Life in Weyers Cave

Certainly this was a vacation of a lifetime. I really grew to love the students and my life in Belgium, although now it all seems so long ago and almost like a dream. I am grateful that I live in America, though. There is a difference. Americans just care more. They are more polite. They say "Excuse Me". They don't bowl you over as you stand waiting for a bus. We have more freedom in America. I still can't believe they outlawed a political party for wanting to cap the immigrants! We are more giving. We have little jars in the stores collecting money for cancer victims or tsunami victims or hurricane victims. We give to everyone throughout the world. We are more questioning. Europeans trust their media to be unbiased and to get it right. They hear one side of everything and don't question that there is another side. Americans are more independent. Europeans think Americans should realize that what we do in America really affects the ...

The morning we came home, David woke up wasted from his injury the night before. So I went to work as quickly as I could, packing, cleaning, scrubbing, getting everything out of the fridge and scrubbing down every side of it, and making sure we had everything taken care of. I had to reweigh each of the suitcases and redistribute to get the weights correct. As I handed something to David to put in his underweight suitcase, he pushed too hard and the zipper came off the suitcase in his hands. It was a new suitcase and not cheap, so terribly disappointing, but time was short so we quickly re-arranged and repacked. Fortunately, I had bought a new larger suitcase to replace a smaller cheap one I was planning on leaving, so we pulled it out and just barely had enough room to make it. As we got all the suitcases down to the waiting car to take us to the airport, I was busy running up and down the steps to make sure we had everything. As I tried to go up one last time, I was told we had...

The night before we left to come home, we went to a lovely formal dinner at the Belgian American Club, close to the flat. Just before we left, David was weighing suitcases to make sure they were under the 70 pound limit. As he dropped one from over his head to the ground, the strap caught on his neck and he went rolling forward with the entire 70 pounds weight hitting him all at once. Needless to say, he was in a lot of pain and we had to put him on some major painkillers for the night. Thank goodness for Percoset. (We used more in Europe for David on his back pain than we did on the knee pain we got it for!) At the club, Dianna was chosen to draw numbers from the pot for prizes. She was taken aback because the skinny Santa giving out the prizes was drunk and kept wanting a little smooch from her! We had a wonderful dinner and made it home in one piece to finish our packing and take care of David, knowing we would have to get up at 5 the next morning.