Getting Here.

For those of you who don’t know, Belgium is not so close to where I live. And accordingly it takes a while to get there. So instead of my usual routine of flying, which consists of packing hours before my flight and arriving just on time to walk onto the plane, often being one of the last people to get on the plane (which for Southwest can leave you with an isle seat since they somehow save money by not assigning seats. How that saves money I’ll never know- ink?) and arriving a few short hours later at my destination which is customarily somewhere in the West. But not this time. First off packing became a dilemma. I could only take so much stuff, two carry-on pieces and two checked bags weighing 50 pounds or less (which I have gotten very good at, having a number of bags coming in at exactly 50 pounds). As I had never been to Europe, I wasn’t too sure of what I would and would not need, and things here are more expensive, so I didn’t want to leave out anything important. So I spent hours going through everything, discarding tons of shirts, ties, and a suit, as I didn’t want to cut the 50 pound limit too close as I would like to have some leeway in bringing stuff back (you should get your orders in as soon as you can), but I had to be careful to take enough. Now, back to the aforementioned distance from California to Belgium. Most flights from the U.S. arrive in Belgium in the morning, Belgian time. This means a 6 am departure from California. And that means at 3:45 am departure from the house. So combine these two factors 1. Me packing and 2. Early departure and you get no sleep, at all.

I did have one moment of worry as I arrived at the airport. I bought my ticket on studentuniverse.com (which is a great website for cheap flights if you are a college student or a professor), which means that I didn’t have any interaction with the airline in my purchase. Well when I arrived at the US Airways ticket counter, there were only flights listed to Phoenix. Well I started to panic a little bit; I knew my first leg was to Denver. Initially I started to wonder if I was at the right airline, check- yup, US Airways. “Oh no, am I at the airport on the right day?” Check e-mail, yup, January 25^th. So I get up to the counter and slide my card. No surprise, “Your reservation cannot be found. Please try United.” Ah crap, did studentuniverse.com mess everything up? Well turns out they had contracted out the flight, but you can imagine my no sleep-worried about getting to Europe, state of mind. The only other incident at the airport was my flagging for extra-security. I guess when you buy a one-way ticket to a foreign country at the last minute it looks a little suspicious.

Needless to say, I slept the entire first leg of my journey to Denver, where I had perhaps my last American mushroom-Swiss burger for 4 months (mmmm….I can taste it now). Then I slept from Denver to Philadelphia, not even remembering passing out. In Philly I learned that the flight to Brussels had been delayed, by an hour and a half. Well that sent me into a bit of a panic as my host family was leaving for a 10 day trip a few hours after I arrived. I had gone through a bit of trouble to ensure that I would be there in time to meet them before they left. So I sent off an e-mail to my boss informing him of the change (he had arranged a driver to pick me up and had a schedule worked out for my arrival) and to my host family letting them know I would be late and to hopefully have a contingency plan ready. I clicked send and boarded my plane, knowing I wouldn’t’ be able to get their responses. I slept 5 of the 7 hours of this flight, which was greatly facilitated by the fact that I had an entire row to myself and could lie down.

Ever come off a plane and had a guy there waiting with a sign that has your name on it? Well now I have. The Embassy had a guy waiting for me, which instantly abated any fears of my wandering around the streets of Belgium searching for NATO or for a big white house in Kraainem. Needless to say everything from there went smoothly. My boss and driver were outside customs waiting for me and drove me over to NATO. My first impressions were that it looked much like I thought it would. When we were coming in for landing I noticed that there would be clumps of houses, then vast areas of country with only a few houses sparsely scattered about. There is no urban sprawl here. And the houses and the general architecture were generally what I had expected. It is very beautiful here, but has been very foggy and overcast most of the time I have been here. It is also cold, very cold. I knew this before I came and expected to be prepared for it. I have lived in Utah for over 4 years and survived 2 Canadian winters. But Belgium has something that neither of those places has, humidity. And it certainly makes a difference.

My host family is very nice, Marianne and Pierre. They speak good English, but would like to improve. So we made a deal that they would help me learn some French and I would help them to improve their English. As I said before, they left shortly after I arrived here. They have a house in Southern France and have gone there for 10 days to escape the cold.

Well this post has gone on long enough, but I have just begun. Some things for next time… making breakfast when you can’t read anything is harder than you think, riding the bus when you can’t read anything or communicate with anyone is also harder than you think (and leads to wandering around from bus stop to bus stop trying to figure out where you are), and some other comical adventures, most involving language and customs barriers.

I have enjoyed every minute of my time here and my internship is going great. I have already learned a lot and look forward to some rewarding projects.