Dinner out

I am so tired of packing up and partially unpacking our belongings! Right now it seems like we will never be finished, as we inch into our fourth move this year. Normally I like moving, but I guess you can have too much of a good thing. Also we are struggling with the bureaucrat side of this move--it's not so difficult, really. I mean, we are here, right? but the devil is in the paperwork.

We got a break from all this last Friday as Travis' employers organizes periodic expatriate dinners for all of the employees from other countries. This time, everyone met at a Tapas restaurant in Gent. We took the train up to Gent and walked up to the restaurant, which was about a 45 minute walk. In that area of town, restaurants abound. Within a couple of blocks we saw some Mexican food, a Thai place, and Italian place, and too many others to list.

Over twenty-five people came to the dinner, filling up the entire first floor of the smallish establishment. The only language we all had in common was English, so Travis and I got to enjoy a small island of our own language. Even so, we were the only people from the US. At one point in the evening someone counted, and we had 13 different nationalities there! We were at a table with people from England, France, China, India, and Brazil. But there were also people from Russia, Indonesia, Sweden, Luxemburg, and, well, others I can't remember off the top of my head, plus one female employee brought her Belgian boyfriend. Everyone was very friendly, making lots of jokes, and generally being pretty loud.

It was comforting to find that some of the other expats have had some of the same experiences that we have. For instance, one gentleman from Brazil was commenting that the Dutch you learn in class is not the same as the dialect that people actually speak in the area. He related a story about a time when he went to order a sandwich, asking for a "brodje" and the woman behind the counter didn't understand him at all. "Oh, you mean a brOHdje," she finally said, with basically the exact same intonation that he thought he had just said. We laughed pretty hard at that one, because on the way there, Travis had asked for two roundtrip tickets to Gent, and had the exact same problem with the word "terug" (which means return). His pronunciation sounded perfect to me, but it was met with the same puzzlement. The woman behind the counter eventually said something that sounded more like "Trg".

The food was very good, too. We started out with bread and a plate of goat cheese, olives, and salad as a cold platter. Then the hot dishes were potatoes in a tomato sauce, fried calamari, some shrimp, stuffed mussel shells, and more salad. We finished up with a nice cup of coffee. They do take their time over dinner in Belgium, though, and we ended up having to get a ride back to Zwevegem because we would not have been able to catch the last train. There are a lot more expat activities in Gent in general, and I think that when we live there we will get out and participate.