Made-to-order

Another for the how-did-I-just-find-this files: Bento Monogatari, a Belgian (Flemish) short film about a woman who becomes obsessed with Japanese culture, cooking in particular, and inflicts this on her husband who prefers cheese sandwiches (and nice-looking young men in their underwear). The wife even watches "Cooking With Dog" at one point! You see Francis!

Given the themes this movie addresses, it seems as if it were created from some kind of algorithm designed to find me the movie of my dreams. That said, it wasn't the best movie I'd ever seen. The homoerotic subplot is maybe done in too generic of a 'this is a European art film' way, and the bit in the synopsis about how the wife is making all this Japanese food to save her marriage doesn't really come through at all. What comes through is that she's super into everything Japanese, including looking like a Japanese teenager, which isn't a look that comes naturally to a middle-aged Flemish woman.

(Flashback to the great joy I experienced upon finally seeing those teen clothing stores in Harajuku... only to remember that what works on a 15-year-old looks odd, not cute, on someone twice that age. A realization that saved some yen, but still.)

In other Japanese-cooking news, I recently met a Japanese woman who cooks bagels from scratch at home. Grass is always greener and all that.

From toast to waffles UPDATED

-"Into The Gloss" has a Top Shelf on Garance Doré. Like you're not going to drop what you're doing (in my case, eating a Montreal-style bagel imported from Philadelphia) to look at it. The takeaway: all things equal, find a partner who lets you eat what you'd like for breakfast. On switching to oatmeal because Mr. Sartorialist vetoed toast: "My mornings used to be a celebration of life and now it’s like, ‘Ok…’" Remember that (the already-slim) Doré has, in the past, referred to her boyfriend as her "weight-loss coach." I mean, eh, to each her own. I just ask that we not nod along when Doré refers to this as an American thing, when it's quite obviously a that relationship thing.

-While I personally have nothing against handlebar mustaches, I sure enjoyed Marc Maron's description of them.

-David Schraub endorses my definition of what anti-Semitism consists of. And, inadvertently I'm sure, reminds me of a certain conundrum that happens when a woman changes her last name.

-Miss Self-Important takes on the traditional conservative task of lamenting the decline of Western Civilization. Not the civilization itself - the UChicago Core course. There's now a Gender Studies option, which is a problem a) because Gender Studies means the teacher lectures while gesturing with a dildo and shows clips of "Real Housewives" during class because what canon? (inferred* from MSI's post title), and b) more to the point, because a civilization class needs to be rooted in a particular time-and-place, about a particular civilization, and therefore can't be about Gender and Sexuality across all of human history. (Foucault might disagree, but wouldn't he though.)

I know it's a tradition for conservative critics of academia to see Gender Studies as a proxy for a perceived decline in rigor, but my own experience of gender-as-a-lens is that it's really about introducing an integral part of the study of history that had been ignored. It's neither as sexy nor as 'oppression studies' as it's made out to be.

I'm more sympathetic to the need for a class called "X Civilization" to cover a particular area, but my guess is that they would. Which area will just depend on who's teaching the class, and because there will be multiple instructors, it won't be in the more general course description. And I think it's worth remembering (although conservatives might disagree) that even a course called Western Civ, even taught by the tweediest of instructors is going to have been edited, texts selected not according to some eternal canon, but the instructor's (or department's) interests and knowledge, which are themselves products of their own time, i.e. the time in which the class is being taught.

-If I ever have the time to spare - which I never will - I will make these.

*UPDATE - and only inferred - MSI said nothing about either of these things, merely used the word "sexy," thereby linking her critique, in my mind, to the broader conservative critique of Gender Studies.

In passive, inadvertent search of lost time

It's finally happened. Someone put my kindergarten class's photo on Facebook. I learned, of course, when I'd been tagged. And that tagging couldn't have been so difficult - I'm nothing if not a 29-year-old version of my five-year-old self. I suppose I never went in for cosmetic reinvention, although I must say that virtually all the faces I recognized looked like little 5-years-old versions of the grown women, to the point that I couldn't even see this as a photo of children, but as one of tiny adults. Not much reinvention all around, then. Not what one might expect from an Upper East Side girls' school, but there you have it.

Note the collar. How Alexa Chung avant la lettre!

UPDATE: See! I'm not kidding!

The only potential downside to this photo's new prominence is the now wider knowledge a) of where those in the photo went to kindergarten, and b) of our age, this kindergarten photo coming, as it did, from 1989, and don't bother doing the math because you have my age higher up in the post. Unless I've forgotten how old I am (not impossible), it adds up.

But as trips-down-memory-lane go, this has nothing on the real story of the week. My brother-in-law was in town from Belgium, and my husband and I decided to show him our favorite Japanese restaurant - no, make that restaurant - in the area. It's a tiny place with a great many rules and incredible food. We found it soon after moving here a year ago September, and have been going maybe every two weeks, maybe every month, ever since. We are, in other words, regulars, although this is not a chummy sort of establishment where you walk in and they confidently announce, aha, it's the couple who always order [what we always order]. It's serious business, thus sushi-consumption.

Well! We learn that there will be a long-ish wait, and decide that the food is indeed good enough to wait for. We wait, we sit, and we hope that my brother-in-law will be able to stay awake, what with the jet-lag. And then just before we're shown the table, my brother-in-law is recognized by the place's waiter. And the recognition is mutual. Turns out they went to high school together. In the same class. In Belgium. In a small-ish town, at that. Not a place from which there's a particular diaspora. My husband and his brother are different-enough ages that they had never been classmates, and there had been no previous recognition on either end. But the connection made, there was all of a sudden a really exciting to-do, with the owner taking a picture of the two of them, and a boisterous Dutch-language reunion. And so all our previous small-world anecdotes were outdone, just like that.

Requisite Jewish Christmas post

If you're Jewish, and do the thing of treating non-celebration-of-Christmas as the major, definitive Jewish holiday, what actually goes on on this day for those who do acknowledge it remains something of a mystery. That it is often a drag, or just something like Thanksgiving, never occurs to you. It must all be really magical, or else why are Jews obligated to show their non-celebration of the day by being miserable? By bemoaning the fact that nothing is open, even things that you would never notice weren't open on some random weekend?

It was only as an adult, I think, that I realized there was a whole tradition of Jewish Christmas, a cheery day with Chinese food, movies, and of course singles mixers, so that more non-Christmas-observing babies might be born. Although it's possible my family did this (not the singles mixers, just the dumplings) and I somehow never put it together that this was part of some larger tradition, and assumed it was that one would year after year run through all the things that weren't possible and come up with Chinatown and movie theaters by process of elimination. (Childhood's a bit of a blur, I suppose. No "Angela's Ashes" coming from me.)

Also as an adult, it's something of a fluke that I don't celebrate Christmas - my husband's family does, but they live far away, off in Gérard Depardieu territory - well, the same country. If I were one of the Jews who had always dreamed of celebrating the holiday, I could do as apparently many in my situation do and use intermarriage as an excuse to go all-out. This is, if the social-media site mentioned below is any guide, a thing. The quasi-guilty, massively-enthusiastic celebration of that which was once taboo. But I don't really get this - it's precisely because the non-Jewish world is no longer a mystery that Christmas is no longer a mystery, just a holiday my husband's family does and mine doesn't acknowledge, much like his family, not being American, doesn't do Thanksgiving. Not exactly the same - it's different to be Jewish in a majority-Christian country. But not all that different. If I were in Belgium this time of year, I'd go in for it, especially given that the "it" of all Belgian celebrations involves eating copious amounts of delicious pie. Although Easter's somewhat more intriguing, what with the chocolates. And because non-celebration-of-Easter isn't one of the major laws of secular Judaism, I can eat as many white-chocolate-praliné eggs as I want guilt-free. Jewish-guilt-free, at least.

But the weirdness of December 25th for the likes of me, it really is about being Jewish, not merely non-Christian. It might be PC to frame it as time of the year is for non-Christians, but from what I can tell, other non-Christians either just don't care or celebrate it as a secular holiday. And obviously not all Jews care - some go in for it (old-time German Jews, more recent Russian-Jewish immigrants) even without an intermarriage as cover. But I do wish - as I think I ask every year - that the secular-of-Christian-extraction community would get that this is and is likely to remain a thing for some Jews, and would not insist that Christmas is a secular rather than a religious holiday, get-over-yourselves-already. And that this isn't because Jews are being difficult, but because Jews are projecting onto Christianity that same blurry is-it-a-culture-or-a-religion identity that constitutes Judaism. Christmas, to many Jews, feels Christian, is Christian, even if it's a secular/cultural/"pagan" variant. Along the same lines, even if you-the-secular-but-of-Christian-extraction don't identify as Christian, you may be identified as such by Jews, who are merely responding to the fact that they get identified as Jews regardless of religious affiliation. If any of that makes sense.

At any rate, a holiday that involves putting up a decorated tree and placing gifts under it doesn't seem even remotely compatible with ownership of a naughty and hyperactive (impervious to dog runs, woods walks...) miniature poodle. No menorah, alas, for the same reason.

WWPD, honorary Belgian

Back from a whirlwind trip to Belgium for my brother-in-law's lovely wedding. I traded roadside deer for roadside (but penned-in) cows and sheep. I think I've filled up enough of my Belgium punch-card that I now count as an honorary Belgian.

My students asked where I'd be (I'd warned them that attendance would still be taken in my absence) and their reaction was... exactly what mine would have been, pre-having Belgian family. Belgium, wow! For me, it's still the country of amazing food and incredibly tall people, but it's no longer exotic. Not Long Island, but more Long Island than Mars at this point, for sure. 

On the flight back I read a French women's mag, a hastily-selected "Marie France," which had a long article by a "philosophe" about love (with quotes from classics like Descartes on the subject); a profile of various French women of foreign ancestry (including one who was the product of not one but two mariages mixtes between Jews and Catholics); and a makeover featuring a woman of I'd assume North African extraction, which involved the magazine instructing readers on the importance, if you wish to look sophistiquée, of straightening your hair already. A woman with unusually gorgeous curly hair (think natural ringlets), subjected to a middle-schooler-style inept flatironing job. This article also claimed that straightened hair gets greasy more quickly, which is just bizarre - it's naturally straight/fine hair that does this. If you have thick/coarse poufy hair, style it however you please, the apocalypse will come before greasy hair is something you need to worry about. This is the immense upside of hair that is not, by Western standards, wash-and-go. 

And, in case anyone is curious, Belgians are following the US elections perhaps more closely than most Americans. It's apparently - understandably - amusing, in a country with an active Socialist party, that Obama's referred to as such.

In other, no less blue-state-ish news, expect posts on an anti-YPIS (not by me, alas, and not using that acronym) article in the Guardian, and one about racial and socioeconomic tensions at NYC private schools in the Times. 

Belgdar

For a Jew, I have no Jewdar. For a native New Yorker and longtime student of French, I have no gaydar. What I do have, however, is Belgdar.

This afternoon, I decided to make the best of needing to go allll the way to Rite-Aid (success, at last!), up the various hills on the bike, and stop by Bon Appetit, which is in the same mawl as the Rite-Aid, to get more Dutch sprinkles, maybe check out the Passendale selection.

And sure enough, at the cheese counter, I see a man who I immediately put together must be the Belgian responsible for the pervasive Belgian-ness of the ostensibly Franco-gourmet establishment. Was it the glasses? The accent? The proximity of Passendale? Whatever the case, I figured if anyone in any shop in the U.S. would know where to find Sirop de Liège, the elusive Belgian syrup Jo and I are always bringing back in our luggage, this was the guy.

He of course knew immediately what I was talking about, and they'd apparently stocked it there for years, but it's no longer exported to the U.S. What they have now, he explained, is the Dutch version, which instead of being apple and pear, is just pear. There was something in his tone that told me that the Dutch version would be adequate but a disappointment. This, in turn, confirmed for me that the establishment's Low Countries influence is indeed Belgian, rather than Dutch. Further confirmation. Further still.

There is probably no skill in this world more useless than the ability to spot a Belgian, and please, save the cracks about getting a PhD in the humanities. But this is, it seems, a skill I have.

Princetondale

In Park Slope, there was a store we referred to as "The Man," one that unlike the nearby Co-op was extraordinarily hierarchical, the chief being one of the older men who worked there, "the man." The store was The Man, even if the man himself wasn't around, although he was almost always there. It sold tiny expensive morsels of gourmet-ness - as in pre-foodie, pre-food-movement imported delicacies - and was both pretentious and wonderful. Atmosphere-wise, I prefer a supermarket, but it's not right to complain about the proximity of good cheese, and unless you live next to a Fairway (or, uh, Monoprix), you're not getting the cheese without the 'tude.

In Princeton, store after store after store has a The Man-like quality times a thousand. Purveyors of all kinds of things I thought I'd need to order online (the pizza peel somehow lost in the move, for instance), which is great, but with this requisite faux-folksy chit-chat and a hefty mark-up. At one shop, an overenthusiastic/over-pedagogic 'monger asked a customer who'd just tasted a cheese, "Why do you like the Manchego?" It was at that moment that I turned around and left.

But today was an exciting (and traffic-wise, bad-exciting) bike adventure to the Princeton Shopping Center, which I'd passed by on shuttle but never actually entered. (Bike lanes are a great idea, but it helps if cars acknowledge them.) The main purpose of the trip was to return with non-spoiled milk and "accident" pads for Bisou - missions accomplished! - but this store called "Bon Appetit" caught my eye, probably not unrelated to the fact that after the ride there I was famished. At first glance it seemed like every other home-of-cutesy, but it was past my lunchtime and I was not going to leave it at one glance. Good thing too - it's chock full of all kinds of Dutch and Belgian (and French, gourmet, etc.) products, including the chocolate sprinkles Nederlandophone-types put on bread, speculaas, and... Passendale! The cheese that was so tough to find in Paris (only at Bon Marché's food hall), and that I didn't think could be found at all in the States. Just as at The Man, there were all these random not-so-chic German products interspersed with the Fancy, here there must be some Dutch connection or other, but this was truly fantastic, and not just because I'd spent the previous half-hour staring slack-jawed at seemingly indistinguishable chew toys and canine shampoos.

Passendale

I just got back from vacation, first a week with Jo in the five-star Parisian hotel known as the dorm, then a weekend trip to visit his family in the country with no government but seriously amazing bread. Bread so delicious that Jo's mother packed me some to bring back to Paris. Yes, it's that good.

If you like food, I highly suggest finding a significant other from or a job in Belgium. Family gatherings center around pie and, of course, chocolate. No kitchen is complete without a deep fryer. Coffee comes with at least a chocolate if not also a cookie. And, when you walk into a supermarket at 11:30am, you're greeted with Leffe and Maredsous representatives offering tastes of their beers. This following a week of steak (more on that for another post) and I'm starting to see the appeal of those celebrity detox juice diets. Or more accurately, I now see the months of bread and cheese, pasta and bags of Florette arugula before me as refreshing, not dreary and repetitive. This is, I think, the best result of a culinary vacation, the sense of joy at having eaten well, paired with the sense of relief one's stomach feels at a return to the basics.

My favorite food in Belgium, as everyone seems to find amusing, is a cheese called Passendale. The name sounds Welsh to me, but is apparently a town with significance in Belgian history. And with its very own cheese museum. (Slight NSFWness on one of the cheese museum pages, because European websites can have random topless women, even websites for cheese museums, apparently.) Passendale can be purchased from an actual kaaswinkel, but I'm (more than) content with the sliced, packaged kaas, and see no need to cultivate fancier or schmancier tastes. What is Passendale? It's a bland yet delicious, rubbery in a good way kind of cheese with small holes, but not quite like Swiss cheese, either. It seems to be completely unavailable in Paris; my one attempt at getting a cheese that at least looked like it ended, as cheese purchases rarely do for me, with my throwing it out. Wikipedia, however, claims France is positively swimming in the stuff. (I'm now curious about Tilsit - I always go for the weirder cheeses, and need to move on to exploring the less moldy varieties.) And the website of a nearby upscale cheese shop seems, if not to have Passendale, to at least acknowledge its existence. Sacrilege or not, my quest for non-French cheese in France shall continue.

Whereabouts

On vacation, first in Paris (a tourist, at last!), now in Belgium. Will return with photos and anecdotes.

If ... then... Part II

So I recently taught my students, and a class I subbed for, the "si..." construction with the futur simple, which is to say, "if... then..." And now, trying to revise a paper I've been working on for seriously most of my grad-school career, I am unable to think up sentences that don't begin with "If..." As in, "If the obscure guy my paper is about is so obscure that even I am starting to forget why he's So Important in the first place, then maybe more chocolate would help?"

I should mention, I suppose, that I'm sitting here writing about conversion from Judaism in 19th century France while eating (beyond delicious) Belgian Easter chocolates. (Not all of them, Jo, I promise.) Ideally, this is the very food that will make me understand the topic on a whole new level. Realistically, it will just make a dilemma like the one described by Miss Self-Important ever more pressing.

Major culinary achievements

Below is evidence of my proudest moment ever: a successful recreation of a Belgian plum tart recipe that - and here's the important bit - involved yeast, which I'd never figured out before. Jo and I had been looking at this picture in a recipe book his brother got us since forever, assuming it was in the realm of the unrealizable. And yet! And, the excess dough, rolled into a ball and cooked for I'm not sure how long at 350 degrees, made a totally passable, if dense, breakfast roll.

Reading material

The man who wrote the book letting Americans known that Europe has a Muslim problem is now telling Americans about Belgium's Walloon problem. (via)

19th C French Jews and American Jewish francophiles, and I only just found this? (via)

Tipping is a mystery both to visiting foreigners and to those just reaching the age where situations requiring tips become relevant. No one tells you these things! How are you supposed to know? A dollar per drink at a bar, doubling the tax at a restaurant, these become clear early on, but the rest? So when Prudence mentioned she tips newspaper delivery people $75 each, I was torn between appreciating that someone finally addressed what's appropriate in these situations, and thinking that perhaps this is a bit above and beyond. (Also, the first letter of this set has to be a joke played by someone against letting gay couples adopt.)

Hallo up there

I'm now in the Netherlands, reading for orals met koffie while Jo attends a conference. Things here are almost too serene - the only places I associate with schoolwork are Hyde Park, Chicago and lower Manhattan, so sitting with a book by a canal just seemed bizarre, but in a good way. Although tomorrow I may have to turn the two-mile (each way) walk to the center into a jog, to up the reading-to-sightseeing ratio. It is truly lovely here (and not just because of the giant HEMA, to which I will no doubt return...), so it should be a good week.

You knew this was coming: I keep looking for clues in the food here as to why people here are ridiculously tall, even, it seems, compared to Belgians. Last night, upon arrival, Jo and I had some truly awful hamburgers that many Dutch people seemed to be enjoying (an acquired taste?) at a fast food place that specializes in sustainability, and has pictures of cows on the walls. There were so many cows staring at us that between those pictures, the (real-) cow-filled pasture next to the conference hotel, and the horribleness of the aforementioned hamburgers, I'm considering vegetarianism. Then again, the muesli cereal I bought to compensate: also verging on inedible.

The lunch I assembled for myself via the supermarket - gouda on a couple of wheat rolls - tasted very... nutritious. Not the gouda - that just tasted like gouda in the States, only fresher - but the roll. It had this vitamin-y aftertaste that prevented me from finishing the second roll. (No tragedy - I'd prepared for the possible failure of the sandwich with additional purchases of fruit and chocolate). But perhaps the aftertaste comes from the mysterious height-inducing substance? I did eat most of the two rolls, so we shall see.

Linguistically, the Dutch-Flemish thing is confusing me to no end. When Jo speaks his native language here, even at length, people reply in English. Is it that they've heard us speaking English? Sometimes, but not always. That Jo has brown rather than blond hair, and is 6'2" rather than 7'2", as is usual here? Perhaps. Other possibilities include the tendency for store and café signs, even in places I can't imagine cater to tourists or other international types, to be in English - perhaps all formal interaction with people who even might not be Dutch takes place in English? Or is Flemish really that different from Dutch? The sound of the two languages (two accents?) is noticeably different to me, someone who at this point understands some Flemish, just about no Dutch, and can only express coffee-related concerns in either, while despite knowing French, I'm still not convinced I'd hear any difference between the French in Paris and in Brussels.

That's enough of that. Now, back to 1870 Paris, where no doubt people were closer to my size.

Summer adventures

Still here! Kind of - 'here' is Belgium, not Brooklyn. Before that was Italy - there will soon be a post on Cheapness Studies about the futility that is attempting to purchase food in that country while not Italian. Hint: never, ever eat in a restaurant. Now, back to the reading extravaganza, with perhaps some moments of blogging thrown in.

Sephora the Cheapskate

According to turn-of-the-century Alsatian-Jewish critic Moses Debré, the most unflattering portrait of a 'Jewess' in all of 19th C French literature is of a woman whose father is Belgian-Catholic. The woman is, it seems, something of a cheapskate. It gets better. Her first name? Sephora. I don't know what this means, but it did just revive the guilt I felt at spending $18 (before tax) on concealer at that chain.

Ghent is a terrible place to go vegetarian

Mark Bittman's coverage of Ghent and vegetarianism reminded me of my own trip to Ghent, and that the main attraction in that town is an image of a lamb, one whose religious significance I don't fully grasp, but that looked, to a suggestible non-Catholic non-vegetarian such as myself, mighty tasty.

Quote of the day

"One presumes, had the opera been cast as a metaphor of Flemish-Walloon conflicts in Belgium, rather than Palestinian-Jewish, that the local reaction might have been different."

Alternate paths to fluency

Alas, I only really know two languages, English and (in my non-native way) French. But, if the topic interests me, I can understand bits of other languages, too. For example, in Dutch (Flemish), I understand conversations about food almost in their entirety. All other conversations in the language are in Danish for all I know. But once kaas, fritjes, and rijstpap enter the picture, it's as though I took a class or something, it all makes so much sense!

Same goes for Hebrew, except less with food than with fashion. While I understand maybe 30% of what people are saying, reading remains a challenge... except when it's about what people are wearing on the streets of Tel Aviv. This I apparently find very important. "ניקול ריצ'י הישראלית", in reference to this striking image, looked at first glance like a whole bunch of letters, especially because the first two items are not common Hebrew words, but on further consideration involves a blog commenter insinuating that the younger woman in the photo is an Israeli version of Nicole Richie. Because, you see, nonsense online stops being nonsense online once a foreign language - preferably with a different script - is involved.

(Once my Hebrew improves, I will get past the part of this post where it's explained where a certain Ronit was photographed, and where the important question of where she got that amazing space-age shirt is addressed. I'm sure this was what Ben Yehuda had in mind.)

Flemish realism (but where were the pastries?)

Jo and I just got back from seeing "Moscow, Belgium," playing at a tiny theater on 12th Street with seats so crammed together no one much taller than I am (which is to say, no Belgians) could be seated comfortably. Since the film seemed to attract very elderly New Yorkers, this was not much of a problem for most of the audience. Thanks to my stature; a student discount off already lower-than-average movie prices; and the unpopularity of artificial-butter popcorn among the art-film-preferring 90-plus set, I was, for once, quite comfortable.

The movie itself was most excellent, both as a portrait of life in Flanders (complete with beef stew and fries! no Wallonia, this) and as an almost painfully realistic portrait of relationships involving indecisive men. (I'm guessing more realistic than some other contenders, if realistic is your thing.) Further realism: said indecisive man is played by actor Johan Heldenbergh, who is not only the most Belgian-looking man in the history of Belgian-looking men, but apparently grew up in the bleak-but-gloriously-stew-filled apartment building where the movie was filmed.

"Because Education Matters"

At the Carrefour (something like a Walmart) in Tienen, Belgium, Jo and I spotted a boy, maybe thirteen, wearing a shirt that said "New York University." Such shirts are rarely seen even at NYU, so this was baffling: why would a boy so far from New York, in a town rarely visited by Americans, be wearing such an item?

One possibility is the exchange rate: everyone from Western Europe has, by now, made the rounds from Century 21 up to Union Square, so this could be a souvenir from his travels. But just as likely is, he bought the shirt right there in Tienen. For reasons I don't entirely understand, the main shopping streets of Belgium (and Cologne, so perhaps of Western Europe) are filled with shirts that say either "America" or some variant; bearing the name of an American sports team, real or imagined; or an expression in grammatical English (unlike what I've heard is the case of such shirts elsewhere in the world) that would nevertheless not surface anywhere Anglophone. An example of the last one: "Because Education Matters"--this on a new t-shirt in a department store, that is, not meant to be worn ironically. Brands claim Americanness even while serving only to make the wearer look all the more European.

The Americana-that-isn't extends beyond clothes. On the radio are songs by Belgian artists... in English. The lyrics... vary, but I shouldn't talk until I learn how to form a coherent sentence in Dutch. Also, one of the more popular foods in Belgium, one I didn't dare try, is a raw-meat based spread called "Filet Americain," which, as the blogger I link to notes, is something you'd never, ever see in America, much to Belgian expats' chagrin. France, the only other European country I've spent much time in, seems to make more of a commitment than Belgium to preserve its own culture, particularly from American influence. It could be, though, that everything designed to seem American seems extra-European simply because, in America, stores and food items (freedom fries, anyone?) claim to be European. Discuss amongst yourselves.