Expensive Plumbers

Each person has a fetish of his/her own. Some have shoe fetishes, some have handbag fetishes, some have canine fetishes, while some have feline fetishes.

I have a bathroom fetish.

I like my bathrooms squeaky clean, shining, shimmering, splendid.

So it was on one gloomy afternoon here in Gent, that I was happily cleaning our bathroom when I didn’t notice our toilet deodorizer slipping into a bubbly pit on its way down to oblivion. Unaware of the escape, I obliviously flushed the toilet with little regard for what I thought was a tiny transparent something sticking out amidst the suds. “Oh, it’s just bubbles.” I told myself.

A couple of hours later, in one of my random toilet trips, I noticed that the color of the toilet was turning blue. But this time, instead of blue dripping down, it was blue rising up! It was just then that I realized what had happened.

Not knowing what else to do, I just continued living a normal life that day. K came home and I told him what happened and we both just tried to be positive and hoped for the best.

But alas, positivity had no room for our hopes. After a couple of days, the most dreaded thing happened: Our toilet got clogged.

Though not to despair! Google had helped me before in dire circumstances and I had great faith that it would redeem me again. And so I Googled (and Youtubed—I move to propose that the latter be also made into a verb) the magic words: “How To Fix a Clogged Toilet”.

As expected, my surfing skills came up with several, ingenious options for us. I will not go into great detail as to what these selections were but oh, after extensive research and some equipment bought at a supply store, I was ready to become a plumber.

Now, plumbing isn’t as easy as it looks. On second thought, I take that back. I never thought plumbing was easy…doable, but definitely not easy. And after my first try, I unfortunately, had to give up. It is to be noted, however, that I am NOT a quitter. I just know my limits…and for plumbing, my abilities were merely good for one go (also, I feared making more damage than good). ;P

A couple of days later, it was K’s turn to put his plumbing skills to the test; but also to no avail. We were both not cut out to become plumbers, after all.

And so we had to submit to defeat, set our prides aside, and dial the dreaded plumber hotline to make an appointment. Two of them promptly showed up the next day.

I am always apprehensive about these Belgian servicemen (mailmen included) as I often feel as if it’s a “close encounters with the third kind” sort of thing. I have to speak Dutch and I’m always afraid I might say something incorrectly. “E.T. phone home!”.

So before they arrived, I made sure I had all my “visual aids” ready. I cleared some space in the bathroom so they would have more area for mobility, I put a sample of the same toilet deodorizer within reach, I put some paper towels on the floor, I set a bucket with a sponge nearby, and I made sure that whatever “not-so-miracle-after-all” stuff we poured down the toilet were within reach so the plumbers would be aware of what had already transpired.

They arrived on time (Europeans and promptness! Pfff… =) and immediately asked me what the problem was. I proceeded to explain what had happened and directed them to the bathroom for my presentation. Good thing I did not pull out my laptop. hehe

Again, I will not to expound on the plumber’s next moves but all I can say is that he was certainly (and nonchalantly) HANDS-ON when it came to doing his job!

He told me they had to get some equipment from their truck and so they went down and came back with an R2-D2 looking machine. Thinking that they needed some “privacy”, I decided to just loiter around the living room.

After one hour (including a cup of coffee and some paperwork), they were done. The whole ordeal made me so relieved (as the plumber said that our situation was dangerous in that the toilet thing (let’s call it “TD”) might have clogged up the pipes of the whole apartment, thus, affecting the flushing and draining capabilities of other units. I wouldn’t have forgiven myself if that happened…and all because of a small TD!!!). Although another thing wasn’t so pleasant afterwards—The bill.

The bill was a whopping 190 euros! Even if I don’t convert that to pesos that is A LOT here in Europe…and just for a TD!!! Okay, converted to pesos that is roughly 11,000php! I can send a kid to school with that amount of money! Or maybe even send one whole class to school WITH books!!! Now, now, Jacki don’t get carried away…

It made me feel so terrible. But then my bestfriend told me that in France, should you be in need of the services of a locksmith (you know the guy you turn to when you lock yourself out because you forgot your keys or you lost them?), that will cost you pretty much 2,000 euros—with three (3) zeros, and not just two (2)! That’s 118,000php!?!@#%

If time comes that I get locked out, I might as well hire a locksmith from my country. It’s much cheaper that way (fare included).

And when he goes to the Belgian embassy and gets asked the ultimate question: “Why are you going to Belgium?”

He would then answer: “Because a client of mine has locked herself out of her house.”

For 200 euros per job, I had wanted to become a plumber. But now I have found my life’s ambition and my bestfriend is also willing to discontinue her law practice for it….

We are off to become locksmiths!

This article is based on true events. Any resemblance to similar incidents or real people, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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Philippine Postal System Trauma

Yesterday my post office nightmare came to an end. After 7 months, I can finally sleep soundly at night.

7 months earlier…

7 months ago was my birthday. Being in a long distance relationship has never been easy (nor cheap) but K and I have tried to make the most out of it. I had wanted to celebrate the day of my birth with him but since he couldn’t come over yet, he sent me a great present and wrote me a wonderful note instead.

The present was (can I write about it?? Hehe) a personalized “pull” (in Filipino: “sweater” ra diay) with a fabulous drawing (since K is quite a talented artist) and a pair of boxing gloves, to name a few. I was so excited to receive it (as I had begun to get hooked to boxing at that time) and when I got the notice from the post office I immediately went there to claim it.

Long story short, they asked me to pay a P3,500 tax for my BIRTHDAY PRESENT (half the price of the present) and so in not so ladylike terms I sorta told them to take a long walk over a short pier, dive headfirst, and never resurface. They didn’t even allow me to read the “birthday card” inside! Grrrr…

That marked the end of my post office days—or so I thought. A month after I asked them to send it back, the package still had not reached the sender. So I had to take a trip to the post all over again—this after having consulted 3 lawyer friends of mine. Seriously.

In the end, they told me they had sent it on January 12 and that I should just wait for it. They even showed me their books indicating such.

And so we waited…and waited…K came over to the PH to spend the holidays…he came back to BE…we waited some more…and waited still…I packed my bags and moved to Belgium and we waited again… winter went, spring came, and summer is almost here…well, I guess you get the picture.

But alas! The other day we got a note from the post informing us that an international package was waiting for us. More specifically, a return to sender package. We really hoped for the best and expected the worst. I will not begin to narrate the horror postal stories my trainees had shared with me.

I was finally able to open my present yesterday. Amazingly, everything was there (what a disappointment! ;). Now I hold the hopes of so many others who have been waiting for their mail (e.g. K’s aunt who sent a parcel to Mexico from Belgium in 2007). That package give people like me hope…and so much more. There is a God.

From now on we really ought to take the term SNAIL MAIL to heart.

Thank you post office. You didn’t fail me after all. ;P

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The Magritte Museum: My 2 cents worth retrospect

Brussels, Belgium
1500 hours
Date: Classified (hehe, I just wrote this for added effect)

Rene Magritte.

For commoners like me, he is known as the person who painted the “Man in the Bowler Hat with a green apple head” in one of ex-James Bond’s more popular movies “The Thomas Crown Affair”.

Now, to take my common knowledge about this man to a higher level and to bring my ignorance to a lower level, I did a bit of research before visiting the museum, and this is what I found out: René François Ghislain Magritte is a Belgian who had lived 68 “art-full” years in Belgium and in France, visiting the US a couple of times as he had 2 solo exhibitions there during his lifetime. He was the eldest of 3 sons, his father was a tailor, his mom was a milliner (ofcourse, I didn’t know what a “milliner” was and I didn’t have time to look this up yesterday before we left (*wink*) but now, interestingly, as I looked it up and contrary to my initial silly fantasies that it might have been a typo or that it was the Filipino pronunciation for the word “millionaire”, a milliner is a word that originated from Milan, Italy referring to someone who designs, makes, trims, and sells women’s hats).

Hmmm…interesting…

The Museum allocated 3 floors purely for the display of his life and works. For a staggering price the equivalent of 1 movie ticket (Belgian not Philippine) you can get a sneak peak into the life and works of one of the most influential painters of all time.

The tour starts on the 3rd floor down to the 1st, where the juicy paintings are. Just like what I read on wikipedia hours before (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rene_Magritte), pretty much everything about his life that is known was there as inscriptions on glass mounted on the walls. Everything that I remember reading was there except for that bit about him having supported himself during the time of the war by reproducing Picasso paintings, among others, and forging bank notes, having an affair with a surrealist model, and his wife also having an affair with another man and at one point filed for divorce. But well, this isn’t E! Gossip, this is my retrospect of the Magritte Museum. Ehem…

At the entrance of the 3rd floor a disclaimer was given that out of respect for Magritte, they displayed his works and notes in their original version, French. If you did not understand French then it’s your problem (the latter was not part of the disclaimer;). So as part of their respect for Magritte it wasn’t really very nice to include something nasty about his past which was highly understandable. If I were Magritte I wouldn’t want that either. Other people had bad hair days in the past, or terrible tastes in clothes, or just made bad decisions. He opted forgery to support himself in a time of crisis, when the Germans occupied Belgium during World War II. There is no shame in that, I guess. He just did what he was best at. For the other tidbits, hey…What else is new?

For a couple more Euros, the museum can provide you with a mobile phone looking device that, at the press of a button, can give you more anecdotes apart from what is visibly there, on whatever it is that you may be looking at. The titles of the paintings were in French, Dutch, and English, respectively. But well, if you can very well read and have no desire to join the Magritte Quiz Bee at the end of the tour, then a regular, savory walk through the museum would suffice. You may ofcourse, look for another patron who has one of those mobile phone looking devices and stand really close to him/her so you can also hear the audio free of charge. If it is not in YOUR desired language they might be kind enough to switch it to YOUR preference if you ask extra-nicely…all at your own risk–ofcourse.

At times, we wondered if they didn’t accidentally (or intentionally) switch the titles of the pieces to make the visitors even more confused or wonder some more. But among the things that I like about Magritte, I appreciate the fact that he “said” this:

“My painting is visible images which conceal nothing; they evoke mystery and, indeed, when one sees one of my pictures, one asks oneself this simple question ‘What does that mean’? It does not mean anything, because mystery means nothing either, it is unknowable.” –René Magritte (Yes, not really grammatically correct but that’s okay)

In my stroll, the paintings evoked different feelings. Some made me say “huh?” or “eww!”, some made me giggle or just stare, the last few creations especially made me marvel at his journey through painting and at the outcome of his endeavors. Truly, he had mastered the art and had improved on it quite noticeably, at the latter part of his career.

Despite all those feelings though, I did not once feel stupid. With some painters, you just know that there is an even deeper meaning to their work and you just look at it and wrack your brains just trying to figure out whatever underlying meaning there might be coz you want to seem smart but in the end, feel stupid if you don’t get it. With Magritte, it was different. You didn’t have to get anything. Just look at it and appreciate it because you dare not interpret it coz he himself indirectly said that you’ll be stupid if you do.

But some of his mysteries I might have understood through my mini-research: His mother, who was a milliner, died when he was still young. She was suicidal and eventually succeeded at killing herself through drowning. They say that he was there when she was found on the river…that’s why he chose to be a surrealist, coz he knows that she’s dead and would just like to think at times that she was still there somehow and that is depicted in his paintings. They say that that’s why some of his subjects are veiled in white sheets or that he paints this or he paints that.

Maybe that’s why he paints bowler hats.

On another note, I read that contrary to popular belief, it was the bowler hat and not the cowboy hat that was the most popular hat in the American West. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowler_hat)

Going back, it is not uncommon knowledge that it is our past that makes us who we are. And what we do defines us. Sometimes mysteries cannot just be left as it is..because people have a natural curiosity that needs to be fuelled with answers. With answers come appreciation or a sense of peace or fulfillment. Whatever tickles one’s fancy.

Bottomline, Magritte is right: Things are not always what they seem…

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The Tale of the Filipina who got lost in Belgium

This is “Verloren” (Lost): A tale of a young pinay who, on her first time out alone in the cobbled streets of Belgium, expectedly ended up getting lost.

The story goes a little something like this…let us call the young lady: “J”.

J had to be enrolled in a dutch class. Being a Filipina who only knew English, some tagalog w/ a visayan accent and ofcourse, Visayan, her native language, living in a country like Belgium requires a mastery of a couple of things, apart from layering. One of these things is the mastery of Dutch. Hence her trip to the House of Dutch.

Our tale begins with J being dropped off by her partner at the school. K, the partner, needed to get back to his workplace after lunch thus could no longer accompany J to the school to process the admin stuff. The independent J didn’t mind. She was even able to make friends with the belgian registrar, who was ehem…quite impressed by her mastery of the English language and high test scores (NOTE: The day before, J took what she thought was a cognitive test for dummies at the same location (Google: Covaar Test). The registrar, not having had an inkling as to what a Philippine Peso looked like, was promised by J to be shown such the next time they met. He was most certainly pleased. No marks for extra belgian points were gained from this exchange though.

So, after asking the registrar to google for her what a bus stop looked like (as J knew for a fact that there were bus stops in Belgium, however, did not know how to detect one YET), J left the building took a right, then a right in search for the elusive bus stop. She finally arrived at the same bus stop her friend oriented her on the day before. (NOTE: Her friend, A, had to take her to the same building the day before, by the bus route, so J can be oriented as to how to get there should she need to do it more often in the future).

It is to be noted that the following instructions were noted / remembered:

1. From the house go straight to the city center and get on bus number 5 ONLY.
2. Swipe your bus card with the front facing you and don’t hold on to it. Just insert it and wait for the machine to spit it back out.
3. Put the card back in your pocket. There is no need to punch out. As long as you don’t exceed an hour, you can get on as many buses as you can. Additional note: Don’t lose the card.
4. Ring the bell on the first bridge you pass and get off on the next bus stop. Additional note: NOT THE RED BELL. Ring the BLUE bell.
5. After getting off at the bus stop, just go straight and in the next intersection that forms a Y go left to Congostraat (Congo Street).
6. Destination reached: Inbergering / House of Dutch.
7. On going back: Just retrace your steps and take the same number 5 bus or any bus as these will pass by the city circle.

Easy, noh?

Yeah, it should have been a piece of cake and it really seemed like it except for one minor thing. I missed the part about having to get on the bus in the bus stop AT THE OPPOSITE SIDE OF THE ROAD. So poor, provincial J whose common sense had most likely been greatly affected by the cold, took some bus at the same side where she initially got off and ended up in the outskirts of Ghent that could not even be found in the main map and could barely be identifiable in Google Maps.

Confession: She doesn’t even know if she got on bus number 5.

But after a couple of phone calls, some walking, waiting, and more freezing…after battling the fear of dying from hypothermia and getting frostbite, an hour and 45 minutes later she was back at the City Circle and had never been happier to see civilization, more so a familiar location.

8 hours later she is writing this note.

Her only consolation from this whole dummyscapade was that she thought she saw Gavin Rossdale get off the bus she was first on…

But then again…that could still have been the effect of the cold.

—The End—

Editor’s Note: Crying has been censored from this essay.

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What I Like About Belgium

I have been meaning to write this. I have always tried to be an optimist if I can help it and I think making this list helps me appreciate my new home even more. So here it goes (and not in any particular order):

1. The fresh air (most of the time anyway *wink*).
2. The cool breeze (that more often than not, ends up being a cold, bone-chilling, icy breeze–hehehe)
3. The way the government and the people are concerned about the environment. So here, waste segregation is a must, companies give their employees environmental certificates that they can use to buy environmental products like Ecover http://www.ecover.com, how the government give subsidies for house renovation if you make your house more environment friendly…and many more. 🙂 This makes me very happy.
4. The chocolates ofcourse!
5. Speculoos pasta! and the new and improved crunchy Speculoos (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speculaas)
6. The systems (even the government systems ;p) are very organized.
7. Hot and cold showers and bubble baths!
8. A warm welcome in a cold country.
9. SALAMI!!! My favorite.
10. Yummy cheese.
11. I would say varieties of wine and beer but I seem to have recently developed an aversion for anything that contains alcohol lately. waaaah! Don’t worry folks, this is just a phase. I will soon appreciate their wine and beer. 🙂
12. Cute clothes. It’s interesting to just sit and watch the people that pass by. In my country, it’s shorts / jeans, sandals or closed shoes, and a blouse / shirt. Here it is completely different and even just that, I find interesting.
13. Fast internet. Need I say more?? ;P
14. It’s so easy to find somebody to do sports with…I haven’t tried it though coz I’m still adjusting to the cold. Give me about 3 years and I’ll start playing again. 😛
15. The amusing dishwasher. ;P
16. The museums. We might visit the Magritte museum this weekend. Remember “The Thomas Crown Affair”?
17. The continent. Instead of island hopping this time it’s quite easy to go “country hopping” coz they are ofcourse, all connected. This time, I am not in an archipelago.
18. The free library! I just found this out yesterday. It even has a whole music collection.
19. Cool houses. Belgians, apparently, are very good at interior design.
20. The fact that I don’t have to miss K anymore…that much. ;P

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