The march towards Belgium continues...
We've made significant progress in our preparations to leave. Huge new suitcases have been purchased, travel medical insurance has been arranged, the first month's rent on our apartment has been wired and a garage sale is planned for Saturday. There's been a couple of wrinkles in my financial aid paperwork, due to incorrect information sent by the University to SallieMae, but I think it has all been ironed out. The Jeep is being inspected and returned to the dealer on August 29, along with an expensive pay off to the leasing company for ending my contract early. At this point, I am happy to be rid of it, no matter what I have to pay! As I was taking care of all these details this week, I was asked by assorted and sundry people...

Why Belgium?

The choice to go to Belgium was not an obvious or intentional decision. Well, actually it was intentional once we were able to define our goals. This all started over a year ago, in LA, when I realized that the television industry was not a good place for me. To keep the explanation brief -- everything you've heard about Hollywood is true and I couldn't live that way. Rich was a little more insulated from the shit than I was, so he didn't reach his saturation point until a little later. But reach it he did and by the end of the summer, there we both were, two dorks with film degrees living in LA and not wanting to play the game. What to do?? For me, more education seemed the most logical route since a master's degree in film is not very marketable (even in the entertainment industry!). There seemed to be only one choice, and that was trying for a PhD in mass communication, until a brilliant friend of mine asked me why I would continue in a field that I clearly did not want to be in. A bolt of lightning! I realized that not only could I go back to school, I could actually study anything I wanted to, although it would require another master's degree before the PhD. But hey, why not? I love school!

Researching various degree programs led me to two areas that seemed most interesting: international relations and cultural studies. Cultural studies eventually fell by the wayside when I realized that the only career path would most likely be teaching. I wouldn't mind being a professor, but I wanted to have some other options as well. So, I requested information about international relations' programs from schools all over the country, examined their websites for faculty publications and department resources, and we really thought about where we wanted to live while I was going to school. Rich and I spent weeks looking at maps and reading about various cities, from Chapel Hill NC to Syracuse NY to Davis CA. Nothing was clicking. The programs were not exactly what I wanted and none of the cities excited us. Finally, Rich, in a casual offhand way, suggested Europe. This had not occurred to me and I was immediately enraptured with the idea. A whole new frenzy of research resulted in the conclusion that we wanted to be in Western Europe and it had to be an English language program. That narrowed the field pretty quickly! It would have to be the UK, the Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden or France. For a variety of reasons, Sweden, The Netherlands and France were ruled out. We talked more about it and decided that if we were going to do this, we should take the plunge and choose a non-English speaking country. Also, by this time, Rich was fully into homebrewing and was considering it a possible new profession. So Belgium became the obvious choice and won out in the end. Its kind of a compromise, the University is British, but we will be living in a French-speaking city in the middle of a Dutch-speaking country. Just in case school isn't challenging enough!
~K