American food is delicious.

You only realize how delicious it is when you miss a few staple meals for an extended period of time. During my one month back in the states I had to "catch up" on all the foods I was missing out. I'm pretty sure I over did it, which is good cause it means I won't want anything in the categories for quite a while.

1. Cheese Balls: 1 enormous barrel, I don't really want to talk about it.

2. Dunkin Donuts: Cinnamon Coffee w/ Milk and Sugar does not taste like coffee in any way. It is also delicious and warm. Unless it's iced (also refreshing when my first day back in the US was 90 some degrees), in which case it is not warm.

3. Bagles: Ham & Cheese on a Salt Bagel. This is a classic combo that I've had for years, the Salt Bagel is a slightly new addition but the sandwich keeps hunger away for two full meal times.

4. Fried Chicken: Popeye's spicy blend & Biscuits. This is probably the grossest meal on the list as it consists of mostly fat and or fat. The grease is unimaginable... the biscuits are essentially layers of butter with salt in between.

5. Cubano: At the corner Cuban restaurant where the waiters barely speak English... a great roll with pork, ham, pickle and cheese. I'm not sure why I keep going back to this sandwich, though it does only cost 3 dollars. The best possible bite is right at the end, with a small amount of pork and ham, but a lot of pickle and cheese.

6. Buffalo Chicken Cheese Steak: From the famous Hoagie Haven in Princeton. A basic chicken cheese steak with a ton of Tabasco and blue cheese dressing.

7. Burrito: The last and probably biggest mess of all the cravings. My favorite combo includes spicy pork, rice, black beans, all kinds of salsa. Also... lots of cheese, guacamole and sour cream. I haven't attempted to eat one of these with my hands in years, fork and knife are key. I do enjoy a bit of Green Tobasco as well.

I will post up pics of these disgusting concoctions later as my stolen Internet isn't ideal for uploading photos.

Season Two

I'm back in Belgium.  I've written emails to my family and friends saying I'm back in the "+32."  That's my dumb slang utilizing the Belgian country code; I like to think that I'm clever sometimes.  Anyway, it turns out I was being a little optimistic suggesting I was all but done with my Visa.  Long story short:  I wasted a return flight and got a new flight for NO reason.  The result was my girlfriend leaving for Brussels by herself for five days.  I like to think it was better that she got to see parts of the city on her own so that she could discover things without my biases.  Then she may be able to show me things in the city that I lived in for three months prior.  She spent a little time looking for a long term apartment for us as well as being a tourist.

Once I arrived back in the city we did a bit of walking and more apartment searching.  We were both desperate and unknowing but ended upon this cool little one bedroom.  Its about 400 square feet with one front room (bedroom / living room / office) and one back room (kitchen and sometimes bedroom).  There were two caveats with this place: one we knew before we paid our security deposit, one after.  Before we moved in, and something that is pretty obvious from the photo:  No furniture.  Oh, we're also on the third floor of a walk-up.  Walk-ups don't usually phase me, but these stairs are so steep I actually feel like I'm climbing a ladder.  (Mom & Dad: we'll find you a nice hotel in the area cause I don't think it'll be easy for you guys to get up here.)  So, no furniture in our new apartment and where do we go?  IKEA!  Seriously, this is where you go when you want cheap stuff in Europe.  Its like a nice version of WalMart with no creepy people... well there's Eurotrash but I don't understand French still so they're still just "exotic."  We were able to stock our kitchen with cooking supplies, two sets of eating utensils and two bed rolls for under 100$.  That's Dollars, not Euros.  We've got to do another trip to get "furniture" so we aren't sleeping on the floor, and so we have chairs.  I'll go through a real breakdown of the "minimal kitchen" we've stocked in another episode for now I'll go onto the rest of the apartment.

The second caveat we learned about the first night we slept in our apartment.  We spent the majority of the day moving our stupid amount of luggage from our temporary spot to our "permanent" spot (including the stairs) so we were pretty spent.  Except when we got the apartment it was the middle of the day, and the three bars and restaurants that are immediately beneath us hadn't opened yet.  We're right near St. Gery, which is one of the major nightlife spots in Brussels.  Also, it just happens to be a big Jazz weekend... so there was plenty to keep us awake in our apartment all night.  This is the moment where our kitchen (in the back) became our bedroom for a short while.  Well, no matter what, we're pretty happy with the apartment because its pretty close to everything in the center of the city.  I'm also about five minutes from my office... and that's worth the cost of the apartment by itself.  Even with a trombone player standing right outside my apartment I will still get more sleep because of its office proximity.

I think Wednesday I will write what I promised and put down all the crap American food I ate while I was home.  *Spoiler alert* cheese puffs and fried chicken.  By the way, all you nay-sayers who thought the Waffles had calories:  I lost over 10 lbs while I was in Brussels.  Belgians don't lie:  Waffles are 0 Calories and 0 Fat.  Eat as many as you like when you come visit.

I'm alive and well.

I'll apologize to everyone for the recent month long outage.  Here's the deal:  I had to return to the US.  I last left with some words about an equine delicacy and a big french mess.  Immediately following an extended work session I went to deal with "visa stuff," only to learn that 7 days later I would be escorted out of the EU back to the US.  I basically had to rush to get all the paperwork done in Brussels that could get done there and then fly back and WAIT until my visa was ready.  

That brings me to a month of silence.  I'm sure it was based on a little disappointment that I had to cut my adventure a little short with a hiccup but in addition I didn't have many exciting things to write about.  Since I've returned every day is Saturday.  It is a wonderful break, but not one I was prepared for so it wasn't entirely welcome.  I will shortly write an update on what I've done while I was home.  It will mostly be about the disgusting but necessary food items I've digested while home.  But I will be scaling back my writing a little bit.  Once I return to Brussels (on May 21st) I'll be there for almost a year and it won't be as "new" as it was in January.  I'm still going to be as American as possible and maintain a healthy amount of exploration into embarrassing myself.  But I will only be writing 3-4 times a week.  I plan to write M-W-F and the occasional weekend.  This will allow me time to prepare and set up pictures and such.

I've also been a bit silent about the whole deal because I didn't want to write about how I "hoped" things were going.  Today the final piece of the puzzle (working permit) was completed.  I will be turning in the final paperwork for a Visa by the end of the week and returning to Brussels Visa in hand.  What you see in the image (which is a little small) is a piece of paper that says I can work in Belgium for up to ONE year.  I need to renew if I stay beyond that.  I'll explain a lot more about how this works in a following post as this is more of a teaser.  I will also be writing a post soon detailing all the 'catching up' I have done in the US as well as leaving Belgium shenanigans.  I'll say this much, 8 hours in Dulles Airport is not awesome.  

I was so hungry, I could eat a horse.

So I went to the butcher down the street and bought a horse steak...  I've been planning this one for a while.  Both the horrible joke, AND the consumption of horse.  Once I was told that there is a chance that any steak you are eating in a restaurant could be horse... I went out LOOKING for horse.  But in my searching, I've learned that "restaurant with horse" is not the best possible way to find what I was looking for via GOOGLE.  In the end, its best to go to the source and ask them.  

My idea was to stop at a good looking butchery and ask what restaurant would be best for a foreigner to try out horse.  I got way ahead of myself when I realized the only word I could communicate in that sentence was Horse... Cheval.  The Butcher knew NO English, and all I could really say was, "I'd like some horse."  He put a hand up (in a cartoonish way), left, and upon returning had a steak in his hand and insisted, "Cheval."  Ok, I guess I can just cook it myself... why didn't I think about that sooner.  It was priced about the same as a medium cost beef steak:  4.50 Euros for around 300 Grams (which is plenty for a serving).  

I was planning on a steak dinner for Easter, with some new experimentation, but I decided to go with my classic tried and true steak cooking method.  Sear in a pan with some oil, salt and pepper... nothing more.  I was told to be careful with the horse as it is much more tender than beef and tends to over cook quickly.  After doing a bit of research I also learned that horse can contain half the calories of beef by weight, and almost double the protein.  Its like a super steak... but how did it taste?  Hard to describe, but it was just different enough to exit beef territory.  It was extremely tender, and had a very slight gamy taste.  This was a mixture of venison and beef.

Horse isn't something I'm going to be looking for constantly, but its always fun to find culturally accepted things that just aren't available in the States.  Next week?  Waffles...

"Waffle Breakfast" or "The 25 Hour Day"

Its been a while... I'll admit it.  I've posted about 13 days LESS than I should have this month according to my average for the first two months.  As you can imagine... this does not bode well for the rest of the daily habits:  no blogging, no pushups, no spending reports, no french.  Bleh.  But If you remember from one of my previous posts I described one of my new habits/celebrations as the post-all nighter waffle breakfast.  In the past two weeks... I've eaten a LOT of waffles.  That said, this will be a post about a multitude of concerns that pushed me towards extra waffles and a "25" in the Wednesday column of my time sheet.

I'll start at the beginning:  In the past three weeks, three people from my project team (of six) have left.  Those three people were also the people who had the most long term experience with the project.  It is also important to mention the fact that I have had four deadlines since the beginning of April.  Oh... and my project manager got chicken pox and was out of the office for about six days during the last two deadlines.  That sets the stage a little bit, imagine too much work with a shrunken inexperienced (on the project) team.  At each of the previous meetings there have been so many changes that we have edited essential building elements (elevator location, entire building dimensions and proportion blah blah blah).  That is our given environment, next I'll give a list of very generic requirements for this project:

1.  Renovation to an existing building in Paris (we are adding a "new building" on the roof of an old warehouse/factory)

2.  This is a "master planned" project.  One team of architects set up rules, and about six other companies are each designing their building to fit within the rules.  Our company has Two buildings, I am in charge of one of them.  The master planners coordinate all project teams, they also change things for the lower floors which will be commercial space.

3.  I have one neighbor, with whom I share a wall.

4.  There is a restaurant shoved into the bottom two floors of my building... but I am required on floors 3-7 to go to a lot limit that is on TOP of the restaurant.  This means I have a mechanical shaft (for the stove) running through my building to the roof.  This mechanical shaft is as large as my bedroom in my apartment in Jersey City.  

5.  We have a client beyond the master planning team who have their own set of requirements.

6.  These clients are building "social housing," or super cheap government subsidized housing.

6a. In social housing EVERY apartment needs to be handicapped accessible.

7.  The client is also a savvy developer and has been making a lot of money for a long time building social housing, their requirements are intense.

8.  We are contractually obligated to create a certain amount of square meters of housing as well as a certain number of apartments in that square meters.

8a.  There is a chart that shows us how many apartments of each TYPE there needs to be (5% studio, 25% 1br, 35%2br, 30% 3br, 5% 4br)... also a sub chart that shows us that more importantly we need to have a mixture of 3&4 bedroom apts that adds up to 35% of the total.

9. Each apartment type has a prescribed number of rooms, each room has a prescribed maximum area, each room also has a minimum dimension for window space.  

10.  We need to have a magical efficiency ratio.  We measure this by comparing the rentable space (literally the floor that you can rent... not space inside walls) to the total built space.  This has to end up at 87%  The calculation has a lot of complicated gimmicks and loop holes but this is the basis.

10a.  This requirement makes me pull my hair out.

*11. The BBM (big boss man) needs to like the look of the project.

I starred 11 because it is a general office requirement, but makes this process unbelieveably more complicated.  Usually social housing is designed as just that... social housing.  I believe that when the project was conceived it was unknown what housing type we were working with... thus it was unrelated to its eventual programmatic function.  So... hopefully if you've made it this far you have a sense of the complexities of the drawings, as well as the environment we are creating these drawings for.

About twelve days ago (soon after the three senior project team members left) a co-worker and myself decided to start from scratch.  After a full three months of people working on it prior.  With six days before a monthly presentation to the master planners.  This was a response to a mis-understanding of apartment sizes and a requirement to cut the building from 5000 square meters (50,000 square feet) to 4400 (44,000 square feet... hopefully you're all catching the math).  We had to keep the same number of apartments. We had to keep same rentable to built ratio.  We had to keep the BBM happy, with a very similar form.  

In addition to this, a consultant that will be on site working our project through the built stages stopped by the office and begged us to try to simplify the process and to use rational thought to make it work.  We were excited by the idea, out of 63 apartments in the previously presented edition there were about 55 unique apartment types (this means a lot of drawing... a LOT OF DRAWING).  After thoroughly disproving the ability for the previous building to be "fixed," we consulted the rest of the office for some fresh ideas.  A few mentioned that the access to the apartments, or the public corridors off the elevator, seemed a little large or unnecessary.  From there we drew about ten quick schemes of re-approaching the elevators and hallways in new ways.  We found one we were happy with... but we had to also imagine a way to fit all the correct apartment types at the right size as well as keep the right percentages.

After our very basic sketches we spent almost four hours doing MATH in an attempt to predict the reality of the building.  If you've made it this far you'll be rewarded to know:

A.  Our ratio of rental to built space = 85%  We were almost disappointed but,

B.  We cut the total area down to 4300 square meters... 100 more than they asked.

C.  We fit in 64 apartments... the last version only had 63 apartments.

D.  Our apartments are within 5% of the "prescribed apartment size"

E.  We have about ten different apartment types with minor variations on each.

I mentioned "about twelve days ago" for a specific reason.  While, I know the exact time and date that we made the decision to re-work the base elements of the project I also marked 25 hours on my time sheet for a single day... making it quite hard to consider it a measly twelve days.  That week deserved quite a few waffles.

Update!

Check me again tonight. I should be filled with a shiny new post... Promise.

Spending Report: Week 10

There are going to be two weeks relatively quickly here but oh well.

Overall:  68.20

Restaurant:  18.10

Groceries:  17.80

Fun:  14.00

Transportation:  8.00

Miscellaneous Food:  4.80

Stuff:  3.50

Beer:  2.00

Restaurant:  This was lunch and dinner for a few days because of some late hours and au revoir parties.  Not bad for multiple meals, but I should be cutting it down post April.

Groceries:  This included a 3.50 Euro bottle of wine and a bunch of onions.

Fun:  GIRL TALK!

Transportation:  Au Revoir Liz night = Beer and Taxi's

Miscellaneous Food:  I was pretty sick so I downed a few bottles of good juices through out the week.

Stuff:  My previous 3.50 Euro umbrella suffered a fatal accident so it needed to be replaced with another flimsy 3-5 use umbrella.

Beer:  Beer.

I started off really well last week doing both french (over an hour two days in a row) and physical stuff (like 150 sit ups and 90 push ups).  Then I got sick on Wednesday and I'm still getting over it now... I'll blame some Belgian devil weed that decided it was pollination time.

This week was considerably worse as I'm still sick and I've been pulling mega hours again.  The time change was not kind to my sickness, but sun until 8pm is very welcome.