On flowers, potatoes and chestnuts

Disclaimer

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It would be odd to cut the following story into pieces.

So it became a bit longer than our average writings.

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When I travel between Ghent and Antwerp, I usually sit close to where I put my foldable bike, carefully wedged in that cavity formed by two rows of seats. Today was no exception to this rule.

As a matter of fact, it could have been any given weekday; as soon as I sat down, I took my notebook and starting scribbling down a few research ideas.

On my head, a set of giant head phones, converting Amenra's repetitive drones into an inspiring sludge that seeped into my racing mind.

Opposite me, an older lady, donning a green park ranger's type of hat and matching boots, observing me through an old-fashioned pair of glasses, resting on the tip of her nose, hiding behind a foolish smirk.

Bleep.

She triggered my nutty people detection device.

For a moment I felt safe behind my calculations, buried underneath thick layers of sound.

'What are you doing?', she suddenly asked in an English accent that sounded as if it was still healing from a recent fracture.

I couldn't tell where she was from. Besides a forest lodge maybe.

I pretended neither seeing nor hearing her, but I realized soon enough that this approach wouldn't last.

'Excuse me,' she repeated, 'what are you doing? Are you writing a poem?'

I lifted my head phones and decided to play the business card.

'I'm working, madam. And this music inspires me. So if you excuse me, I would rather continue writing.'

'What are you working on?', she suddenly continued in West-Flemish, mistaking my polite retort for an invitation to start a conversation.

'A poem?'

'It's mathematics,' I tried, hoping that this would make her understand that I was doing serious things.

'Interesting,' she replied, and extended her arms.

'Can I have a look at that?'

I decided to give her some of my calculations. If luck was on my side, she'd immerse herself into my writings and get lost.

She stared at my handwriting, not unlike someone finishing a 10 000 piece jigsaw version of the Taj Mahal: completely puzzled out.

'This doesn't look like what I learned at school,' she concluded.

'Of course not,' I thought, 'this didn't even exist when you were at school. That's why they call it current research.'

I remained silent, aware of the fact that the people at the other side of the corridor started staring at me as if I were the oddball.

'What have we become?' she started to complain.

'Plenty of people on this train, and nobody feels like talking to me.'

Bleep.

'You have all become socially handicapped.'

I couldn't help looking up.

Her smile penetrated my bubble and made my realize that my attempts to look busy were as feeble as my excuse not to prove her wrong.

I unplugged my iPod and surrendered.

I appreciated her line of thought, and she had a point.

'Why do you need music for inspiration?', she asked, as if this was an unresolved issue.

'Why not just watch outside, for example? You're on a train!'

'It doesn't work that way,' I said. 'It's not like what I want to write down is hiding behind those daily things.'

'I bet it can be!' was her somehow inviting answer.

'Look, I will show you some of the things I am carrying to Antwerp, maybe it can trigger you to write something.'

And from her old-fashioned slightly faded hippie bag, she took a bunch of green flowers, a plastic bag containing potatoes and a brown paper bag full of chestnuts.

If she wasn't, she at least had them.

Nuts.

Bleep.

'Flowers, cooked potatoes and steamed chestnuts.'

As if that was the most natural thing to have on you.

'Erhm, and what are you going to do with that?', I addressed her now.

The stares from the other side of the corridor didn't bother me any longer.

'I am visiting friends in Antwerp whom I haven't seen for 25 years. This is a present.'

'Where do they live?', I asked, trying to imagine how I'd feel when someone were to give me these presents.

'No idea, I'll find them when I get there.'

Bleep.

She took three pictures from an old crumbled envelope.

'My biggest surprise for tonight,' she said, handing them to me.

'I found these at home, in a box in the attic,' she added.

One was a group picture, which was so blurry and out of focus that it felt as if these people should have been wearing swim suits.

'This is when the television crew visited at our village,' she explained.

It turned out 'Boeketje Vlaanderen' had once shot an episode in the place where she was born.

'This man,' pointing at a murky face in the background, 'was the groom. He's a good friend of mine.'

'And those people?', I wanted to know, showing her the other two pictures.

'Those are his parents.'

A short silence comfortably nested itself between us.

Meeting this old, somehow oddly looking lady who came all the way from Tielt to visit people she hadn't seen for 25 years - carrying a bag with what can only be described as the strangest collection of presents I'd heard from in a while - made me realize that the beauty of life lies in random collisions.

'Can I take a picture of you?', she suddenly asked me.

Had she not just shown me these pictures of the friend she was visiting and his parents, I would have said no.

I didn't.

Call it vanity, but the prospect of a picture with my faded face on it somehow felt like it might one day spark another conversation.

Flash.

'Funny,' I blurted out, 'maybe you can come to Antwerp again within 25 years.'

She looked at me sideways.

'Yes,' I continued, 'when you'll find my picture in a box in the attic. Then you can take the train to Antwerp again, and come looking for me.'

She stared at me. In an almost pitiful way.

'You don't have to look for people,' she enounced.

'You just find them.'

I got off at the railway station in Berchem. Me, and my foldable bike.

Amenra was blasting through my head phones again and I thought about this old lady's words.

She was right.

The flower, the potatoes and the chestnuts had triggered me...

Anthropology for commuters

Many of these blogs are conceived on a train. Belgian trains have the tendency to run late, as I’m sure many of you know, so they offer ample opportunity to think about the odd blog entry. Moreover, travelling by train provides you with a steady flow of strange events, strange people and strange conversations. This blog is about all three of these elements.

I don’t know about other people, but once I set foot on a train, I turn into something of an anthropologist. Especially, when there’s a delay and especially when annoying people cross my path, I feel the urge to analyse the situation and the people in participant observation, as anthropologists do. Today, the ferrovian karma decided to punish me with both things: I had to take a one hour stop-train on a trip that usually only takes twenty minutes and I was in the company of three young girls who, much to the blatant frustration of the other commuters, said out loud (very loud) whatever came into their heads.

So I put on my anthropologist’s cap, or hat, or whatever it is anthropologists wear, and decided to study these girls as if they were an undiscovered tribe whose language I now finally understood. Here’s a transcript of the notes I made. (FYI: I’m not kidding, I took out my laptop and just started typing away):

Observation log, entry 1.0: Have spotted three members of said tribe engaged in conversation. All three are young females; probably between the age of 16 and 19n judging by a) the fact that all three smoke (they are nervously fidgeting lighters); b) the fact that all three wear heavy make-up and highly sexualized items of clothing; c) the fact that one of them got a call from an unemployment agency. Still, I’m unsure if any of the three facts really falsifies the hypothesis that they could be under sixteen…

Observation log, entry 2.0: The tribe seem not to mind my presence. After a preliminary study of their behavioural and communicational strategies, I have established the basic social matrix of this group of females. The brunette is obviously the alpha-female; the others look at her, not at each other, when telling a tale and spy for signs of approval (mostly an annoying sound which I presume is laughter). The Asian girl, who could be her stepsister (I will have to double check my transcript of the conversation), is the prettiest one and the brunette’s best friend. The social exchange happens mostly between these two and when they talk, the third one does not disrupt the conversation. She only addresses the brunette directly, or so it has seemed during the span of my observation period. One might conjecture that she feels threatened by the Asian girl’s looks and her close relationship with the alpha-female. Still, the third one is clearly the smart one, but does a good job of hiding it vis-à-vis the others.

Observation log, entry 2.1: Indeed, stupidity seems the pivotal sociocultural dynamic in this pack. On several occasions the females have given proof of this fact, including the previously-dubbed ‘smart one’, who has just claimed that not only Ethiopia, but also ‘Utopia’ is an African country. ‘Honestly’, she said, ‘I have heard that name before’. On the other hand, though, the three seem very fond of the Harry Potter-movies - paradoxically a tale of a slightly nerdy character, sprung from a bookish background with pseudo-Latinized spells and such. They seem quite intimate with the movie’s details. At one time the alpha-female and the Asian girl even produce black magic wands and start doing some of the Harry Potter-spells. They know quite a few of them by heart. Still, this Harry Potter-cultureme seems only a subtext in the general sociocultural repertoire of stupidity, as the conversation about Harry Potter climaxes in an argument about whether they had once spent a ‘whole day long’ or ‘twelve hours straight’ watching the movies…

Observation log, entry 2.2: I’m fairly convinced now that stupidity is the main typology of this tribe’s sociocultural code. Another cultureme that fits into this hypothesis is rude corporeal behaviour. However, there is special social capital involved here, as this behaviour seems largely reserved for the alpha-female. In the last hour she has burped loudly several times, stated angrily that her face is covered in zits (which is true, this observer might add, yet the other two females would not acknowledge it), and she has complained that her arse is sweaty and itchy. In a surprising turn of events, the Asian girl then tried to match the alpha-female’s behaviour by coarsely stating that her titties (sic) are getting too big for her shirt and rudely shaking them up and down to demonstrate her claim. However, neither the alpha-female nor the third one met this behaviour with approving acclamations or gestures. As to the reason of this lack of success for this equally rude corporeal behaviour, this researcher can only speculate…

One of the advantages of being a nerd with a lot of imagination is that it kills time. And keeps you from laughing out loud when you actually start listening to the conversations some people have. But today, it was a close one...

Summer break

Just like the other Fred, I will also leave our beloved Ghent for a trip abroad. Hoping to gain more insight into myself and the world I'm living in, ready to prepare enough blog blurbs to keep you all entertained after the summer break.

May your summer be hot and sticky, devoid of mosquitos and long enough to reset what needs to be reset.

“The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land.”

(G. K. Chesterton)

De gustibus et coloribus

Although partners will usually not appreciate you bringing this up in the heat of a battle, I do believe that it's more important to ask the right questions than to give the correct answers. So when I say "Where do you think Fred will spend his summer holiday this year?", the correct answer is not "Malaysia!" but the right question is "Why Asia again?". And I'm stressing the word 'again' here, because I may still haven't found what I'm looking for, but I'm pretty sure of one thing: if I am really meant to find it in Asia, someone did a terrific job hiding it.

I will not waste your time trying to explain what attracts me in our world's greatest continent - de gustibus et coloribus non est disputandum - but let me at least give you a modest piece of advice: there is a first time for everything, but don't let India be your first travel destination in Asia, as this would be the equivalent of letting a rock festival be your introduction to outdoor camping. And then again: once you start thinking it through, there's not really that much difference between traveling India and attending a rock festival.

To start it of with, it's not like you can just walk into these places. Rock festivals require you buy an entrance ticket, and in order to get into India you need to apply for a visa: both are too expensive nowadays, and unless you really want to try your luck you'd better not buy them from a Pakistani in the street, as official documents are rarely made in Bangladesh. Moreover, and this will be confirmed by anyone who has ever had a serious bowel obstruction and therefore spent a few hours on the toilet with a new book and a fresh toilet roll: bringing the appropriate pieces of paper is by no means a guarantee for succes.

At the gates of the festival camping, your luggage is usually screened by a team of security agents holding at least a bachelor's degree from the MacGyver Institute of Technology: anything that even remotely looks as if it could serve to build an improvised crossing between a hovercraft and a nuclear warhead launcher is held behind and thrown into a container. Drugs (don't tell me MacGyver was sober when he opened a sound activated security lock by filling four glasses of wine at different levels and playing the tones in ascending order), knives, BBQ-sets and bottles of alcohol: I suppose sometimes even garbage men enjoy extra legal advantages. At the border, it's not just your luggage that will be scrutinized: you also need to get through the immigration officer, whose intense stare is switching from your face to your passport as if he's playing "find the seven differences". Next time I need to go to a photographer for passport pictures, I seriously consider wearing comfortable clothes for a long-haul flight, in order to make it a easier to look like myself.

Once you've made it inside, it feels like you just set foot on another planet. A crowded one, that is, because the first thing you'll notice is way too many other people. In front of you, behind you, to your left and to your right. Depending on your moves, they may even end up under you or on top of you. I guess most people are not too familiar with Kepler's sphere packing problem, so allow me a few lines: back in 1611, the German astronomer Johannes Kepler posed a famous problem, asking for the most efficient way to pack equal-sized spheres together in a large crate. Should you pack them in identical layers, one on top of each other, with each sphere in one layer sitting right on top of the sphere directly beneath it? Or can you get more spheres into the box if you stagger the layers the way greengrocers stack oranges? It took mathematicians nearly 400 years to find the solution to this question, but the answer has always been out there: replace 'sphere' by 'personal bubble' and 'box' by 'festival ground', and you've got yourself a groundbreaking paper.

Now, the good news is that you can get used to this unnatural proximity of unfamiliar people, the bad news is a rather bizarre cosmic principle, which says that during your favourite band's gig, there will always be a taller person right in front of you, ethusiastically clapping the rhythm with both arms pointing towards the sky. Not only will this guy be blocking your view, he will also force your nose to be trapped inside his armpits. Sweaty armpits, of course, because the security dork at the entrance decided to classify his deodorant as potentially dangerous.

Needless to say that in India, the very concept of packing people in public places is taken to a whole different level: I remember taking a bus from Mahabalipuram to Pondicherry which was so crowded that I was no longer able to tell where my body ended, and my neighbour's began. Distraction was somehow provided though, in the shape of a colourful Bollywood flick on the shabby television screen at the front of the bus, but that didn't really work for me: I'd read in my guidebook that Indian movies are full of sexual references, and the last thing I needed was collective arousal...

There are more analogies to be found, for example when it comes to food, but that will be for next time. And it's about time you start using the comment box - right?

Old t-shirts

One of the things I disliked about being young is the fact that I grew up as a kid under a Fashion Fascist regime. My mother - aka die Führerin - bought my clothes, decided where and when to wear what (wondering why not being allowed) and dictated what was in. Well, out is the more appropriate preposition here, since 'fashionably alternative' was not in her dictionary. Nor - as I later came to understand - in the budget.

Luckily enough, this all came to a halt during the Great Era of Textile Revolution - more commonly referred to as 'puberty' - when I managed to end her supremacy over my wardrobe. The price I had to pay was high - literally then, as I didn't get too much pocket money - but step by step I was able to climb the young adult's sole scale of relevance: the Ladder of Coolness. Sneaking out of the house in an old pair of trousers from my dad (there used to be a cheap alternative to baggies), donning a shirt from a favourite band underneath the jacket that went into my backpack as soon as I rounded the corner, and wearing a legendary pair of old-school Adidas shoes I once won through a television show (long ago, in a time where answers to television quiz questions were still answered by post-cards, not by speed-dialing): puberty started to feel not so bad after all...

And although I don't wear my old shirts from the Offspring or the Beasty Boys anymore, I can't really get it over my heart to throw them away: they are still part of the pile, like withering witnesses of the numerous battles fought for Freedom of Fabric. Battles it were indeed, because there was an annual counter-movement: during the spring break cleaning, the Fashion Police launched unannounced raids. This meant Government intrusion into my kingdom - a four-walled room plastered with posters and rock star pictures - relentless wardrobe inspections and the annual deportation of anything that didn't match the official taste.

Resistance was futile, as I once experienced. The victim was a self-made shirt. To be more precise: a white, tight Fruit of the Loom shirt customized with my very own graphic design in black marker, turning it into a piece of an imaginary band's merchandising. In all my haste, I had forgotten to hide this unique member of the censored collection when I heard my mom marching up the stairs. And as she crawled herself through a pile of clothes that were even out of fashion to her taste - which, in view of her perspective on the concept of being in fashion, meant that they were almost ready for an afterlife as a retro style piece of clothing - she bumped into the unfortunate politically incorrect refugee in the closet. "This one," she said with a look of disdain on her face, "does not belong here." And the fearful words fell, the equivalent of a shirt's condemnation to death: "This one has to go." I tried everything I could, even a rather far-fetched "But mom, this one brings good fortune!", but nothing could prevent one of my favourite shirts to be banned forever. Off with a bunch of other clothes, in a big yellow plastic bag, direction Africa. "The poor little kids over there will be more than happy to get these clothes," she always added, addressing my conscience and thereby suppressing any further inquiries for justification from my part.

Last week, I visited a tiny village in Kirundo, the northernmost province in Burundi, close to the Rwandese border. Across lake Cohoha, walking a mile inwards, through banana tree forests and randomly scattered huts housing a family, a few chickens and - in the best case - a goat or a cow. It was one of the weirdest moments of my life. I was literally surrounded by a whole village, more or less 200 people, with the likely exception of the unfortunate guys lying passed out under a tree, probably still regretting having knocked down too much impeke the night before when they heard the news of the day: a real muzungu, from across the water, in the middle of their village. According to my guide I was the first visitor in five years, and judging from the stares I got I don't think he was exaggerating. If you'd ask me, this should be a standard part of our education: standing alone amidst dozens of black people, including the poor little guy bursting into tears in fear of the unknown, pointing at you and your white skin.

I have to agree, I felt rather uncomfortable. Not that I was afraid that something might happen – I was accompanied by a guide from the village after all – but the average dictionary contains more than one entry whose meaning I don't necessarily want to understand through experience, and 'a mob' is definitely one of them. So I felt rather relieved when my guide suggested to walk me back to the boat. Until one particular man suddenly caught my eye. A shy, slender guy, sheepishly peering at me from a distance. I couldn't help myself, but I give him a long incredulous stare. Back where I live, in the so-called civilized world, this is often considered as an application for a fight: looking for a fraction of a second too long at someone - or, as is often the case, his girlfriend - usually induces a rhetorical "What you looking at? Am I wearing something of yours?", and may result in your face meeting that someone else's fist. This man though, did nothing like that. He just stared back at me.

Strangely enough, this was the first time the aforementioned question would have been justified, as he was wearing a not-so-tight, not-so-white Fruit of the Loom shirt. Customized with red soil streaks, bloody stains and hardly visible black markings referring to an imaginary band. The only thing that crossed my mind was a genuine repetition of my earlier plead: "I hope this shirt may bring good luck to you.".

Three-bit-liner

Apparently, Burundi has an "anti-corruption Brigade".

We found out about this on our way from Bujumbura to Kirundo, when our vehicle was pulled over by an officer.

We came away without inspection though: 20 000 Burundi Franc did the job...

Kohlberg's train

Years ago a friend of mine had to do an experiment for her pedagogy paper. (Yes, it was you, K.) She came over to my place one evening and announced she'd put some hypothetical dilemmas to me, to which I should respond truthfully. Being a little bastard at the time (a perhaps even today) I replied: "No problem, but if your paper is about Kohlberg's stages of moral development, I'm afraid I know the correct answer to each one". Her face darkened and she must have said something like "I knew it, you pedantic twat!" Sure, I felt guilty, but in the interest of good science, I thought it best to state that I was not her proper demographic. Besides, I couldn't help it that my professor had been on about the same thing only the day before! Anyway, we ended up having an interesting conversation about it, so no hard feelings. Today, years and years later (I'm thinking it must be at least seven or eight years ago), I was suddenly reminded of Kohlberg and that evening again...

But first for some explaining. It's easy, basically, Kohlberg teaches how people develop a sense for what's right or wrong in stages. First, when you're a small child, you're in the pre-conventional stage, deciding on dilemmas by avoiding punishment or looking for a reward. Then, you start to grow up and arrive at a conventional stage, where you do or don't do something to be a good boy/girl, or conform to some authority (police, etc). Finally, as an adult (or some adults at least), you reach the post-conventional stage and realise that there's a social contract we all have to sign. We live in a society, and you can't expect you're rights to be respected, if you're not willing to agree to respected someone else's. Can you? To do so, we develop rules and give people the power to enforce them, but that's only because we agree upon a contract, not because this power or these rules are absolute.

So today I was sitting quietly on the train from Leuven over Brussels to Ghent when the ticket guy came round. Of course, I dutifully showed him my ticket, complete with a polite 'Here you go'. Fifteen minutes later, the same ticket inspector returned to my carriage for a second round of inspection. When he came to me, I did what most people do. I gave him the 'Been seen'. Usually this is met with a nod, most guys being happy to be able to proceed. This guy, however, put his hands in his waist and proclaimed: 'Sir, I'll be the judge of that. I will have to see your ticket again please'. And then I got angry. 'Fucking train guy', I thought, 'my last rail pass was spent with five uninspected lines. Now you're gonna ask me twice in the span of fifteen minutes? How about having the trains arrive in time?' That sort of stupid thing.

And then it hit me. 'This is just a guy wearing an ugly grey NMBS T-shirt', I thought, 'he has no real authority or power over me!' And in a fit of moral superiority, I happily produced my ticket again and obliged to his wish. But not without thinking 'Here's some level 5, post-conventional Kohlberg for you to shove up your arse'. Phew. Only narrowly avoided a fine there! But wait a minute... Yeah, still a child at heart sometimes.

Random blurbs

In information science and communication theory, randomness or noise is often described as irrelevant, meaningless data. A fairly simple description, but it raises interesting questions. What is meaningless, and what do you mean by irrelevant? Being absolutely no stranger to alcohol and what it can do to the human brain - ranging from making you put your (double) tongue into a completely stranger's mouth to having a groundbreaking insight of cosmic proportions, I feel rather tempted to wave this description away as absolute nonsense. But then again, what is randomness?

I was being confronted with this rather erhm... irrelevant issue a few days ago, during my last lecture for biologists. I had to write down something arbitrarily on the blackboard, but the harder I tried to generate random numbers, the more I realized how non-random my example actually became. And I guess we all have the same reflex with respect to these matters: so-called random number sequences cannot have too many repetitions, and should not include obvious combinations like 1234 or 666, isn't it? But where does that leave you?

I mean, does the following sequence look random to you?

3064464030121369

Probably not, right? Very correct, you might have recognized the conjectured dimension of a module associated with the free commutative Moufang loop with 23 generators. Anyway, my point being that sometimes it is difficult to believe that things are just random. And this applies to real life as well, as we (Fred and myself) once again experienced this weekend: our flight from Prague to Brussels was delayed, and this lead to missing the last train from the airport back to Ghent. By two lousy minutes, I guess delayed trains are never to your advantage. However, we did realize that there was a tiny chance that we could get home, taking a taxi from the airport to the Central train station in Brussels where we might still catch the train coming from the airport. In poker lingo: the backdoor flush draw to the nuts.

And guess what, on our way to the official taxi stand - where you are supposed to queue and wait for a yellow cab - we bumped into a shady driver addressing us with a coincidental "Voulez vous un taxi?". For exactly one nano-second, which is more or less the time it takes an average person to notice that the word 'Eyjafjallajokull' contains a spelling mistake, we felt a bit uneasy. Was this not too fishy? One exchanged look later, a classical "I don't know about you but I am fucking tired and need a bed"-look, we decided to go for it and roll the coaster. Which is not just a funny way of putting it: apart from loops, it really felt like a roller coaster ride. With one hand underneath his seat, "Damned, where's my fucking telephone?", our taxi driver zigzagged us through the city and delivered us to our (almost) final destination in (no) time where we safely boarded our train. There was even enough time left for a snack from a vending machine, and the realization that Brussels central station is where randomly weird people meet on a Sunday evening.

And then again, when are people considered to be weird?