime Achievement Award Gala. We will be streaming his performance FREE online with the help of Fox13 and XanGo. Saturday, October 11 at 9:00 p.m. (Mountain). (don't worry about forgetting, we will remind you!)

Register. It is FREE, but you must register to watch. Register by Friday, October 3, 2008, for a chance to win Collin Raye t-shirts, CDs and TWO tickets to the gala (must provide your own transportation to SLC).

Win. There is also a way to win the guitar played and signed by Collin that night (it's an Epiphone if anyone is familiar with guitars - a professional-quality guitar worth quite a bit)

Register at: http://operationkids.org/register

Why I dislike Fridays...

For some reason, it seems as though all the office equipment likes to start the weekend early. Don't get me wrong, I'm all about seeing if I can pop out of the office a little bit early (at Eurodad, early is before six) on Fridays for happy hour. However, if the server, the website, the printer, the copier and the newsletter host all go down on the same day, chances are I'm not getting out early. Just like today.

The IT guy was coming in today at 10, so I meander in around 9:50, in my self proclaimed "casual Friday" outfit (the boss is out of town, I'm taking advantage by not doing my ironing). I sit down and log into my computer and realize I have no mail. This is simply an impossibility as for some reason people love to send me mail around the time I'm leaving the office, so I always turn off my mail before I finish my last job so I won't be distracted and can leave at what may possibly be a reasonable hour (or at least earlier then the even more unreasonable hour that I would leave if I left my email on). So I knew something was wrong.

I had such good intentions of editing the report that was put on my desk last week and getting out the French newsletter before lunch. Alas, the server and website had other ideas. Regardless, the IT guy came for about four hours, and as he was leaving I asked what he had done and what we should do if Outlook refuses to connect to our computers again. He looks at me a little funny and says "I don't know, call me".

I try to explain the economic restraints of an NGO and how paying him a ridiculously high hourly rate once a week or so is a little out of our price range. He then did what so many Belgians do when they don't like what I'm saying; he pretended that he didn't understand English. Regardless, I was the first person in the office (yes, I came in at 9:50 and yes I was the first...I did say that the boss is out of town right?) and the last person out of the office, on a Friday.

But the evening wasn't all bad, I met up with a friend for margs and a movie (mama mia, I napped to ABBA - but PS they serve beer and wine at movie theaters here, I fell asleep before I could drink mine so I now have a can of unopened fruit beer next to my bed) and then watched the season premier of House on my computer. I'm now stress eating nutella out of the bottle and deciding if I should go to bed or make sure the French newsletter went out alright. I should probably sleep, but I will after I check up on the newsletter.

I can't WAIT to see what exciting adventures the weekend holds (SPOILER ALERT: I have plans to go to Mini Europe and the Atonium, yeah, I'm THAT exciting).

PS, if you can't get enough of my blogging here (Eric, I know you're at work reading this) you can also see the blogging I'm doing for work, if you scroll down a little on this page and click on the link called "The BetterAid Blog" I've started to write posts for that as well as it's run by Eurodad.

The Mysterious Baby Caper

Not a lot has changed in my relationship with my roommate. It’s very convenient, almost as if I live alone, except, miraculously things get cleaned up, it’s really not too bad. There is one strange thing, (well two counting the toilet paper…still an ongoing ordeal in my everyday life) every morning when I’m eating breakfast (the door to her room is in the kitchen) I hear a baby. Every morning. Now these rooms are specifically rented to singles. It was made very clear to me that under no circumstance was I to have anyone else live in my room, and the same went for everyone else in the building. Does a baby count? 1.5 people is not the same as two. You would think that if this girl had a baby, my landlord would have told me about it, if only so I would turn my music down earlier or keep my noise to a minimum when I went into the kitchen for a midnight snack. But, he never mentioned it. In addition, when my roommate does her laundry, every now and then there’s a baby tee-shirt or bib hanging up with her clothes on the drying rack.

Due to the facts presented:

A. Baby noises every day

B. Baby clothes out to hang

C. No mention of a baby by the landlord

There are only two possible explanations.

1. I’m losing my mind and there is no baby, I’m just hearing things, and my roommate likes to wear really, really small belly shirts.
2. My roommate is hiding a baby in her room and my landlord doesn’t know.

Now, both these options seem very possible to me, however as time goes by I’m really starting to lean towards number two. So what do I do? Should I mind my own business and leave it alone. I’m honestly not bothered by the baby; I have yet to hear it cry at night (although there’s some definite gurgling). Should I learn a few French sayings about babies and see how my roommate responds? (I say see, because no matter what I memorize, I will still have no idea what she says when she responds). I tried: avez-vous un bébé? Once, but I don’t know if she didn’t understand or what, because she stormed out of the kitchen without answering me. But then of course, I could always solve this case and simply ask the landlord. However, if she is in fact hiding a baby, I don’t want her to get kicked out and be homeless on the streets with a child. I would feel a little bad about that. So what to do, I’m also thinking I could get my downstairs neighbour who speaks French to sit in my kitchen with me and ask her about it if she’s around. I tried that once and we sat in the kitchen for over an hour, but my roommate never appeared.

Reporter Fail

FINALLY SOMEONE TO ASK QUESTIONS TO

Interesting...

So, tonight Eurodad co-hosted a round table discussion with The German Marshall Fund of the United States. It was a discussion on what to do now that the High Level Forum in Accra is over. Since Lucy, my coworker who wrote the report that was to be discussed at the meeting was in Accra (of course) last week and busy getting ready to go to Accra before that, I helped her out with a lot of the logistics of organizing a meeting (i.e. sending out invites, calling people to remind them to RSVP, going to the hotel, booking the equipment for the meeting room, going to the printers to print reports etc.)

So, the moderator of this forum was Jim Kolbe , who is kind of a Republican rockstar (in my mind) as he was the first openly gay Congressman to address the Republican National Convention. So he's republican, and openly gay.

After the forum, the people from the German Marshall fund took me, my co-worker Lucy and Mr. Kolbe out to dinner to thank us for working on the event (free food and wine yummy!) and somehow...(I wonder how, as all of you know how NOT pushy I am) I end up sitting right across from Mr. Kolbe.

Game on.

So, as an openly homosexual man who is pro choice, how can you really support a McCain/Palin ticket?

How does Hector your life partner feel about your stance on immigration?

Foreign policy wise, aren't you afraid McCain may be a little aggressive towards nations such as Russia?

---

BEST DINNER EVER.

He calmly discussed how even if the republicans win, it WON'T be the end of the world, and if Palin becomes VP, there's no way there's not going to be a very strong Democratic congress who are a million times stronger then any VP could ever be. On top of that, the only people who LOVE Palin, are people who would have voted for a republican anyway, the middle of the road voters who could go both ways will probably be swayed against the ticket as she's so extreme (although I pointed out that there was NO evidence of this but I'm pretty sure the dear man was trying to placate me, and it sort of makes sense.) Anyway, we spent the first half of the dinner discussing politics (as he was A NATIONAL SENATOR) love it. And the second half becoming best friends.

OK, so let's rewind, as I said before, he's openly homosexal. Therefore, we are now super best friends. I may have come off a little strong, and at first I thought it was in my head, but as we were walking out of the restaurant, my coworker Lucy goes...

"Phil, seriously, I watched you charm that man from the moment you sat down, if your pay was based on charm, you would be rich...it's not, but if it were".

Yeah, so apparently that was NOT in my head. And apparently I'm WAY more conservative then I thought I was. Well not socially but neither was he.

As we were chatting I found out that his roommate at Stanford University lives in New Canaan, and his roommate's son (Chris Hughey?) was in my grade, and he happens to be is his godson, and we had physics together senior year (yes, I pointed that out)... small world much?

Yeah, so I got home from "work" at 11pm today, but that's ok because I finally found a republican to get my anxiety out on, and it was wonderful.

Note.

Could you please notice that there is an ad at the bottom of this blog (scroll all the way down). The ad is put there by google, who takes topics from my blogs and determines what topics the ads should be on. Recently there have been language schools in Belgium and Online Toilet Paper sales, all of which I have found both humorous and appropriate. Now however I am ASTONISHED to see that there is a Scientology video link ad.

WHAT in gods name do I have (ok note. I will now be taking out the word GOD from my blog) on this blog that would make google think that people interested in Scientology would be reading it? Seriously? Is it the politics reference, because I know that Oprah likes Obama, and Oprah likes(ed) Tom Cruise, but that is basically the only connection I can find.

I just wanted to share with you the kind of profiling that google thinks is efficient.

Sidebar- I am volunteering for the Democrats Abroad organization this weekend, as I felt so guilty about all those non-Americans doing it, and interestingly enough it is only the Democrats abroad (not Republicans abroad, they don't do this) that works with vote from abroad.org to get Americans (regardless of their party preferences) to sign up and vote while they are living/studying abroad. So I thought THAT was interesting.

Palin:

I’ve been asked by quite a few people about my views on Palin, as an active Hillary lover it’s been awful seeing many compare the two simply because they share a chromosome. I respect and support Hillary for many reasons, one of which is because she is a women, however Palin’s description of herself as a “bulldog” during the Republican convention does not draw a very complimentary picture for women in politics. Do women have to be aggressive and threatening to get ahead in politics?

In addition to that it is astounding to me that a women whose 17 year old daughter is pregnant still does NOT believe in a comprehensive sex ed program. Now I don’t think we should throw condoms at high school students and tell them to jump in each others beds but “abstinence only” programs are simply not effective (point in case: Bristol Palin).

There’s also a strange arrogance that Palin carries around, she’s “pro-life/anti-choice” even in the cases of rape or incest, in addition there was also an incident when she tried to ban library books. It’s this superiority complex that really makes me fearful of a “Palin Reign”. If children go to the library to take out books, it should be the responsibility of their parents, NOT the government to censor which books are taking out. However, it seems as though Palin genuinely believes she knows better then the 'average American' (aka, you and I). She wants to make important choices in our children’s lives that we have no control over. And to me, that is very dictatorial for a democracy (republic).

The fact is, Palin may be a women, but seems to be like the scary nun that hits bad children with rulers, where Hillary seems more like the aggressive smart girl in your senior year who ran for every political office possible, and never got below an A-.

Now to be fair, Vice Presidents are not known to have the most influence or power during their administrations, (unless their names rhyme with Sick Faney and you run the administration like a puppet government through your office at the pentagon.) but with McCain’s age and cancer history one can only hope for the best and expect the worst; and in this case the worst is definitely Palin coming to power and deciding what is best for Americans. As a self proclaimed “pit bull” it would be easy to forget that while she may have won the election, the country is extremely divided. The elections are going to be very close, and if she decides what is best for all with a strong hand, when just about 50% of Americans do not agree with her policies, the Republicans may pay a very high price, but that won’t come close to what the Democrats will pay.

Obamu-ndo

I had an interesting experience this past Friday. The Brussels branch of Democrats abroad was showing Obama's speech in an Irish pub by the European Commission. I decided that I would rather watch his acceptance speech on a nice big screen drinking with friendly people who were also interested in politics than alone on my bed on my tiny computer screen on YouTube.

I therefore dragged my Nigerian friend Okey with me to the pub and there we met a plethora of people anxious to get Obama voted into office, whether they had a vote or not.

I always found it interesting that when people travel to foreign countries, they flock to people like them; Americans generally hang out with Americans, Brits or Canadians etc. I was therefore surprised to see that of the 100 odd people that showed up to see Obama speak, about 45 of them were not American citizens. While I understand that this was social event and like me, many Americans could drag their non-American friends along with them, that is understandable. However, it was not like that, many of the foreigners (mainly Germans, Swiss, French and Belgian) were very ACTIVE in the Democrats abroad organization. While they are not allowed to donate any money, they are active volunteers getting Americans abroad to register to vote, because many are not.

Isn't that interesting, that foreigners are persuading Americans to sign up to vote for THIER President. It's kind of embarrassing even. Why aren't Americans who are living abroad already registered to vote, and why do they need to be pushed to register?

I suppose I understand people's frustration in the American public, after 8 years of G. Bush, it seems as though Americans need to be slapped in the right direction (that direction being...left), especially on foreign policy. But is it really appropriate for foreigners to be participating so actively in the American political sphere?

Who knows, I think it's great that people want to help out, but it makes me sad that more Americans are not active in this area, especially in a place as politically minded as Brussels.