Mon dieu, those Belgians can fry a tasty frite!

Friends, I have returned!

That's right, the Wandering Osteologist is once again a-wandering. For many moons this blog lay dormant, as I stilled my roaming feet and holed up in NYC for the spring semester to teach osteology and start sifting through the piles of data I collected throughout my previous travels.

But now I have taken to the open road again, this time to deplete the remainder of my dissertation grant funds. I will be spending the next five weeks studying chimpanzee skeletons in Belgium, and then it's home to begin the truly difficult part of this whole endeavor: writing the thesis. (Cue ominous music.)

I am currently sitting in my airbnb rental in the Brussels neighborhood of Etterbeek, drinking tea on the deck as the sun goes down. When I began this post the other night, I was listening to the intermingled sounds of thunder and the fireworks for the Belgian National Day - my hostess informed me it is traditional for it to be rainy on the National Day (she's German). I arrived in Belgium Sunday afternoon after a true red-eye from Newark to Amsterdam filled with multiple toddlers who took it in shifts to scream for approximately 80% of the flight (it didn't annoy me that much because I can't sleep on planes anyway, but it made for some extremely disgruntled fellow passengers). Kudos to Delta on the extensive in-flight movie selection, though. I then had a "Cityhopper" from Amsterdam to Brussels, where the flight time is - no joke - 25 minutes. (My commute into the city from Brooklyn takes longer than that.) To squeeze in the beverage service, the two flight attendants literally hop up the minute the plane levels out and start winging sealed cups of water and caramel biscuits at people. They then immediately whiz back down the aisle to pick up trash, completing this task about two seconds before the pilot comes on asking them to prepare the cabin for arrival. I was still wiping off biscuit crumbs as we landed.

Belgium, as a land where both French and Dutch are recognized languages, amazingly offers me my first opportunity EVER to put my high school French classes to use in another land. (I thought I could have gotten some use out of it domestically in New Orleans, but even there I ended up getting directions in Spanish from a gardener while lost in City Park). Of course, what this means is that I can understand a good amount of the French being spoken to me, but my first instinct is to respond in Spanish, or, even worse, in French-accented Spanish. (What the what?)

Every sign has to be posted in both French and Dutch. Seriously. Every. Sign.

But I of course quickly  figured out the most important thing: ordering a beer. And the second most: ordering frites. And holy crap, do the Belgians know how to (double) fry a frite! You may have thought you've had tasty french fries in the past...LIES! All lies! There really is an art to it, and the Belgians have mastered it! Between the wafels and the frites and the chocolate and the beer, I don't know how the Belgians aren't all bigger than Americans. (Oh wait. I do know. It's called moderation and walking.)

Belgians are crazy for comic book art. This swashbuckler was the view I had as I enjoyed my first Belgian beer (well, in Belgium anyway) at a little street cafe. 

The weather has apparently been unseasonably sunny and warm in Brussels, but my first couple of days here were more typical for summer - low 70s and overcast. The weather has perked back up, though, and is set to hover around 80 with plenty of sunshine for at least the rest of this week. Really lovely. Except for the fact that the frugal Europeans disdain air conditioning in their museums. Today in the collections the thermometer read 29 degrees Celsius. In real temperature, that's 84.2 degrees, folks. Inside. Note to self: you can leave your sweater at home tomorrow when heading off to work...

I now feel that I have eased myself into Brussels - because of the National Day, the museum was closed and I had an extra day to adjust to the time difference and learn my way around the city a bit. So I spent Monday doing one of my favorite things in a new city: wandering. This turned out to be a great idea because I saw a lot of fun things going on for the holiday. At one point I stumbled across a small crowd of people waiting around a couple of military vehicles and a small military band, and so I decided to wait with them. Lo and behold, about twenty minutes later, the Belgian king shows up! (I didn't really know that at the time, but figured it might be, and the google confirmed it).  I had randomly found the pre-assembly point for all the bigwigs for the National Day Parade.

Military band, patiently waiting. They played one tune when the president showed up (the national anthem??), which lasted about forty seconds, and then they dispersed.

Not the best photo, but the dude in the pink sash is King Philippe. Yep, less than 24 hours after my arrival in Belgium I was standing about 20 feet away from the Belgian king. I know. I'm impressed too.

My wanderings also took me to the Parc du Cinquentenaire, ostensibly built to celebrate the first 50 years of Belgian independence but not really completed until another 50 years after that. There are several museums in the park that I plan on visiting later, including an art museum and one exhibiting vintage automobiles.

Triumphal arch in the Parc du Cinquantenaire. Just out of a view on the left is a wafel truck. Needless to say, I bought a wafel after taking this picture. And it was delicious. There's a reason Belgian waffles are famous.

Turns out the route I had earmarked for my day of walking was also the one preferred by the entire city for their parade route, so after mingling with the crowds for a bit I consulted my handy Eyewitness Travel map and veered off the main roads. After walking down Rue de la Loi, I skirted the Parc de Bruxelles and found a nice little outdoor cafe to enjoy a framboise (raspberry-flavored beer. Is there anything the Belgians can't do?). Since I had already made it to the division between the Upper and Lower towns, I decided to follow the advice of my guidebooks and see Brussels' premier site: The Grand Place. The central square of the city, the Grand Place is a large open square flanked by the old guildhalls and the town hall. If you've ever seen a picture of the square, it was likely covered in a design made up of millions of flower petals for something they do in August called the flower carpet - which I will get to see before I leave!

Town Hall, Grand Place

Maison du Roi and guildhalls, Grand Place

My walk back across town included more Belgian National Day festivities, such as kids crawling into army tanks and helping soldiers sweep for pretend mines in large sandboxes. In the Place Royale, a huge rock climbing wall was set up - after climbing to the top you could zip line down. After a full day of roaming, I eventually returned home for a late dinner and to prep for my first day of data collection at the museum.

Rock climbing wall and zipline in Place Royale. Along with army tanks. Every tank and humvee the Belgian army owns must have been out on the streets that day.

Now, I realize it might make my posts a little disjointed, but I feel bad leaving out my adventures in Japan so I'm going to tuck a little bit of them in here and there. I had plenty of touristy excursions that I will get around to sharing, but I thought I'd start by describing adjusting to living in Japan. I should point out that I visited Kyoto several years ago for a conference, which was my first time traveling anywhere in Asia. It was also the first time I'd had culture shock in a really long time. Not in a bad way, just in a everything-is-completely-unlike-everything-I'm-used-to kind of way. I therefore thought I'd be much more prepared this time around, and for the most part I was, but this time I had to get used to actually living in Japan rather than just coasting through as a tourist. Meaning, I had to figure out how to buy groceries and do laundry and order sushi from people who spoke zero English.

My time in Japan was mostly spent in the town of Tsukuba, a small suburb about an hour north of Tokyo. The National Museum of Nature and Science has a large research branch out there alongside the Botanical Gardens, and this relatively new facility stores the thousands of human skeletal remains curated by the museum. Luckily for me, the Tsukuba branch of the NMNS has excellent guest researcher accommodations at incredibly reasonable prices. I essentially had a large studio apartment, complete with washer-dryer!

Let me walk you through my first hour in the Tsukuba guest house. It was a confusing hour, my friends, as I hope the following set of pictures will convey. First, let's discuss how long it took me to find the light switches for the main part of the room. TEN MINUTES, guys. I'm not even kidding. They are present in the picture below, but here's a hint: it's the not the remote-looking thing on the wall (that was for the heating. And that only took five minutes to figure out. Needless to say, it was a long hour.).

Give up?

Bam!

The bed! The light switches were on the bed! Or, should I say, they were on the awesomest 80s technology bed ever. That's right, friends: light switches, digi alarm clock, and sweet built-in radio with knob dials. Sadly, only the light switches worked. I guess some things were only meant for the 80s.

Feeling more confident now that I could control the electricity, I continued settling into my room but was soon confronted with another kerfuzzling moment upon inspection of the bathroom. 

Take a good look here, folks, and you will notice a shower head that by no way, shape, or form would spill into the tub and its drain (unless you were holding it, of course). Again, I probably stood and just stared confusedly at this set-up for a good many minutes. I did have the idea that the whole room was supposed to be a shower, but with no visible drain outside the tub that didn't seem very likely. So, like any good researcher, I took to the internet, where the google informed me that I was indeed in possession of a Japanese shower room (further inspection did reveal a hidden drain in the floor) - the idea being thus: you first either stand (or sit on a little bathing stool) and wash yourself OUTSIDE of the short, deep tub, and THEN you get into the nice clean tub water for a soak (because who would want to soak in a tub of dirty bath water? Not the Japanese, that's for sure.). Traditionally, a whole family would share the same bath water because technically the water isn't really getting dirty between people. But I'm not sure how I feel about that one. Again, despite having been to Japan before, I had never come across one of these because they're not really much of a priority in cheap youth hostels. The cleanliness idea is the same at the sentos (=bathhouses) you can go to in Japan, though, as I do recall having to sit on a little stool and wash myself before getting into the thermal pools when Siobhan and I went to a sento in the mountains outside of Kyoto. But I digress. The last truly confusing thing about my room was my Japanese washing machine:

I had to watch two YouTube videos just to figure out how to use this puppy. Thank you, interwebs.

And just because it fits in with my adventures of being a stranger in a strange land (or, at least in this case, a strange room), I will leave you with this:

Yup. A tasty chocolate chip sweet bread thing that was inexplicably green on the inside. I don't know why either. But it was delicious. Which is why, as strange as I often found Japan, it was wonderful too.

A bientot, mes amis!