Goodbye Antwerp!

I'm back to being homeless and unemployed (temporarily)! The kids left for Thailand yesterday, finishing off a difficult week here, so now my bags are packing and I am hitting the road again. The last week has been tough, while I am really going to miss the kids, I have also been counting down the days. We've all been sick, but while everyone else camped out in bed for a few days until they were over it, I kept getting up in the mornings and looking after the kids, so I'm still struggling to get rid of this cold. Feeling really terrible and still working 14 hour days while Koi got ready to go to Thailand hasn't been fun.

Simon

I had Friday off, I went into Antwerp and met up with Simon again, a former AFS student that I've met up with before here. We spent the afternoon looking in different shops, turns out July is a month of huge sales, just like back in January when the 'Rebajas' in Spain turned my budget inside out! We checked out a lot of designer shops though, not high-end labels but the mid-range, one-off kind of stuff. Antwerp is getting a reputation for fashion that is pretty well deserved, the shops were really cool and expensive enough that I managed not to waste a whole lot of money like I would have if we'd visited cheaper stores during sale time! Then we just sat in a bar nursing a couple of beers and talking for the rest of the night. About 11pm I got a phone call from Jan asking whether or not I was coming home that evening, and when I said I was, he said it would probably be better if I didn't because the builders were coming at 6.45am. Apparently, they didn't need my room that early, but they would be making a lot of noise.

Getting advised about this so late really ticked me off, because when the builders come I really have to move all of my stuff onto my bed and cover it with plastic to protect it from the dust, so even if I had somewhere else to stay I would have had to go home to sort things out. By the time I did take the bus home and then sort everything out in my room (I was in the middle of packing so there were half-finished piles everywhere) it was 2am, and I was still so tired that I feel back asleep after the builders came in at 6.45.

Antwerp

An hour later, they knocked on my door and kicked me out of my room. I guess it's not the builders' fault that I was so badly warned about all of this, but I really didn't take it to well and stomped off to catch the bus back into Antwerp. This time, I did allow myself a little retail therapy but I swear I really needed what I got! I think my clothing choices have changed quite a lot here actually, in New Zealand I always wore skirts and dresses, and usually clothes that I could wear to the office, but now I actually own a pair of pants and wear shorts all the time. I nearly bought a pair of denim shorts, but then the thought of being only one step away from my first pair of jeans in four years freaked me out a little to much! I also walked around the city for ages, to find a cheap suitcase and head through a poorer area to take photos of stuff I normally see from the bus.

I got home at 3, hoping that the builders would be done in my room so that I could nap. No such luck! I was still in quite a bad mood, so I hid on the balcony of my room for the rest of the afternoon, until finally they finished up around 7.30pm. This time, even covering my stuff in plastic wasn't enough and everything I own was covered in dust. I looked around me at the dust over all of the floor, furniture and my possessions for about the sixth time in three months and just wanted to cry, it takes me hours everytime I clean and I am just over it and really couldn't face it again when I was sick and so tired. I was tempted to just push everything into a huge dust-covered pile on the floor and crawl into bed, but then I put on my big-girl panties and just got stuck into it. My stuff will never be the same again, I'll be finding dust inside things for years to come, and I even threw some stuff away because even after cleaning it wouldn't look the same. Hauke will be happy to know that a particular hat that he despises ended up in the bin!

Antwerp - propping up the gap between two houses

I really think that it was unfair of Jan not to warn me that I would be living in these kind of conditions here. For three months I've been packing up and then unpacking again, putting up with builders at all hours of the day and night, and living with all of my stuff in piles on the floor while the furniture and closet was being worked on. I'm a pretty flexible person that doesn't get too hung-up about that kind of thing, but at the same time I feel like it would have been common courtesy to warn me about it before I came and then apologize a couple of times along the way. This Saturday really pissed me off, because there was no reason why he couldn't have warned me about it earlier, and I had planned on spending the day in bed trying to get rid of this cold. I refused to get up and work early on Sunday morning, because I just really needed to sleep. This really made them mad at me in return, because they had guests coming that afternoon and didn't want to get up early and watch the kids and prepare at the same time, but I'd reached the stage where I really wanted to put myself first and say no when they were demanding too much of me, especially where my health is concerned.

Alice in the middle of lunch, at Quick

Even sleeping most of Sunday didn't shake this cold I have, its really weird, I've been sick for well over a week now. I think I'm seriously run down. Monday went pretty quickly, I took both of them for a walk to the supermarket and then to Quick so Arin could play on the playground. I think this trip really proved how much I've learnt in three months, going from someone who had never changed I diaper before to someone who could take both kids out for hours and manage feeding and changing them and dragging the stroller and Arin's scooter around and not losing anything or forgetting anyone or forgetting hats-incase-its-sunny, jackets-incase-its-cold or anything else from the massive list of what you need to take when carrying a baby around. I guess it doesn't sound like it's too difficult, but to anyone who hasn't taken a baby and a small boy with behavioral issues out alone for the afternoon before, you should try!

And then it was Tuesday and the kids and Koi were leaving for Thailand. I got up early when Arin excitedly prodded me in bed, telling me we had to get ready 'quick fast' to catch their (7pm!) plane, and spent the morning feeding, bathing and clothing the kids, washing their bedding and cleaning their rooms ready for their return, keeping them entertained and packing their stuff, and toys and snacks as carry-on, because Koi had told me that she would be too busy getting herself ready. She got up around midday, went for a swim, got dressed, loaded the car and managed to leave Alice's food behind. So I really wonder how she coped with both kids alone on the international flight, and how she will manage the next six weeks by herself with them. Jan really surprised me, I had thought that as he wouldn't see the kids for six weeks he would have made an effort to spend the morning with them, but he didn't even touch Alice once, it was really sad to see. Goodbyes were quite awkward, Arin doesn't really understand and never displays affection anyway, Koi barely said goodbye at all, and I had given myself a lot of last-cuddles with Alice throughout the day, she is the one I will miss the most.

Random building, Antwerp

So suddenly I was alone in an empty house! I walked into the village to go to the supermarket and tried to bake muffins to take to Luxembourg and Gent, adapting a chocolate muffin recipe I already had to include speculoos and finding an apple-speculoos one on the internet. Neither were a real success, I threw out as many muffins as I ended up with, but in the end I think it's actually the oven that's the problem, it seems to cook only or more from the top, so that the tops are overcooked and the bottoms undercooked. I will try both types again in a different oven before I post the recipes on here. I finished up my packing, in the end I seem to have a lot less stuff than I thought, just one huge suitcase and a backpack to drop off in Luxembourg, and my huge backpack and a smaller bag to take with me for July. Packing this bag for summer backpacking was much more fun that packing for backpacking during winter was, I keep looking at my piles of clothing wondering why it seems like not enough! I also celebrated the beginning of my time off working with kids by painting my nails, straightening my hair and putting on a dress, I feel like a different person!

Houses in Antwerp

Wednesday I headed to Luxembourg, to drop things off at my new house and meet the family I was going to live with. I got an awkward ride to the station with Jan, trained into Brussels and then realized that I had forgotten my passport, it just doesn't seem like I'm visiting another country when I just jump on a train for a day trip. I'm not sure if my spanish ID card would be enough if I get checked somewhere, but luckily nothing happened. It took another three hours from Brussels to Luxembourg, not a very fun trip because its now summer holidays here and heaps of scouts were on the train on the way to their different camps. I'm not sure I've written about scouts in Europe too much before, its a phenomenon that I don't really understand, but scouts are cool here. Like everyone in Belgium does scouts, and its pretty big in the other european countries too. They do normal scout stuff like camping and skiing, but also weird stuff like running all over the city wearing weird clothes. I don't get it, scouts in NZ are really small and really geeky. These scouts were really annoying, some boys had water guns and I kept getting splashed with water, so I was too scared to take out my laptop to make the trip go faster! It was also a difficult trip because I had the world's largest suitcase with me, and it weighed so much that it was off my (40kg max) travel scale. Both times the escalator to the train platform was broken and I had to drag the damn thing up the stairs, after the one I got in London I don't have much faith in cheap suitcases and I'm surprised it lasted the trip.

Antwerp

The family are lovely (and I'm not just saying that because they read my blog!), like a real family rather than a bunch of people living in the same house but never doing anything together like in Antwerp, and the openess and honesty from Rogier and Jacqueline is really relieving. I also think that their Dutch sense of humor is really similar to kiwi humor, its nice to be around people who laugh for a change! It's also a completely different feeling going there and meeting them three weeks before I move there and after having talked to so many families and thought about it so much, to when I made a quick decision and just jumped on a plane to go to Antwerp, and I'm sure it will work out differently. The kids are really cute, Pepijn is about 3 1/2 and Olivier is 1 1/2. You can really notice the difference between then and Arin and Alice in how they interact, Alice hates strangers and cries when anyone is even in the same room as her, and Arin would never just start to play and chat with someone new. It will take me a little while to get adjusted to Pepijn's way of speaking and accent, just as it took me some time to work out what Arin was trying to say, but they both seem pretty good at making you understand what they want! The house is in a neighborhood on the outskirts of Luxembourg, so you look out the living room windows onto paddocks with cows, its great, like being back in NZ. And of course, amazing to be in a house that is clean and has no dust, plastic or building supplies anywhere! So I'm happy!

Antwerp

The train ride home was much more straightforward without any luggage. Summer means that it now stays really light well into the evening, and leaving Brussels North station at 7.30pm I noticed for the first time the row of buildings with underwear-clad girls in the window. I've been in and out of that station half a dozen times in the evening and never noticed that before! I also noticed that the people who clean the train stations and empty the trash wear white, kinda stupid right?

Tomorrow I'm off to Gent, here in Belgium, to stay with Anais for a couple of days, she was an AFS student in Christchurch and stayed with me when she visited Wellington. I've heard good things about Gent so it will be cool to visit. I'll post a mini-itinerary for July on here, so mum and grandma you can keep track of where I am!

Photos are here.

The countdown begins, and a Uni party in Liege

The hallway. I am really over living like this!

I got back from Germany at about 3.30pm on Monday, started working as soon as I walked in the door, and didn't stop until I left for Liege on Friday morning! Koi and Jan had decided that the current phase of work on the house had to be finished this week, so after them sitting around for months while builders came in once a week they tried to finish it all off by working non-stop for a week themselves. So I had the kids non-stop for a week myself, and I think I will right up until the go to Thailand.

Alice has a newfound love of toilets

The original deal was for me to work a 35 hour week here with two days off. Even with my two days off I've been doing 45-50 hour weeks and I'll get paid for the extra time, but I am starting to feel a bit abused, they are putting a lot of pressure on me to look after both kids and do all of the cooking and cleaning. I realise this is what I'd be doing if they were my own kids anyway, and it's not really a big problem, I prefer  being left alone with the kids to organise things my own way, but I think its hard here because they have such high and specific expectations of me. Like, if it were my kids and house, then I could decide just to order pizza and let the dirty washing pile up for an extra day if I had a headache or if the baby was sick, but here I'm paid to just get stuff done. Also, they somehow expect me to be doing all of this and actively engaging with Arin one-on-one at the same time, like reading with him and playing outside etc. Which I love doing, but I only have one pair of hands and can only be in one place at once. Yesterday, a Belgian girl my age came to play with Arin, and Jan got all 'look at how happy he is playing outside with her, we expected you to do that'. I was too shocked to give him a witty reply about how I was inside cooking them dinner and dealing with the baby the whole time. I'm sure if she tried to cook dinner and juggle both kids, then Arin would have just been hanging out in the kitchen like he does with me most evenings. I think their unrealistic expectations have a lot to do with why they chew through nannies so fast, they really need to decide whether they want a one-on-one tutor for Arin, or someone to cook and clean and look after the baby, because achieving both at the same time are not possible, apart from the brief time that she naps.

Liege train station

I think that because we all know we've only got a week left to go, no one is being polite anymore. This last week, everything that has gone wrong here has been my fault. Which does kind of make sense, seeing as I am the one that does pretty much everything, but its really unfair. Like, blaming me for using the washing machine when there was a problem with the pipes. Seeing as I am the only one who using the washing machine, would it not make sense to tell me about that? I used it at 5am when I got up for the crying baby and she puked on me, her bed and the couch, I really don't appreciate being told of for doing washing when I was never told not to. Nor did I appreciate being yelled at today when the two of them left the house too late to pick up Arin and still make it to the doctor on time, when I had given them three hours warning that I wasn't happy taking the sick baby out into bad weather to pick him up myself. And on the subject of the sick baby, I am getting so stressed out by them not taking her to the doctor. She's been coughing and scratching her ears for a week now, and I keep telling them but they keep insisting that she's fine. She might be fine for the whole 20 minutes of each day that they see her, but she certainly isn't fine the other 23 hours and 40 minutes of each day.

So, I am definitely counting down now. I almost feel like I should do something about the situation here, but I'm a bit lost as to what I can do. They leave for Thailand next Tuesday, so I guess I only work Wednesday and Thursday this week and Sunday, Monday, then I'm done and off again traveling for the rest of the month.

Lena and I

I spent last weekend in Liege with Lena. I waited over half an hour for a bus to get to Antwerp, which then turned up so loaded that I couldn't get in the front door and took so long that I missed the train I had planned to take, and then I got all confused when I had to change stations because Liege is actually Luik in Flemish (this is annoying right? If it's a french-speaking city then it should have the more common french name on the sign, even in the flemish region!) but must have managed a connection that the website deemed impossibly fast because I still arrived in Liege at the time I had intended.

Part of the HEC party

We went to 'HEC Escape Garden Party'. HEC has something to do with their university, pretty much it was a huge party held by their student union or something, to celebrate the end of the school year. It was meant to be a summery garden affair, but it was raining and instead of gardens it was half on a uni driveway and half in the forest that surrounds Liege. It was a bit different from any organised university party that I went to in NZ - there was no toilets (everyone just peed in the trees) no rubbish bins so the ground got disgusting, and as we arrived they had Jim Beam there checking the ID's but only of people who volunteered them. So if you showed them your ID you got a free drink, if you didn't, then you just had to walk in and buy one. Totally illegal in NZ!

Celine, Valeriane and Lena

Anyway, we spend the the afternoon drinking and running around in the rain meeting different people. A vodka-filled watermelon and Lena's sister made notable appearances, and Lena did a good job of scheming free drinks out of the bartenders. We had to wait aggeeees everytime we wanted food or drinks - we once waited like 15 minutes for an expensive sausage that Lena took one bite out of and then dropped on the ground. Quite a good party though, they had a DJ with a good crowd going and Lena's friends are really cool, although I found it really weird to look around and see only all-girl or all-guy groups standing around talking, here it's definitely less common to have friends of different sexes.

The Square

Then it was back into the city, with a brief stop at her place before we headed into town. Liege is famous for its bars, they are all centered in this area of old cobbled alleys called The Square, I went there a lot last time I was there, its fun but really gross. Unfortunately, the almost twelve hours straight of drinking caught up with us and we headed back to bed around 1am.

Garlic (The french dude is smoking an awesome pipe)

We headed out around lunch time the next day, and visited a weird international market that was taking place in the centre. The stalls were mostly dedicated to food, whole tables piled with huge cheeses or saucisson or garlic, and I ate some good polish barbeque for lunch. We had coffee and then went to a movie, Get Low, which was actually quite an event for me because I hadn't been to see a movie in over a year and a half (and that time was with Lena too funnily enough!). Then her mum cooked some awesome duck for dinner and I was off back to the train station. Liege is only a couple of hours away by train, but I got stuck outside the Antwerp train station. Normally, no matter what time I arrive back here by train, I miss the bus by a few minutes. This time I was at the bus stop three minutes early - and then the bus was 23 minutes late! I think they've been on strike or something, normally the buses are pretty good but I had two bad runs in two days. It was a great weekend, I came back to Antwerp feeling a lot better, I think I just needed the reminder that I have friends in this country, it was good to hang out and not feel so isolated, and as things get crazier here, its good to actually get out of the house during my time off.

my packing. so far unsuccessfully!

But, the weekend left me feeling quite tired and now I'm sick, everyone is sick but of course I am still the one who gets up for Alice all the time. Last week, I had managed to run every day even when kids woke me up in the middle of the night or early in the morning, I was quite impressed with myself, but being sick has thrown a spanner in the works the last couple of days and I really hope that I wake up healthy tomorrow. It's also been really really hot the last couple of days, highs of 35 even when it's pouring. I'm  trying to pack, not easy when I'm working thirteen hour days and then collapse into bed sick at the end of them. So far, I haven't gotten much further than walking around my room aimlessly wondering how my stuff all managed to multiply while in my closet the last three months. I'm going to take a suitcase or two to Luxembourg next week, but I am really not looking forward to returning to the nomadic thing with such a huge backpack again. Plans for the next month are starting to take shape, I'm staying in Belgium a little bit longer to visit Gent and Liege again, and go to a festival with Lena, and then I'm off to Gottingen again, Dusseldorf, Hannover, hopefully Nuremberg to see a (non-AFS!) kiwi friend, Italy for a week, and Mainz where I hope to prove once and for all that I can eat the spiciest currywurst! Then Luxembourg at the end of July.


One week to go....


Photos of the weekend in Liege are here.

Brussels, Antwerp, and a big decision

Brussels

Saturday morning I was up and off to Brussels again. I quite like this city, its not to small and not to big. It amazes me here how you can tell the difference between cities in the french and flemish halves of the country - the cities in the flemish half are clean, those in the french half are all dirty and grimy. Completely different feel.

Brussels

I had coffee with a Norwegian friend Lillian, who I know from the Ship for World Youth programme in Japan (side note, applications for NZers wanting to go on the Ship in 2012 are open now, if you know anyone who might be keen send them here.) She currently works in the Hague and pops over to Brussels every now and then. I've enviously watched everyone else who participated catching up around the world while I've been stuck far away in NZ, so it was great to meet up and talk. Then I ended up just wandering around and shopping before I headed home, I had plans but they fell apart and I was so tired.

Alice

I told myself that I was going to go to bed at a reasonable hour every night this week and run everyday. I achieved this on Saturday night, and left the kids with Khoi for an hour on Sunday while I ran. Then Arin got bitten by something, he reckons he was stung by a bee but he didn't cry or anything and I couldn't see anything there so I just whacked a bandaid on it to make him feel better. By dinner time his foot had swollen up, gotten really painful and caused him to cry, so I asked Khoi where her first aid kit was. She just looked at me blankly! Turns out they have nothing on hand incase one of the kids gets stung by a bee or has a minor allergic reaction to something. I asked if maybe it was a good idea to go and get something now, because no doubt it would get worse in the night and keep him up, but they seemed to think that they could run it under cold water and make it all better.

Koi and Alice

So Arin was up about every hour and a half throughout the night, crying because it hurt. And this is a kid that rarely ever cries because of pain, he's pretty staunch. So my Monday was thrown completely out, because I had such a terrible night's sleep and turns out it was a public holiday and Arin was home from school, and I took a nap in the middle of the day instead of running. Tuesday was a similar story, Alice woke up crying at 6am and it took me an hour to get her back to sleep, she's teething at the moment, so again I was too tired to run and took a nap instead. Tuesday night was interrupted by Arin with his sore foot again and mum calling me on Skype at 3am....so on Wednesday I admitted the week was a write-off on trying to sleep properly and run every day. This sleep thing is really getting to me, I haven't had a solid night's sleep in weeks. A night in Guantanamo listening to non-stop ACDC is beginning to sound appealing, crying children are a much more horrible means of sleep deprivation I reckon!

Arin

The whole insect bite thing makes me mad to be honest, who has kids and no first aid kit? Isn't that just asking for trouble? What happens if one of them gets burnt, or breaks their arm or something? And then, it would have been much easier to just go and get something on the Sunday afternoon like I said, I'm always giving them advise about medical problems but they seem to think that my first aid cert and years of pharmacy experience count for nothing. Even though he woke up crying all night and then again in the early morning, they just sent him downstairs to play with me, got up around lunchtime, went for a swim, and then went to the pharmacy. By which time of course, the poison had already spread around his foot and it took days to get better. I don't get it, it kills me listening to him crying in pain and he's not even my kid, shouldn't they have done something about it sooner? Poor little guy.

Mucky pup kid! I swear some of it did get in her mouth!

Searching for a new nanny job has also really cut into my sleep this week. It's a really horrible process, trying to juggle conversations with different families, who are also talking to different potential au pairs, worrying about leaving things too long or taking an offer before getting a better one the following day or not taking an offer and then getting nothing better! I really hate talking myself up to families and meeting them over Skype, especially when they introduce me to the kids, and then turning around and saying no to them. For anyone that's interested in doing the same the links are listed in the bar on the left. Finally, on Monday I spoke to two families in Luxembourg, one who wanted an au pair to work a couple of days a week for less money, and one who wanted more of a nanny, so five days a week for much more money. I spoke to the former family first, and it just clicked, they are the most amazing family. They had even found this blog and somehow not been convinced by it that I'm nuts! The other family were almost as amazing, if I hadn't of spoken to the other earlier than I'm sure I could have been perfectly happy there. So I had a difficult 24 hours of trying to decide between having financial security or following the feeling in my tummy and just hoping I can find some odd babysitting or english teaching jobs to make ends meet.

Arin excavating the dinosaur skeleton

In the end I went with the second option, and so at the end of July I move to Luxembourg to a Dutch family with two adorable boys, aged 1 1/2 and 3! I am really excited now, I loved Luxembourg when I visited in February, I love this family, and I am looking forward to starting German lessons finally. That leaves me with three weeks of nothing to do between finishing here in early July, but I will spend a week in Italy, some more time here in Belgium with AFS friends, and head over to Germany for a bit.

Found some bones!

Wednesday was pretty eventful here, I was left alone with the kids in the afternoon and we spent it 'excavating' a dinosaur skeleton and putting it together from a set that my parents set over. I set Arin up on the kitchen table and let Alice play with the plastic container drawer while I baked a cake, although the kit was really hard and messy and I ended up running between my cake, helping Arin and trying to keep the baby away from the table so she didn't get plaster powder in her eyes. Then Arin 'helped' me to cook dinner, this is a big thing for him at the moment, we give him a couple of random vegetables to cut up and he mixes them with various things he finds, like sugar and salt, and sets it out for us. Tonight he made salad with cucumber, celery leaves and sugar, and because he announced it was specially for me and I'm such an awesome nanny I actually ate most of it.

Arin's salad. Mmmmm.

Then Jan and Koi brought Jan's mother home for dinner and that ruined the awesome day we'd been having! I'd heard a lot about her, they all intensely dislike her because she's a really negative person and is really rude and puts everyone else in a bad mood. Normally they visit her a lot, but this is the first time she's come out and met me, and it was horribly awkward, she pretty much just ignored me the whole time, and also because she really wanted to cuddle Alice but Alice just cried desperately and reached out to me the whole time, and Arin refused to have anything to do with her either, I think in the past she rejected him as not actually being her grandson so he doesn't like her. Awkward.

Alice, me and Arin using Photobooth

Thursday was madness! They've been asking me to take the kids all day whenever I can, so I've been doing 13 hour days and getting up with Alice every night while she's teething. I really didn't need the kids all day today though because I've been rushing around trying to do a million things before I go to Germany, including leaving the house as clean as possible because no one else will do anything before I am back on Tuesday. I ran around with Alice in a harness all morning, which meant I could finish the cake and clean a lot, but man it killed my back! Arin was really good all day, and we spent ages taking funny photos with Photobooth on my computor.

But, its the end of the working week for me and tomorrow I am off to Mainz again for Hauke's birthday! Three nights of no baby monitor...murphy's law someone snores though!

Incase you didn't notice, my blog got a little bit more fancy, you can now check out my most popular posts, some of the blogs that I follow, and view pages I wrote about AFS, SWY and help on finding your own au pair job.

The Month of May

Spending the afternoon with the kids in the sun

I got back from Spain late on Saturday and arrived at Charleroi airport. It's always a little bit of a mission flying in and out of there, and this time I arrived five minutes after the last bus left and so had to wait nearly another hour. Then it was bus to the train station, train to Antwerp, and bus out here to Zoersel - it takes longer to get home from the airport than it does from airport to airport! Then the fun began because I had 45 kilo of luggage, in two bags and a broken suitcase (the really cheap one I got in London) that no longer had a pull-out handle and the ten/fifteen minute walk from the bus stop took me an hour, in the end I left one on the side of the road, went and dumped the other two, and returned for the third.

Alice stealing my shoe. I miss my wardrobe doors!

I got back to an empty house (they'd decided to stay until Monday night. Thanks for deciding that after booking my tickets to Spain) with dust EVERYWHERE. I cannot even describe how bad the house was post-sandblasting, even with three people cleaning for eight hours the day before. It was like a whole kindergarten's worth of kids had had a massive marathon-length sand fight inside. I spent four hours cleaning my room and bathroom again on the Monday and a month later I am still finding sand everywhere. I couldn't go upstairs until the Monday, because the floors were being varnished, so I slept downstairs and spent most of the weekend watching DVDs and hanging out in the pool, the weather was kinda crap. The builders have been here ever since, a polish gang that don't speak dutch, and only a little english between them. Turns out they have to hand-sand all of the already sandblasted surfaces, then bleach them, and then hand-sand them again before they can varnish them. Its been a month since we got back and they are still camped out here. They're kinda fun, they talk about me and whistle when I walk past, and once one woke me up from a nap all stressed out saying "you baby cry, you baby cry". Annoying though because my room keeps getting covered in stuff, I can't use any shelves or the wardrobe so everything is dumped on the floor, and they wake me up all the time!

Alice playing with the box

So then everyone came back on Monday and life resumed as normal. I loved how Koi and Jan brought Arin one of those weird Bakugan toys in London and he played with it for like, five minutes, but Alice played with the cardboard box for two days! And I brought Whale Rider for them, the next day Koi says to me, "I watched that movie last night but I didn't really get it, something about a girl and a whale?" Um, yes. A girl and a whale.

It seemed like things were going more smoothly here, Arin seemed much better with me and Alice stopped crying so much. I changed to an actual schedule, where I worked Sunday-Thursday, mostly mornings with Alice and then school to bedtime with Arin and sometimes Alice too. I went out a couple of times, to the Irish bar in Antwerp and spent the night talking to foreigners - a crazy spanish-speaking Moroccan and a even crazier Russian included.

Out with the Antwerp Roller Darby team

 I also had a night out with Arianne, the girl that comes to speak dutch with Arin and her flatmate's roller darby team. I say girl, but she's a lot older than me. This night was pretty good, I had a chance to rant with her for ages about Jan and Koi and their lack of organisation and how that affects other people and lets them down all the time. She goes really out of her way to come all the way out here and spend time with him in the evenings after getting up at 6.30am and working all day, because Jan is a family friend, but they tend not to let her know if Arin is sick or whatever because they forget or think that she likes coming for dinner anyway. The night also saw me promise to play roller darby (so far an unfulfilled promise) and doing a mad dash with Arianne to get to the bus stop because I didn't realise how far away it was and left it until right before the last bus to work out I didn't know how to get there. Sorry!

View during our walk home, "rural" Belgium

That conversation made me think a lot more about what was going on here. I think I was refusing to think too much about the negative stuff here, because I figured that anywhere I went there will be negative aspects to the different families, and not thinking about it meant I wouldn't notice so much and be able to cope. That conversation made me voice a lot of things that were making me unhappy, like the complete disorganisation that led to them often letting me down or making life really difficult for me. When they said that they'd decided to take Arin to Thailand for six weeks, giving me an extended unpaid holiday with little warning to prepare for it, this was another example of their disorganisation making life hard for me! In the end it seemed a lot easier to just move to another family, rather than work out what I was going to do for six weeks with no money, so I re-activated my nanny profiles on the websites I used before. I've since been told by them that it's a good thing I'm leaving because 'Arin doesn't like me'.

Alice

They say this because he's difficult and when they are around, he much prefers to play with them and have nothing to do with me. They don't seem to realise that when it's just the two of us, I rarely have a problem with him, and that its a much better thing if he prefers his parents over his nanny! I think reason he hasn't bonded 100% with me though is that all of his main caregivers (including Koi, his mother) have either left him behind in the care of others for years, or died, and then he's had six nannies in the past year. He is always just scared that everyone is going to leave him, it took Arianne about six months to get his trust.

Arin's dinosaurs all lined up. Aspergers Syndrome?

He has been increasingly difficult the last three weeks, throwing tantrums all the time that last for hours on end, so it's getting harder to be here. A big part of me wanted to suck it up and try and help him through it, because I really do care about him, but as Jan and Koi don't really listen to my suggestions, there isn't so much I can do. I keep telling them to talk to his school, as every day he says that school is 'not-good' and he puts up a fuss about going there - when a four-year old that just plays games and does painting all day at school decides he hates it, there must be something else going on there. Also, my parents pointed out that a lot of what he says and does is associated with Aspergers Syndrome. I think Koi and Jan try to explain each element of his behaviour with things like, well he's an only child, and well dutch is his third language, rather than looking at the big picture of him being a really slow developer, unable to handle social contact with both kids and adults, and so many other things. I've tried some different things with him since and its worked well for me, but I can't convince them to use the same approaches. They just don't get a lot of things, I've only just managed to convince Koi that sugar affects children's moods and behaviour, and I'm still working on convincing them that kids need actual bedtimes that are adhered to everyday. I thought that I wasn't good with kids, but I guess so much of it is just common sense and putting the kids needs ahead of your own, two things they don't really seem to have. The silver lining really has been that I've realised I am capable of raising my own kids and being a good parent one day. Hopefully one day far, far away I remind myself everytime Alice wakes me up in the middle of the night. Baby monitor bad, contraception good.

Khoi and I in Antwerp

Other than that, its been pretty quite here. Sunny, so I now have a pretty epic tan. Well, epic if you're as white as me to begin with! I went through a big healthy buzz of running and swimming every day, with big dreams of entering some marathon/triathalon in the future, a dream that came crashing down this week as Alice cut another tooth and my sleep got really interrupted. This week, the only exercise I've had is rocking her for an hour and a half in the middle of the night, which is actually pretty good for my arms, at 8kg she's damn heavy after the first five minutes! Not very good for my sanity though! Khoi, a kiwi guy I know through AFS came to Belgium on his way home from working in Norway, I spent the day doing a terrible job of showing him around Antwerp, although we did find an awesome cafe with couches in a huge cellar, a good find. We also went to Diamondland, where I discovered a) Khoi knows nothing about diamonds or jewellery, b) Antwerp's diamond cutters spend most of their time smoking and eating in their workshop and c) New Zealand is so far removed from the diamond trade scene that we aren't even on the map. Literally. See my photo album.

Diamondland fishbowl workshop

So now that I'm planning on taking off again, Im trying to rush around doing all of the sightseeing in Belgium. I say rush, but its noon on Friday and I'm still in bed blogging, despite telling myself I was going to Ypres today! The plan is to head there today, to Brussels to see a friend tomorrow, I'm off to Mainz for Hauke's birthday next week, and then go back to see Lena in Liege and visit Leuven the weekend after. I still don't know when I'm finishing up here, they planned on going in three weeks but they still haven't looked at buying tickets, and I still don't know where or when I start at another family (at the moment Im looking for something in a German speaking country, Germany or Luxembourg seem most likely) but I probably have several weeks in between. I'm off to Sicily to visit Francesca from AFS for awhile, and then I think I'll spend the rest of the time at Hauke's parents place in Gottingen and travel around Germany a little more too. So a time of much uncertainty and much to do!

Me and Alice

To end the post on a funny note, yesterday I was holding Alice and Arin was standing beside me, looking up at her and playing with the sticky tab on the back of her diaper when she let out the most enormous fart! I burst out laughing but he got really angry, took of his belt and tied her up in it, saying he was taking her to the police "for being naughty and make a stinky on me"!

Ok! Off to have a shower in my door-less bathroom and then to Ypres I go! More photos are here.

Fusion Food a la Koi

This is pretty much exactly what we always eat. Meat, rice and cucumber!

I can't really complain too much about Koi's cooking. It's not particularly healthy unless you adhere to the 'five slices of one vegetable = 'five a day" philosophy I mentioned in my last post, but its damn tasty. I've always been a huge fan of Thai food, I think Satay Kingdom's profits nosedived when I left the country, and their mee goreng is definitely the dish I miss the most from NZ, I would pay heaps for that now, you can't get good asian food over here at all and it's one thing that Koi never cooks.....anyway I digress.

Traditional Haggis

Eating her cooking everyday, while terrible for my waistline and general health, is great for my tastebuds. Last night we had four separate Thai dishes, it was awesome. And I'm addicted to spicy food, I used to amaze my coworkers by keeping a box of chilli powder in the staffroom and adding it to everything, even normally non-spicy things like macaroni and cheese or slices of pizza. I also used to think I had pretty good tolerance for spicy food, I'd never found anything too spicy for me to eat, even when I spent a couple of months challenging the Satay Kingdom staff to keep making it spicier to find my limit. I guess they never took my challenge very seriously though, because with Koi's cooking I've discovered a limit of sorts, in that what she considers hot makes me walk round in furious circles eating cheese while my tounge feels like its crying. Arin finds this hilarious. Still doesn't stop me from eating it all though.

So on the whole, I'd rate her cooking pretty highly. Until she attempts European cooking. Because somehow she can't manage to cook anything European without throwing some Thai into the mix.

Koi's version of Haggis: Haggis-filled spring rolls

Like Haggis. When she announced she would buy haggis in England and bring it back, I actually got kind of excited about trying this world-famous traditional dish. Until she brought it home and cooked it. I don't think Haggis-stuffed spring rolls, deep fried and dipped in chilli sauce, is particularly traditional or a good indication of the true taste of Haggis. Although I guess not many people can say that their first taste of Haggis was cooked by a Thai woman in Belgium.

Koi's tortellini/chicken stir-fry

Or tonights dinner. She chopped up chicken, onion, mushrooms, capsicum and chillis, and chucked them in the wok with a whole lot of asian saucy stuff. Ok, I think to myself, stirfry on rice for dinner tonight again. But no. Then she took out two vastly different packets of stuffed tortellini, cooked them, and then added them to the stirfry along with cream. And called it pasta. I'll tell you, biting into spinach and feta tortellini covered in spicy asian sauce along with your mushrooms and chicken is interesting. Interesting in the sense that it makes me want to plead having already eaten and go for a walk down the road to Quick.

So I call it Fusion a la Koi. Definitely not the kind of Fusion food that you pay good money for along the Wellington waterfront, but an experience all the same!

Imaginary letter to the V family

If I were to give a letter to the family I work for tonight, it would look something like this:

Damn, she gets to cook, carry, and wear a starched hat!

To Jan: I appreciate you offering to hold Alice for half an hour, to give me a break in my 13 hour day today. However, asking me to then make you coffee, make Alice milk, and then reheat your lunch because "those are things you can't do while holding the baby" doesn't really make it much of a break, and how the #@$& do you think I manage to get both kids up, bathed, dressed and fed real home-cooked meals while you and your wife are still in bed? Magic fairies that come and hold the baby for me? If all modern fathers are as useless as you, then I'm totally going to raise my own kids with another woman.

Also, when your son starts saying at 6.30pm that he's tired, send him to bed early. At the very least, adhere to his 8pm bedtime rather than having him stay up an hour late to write. I don't care that you think it's important he works on learning the alphabet with you everyday, if it's that important, maybe you could have emerged from your office before 8pm on a Sunday. And yes, I made it clear I was pissed off about it, but I knew I'd be minding a tired and exceptionally grumpy kid today (although I did not expect his teacher to complain that he had been tired and disruptive all day, and I did not expect him to keep up his tantrum for a whole 15 minutes). And yes, I'm now even more pissed off seeing as its 9.30pm and you've only just arrived home with him from working on one of your properties. Bring on dealing with Arin tomorrow...

To Arin: I know that you're tired. I know that it's not fair your parents are too lazy busy to come pick you up and therefore you have to walk home with me, and I agree that sucks when you're only five, you didn't get enough sleep last night and its a 2km walk. But dude, you're five. You're too old to throw tantrums on the ground kicking the baby's pram. And for all that I'm sympathetic, you should have learnt by now that crying will not make me give in to you. It just makes you more tired. Great.

I realise that you weren't put to bed tonight until 10.30pm, two hours after you should have been tucked in, and therefore you're really overtired and having trouble sleeping, but buddy please please please stay in bed until you fall asleep rather than getting up every five minutes to complain, because you're damn well keeping me awake too, and you know we don't have fun when both of us are tired and grumpy tomorrow morning.

To Koi: I realise that you come from a country where you had a personal assistant, full-time nanny for Arin, a cook, and cleaning ladies that were on-call 24/7, but welcome to the western world, where nannies do not appreciate being "asked" at 1pm if they could work the entire day, that same day that is already half over, because you have appointments that you've known about for weeks. That's not cool. Nor is you arriving home to find the baby fed, clean and ready for bed, and the entire house clean (which was never in the job description but it's easier to clean rather than chase the baby around all day taking away the random shit and dead flies that she's picked up off you're filthy floor before she puts them in her mouth) your washing done and me tired after working since I woke up this morning, and not saying thanks. I realise that you've never tried to cook, clean and watch children all in the same day, but let me assure you that it does deserve a thank you when your nanny does it outside of her job description.

Can I also say, I guess a lifetime of paid staff bringing meals to your table means that cooking is not your strongpoint, but really, cold pizza and ice cream for a five-year old's dinner on a regular day? And giving him five slices of cucumber with whatever rice/meat dish he happens to be eating each night may be better, but is not the same as 'five a day'. "Oh, your five year old has already had to have more than half his teeth pulled out, really, what a surprize." And starting to cook him dinner at 9.30pm because you 'forgot' that he'd need to eat while with you this evening, not exactly stellar parenting.

And finally, I don't think coming from a developing country is an excuse for not teaching your son to wash his hands after he goes to the toilet. Why is my bathroom the only one in the house that has soap in it? Am I the only one in the house the actually washes my hands? That is gross. Please invest in an economy pack of Imperial Leather and some of those Horoia Ō Ringaringa signs that are stuck to every public bathroom mirror in NZ.

Keep that up and I'm coming after ya!

To Alice: I love you. You are the cutest thing on two legs and the adoring look you give me when I kiss your tummy is the about only thing keeping me around here and stopping this nanny experience from putting me off procreating one day. But for the love of all that is good in the world, please stop crying every time I put you down. You are damn heavy, and while I can make milk, coffee and reheat food with one hand, I cannot peel vegetables for your dinner while holding you. Just sit at my feet and play happily with your toys, because screaming like you are dying a slow death from a very painful disease is not going to make me suddenly grow another set of arms and agree to carry you around for the rest of your life.

To the frogs that live in our pond: SHUT THE @*$# UP! I've averaged five hours sleep a night for the last two weeks because of you. I get that its that time of year, and you're up all night partying 'coz you just wana get laid, but go take a cold shower otherwise I am coming after you with some heavy-duty rat poison.


Be warned, it is getting near the time I had a change of scenery.

Kind regards, your dedicated nanny Claire