I joked in passing to French that I was liable to fail at taking the train to Antwerp, so he mentioned he'd pick me up in Brussels as long as we went to Pairi Daiza and saw giant pandas. This was highly successful, and we went on the same day that school started in the country, apparently, so it was the emptiest zoo I've ever been to, which was amazing, as it's so open and the animals so accessible.
Unfortunately, sleepiness set in around the 30 hour mark of being awake, and I started to flag in the early afternoon, so French deposited me at the hotel in Antwerp and I meandered about a tiny bit before passing out.
A few interesting notes from day 1:
- Driving to Pairi Daiza involved many backroads, I have high confidence if it had been night time French would have been driving me to the countryside to murder me for the sins of Trump.
- Brussels and Antwerp are way, way, way smaller than I expected.
- There are wind things here for energy, which I've never seen before, and they are huge!
- The hotel has no computers, and they do everything in pen/pencil and have a landline, it was super neat, but the cute college girl at the desk seemed frustrated when I pointed it out as something I found to be neat.
The second day was a day of much exploration and was, in general, pretty excellent. I managed to get lost enough to where Google Maps was required, which allowed me to then just wander around knowing I'd be able to get back. One of my co-workers asked if I'd like to go to dinner with his girlfriend and her son at their house and I accepted and it was fantastic. I spent 4 hours with some of the nicest folks I've ever met, the food was delicious, and I felt like the most important visitor they'd ever received, which was disarming, and humbling, frankly. My takeaway is that I need to do much better when I entertain guests, especially if I bring folks from out of town, as I have never been half as good a host to my friends as they were to a total stranger.
Humbling.
She has a small storefront where she does bespoke tailoring, and if I can lose a few more pounds, I will 100% be asking her to help me become Dapper (the capital letter is very important).
I walked around to find the University of Antwerp and the Antwerp Management School and the campuses are so, so, so tiny. I'm used to sprawling American universities where towns spring up because of the campus, and this very much is not the case here. Fashion is big, food is apparently big, and the campus just happens to exist, which was interesting. It's not that it looked cheap, just.... very small, but very nice and authentic. The lady at the front desk didn't seem to speak very good English, which made me worry a bit about my absolutely non-existant grasp of Dutch, but things ended up working okay.
Day 3 was a nerve wracking morning of walking around the city and wondering if I was going to be completely out of place when I got to meet my cohort. I spent the last 30 minutes trying to decide between a tie and jacket or just a polo shirt, and ended up going with the polo shirt (but I buttoned the top button, to show I was a rebel; actually, I thought it looked a little cleaner, but later googled it and found out it's a hipster thing to do, so.... that happened).
There were 11 of us there, 4 that were unable to make it or were carrying over from a previous cohort, and everyone was very friendly, seemed highly focused, and very outgoing. The faculty are very plain spoken, and are more than happy to crush dreams and hopes if they feel it's appropriate. I made a joke about their titles being Prof. Dr.
I'm a fan.
The program is not what I expected - the worst parts of what I know of the PhD (getting an advisor/supervisor, getting past quants/quals, getting accepted into the formal PhD portion) all seem to basically be the driving force of the program itself, so everything feeds into itself and they do the legwork to line you up with two-to-three supervisors, depending on the topic.
Very cool.
I'll also describe the part of today that was utter failure, as it was hilarious in retrospect, even if I was very confused at the time.
I decided, while doing normal tourist things, that I should stop into a Delhaize (Food Lion!) and see what shopping is like for the locals. It was remarkably similar, although smaller, much darker, and with a bit less selection... until you attempt to leave.
1) The green swinging doors? Those are entrance only, if you walk through them, alarms will go off.
2) The green door with a person walking out? Those are emergency exits. If you try to walk through them, alarms will go off (Someone yelled at me to stop before I managed to set an alarm off).
3) The way everyone leaves by the self-checkouts? Those are only for people who purchase things, and if you try to walk out there you will be yelled at.
4) The lines are very slow, I waited for 5 min while folks in front of me slowly rang stuff up before I grabbed a pop, went to the self checkout, and tried to leave.
5) The receipt you get upon payment is required. If you try to leave without the receipt, they will yell at you, and the door may or may not open (I didn't get to figure out, was busy being yelled at).
6) If, at the end of this, you are traumatized and decide to take a picture of your harrowing experience, they will yell at you, as no pictures are allowed, and I think they tried to ask me to delete them.
I may have copped a strong accent and tried to sound as stupid as possible as I walked away, shoulders high, not fleeing at all.
It was so bad, I was so confused, and had no idea how to leave, and kept messing it up, and all I could think was:
"My god... I'm in a PhD program... Where did I go so wrong?"
Luckily, there's always tomorrow.
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