You’ll be an expat for a while and you’ll have got used to keeping in touch with friends and family back home in a kind of random, long-distance way – a bit of skyping, some texting, some calling when skype is playing up, lots of facebooking. Then one day you’ll realise you haven’t actually been…
There was a sweet middle-aged Tibetan woman in my Monday evening English class. She wore lengths of fabric wrapped around her as a skirt and thick woollen socks under her sandals to ward of the cold wet Belgian winter. Her English was almost non-existent. We worked our way slowly, oh so slowly, through a few…
At the end of the church service on Sunday, I joined our pastor on the stage, and tried to calm the loud beating coming from my chest. Public speaking doesn’t usually unnerve me but yesterday was a little different. I was saying goodbye to two of our closest friends and I wanted to do it…
Last night there was a mix-up, a forgotten plan and a volley of phone calls, that for about two hours had me thinking with increasing seriousness that something dreadful had happened to a friend. It hadn’t. She turned up fine – just a mix up – even as we approached her flat with torches and…
31 days. I can’t quite believe I made it! Granted, I’m three days late in finishing, but here we finally are at day 31. It’s been so interesting writing this series. It’s different from anything I’ve done before – my posts are usually spontaneously written about whatever it is in my life that has been…
Rasmus and I met at a picnic in the Parc du Cinquantenaire in Brussels on a warm May day. I was nine months into a ten month internship and only just now starting to feel like maybe it would be okay if I stayed a bit longer. My first six months had been lonely and…
