Christmas in the West Bank ...

Merry Christmas from Jerusalem and "the territories" ... a quick update as to how I spent my Christmas in the Middle East. All of the big christian midnight masses were "sold out", so I attended a English Epsicopalian service outside the walls of old jerusalem ... for the day, we travelled to Bethlehem in the West Bank to the Church of the Nativity (seemed the most appropriate thing to do) to light a candle for my grandmother ... staying in the Muslim quarter of the old city, it is strange to see picutres of Arafat alongside pictures of Santa Claus ... 'tiss the season ...

A strange seasonal message brought to you at the West Bank border crossing


The much less seasonal insides of the West Bank ...

Oh, how Bethlehem has changed in 2000 years ...

La Fiesta De Mi Despedida ...

As a celebration of my final days in Leuven, my beloved Spanish threw me a surprise going-away party ... a most unexpected yet appropriate end to my three months here ... I will always remember Leuven as being more Spanish than Belgian ...

And of course no Leuven celebration would be complete without the Turks !! God bless you all ...

And of course no Leuven/Spanish celebration would be complete if it didn't spill over into the clubs at the wee hours of morning ...

Ah, the end of an era ... thank you all for a wonderful chapter !!

The Stockholm Syndrome

Subtitled: Still looking for something Sweder ...

I made use of the cheapest round trip ticket imaginable (.02 Euro + taxes and fees) to visit one of the most expensive cities on the planet (mixed drinks for about 10 Euro, coffee for about 4 or 5 Euro -- the Italians in the group were almost in revolt) ...


Stockholm ... where the sun rises at 10AM and has set again by 2PM, and everything is covered by a perpetual layer of frost ....




Christmas markets were everywhere ... where one could enjoy a warm seasonal Glogg

One of my favorite parts was this open air ice rink where I found that I could skate as well as some of the Swedes ... which seemed somewhat unnatural (particularly for someone originally from Texas)

Numerous museums (mostly free) ... my favorite was the Alfred Nobel Museum (ironically, the man who endowed the Peace Price is most well known for his invention of dynamite) which featured an exhibition of the paitings of Winston Churchill

By far the highlight of the trip was a day trip I took to Sodertalje to see a Swedish Master's League Ice Hockey Match (SSK vs. Bjorkloven) ... Swedish hockey is beautiful thing ... much more fluid with more finese and less sluggish boards play ... the crowd was equally appreciative and amazingly attentive to the game as well ... In the picture below, if you zoom in on #33 (upper left), you will see one of the purest smiles -- which, afterall, is what hockey is all about

Signs of the Season ...

Christmas/Hannukah/Kwanza/Wright Bros. Day are fast approaching ... A few local signs of the season:

I had my first two oral philosophy final exams this week ...

The area nearby my house has been turned into some sort of seasonal village (Leuvenuse Kerstmasfest) ... filled with venders selling crafts, waffles, fudge and hot wine ...

A stage with choirs and a PA system blaring Bing Crosby ad nauseum ...

Some of my Spanish friends are very cold despite being dressed warmly ...

All signs that the year and my time in Leuven is drawing to a close ...

A Trip to the Belgian Promised Land ...

Subtitled: Neil and the Stella Factory ...

As I close in on my final few weeks in Leuven, I got the opportunity to make the obligatory pilgrimage to the Stella Artois brewery (by appointment only) ... the juggernaut that fuels the economy and spirits of this university town, and is, in a word, omnipresent.

The technological heart of Leuven ! -- Monitored like a nuclear power plant, and not one person to be found playing Solitaire or MineSweeper ...

Some of the vast (*echo* vast, vast) sea of brewing drums ...

The beginnings of a labyrinth of beer kegs ... incredulous, I kept looking out for umpaloompas

The Stella experience is not complete without training and evaluation in beer pouring technique ...

Now I can officially consider myself having lived in Leuven !

ICTY ...

Adding to what I now realize could be seen as a travelogue of atrocity/genocide tourism (Dachau, Tibet, Rwanda, Ypres ... ), I joined a law-faculty sponsored trip to Haag (mispronounce as "The Hague") and the International Criminal Tribunal of the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY for short) where we got introductions from various Leuven alums working on a range of ICC business and got to sit in on the Milutinovic et al. (Sainovic, Ojdanic, Lazarevic, etc.) trial ... rather erie seeing them in person in the courtroom ... I was lost in my thoughts all afternoon, and didn't pay much attention to the boring testimony or the funny outfits of the lawyers ...

Understandably, security was very tight, so I was only able to abscond with this picture of the exterior of the old insurance-company-turned-temprorary-court ... fairly unassuming

When a Discourse Becomes Stereotyped ...

I had the opportunity to go to the European Commission last night as a friend invited me to a forum on the status of Roma/"Gypsies" in the EU ... with the recent additions of Bulgaria and Romania, there are now an estimated 10 million Roma in the EU (more than the entire popuation of Belgium) facing important issues such as discrimination and challenges integrating into the global economy ... once again I got to (this time honestly) play the part of the ignorant American (even to all of the stereotypes that they were trying to dispel) ... it was very informative ... I met a Lithuanian girl interning in the EC who had never met an American before in Europe ... so I evidently dispelled some stereotypes of my own ...

I ended up going out for drinks with some of the participants (at an Irish pub ... so much for stereotypes), and missing the last train back to Leuven ... leaving me to explore Brussels (once again ...) until the first train at 5AM ...

The train back was beset by a group of loud and obnoxious Loyola College students (appropriately enough) ... and I understood much clearer some of the stereotypes against Americans ... the worst ones are those rare ones that you can't escape because they end up to be occasionally true ... I apologized to all on the train for them once they had left (but that didn't make me feel any better about it all)