spelling related apologies in advance-spellcheck is running in French

okay, so, Not Cookie's name probably isn't Isabella, because Not Cookie is a male...oops. My landlady gave me some stawberries that she had picked herslef in Wepion, the strawberry capitol of Belgium...they were quite yummy. She seemed dissappointed when I told her that I was going to Antwerp; she said, "But they are Flemish." Oh, Belgium is such a silly country.

Went to Antwerp this weekend and shopped in Belgium's fashion and antiques capitol. I bought the bikelock I've been eyeing for over a year, some acessories, and something else that I bought as a gift, but i really like, so I might just keep it for myself (this happens rather frequently and is a habit I would like to try to break). I also witnessed the end of what appeared to be a mustashe parade. I don't really know what it was all about, but there was a large flag with a mustashe and marching men (some mustashed, others not) in funny hats.

oops

got locked in the park after ultimate. was halfway over the fence, when someone started yelling at me in dutch. i knew that the park closed at nine thirty, but it was very clearly 9:27 when I got to the gate.

Weekend

Friday there was a campfire by the lake where we met up with some other international students. I had to get up at 6 to cqtch a train, so didn't stay very late. I was scared about mixing up the train connections on Saturday, so I only got about an hour of sleep.



We had Monday off of Pentecost, so this weekend I met up with Timo and Antione to go to Antione's grandparent's beach house at Merlimont on the English Channel. The town has 3000 people in the winter and around 20000 in the summer (and most of these vacationers dress like sailors in blue and white striped shirts). In order to not have to pay for a fast Thayles train to take me to Paris and then back north, I had to change trains a lot (5 different trains). I mean it saved 50 Euros (each way) and I was not in a hurry. I learned that France is really agricultural, at least near the railroad tracks. I left Louvain La Neuve at 630 and met up with the guys around 3. Once the guys picked me up in Compégne, we drove to paris so Antione could look at some jetskis, then headded to the beach.
It stays light pretty late so after dinner we walked around some massive dunes. Then we went to Le Touquet-Paris-Plage with Antione's friend Oliver. I thought we were just going to pub, but it ended up being like a pretty hip/posh clubbing town. If felt kind of awkard because i wasn't really dressed properly (almost everyone there had a collar to pop). By this point, I was about to fall asleep standing up, but still managed to get my dance on (a little).

Sunday we made Brie and tomatoe omlettes, watched some of the french open, then loaded up the kayak and skimboards and hit the beach. The water was really cold and i was wearing a wet suit, but it was still fun to be out in the water. We went back to the dunes armed with a sled and a homemade sandboard (plastic sled with the sides cut away and with bolted on foot straps). It wasn't as fast as I had anticipated, which is probably good, and was really fun. After a yummy dinner of salmon, sauteed red peper, and a mystery fish that looked pretty, tim made crepes that went wonderfully with strawberry ice cream and the belgian chocolates I brought.

Monday morning we ate, cleaned, and raced to Amiens, where I caught my train with 5 minutes to spare!

UPDATE: Cookie is gone...

Okay, so it has been a little quieter around the house and I ad been wondering why. Apparently we were just dog-sitting Cookie, which explain some of the agitation. Not Cookie has a name. It is "Isabella Bischon" Really, it's a two part name, so I wasn't that far off. It's also, like if my name was "Caroline Human" or "Caroline Looks-like she's-from-northwestern-Europe"

I kind of miss Cookie, she was very social. Isabella Bischon is pretty old and doesn't do much.

Spel een Matchke

For the past two weeks, I have been taking the train to Leuven where the original catholic university of Leuven is {I'm working at the shiny new (built in the 1970s) French version} in the Flemish part, to play ultimate on Tuesdays. It is an hour train ride each way, but seemed to be the closest ultimate organization with a website. I've been practicing with the Propellers, the B team for JetSet, who are/were apparently like the #2 team in the nation (I don't really know what that means because Belgium is pretty small). I was told that I can go to their practices if I want to, but they get out kind of late & I’d be risking missing the last train back to LLN. Everyone is supernice and they even conducted practice in English, just for me (I was planning on just standing at the back of the drill lines and following). It’s kinda fun to see how much of their Dutch I can understand. Practice is held on a soccer field in the middle of a rollerblading track, no one has gotten hit (yet), but it is only a matter of time. At the end of the scrimmage, instead of doing the traditional highfive-”goodgame” lines, they definitely did the euro-cheek-kiss, it took awhile and I had to suppress giggles. They were also really impressed that we practice 3 times a week.

Brussels/Brugge

So far the group has taken day trips to Brussels and Brugge. We went to Brugge on the Day of Ascension. We toured De halve Maan (the Half Moon) brewery where we learned tat the number of breweries around Brugge had dropped from 700 to 30 in 30ish years. We tried one of their newer (award winning) brews: Brugge Zot (the crazy person from Brugge), which was pretty tastey. After eating waffles and looking at old buildings/canals (I can't seem to escape hydrology anywhere), we staked out a place to watch the parade. We had heard that people dressed in medieval garb and followed a vial of Christ's blood (a relic from the crusades) around. We didn't know that we were towards the end of the parade route or that it as going to reenact basically the whole Bible. During the hour and a half we spent waiting for it to start, we sat on the curb and played travel scrabble. Once the parade started, we were trapped on our corner for the 3 hours that it lasted, which is pretty long for a parade, but there were like 7 different Jesuses (Jesi?) and several miricles so that kept things interesting…almost.

In Brussels, we pretty much walked around, looking for old tall structures. We found our way though Africatown, which was really cool. If I spoke French, I would have ordered some African food (most of it looked similar to what we had in Ghana) because I miss me some fufuo.

Why I'm in Belgium

I'm learning about fluvial hydraulics. I'm basically helping a PhD student, Rui, with his research on dam breaks. Ryan, from South Carolina, in the same program as me is also in the group. What he's already done is assess the velocity profile of the water in his model when a gate separating two different depths drops. What we are doing now is adding a sediment layer to see how that affects the flow of water and to see how the sediment is transported. We work in a basement lab called the Cave. Each experience (that's what they call experiments) takes 4ish hours to set up and 10 seconds to run.

This next bit may be a little boring, but checkout the pics & videos.

The typical lab day goes as follows:

1. attempt to plug the leaks in the pneumatic gate with silicone strips from a caulk gun and play-doh (they were calling it plasticite and i thought it was a super-technical polybonding something..... until they gave it to me to use and i realized that it was edible and came with cookie cutters). we have yet to do this successfully, but the volume of the dipping is relatively small compared to the volume of water in the tank.

2. Create a Uniform and Compacted Sediment Layer.

We put a lot of sand, our sediment of choice, (for my soils friends, i'd give it a visual classification of a uniformly graded largish sand, i think i'm trying to forget about that class so i don't know if thats actually a possibility). have this board that hangs 10 cm above the bottom of the tank so we drag it across the top of the sand, so it's all the same depth. Then we (okay not really “we” more like “the guys”) drop a 40ish pound hammer three times on a square piece of wood as wide as the tank, this is repeated over the entire surface of the sand. {it ends up being about 100 lifts & drops per experiment run}. I move the wood square between drops. Then, we use the leveling board again, add more sand if needed, level that out. if lots of sand was added, we have to do the compaction all over.

3. Fill the tank. it's like watching paint dry. A diffuser, like one you would use in a garden, is used so the sand is only minimally deformed. The downstream half of the tank, is filled just to saturate/cover the sand. The upstream section is filled to 32.5 cm above the top of the sediment.

4. Play with Cameras, angles and lighting. Attach probes.

The space we have kind of stinks (literally, but here i”m talking figuratively), so everyday we have to make sure the camera lens is is parallel to the tank (so our distance measurements aren't distorted. The position and reflection of the lighting also has to be tweaked and the aperture adjusted.

Right now, We have 4 depth probes (1 before the gate and 3 after) and will move two of them further down the tank to get more readings. They are clamped to the top of the tank and transmit a signal, which has to be converted (or something...something about ac/dc, and volts to digital...i don't know) to the computer.

5. Lunch. Still struggling with getting what I want when I order. But i did have a traditional Belgain dish,Vol au Vent, that had been vegetarianized by the school cafeteria. A biscuit covered in some a thick white buttery sauce with fake chicken and a side of mashed potatoes. Um yummm, but very white. I can't really cook here, so i'm hurting for some good green veggies, but “salad” they put in sandwiches should suffice (for awhile at least).
   

6. Lights, Camera, Action! After distributing some plastic balls of varying densities in the Tank. Turn on the lights above the tank. Start the Camera; it takes 50 images a second for 15 second. Drop the gate. WHOOOSH! Keep seeding particles in the upstream section. When we analyze the data, we will use software that will track the individual particles so we can do velocity calculations.

   
   
   
   

7. Separation. The downstream end of the tank is open, so all of the water and some of the sand spills out. It lands on some mesh over a plastic tank to separate the sand and plastic from the water. We then get to separate plastic from the sand, so that the sand can be dried and weighed. this is done by placing the soilds in a bucket and spraying water into it. the agitation causes the plastic to rise; then we fish it our with a net or skim the top off with mesh.

8. Clean up.

Put away cameras & lights. Pull the sand away from the gate. remove all the stuff we stuffed down the sides of the gate to try to stop the leak.....gross (soggy play-doh mixed with WD40).

Belgium Accomodations

This is my house. It kind of reminds me of a squared hobbit hole, but that may just be because I was reading The Fellowship of the Ring when I arrived.


I live with a grandmother, who frequently has her two granddaughters over and does not speak any english (& thinks I understand much more French than I really do), and her two dogs- Cookie the one that kind of looks like an evil Toto and the really old Bichon, who I like to call Not Cookie, because when i ask what her name is that lady tells me she is very old. Not Cookie is totes obvi the favorite: her picture is on the woman's bedroom wall and Cookie barks a lot. Cookie is smaller than Blaze, which i think is odd.

I have a nice room in the back corner of the house that has CNN and BBC1, as well as, some french and flemish channels. The house is, 10 minutes from the lab, 2 minutes from the train station/main square, and even closer to the Cuvee des Troll pub/microbrewery and cute creperie.