The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.

It’s not quite what I saw yesterday evening, but it comes close. Maybe you know the title-phrase. It contains every letter of our alphabet, and is often used to try out new fonts.
What I saw yesterday made me think of this sentence. Jogging through our beautiful nature, we saw a couple of rabbits, chased by a fox. It was an amazing sight, it really was a quick brown fox!
I actually realized that I never saw this kind of animal before. I might have seen it in a zoo, maybe, but definitely not in the wild. Again, my colleague and I, we were lucky to witness this scene.
What a night it was: everything is covered in snow, and we don’t see that very often here. Usually when it snows, it’s all melted the next day. Now it’s been freezing cold for a couple of weeks, and even more snow is expected. Not a few people are already dreaming of a white Christmas.
So that was last night: jogging in the dark, the full moon reflecting on the ice-covered trees, the biting cold filling our lungs. It was cold, yes, but running keeps you warm. And of course I was in good company. My companion ran quite a few marathons, she’s my coach!

Today was different. Almost the same route, but under a clear blue sky, with a winter sun shining on the white landscape. It was still pretty cold (minus 5° Celsius), but here and there we encountered some families going for a walk, and some cheering and hollering children playing in  the snow. Nature is so amazingly beautiful these days. One would almost start singing Christmas songs. Almost.

We ran about 17 kilometers today, taking the time every couple of kilometers to take some pictures. We tried to realize how lucky we are. Not everyone has the chance to see this. Not everybody has the ability to go for a long walk or a run. But we do, and we made our senses work for the full 100%. We saw the beauty that’s in our neighborhood, we smelled a hurdle of sheep taking their nap in the snow, we felt the cold air trying to get a grip on our skin, we tasted the freshly fallen snow, we heard birds calling for each other. We were living life to the fullest.
And that’s what we all should do. You may not like the same things I like, but for certain there are other things you love to do. Well, try to do them as often as possible. Let this be my new year’s wish to everybody who’s reading this: in 2011, may you live your life to the fullest!

1974.

When I was a four year old kid, my parents hosted an exchange student from the United States. She stayed in our family for a year, went to school here and learned (so I hope) a lot about our country and our culture.

In 1974 this was not a common thing to do. Leaving your family for a year, start a new yet temporary life abroad, and being dropped into a bath of another language and culture cannot have been the easiest choice to make.
For the younger readers amongst you, I’m talking about a pre-internet, pre-skype, pre-cellphone, almost pre-historic era.
Basically, leaving your country meant cutting off yourself from your own world.
Making a phonecall from Europe to the States was extremely expensive, which means that the only thing you could do to stay in touch in 1974 was write a letter.
Needless to say that at the age of four I wasn’t capable of writing at all, let alone write a letter.

So after a year in Belgium, Julie went back home. And I never heard of her again. Or at least not that I remember of. So if you’ve ever written me, Julie, please forgive me for not remembering…

Over the past few years, the thought of trying to find her again crossed my mind on a regular basis. A thousand questions about her kept popping up.
I’m so grateful that I had the opportunity of crossing her path.
She has been a great influence for me. She partially made me the guy that I am today. I would never have travelled the way I did if I didn’t speak English.
Whenever people ask me where I learned to speak English, the American-girl-staying-in-our-family-story comes up.
The fact that this blog is written in English, is thanks to Julie. I have met a lot of interesting people, and I have made many new friends thanks to my knowledge of the English language. And therefore thanks to Julie.

A couple of days ago, when visiting my mom, I asked her if she could remember Julie’s surname. And to my surprise, she did. So that’s where I started my quest. I googled her name, searched for her on Facebook and sent out a couple of emails.

Coming home today after a weekend away with a couple of friends, somebody named Julie replied to one of my messages. And guess what? Yes, indeed! I found her!
I can’t begin to express what I felt. The words joy and happiness would be real understatements. I was overwhelmed with a warm feeling of gratitude, and I can’t wait to find out more about her.

Julie made my day. What a nice surprise.

Stay tuned.

The power of music is undeniable. It can transport you to a certain time, specific place or to an exact emotion. The songs that linger in our memories and the lyrics that grab hold of our souls are extremely personal. I bet there is a top twenty list for every single one of us. A list that has been composed carefully, thoughtfully and sincerely and that may help someone come out of a blue funk. It’s a list we all should have in our head, if not on a cd.

Music can bring up all kinds of emotions. We dance to the rhythm, we smile because of a certain melody and we cry when we’re touched by particular lyrics or voices. When was the last time a song brought tears to your eyes?

No matter what music does to you, it will always do something. Just  remind yourself how important it is to take your daily dose of tunes. 

Blinding Colors.

Fall is setting in really fast now. Howling wind en pouring rain.
After going off daylight saving time last weekend, it gets dark way too early. Leaving for work in the dark, and coming home again in the dark.
But hey, there’s always worse. Some people further up north don’t see any sunshine at all for weeks, if not months. At least we have some hours every day to look at the beauty surrounding us.

Looking at the trees right now, our eyes are spoiled by a wide pallet of colors.
Green, yellow, orange, red, even some purple. Even coming home soaking wet after a run has its charms. Who says fall is a grey season?
I don’t see any grey when I look around me. I see colors. Blinding colors.

Happy Halloween!

Friday night. Feeling good. Feeling like having a drink. Feeling like going out! Hell yeah, let’s party!
So I made myself a delicious meal (fish and veggies in the oven, marinated in white wine, with mashed potatoes), and had a glass (ok, two glasses) of wine.

I wasn’t going to finish the bottle all by myself, so I decided to drive to my lovely 79-year old mother, and finish the bottle together with her.
While doing that, I started calling and texting some friends, hoping that somebody would join me to dive into the night. But no…

Apparently everybody was so busy doing their own thing, so they left me no choice. For the first time in my life, I had to go out alone. No way that I was gonna stay in. Hell no, let’s party!

So I came home from my mom, switched my car for my bike (oh yeah, I was gonna go drinking!)  and headed for a café in the center of the small village that I live in.

Coming in, it was funny to see all the heads (8 heads, to be precise) turn my way, then looking at me from head to toe, soaking in their first impression of me. And yes, I know: you never get a second chance to make a first impression. So I ordered a beer. And another one. And before I knew it, people started buying me beers, just to have a reason to talk to this stranger. Where are you from? How long have you been living here? What’s your name?
I must admit that this night was way beyond my expectations. Those people were special, in oh so many ways.
So we Belgians may not be so aloof after all. At least not all of us.
Happy Halloween!

Next blog? I don't think so!

What happened? I started cursing  at my laptop. This thing has become so f*cking slow!
I ran my antivirus program, and it found some spyware on my computer. Nothing to really worry about, but annoying enough to slow down everything I try to do.
Slowness though, seems to come in graduations, which is funny to observe.

Deredactie.be, my daily source of information, is slower than normal, but it’s still ok. My daily newspaper is a bit more lazy. It loads half the page, waits another minute and then pops up the rest.
Facebook takes forever to load. Although I managed to visit my new Norwegian friend’s page, which brought a smile of happiness to my face. Yes, the small things in life remain important.
And YouTube, to end with, doesn’t work at all anymore.

Does this spyware have its own mind? Does it think it’s ok for me to find out about what’s going on in the neighborhood and in the world, but when it comes to Facebook it turns on some Chinese censor-switch, and YouTube probably is considered the source of all evil. Does it work that way?

Retrieving my steps, and thinking about the websites I’ve visited, I ended up at blogspot.com. Really? Can this be the cause of all trouble?
Apparently it can. A bit of research told me that clicking on the “next blog” button is not a good idea. People use blogspot.com to spread spyware and to install it on your computer.
I’m not telling you to take my advice. I just wanted you to know.
Curiosity killed the cat!

Rockin' in a free world.

Liu Xiaobo won the Nobel Peace Prize yesterday. Everybody knows that by now. NOT!
Believe it or not, but Liu Xiaobo himself doesn’t know he won the Nobel Peace Prize.
Nobody in China knows. Nobody!
Internet is being censored, websites are blocked and even CNN is off air!
The censorship is incredible, as I learned myself during my holidays. It’s not easy to find an internet connection, and if you find one, it’s very likely to be cut off while you’re typing you’re email. China is a big country, yet very small in some ways…
Yes, we ‘ve got a thousand points of light. China hasn’t!

On June 9, 1989, Chinese authorities confronted student protesters in Tiananmen Square, which led to the deaths of an untold number. From this event, the picture of a student standing before a line of tanks became the image that was broadcasted around the world.

Neil Young, upon seeing this photo and video, began commenting before performing "Rockin' In The Free World" that the song was going out to that "Chinese boy in Tiananmen Square who stopped the tanks." And in the official video the footage of that era has been used (between minute 2:00 and 2:30).

Freedom of speech is priceless!!

Run, David, run!

As usual on Friday, I left work around 3pm. I prefer working a bit longer on Thursday, so I can extend the weekend a bit on Friday. Today, it created me some time to do something I’ve been wanting to do ever since Lake Baikal: go for a run.

Lake Baikal would ‘ve been the ideal occasion for a morning run. Except for the cold and the darkness… Not the ideal circumstances. I can cope with cold, but I need to see where I’m going, specially on a Siberian road full of potholes.

I was pleased to feel that my heartrate was rising. The lungs opened up and after a while I got all sweaty. Oh boy, doesn’t that feel good?
I was surprised with the ease I completed the 6 km run. After 4 weeks of no sports at all (except for the climbing of The Great Wall, which was a bit more intensive).

The wind blowing in my face to cool me down, the sun caressing my skin, a couple of guys fishing, and some people doing their afternoon walk. Aren’t I a lucky guy? I try to imagine what those people or thinking of. What is crossing the fisherman’s mind as I jog by, saying “good afternoon”? What is the lady with the stroller thinking about when I give her a friendly smile and wave to her kid. What is this other jogger worrying about?

Ah, the joy of life! Run, David. Run.

I fail.

Wirkola was one of the best skijumpers Norway ever had. People who had to jump after him were doomed to fail.
I still feel pretty lost after my holidays. I don’t really know what to do with myself. Everything feels like jumping after Wirkola.

But hey, wait a second. I got to talk to a Polish friend this afternoon. That made me feel better. I feel good again. How nice is it to have friends all over the world? People you can always fall back upon. It makes me feel rich. Filthy rich.
I am jumping after Wirkola, and guess what: it’s gonna be a proper landing!

Geelong.

I just sent a text to a Norwegian friend. Thor did it. Thor Hushovd is the new world champion in road cycling. I was awake all night (race was in Australia, 9 hours time difference!), and didn’t see a glimpse of the impressive Norwegian all night long. Until the last 50 meters. That’s how you win, I guess, and that’s how you make the whole world listen to your national anthem. Congrats!

Who will call me today?

Why?

Let me begin this blog with memories. Memories of a recent past, in which I travelled and discovered. Discovered people, discovered countries, discovered language, discovered new behavior and new cultures.  The last three of those discoveries actually can be covered by one simple word: blogging.

Yes, a couple of my fellow travelers were blogging about their trip and/or their lives.

Thank you guys, for sharing this new experience with me.

Of course I’d heard about it before, and I even read one (yes, ONE!) blog before. That blog though, was just an enumeration of things  someone did while travelling. Sorry, but not interesting enough to convince me to start one myself.

My last trip did the trick! I met special people, saw the most amazing things, and things happened that I never want to forget. Ever.
But memories fade and are colored while time passes by. So this is my solution to it: start a blog. Write it down while it happens (or don’t wait for the events to get twisted and nuanced by your brain).

What this blog will be about? I’m not sure yet. I’ll figure it out along the road of my future. I will probably be hopping from one subject to another event. I might give up after a while. We’ll see.

My recent past.

In three words? Not possible. In three countries? Ok. Russia, Mongolia, China.

Saint-Petersburg.

I started this journey in St-Petersburg (SPB), where I ended the first day in an Irish pub, in the wonderful company of Kiki (who is actually called Kine, but only Norwegians know how to pronounce that in a correct way, so she prefers to be called by her nickname). What a lady!!! Never have I met someone with whom it was so easy to make an instantaneous click. It just happened. Nothing more to it. Yes, it just happened. Sports? Travelling? Handball? Sense of humor? You name it, we had it in common!

Day 2 brought us together again on a lovely sightseeing trip in Saint-Petersburg. Hermitage museum (wow!),  Church of spilled blood (talking to Kiki, I kid you not!), Old buildings (singing to Kiki, I kid you not!), Starbucks-wannabe (hmmmm), war monument (no words, literally no words: it got me, even me, silent), a soccergame (Zenit SPB-Tom Tomsk: 2-0) with all the ingredients: yellow and red cards – game stopped because of lit fireworks – an annulled goal – a farewell to Radek Sirl after 8 years of playing for SPB, the locks-bridge, and a wonderful dinner with my new soulmate.

All this followed by our first group meeting, in which we met the rest of our fellow travelers, that later turned out to be a great bunch of people.

Moscow

Leaving SPB wasn’t easy. Neither was entering Moscow. Big city, grey city. One advice: stay underground! Do a subway-safari, and beware of the blue line. Some people started confusing light and dark blue, and ended up taking the wrong train in the right direction, and vice versa.
The metro is beautiful, all the rest is crap, apart from the red square with St-Basils’s church as the climax. Some people started calling it “my church”. Needless to say who. J

Transsiberian express.

There I was, looking out of the window, seeing everything I would see at home: same landscape, same fauna and flora. Bit disappointing. In the beginning, that is. Soon everything started to change. People started visiting our bunker (was it the vodka we bought earlier?), which was easily renamed “the party-bunker”. Expressions were given whole new meanings, or no meanings at all (“having a cow”) and the world flew along our train, while we were playing drinking/card games.
And yes, the landscape too had changed.

It’s a must-do, this Transsiberian railway. Time flies, when your having fun!

Irkutsk.

Or better: Listvianka. Lovely little town at lake Baikal, the deepest lake in the world. 636 km long, or 64 miles, as Scandinavian people measure it. 10 km to the mile. But only in Scandinavia! Weird people ;-)

Diving in the lake makes you 10 years younger. I didn’t do it, ‘cause all it would have made me was sick. Too cold, guys, too cold for me. I drank from it, so that should at least give me a couple of months to add to my life.

Stayed at Nicolai’s B&B. All I can say is that Nicolai knows how to prepare a great dinner. Fish, of course!
Did an evening walk with Lauren and Maria to have a look at the stars.  Nice, but not more than that. Nothing matches an Australian sky at night, I guess.

Transmongolian railway.

Another train to catch! Another adventure. Irkutsk-Ulaanbaatar. On our way to Mongolia, of all places!

Arriving at the Mongolian border, I had my first impression of this country, and it seemed to be the right impression: chaos.
Border control: chaos.
Border town: chaos.
Ulaanbaatar traffic: chaos.
Medical care: chaos. (As Dave can testify. It took him three hours to get his dislocated shoulder back where it belongs)
Sweet though, is the way (specially older) people are dressed. Very nice. These are only a couple of locals:

By the way, if you’re ever in Ulaanbaatar, have lunch in the Taj Mahal restaurant. Delicious!

Stayed in a ger camp for the night, and went horsebackriding. Not a good idea, and not very good for the macho guys amongst us. We were seven: five girls, two guys. Who got bucked off? Yes, the guys, with consequences: a terrible headache and a couple of broozed ribs for me, and a dislocated shoulder for my roommate.

Ah, another impression of Mongolia: windy and cold. But so friendly! Russians give you the sigh for no reason, Mongolians give you a smile and a “welcome to Mongolia” for no reason. Perfect!

Should I mention the Beatles statue in the middle of Ulaanbaatar? No, don’t think so.

Changing of the wheels.

Last trainride of the journey. I guess approximately 10000 km in a train bunker will do for me.
Do you know anybody that has seen a sunset over the Gobi desert, while gazing out a train window? I don’t. Or better: I didn’t. It’s an astonishing feeling, I can guarantee you that much!

Arriving at the border, another interesting thing happens. The whole train gets shipped into a warehouse-like building. All train carts are being separated. Toilets stay locked for more than 9 hours (no kidding!). And then you go up. Yes: up! Russians thought they were smart and made their railway system 9 mm wider than the rest of the world. So when you come at the border to enter China, you don’t change trains, you just change wheels!

Entering China is entering a new era. It’s a blooming country, and it’s showing it to the world as soon as you’ve crossed the frontier. Modern buildings, big wharfs, everything to show off.

Ready for the last two days of our group trip. No visit to Beijing without having seen The Great Wall of course. Set off at 6am, to visit a less touristy part of it. Walked a couple of hours on a not-restored part of the Wall, and got blown away by the idea that this was manmade. Handmade. And that people died and got buried here while building it. That called for a beer.  Or a bear? No, a beer!

The end.

Kiki and I had a circle to finish. Saint-Petersburg was a great start of this journey, and so should Beijing be a great ending of it.
Just the two of us thus, visiting Summer palace, Olympic area (yes, we saw the Bird’s nest!), and Temple of Heaven. Followed by the inevitable Starbucks coffee, the fil rouge along our 3 week journey. 
She is on an 8 month voyage around the globe, and I wish her all the best for the rest of her trip. I have a couple of new friends, and she’s one of them, that’s for sure.

And yes, I booked a couple extra nights in the Harmony Hotel, which means I can hook up with Lauren, and Dave, and Hanna, and Emilie, and Johan. They too are spending some more time in Beijing before moving on.

And it’s Lauren’s birthday on Wednesday, September 29! Is there a better way to say goodbye?
We spend the whole afternoon by the lake, had a great lunch and moved on when it got dark. After sad goodbyes to Emilie, Hanna and Dave (damn, I’m glad not to be in their new GAP-group!) it was just the three of us: the birthday girl, the cool Sweed, and myself. We finished our last day with a lot of beer, on a rooftop terrace between The Drum and The Bell Towers.

What a day. What a week. What a trip. WHAT A JOURNEY!

I’m looking forward to see you guys again!

Home

I had a last Starbucks coffee on Beijing airport, and another one on Vienna airport. For old time’s sake?
Got home around 1am, and emptied my backpack. And I got the washing machine started…

To bed at 3am.

I woke up at 11.15 am, and had a weird feeling. Where should I go to? What is there to do today? Where are my new friends? Damn, I’m missing you!

Back to reality.

Woke up to my alarm at 7am. World championships cycling in Geelong (Australia). Reminder of another great holiday. I know this track. Been there. Seen it. Rode it!

But the real reason I had to get up: breakfast with the rest of the family, for my mom’s birthday. I texted her at the Chinese border, sending her congrats from Dave, Lauren, Kiki and myself. Yes, the party bunker!

Great breakfast, but coming home reality hit me.
Home alone. All by myself. Nothing to do. A lot to think of. Gone are the days. Gone.
I have to get out of here tonight. Just have to. Which by the way reminds me of a phonecall I received in a St-Petersburg hotel room, at 10.20pm. “Help, I just arrived, and I have to get out of here again. Will you join me?” Of course I joined her. But who will call me today? Who?