I can’t believe it’s only been a week since I last published. The days have been long and full and foreign and transformative. In this city, everything is light until eleven and everything is alive until twelve when the bars close. Even the hopping nightlife is sensible, tasteful, contained.
It was a week of firsts.
I observed Shabbat and went to shul for the first time.
I saw novel sights: Chasidic families of twenty crossing the busy streets of Antwerp; a plague doctor with a train of mourners carrying a shrouded body (for a reenactment, of course); a twenty-foot-tall Reubens and a 13th-century manuscript.
I went to my first bar and ordered my first beer.
I learned how to say “What shitty weather!” in Dutch and how to ride my bike like a local (or at least not like a tourist).
I’m adjusting to being around new people again for the first time in a long time and I’m simultaneously relearning how to be alone without being lonely.
I’ve read American books and listened to American music and worn American boots, sat in English pubs, conversed in German, and hung out with Israeli people.
European me is coming out of hibernation. The desert seems a distant dream—a cool thing to tell my new friends about and not much more.