Jason's Daily Notes

Was up and out of the house pretty quickly. It was raining, so I brought my umbrella. I took 3 empty bottles of wine with me to throw out in the recycling down the street. It was across the street from Del Haise, so I bought some pastries there (€0,79 each) and ate them (and my remaining 2 bananas) as I walked to the university.

I searched for jobs, sent in an application to one I didn't really care much for. Mike called me - he asked for help with his report, and I gladly offered. So I spent an hour or two proofreading his placement report (which was a very thorough report!). The afternoon flew by, so I then returned home. Hungry, I bought a bicky burger along the way (the portion sizes for our dinners have been smaller than I'm used to, so I needed to have some pre-dinner). I offered to make dinner, but Katrien was making pizza. To contribute, I stopped by Del Haise and bought a bottle of wine, some candles, cheese, coke, fake chicken, bell peppers and tortillas (I want to make fajitas).

Katrien made the pizza dough by hand. Impressive. Soon, Shauna arrived, and another friend - Maartin. We chatted and shared some vodka as the pizza was cooking. The pizza was good, thin (but wholegrain) and cheesy. We discussed heavy metal music, because that is what brought them together.

Nike had work to do, so she stayed in. Katrien, Maartin, and Shauna rode their bikes (fietsen) to the bar where we were going; I walked, having a 7up along the way. The bar (Rhythm and Blues) was chill (as is everywhere in Antwerp), but pretty quiet. A live band came on at 11pm.

More of Maartin's friends arrived. I talked to a girl (Anastacia):

"What do you think of Antwerp?"
I needed something original to say. "There are a lot of Jewish people."
"AHAHAHAHA." Turns out, her boyfriend (Jonathan) was half Jewish.

We hung out, just chatting. These friends weren't as social as my London friends. It was pretty difficult to find things to talk about (but maybe that's the language barrier). They kept going outside every 20 minutes to have another cigarette. Man, everyone here smoke cigarettes. I'm lucky that it doesn't bother me at all. (Though I'm suspecting I'm getting a lot of second-hand smoke, which is making more relaxed.) I ended up chatting with Ramses, Bjorn's boyfriend, who didn't smoke so didn't disappear every few minutes.

After midnight we went across the street to Bonaparte, a small club (laughably small by London standards; there were only like 30-40 people there). There was supposed to be karaoke there. The place was filled with Dutch people (even I could tell, they had a different style, were trying more hard to dress up as compared to the Belgians). Karaoke did happen, and I eventually signed up to do my song ("Livin' on a Prayer"). We waited for HOURS before it was my turn. I finally went up to sing (with Katrien and Martin) after 3am.

I was tired and walked home. Ramses was headed the same way, so we walked together. I talked about food and made us hungry, so we bought some durum for the walk back! Got home past 4am and slept tight.