TP

Q W E R T Y U I O P
A S D F G H J K L
Z X C V B N M

I. After Arrival, Before September 20th

At around 7：30 in the morning of September 16th 2022,

I arrived at Frankfurt en Main through Singapore Airline SQ 26, from Singapore, before that Hongkong. ( ... Shenzhen ... Guangzhou ... Shantou ... Qiqihar)
At the line of the border Check, I took off the face mask and activated the Movistar tourist SIM-card that I brought from Taobao.

1. The Movistar tourist SIM-card

Movistar 27 days French tourist SIM-card
·40GB Domestic Data
·80GB EU Roaming Data
·No SMS
·Price 148 CNY
·https://m.tb.cn/h.UigCgZa

About 1 hour later I boarded SQ 2038 to Brussels and then from there,

I took a train to Antwerp Berchem Station, It was raining but not too cold.
I struggled a bit to find my debit card which is at the bottom of my luggage bag, to check the card number, in order to pay for the bus ticket from the SNCB app.

I couldn't find the bus stop after I've arrived at the departing floor of the station,

the map apps apparently had (and still have) a problem with showing the accurate compass direction here, and there were three different stops near the both exits on the opposite sides, making it very hard to locate the stop that I needed to go.
Frustrated after trying to find it myself at first, I asked a girl on the pass-way to the exit on the west, she was very friendly but couldn't find it neither, She said:
"Sorry, but I never take buses."
I thanked her and asked a lady who was smoking at the gate of the station, she responded in french of which I couldn't hear clearly, and then she tried to speak to me in English, in a heavy french accent,
"take the tram, the TRAM."
At the time, I was unfamiliar with the word "tram" yet and didn't understand what did she mean, so I decided to continue my search for the bus stop, while I was walking towards this vague direction the lady just pointed, the girl who I asked first ran out of the station towards me, she found the station and guided me to the bus stop, it was next to the train station, underneath of the railway bridge.

In the afternoon,

I had my first meal in the country, at a restaurant not far from the school, with a light blue facade. I didn't notice / remember the name of the place, but there were a large sign of "eten & dranken" on top of its window, which is two of the handful words that I learnt in Dutch. I liked the sandwich that I've ordered there (even though it was clearly very basic and homemade), especially the taste of the vegetable. Later I discovered it was "rucola" or "arugula", which is actually also a common vegetable in northern China that my mom often use in a salad (a northern China type of it, fresh vegetable served with miso as a dipping sauce). Over there it's called Chòu Cài, the stink vegetable.

For the first night in Antwerp,

I stayed in a 12 beds room in a hostel named YUST, the place looked fine at first glance but not as good as i've expected, mainly because of the higher expectation from the good memories of the hostel I've stayed in on my trip to venice in 2019. But later I started to think if maybe part of that is from my fascination and idealization of Europe, as a young tourist who don't really appreciate the idea of home, and can only stay abroad for 15 days.

The next day I moved to the B&B hotel near the opera train station with a friend,

Ding, who was also going to study in the Academy, and for the following few days, I walked around the central district of Antwerp, sent dozens of emails to the house renting agencies and landlords, and visited the campus of the academy, I've managed to catch the tail of the BA grad show, I couldn't remember most of them, apart from one playing video projection in the room (temple?) at the end of the long hall, called Tendu, and one in the toilet.

During this time we tried the belgian dishes that we've learned before coming,

the belgian fries at Frites Atelier, a place that I found on the monocle Antwerp / Brussels tourist guide book. And, the "stoofvlees", at a restaurant that was clearly for tourist, named "Da Bomma" near Het Steen and the river. The waitress lady with a nonchalant temperament was obviously a bit pissed after we ordered the exact same daily recommended meal, which is the cheapest choice on the menu, with stoofvlees, tomato soup and mashed potatoes. For the soup (desert?) part there was another choice, Ding tried to ask her to explain:
"I'm sorry but what was the other one again? kip?"
"Kish(Quiche). Kish(Quiche)."

We watched a Chinese history drama in the nights when we were at the hotel,

it was shot and aired in the 90s and was called The States of East Zhou, the show was composed of series of stories / legends during the Spring-Autumn and Warring state period of China, Ding had started to watch it in the spring. While watching the episodes about Wu Zixu, We lamented the unruliness and the strong will to revenge of the Chinese at that time, characters that since then seems disappeared.

II. Keizerstraat 14

September 19th, Monday, the first day of the semester.

I haven't received any notification on the time schedule, and didn't know where I should go, so following the advice of Ding, I went to the student administration for help, and received a printed list of the all the classes.
It took me some time to figure out where Room:KS 0.1 - Grote Aula is, and when I finally arrived at there, the class "graphic production" had already started. The teacher was a man at around his 50s, he had an experienced and capable look, with a certain resemblance to some tough-guy-type american movie actor I couldn't be sure of,
The class was not intriguing, it was mainly about the practical knowledge and techniques for working as an (independent) graphic design, something like the problem of working part time for an agency and then having one of their clients wanting to work with the individual designer... or something like an abbreviation as a formula to remember a system of getting the design production process done, like... S.Q.U.I.D... or... B.O.B.O.D.Y.

At around half an hour after I've joined the class,

the teacher posed a question, of course simply as a way to introduce the next topic:
"Who would like to be a freelance graphic designer?"
or maybe "Who would like to be a independent graphic designer?", I could remember exactly...
He hinted with his body language to answer the question by raising hands. I raised my hand, not because I'm looking forward to become a freelance graphic designer, I'd prefer not... but I always acknowledged that as someone spending more than 3k euros a year of his parents' money and most of his time under the education program named "graphic design" or "visual communication", that's quiet possibly what I have to do. And more importantly, at the point the man raised this question, it was just the comfortable and friendly way to respond, in order to let him continue his subject.
But a bit to my surprise, sitting closest to the entrance, at the furthest corner in the seats, I'm the only one who raised my hand. So the teacher looked at me, amicably, and the students too, reflexively took a glance at the new student who certainly wanted to become a freelance graphic designer.

After the class,

I quickly decided to go into the small classroom - Klein Aula (I was getting familiar with the names here), since the students were standing in circles with each other when they stepped outside the classroom and started to chat.

The Klein Aula,

like the big one, looked just like an ordinary classroom, one you would find in a high school, in fact, the mechanism and the atmosphere of the entire school kind of felt like one, and the likeness became more significant as the time goes by.

I greatly enjoyed this second class I've taken,

Genesis of an Oeuvre, a mouthful name for a class, a sprinkle of exotic, just reached the boundary of my vocabulary. There were only three people who came to the class, the teacher, Hans Theys, and another student, Baran. Hans pulled a chair right beside us, under the front window with the iron bars, and we talked, relaxingly about "a good artist would not (for certain) be a good teacher"... origin of our names (Baran was from a kurdish background, and his name was from one of the many representation of Allah, meaning rain, if I remembered correctly)... the french artist Pierre Bismuth and his wonderful experimental film that Hans participated in, a film that only played the sound and discarded the image... and we shared some works from the past, Hans reminded me of Harrison Ford... probably entirely misled by the connection of the name to the character... I felt there were some similar feature around the eyes and the eyebrows, at least to a Chinese who just arrived at europe, in the "all europeans looks similar" sense. He had a warm, humorous energy, and the gesture of a mentor. I learned Hans' passionate advice of creating something new through constantly trying and making mistakes, and through bridging fields of interests and experiences and professions. I would say that I agreed, and moved or motivated with his insights, in the occasional clarity of still acknowledging the value of working, or creating anything new and to last or be seen. But I nevertheless enjoyed the class, when it was the time to leave I said, out of complacent from the complements they just gave me for my works, although we only took a very short glimpse of them, after my awkward introduction:
"I love this class." Baran responded (approximately like):
"Right? We just talk." I forgot the context of this response, probably something from our short conversation before Hans entered the class, but this was, I realized, what I really love (about the class -- which is obviously not the real intention for it),that is, just talk.

I can't recall what did i eat for lunch that day, probably nothing, or Burger King on the Meir Street,

i went there for lunch several times later, whenever i didn't know where i should go to spend the lunch break, and there was no other better choices, out of the front door of the campus, i would turn straight left, and then left again, to the Burger King, like that was a destination that i needed to reach to busy with something. The lunch break was short, I went to the bathroom behind the short pathway next to the elevator, I greeted the cleaning lady on the way, her resting room was right beside the bathrooms, and she didn't fully close the door, as usual -- later i discovered, and she was watch video on her phone, sitting by the little table behind the door, so as i was walking pass her room to and from the bathroom, we shared glances, so I smiled to her, and she smiled back. Acknowledging other people's existence, is what i'm thinking of as the purpose for greeting to any strangers, which i, or anyone rarely ever did back home. For what reason is this i don't know, maybe because there are just way too many people, and everyone have too much to do, or too much on there mind, there's no time to waste on making eye contact with random people, or maybe because of the wars, disasters and the culture revolution, people are instinctively hostile and wary of each other, or because of the composition of the population, that is, constantly migrating and changing, so nobody knows or has the hope of knowing the people they're meeting with... A Cloe, grande città ...

I spent some time to appreciate the elevator,

it was beautiful, like one that i saw in some old european movies, like the one the piano teacher played by Hubert took with her character's mother, to escape the chasing of the young student. I never saw it working though, I saw once, might be on that first day, some cleaning tools in the elevator room, i heard the cleaning lady is the only person who had the privilege to use it.
The other students arrived almost just on time when the classroom of the afternoon class was opened, the class was called Specific art history graphic design on the time table, and History of graphic design on the program list on the website. And the room was "Mix-lab", although it was a quite ordinary looking classroom with a blackboard (with a few little eletronic devices and gadgets around). The teacher was a polite and discreet looking man with thin, rectangular glasses, bald, having a huge glass bottle of some type of premium mineral water and a small cup with him. He quickly announced the topic of the semester's study to be about graphic design and colonialism , and started to share examples of the case studies, i was interested in the subject, in some certain ways and parts that was sadly not aligned with the aim of this class, I learnt, later, after near half of the semester had past.

For the entire first month,

we still lived in the B&B hotel, we were constantly having the hope of being able to move into a chosen apartment within the week, so we extended the booking, repeatedly for 3 or 4 days, and during this time, we've had to move room for two times, first to a room with a way better view, and then near the end when the staff figured out we were students trying to find place to rent, a smaller room on the shadow side. And with each extension, the password to the room, which is also the password to enter the building, would be changed. It created quite a bit of extra worries, on top of every thing that were already quite frustrating.

By this time,

we've started to understand the difficulty of finding accommodation, the choices are extremely limited, student rooms were basically fully booked, and the apartments, most of them didn't make any response to the emails, and a few responded, but only results in complicated and unfruitful dialogs and visits. One time, after the visit to a small and yellowed studio with an unspeakable smell, the middle-aged landlord, with one of the least effort i've seen in belgium of trying to be friendly, asked, before i'm leaving after our short exchange of information: "Chinese, you say. Not Korean, not Japanese, but Chinese." He was indeed disappointed.

On Tuesday,

the first typography and interactive classes, I arrived on time for the morning class, something that i could extremely rarely do, but because of the shift of the time zone, i was at the time still be able to wake up painless at around 7, which is 1pm at home, about the time that i usually wake up.
But the teachers only came at around 11, they told us that the school contract for the teachers only start later from the middle october, and discussed about the program in the past semester.
The teachers are Andrea di Serego Alighieri, one of the two interviewers for my application for the school, whom at the time I felt very familiar but couldn't recall from where, and Ronja Andersen, whose face and tone of speaking reminded me of some nordic films or interviews that i saw before.

III. Ghent Altarpiece

Friday of the first school week,

i decided to not take any class and go to Ghent for a day trip. The school informed me before my arrival at belgium that i can make my own choices of which programs to take, other than the four atelier courses, and two other recommended courses, and everything are not "mandatory", according to the lady explaining this to me. About a month later, when i had to confirm the courses so that tuition payment can be collected, that changed, all the six courses are "fixed", or "compulsory" maybe was the word used, plus another course, Digital imaging, which by that time i have already missed nearly half.

I was going there for the famous Ghent Altarpiece by the van Eyck brothers,

one of the greatest work of the greatest artists from my favorite art history period -- as I decided so for some reason when I was in the first year of the bachelor studies -- "The early Netherlandish school", as the name that i've learnt, or "flemish primitive" as how they prefer to call it here. To go to somewhere for a painting that i knew, a pathetic way to justify, decorate the intention of a regular tourist doing a tourist trip, isn't going to see the ghent altarpiece what exactly a typical tourist would do? ... Of course, and why should I care about this?

I went to ghent by train, from the Antwerp Central Station,

it was the first time that i visited and departed from there, this famous(?), glorious building that i've just heard about before coming, about its funder, Leopold II, and the money he spent to build it, from the profit of rubber that he squeezed out of Congo, by cutting of the hands and feet of the labours / slaves. In this plainly hidden sense of the atrocity, the building was standing there with unwavering confidence, feeding on the strengths of people coming, enjoying on their virtue and view of justice by sharing, recalling or reacting to these old stories, and by doing so, drawing a line between the evilness that nurtured this structure, and their own presence, connection and the coffee that they just bought there.

I stayed there looking at the painting, front and back for a while,

until the staff of the church closed the panel, the closing of the altarpiece was mesmerizing, i didn't expected to be able to see it. The movement was controlled by electric machines, the panels folded very slowly, the top right panel first, it was closing slightly quicker for the first 30 degrees, and then it became slower, when the right panel was finally fully closed, the left one started to move. And followed, the bottom right panel, and finally, the bottom left. I stood there for the closing, and left when the staff came in again to turn off the light.

After stepping out of the cathedral,

it started to rain, i didn't stay any longer, and went back to the train station, to Antwerp.

IV. Velo Antwerpen

On September 24th,

I visited another apartment, one that was quite far in the south, i found and contacted it out of desperation, it was on one of those website platforms that apparently spent a lot on the design, but not enough on its logicstics and functions, that barely operating. (I found this kind of website platforms quite often in here, the opposite to the authoritarian monopoly platforms that i was used to hate, the ones that always works, but are boring, bloated, and buggy.)
I decided to go there by the public bikes, the red ones that i saw very often on the streets, Velo Antwerpen. It reminded me of the public bicycles from Hangzhou, which i used occasionally last year, the facility that stored the bikes looks similar, and also the bikes, they were also in red.
The system to borrow the bike was a bit confusing, after payment, i got two codes, one long and one short, both needed to be entered on the machine besides the bikes. And after using it, i didn't knew how to return it, to type in the parking slot and bike numbers, the instruction said, but it turned out that i didn't need to do anything for it, after put the bike in the parking slot.

The apartment was in a rather remote location,

i realized that it was not a good choice to rent it while riding half way to there. The landlord was not there, instead she told me that "Seyba" will be there for us, turned out Seyba was a tenant, sharing one of the three bedrooms. he didn't close the door of his room, on the center of the ground there was a mattress with a quilt, with no bed sheet, and surrounding it was the clothes, shampoo, toothbrush in the plastic cup, chargers and the cables, potato chips... he told us that the apartment was rented by bedrooms, and because of this there was some problem with registering residential permit, therefore he was also going to move out and find a new place. i took a short look of the apartment, in the bedroom available for me to rent, there was a small glass ceiling, or a hall-way maybe, with glass door and wall on three sides (two of them in this bedroom), right beside the bed, on the other side of the hall-way was a door of another bedroom. On the opposite side was also a window, outside was a garden of the sizes of perhaps 4 or 5 square meters, with only grasses. When visiting the different rooms, i try to imagine myself living there, waking up to the view in front of the bed and coming back in the afternoon or at midnight.

I caught a cold on my way to visit there,

it was raining lightly, and a bit cold. The next morning i started to feel sore throat, and by the night i got a fever, it made me missing the food at home, something soft and warm, i decided to start using the rice cooker that i brought with me to belgium, i bought a very small box of rice and some cheap prosciutto... and made porridge. Porridge, from this foreign and rather complicated word you can tell it's not something common in a western menu, i suppose.
I also drank the chinese cold medicine, a decoction of some sort, in the morning and at night, the last bits of Chenpi (sun-dried, liquoriced orange peels) that i bought in Guangdong, and after that some more that i've found in the asian supermarket on the Antwerp chinese street, and alone with those, lots of tea, it made me noticing how much of a typical, old-style chinese way of life that i was having, despite my own feeling of detachment that i was very convinced that i had from my environment.

I was recovering fairly quickly,

during the nights, i had started to take a walk around the hotel, a walk along at night, my favorite activity perhaps, i would also listen to some audiobook while walking, a habit that i used to deeply despise, but during the time wondering in the parks and mountains last year, in Hangzhou, i've began to do so. The thing that i hated the most about it was the voices of the reader, they always came with these... overly sentimental, melodic, wet kind of tones and timbres, like the tones of some of my elementary classmates would use to read the ancient chinese poems on the textbooks, which completely, with ease, destroyed the texts that was being read. The sound of these soulless, mechanical yet melodramatic voices reading random chinese sentences, with the specific flat and shrill texture of the mobile speaker, also firmly connected in my memory with the figures of the sloppy, oily, rude, lonely middle-aged men that i would meet on every two streets that i walked by, the pathetic men that could only seek accompany from the anonymous young female reader on his phone (or quite often, another middle-aged male... the listener's faithful friend). But now, after maybe a total of a week of adaptation, from each time that i compromised to hear something while walking, i have get used to it, i've managed to get past the disgust from the voice and the sound, and to hear the content of the text, it might be a very similar process with accepting the taste of ginger or alcohol, or wearing sandals (but not without the socks!)... I've became exactly the men i passed by, the guy who walks alone on the street at night, with his faceless, chattering lady friend.

I was listening a book about Chan Buddhism,

the beginner guide of Chan Buddism, perhaps was the name, a book by D. T. Suzuki. There were full of references and quotings of the classical chinese texts, which created a lot of trouble, gaps and holes, for me to properly follow listening, half-heartedly while simultaneously glancing the street.
I walked down to the river, the river Scheldt, and then along the river bank, there were once gruesome war fought here i heard, and therefore the construction of the little castle patrolling it, which now have became a tourist center, not far from it was a ferris wheel, decorated with red and blue light stripes, and a bright glowing white (or red?) signboard of its name, The View.
At there i read (heard) the word used to describe the ideal state of understanding the Dao, the essence or the way or the truth about the world (of Taoism, and here buddhism): De Yi Wang Xiang, To obtain the meaning and forget the image.

And I had to start working on the assignments,

there were already so much frustration, about finding accommodation, the extension and moving of the hotel stay, the cold, finding a fitting place to eat... but yet the homeworks, surprisingly more than i expected started to accumulate.
I tried to make something for the interactive class assignment, which i didn't quite understand, and i had an instinctive repulsed feeling about creating something with the latest technology... or more realistically, a teaser of that, tailor made for the audiences. That happened to be the requirement for the assignment, to create some images with an AI image generating tool around the theme of... John Cage.
A joke was the only route i would like to take to fulfill / escape the task. The craze for the Fluxus and john cage, or any Avant-garde art that had been regarded as courageous and radical reminded me of the revolutionaries' (of art or maybe also politics) own attitude towards newer revolutions, in most of the time, they had shown contempt. So I imagined (and created image with the prompt of) something like... Satie bothered by the music of john cage... or an irritated john cage in a techno club.

V. KMSKA

In the afternoon of Wednesday september 28th,

I visited a student room at Paardenmarkt, which was recommended to me by the lady, whom i've forgot the name of, from an real estate agency i've contacted before. She was at the reception when we came to the place, and had an awkward dialog with, "Most of the housing are rented out in about a month before you came here", she told us: "because at that time most student had arrived for the new semester." She showed us a few more expensive options, ones that we quickly turned down, and she gave me a business card.
After about a week later i decided to wrote an email to her, to ask her for any new student housing options. At the time, Ding got a chance to rent a student dorm with help from his new classmate. Xior was the name of the dorm, a name with an unclear meaning of a taste (attempt) of exotic and premium, perhaps from its similarity with dior, it was quite close to the academy, right across from the hotel we were living in, and the look from its facade and the images on its website, it didn't look too bad, kind of like a hotel i guess, or a hostel, but after his visit to the available room, Ding said it was more like "an european prison". The news gave me great anxiety that i would be left alone with no solution for where to live, I had to try harder at searching. I sent many emails, copied and pasted, and annoyingly sometimes re-edited, to agencies and landlords i've lost count of. I had an appointment to visit every other day, and with them the repeated, uncomfortable conversations.

The room was at the top floor,

with steep steps and no elevator. But the staircase was reasonably clean and tidy, on every half floors there were windows with a view of the opposite side of the street, including an exquisitely decorated church. I didn't hate the room, which means it instantly became my best option, the room is very small of a size of less than perhaps 8 square meters, the walls are in a irregular shape，trapezoidal maybe. There were nothing in there other than the toilet and an extremely crude kitchenette -- a single electric stove without range hood, a sink, and a mini fridge. My favorite thing about it is it was totally newly furnished, although so crudely and basic. Nobody stepped on this laminate flooring with their barefoot, or leaned their head against the wall, or rubbed their thigh with soup in the shower room. It was a new space, with the assuring feeling of safety from the yet not dissipated chemical smell of cheap tailoring, a space of, for a period of time, my own presence and procession.

The next day,

after the editorial and image design classes (during which i was very confused what should i do), i visited the freshly reopened KMSKA -- Koninklijk Museum van Schone Kunsten Antwerpen, which was undergoing a great renovation for a decade, for the thursday of the opening week, the museum will open till ten at night. The works of Rogier van der Weyden, Hans Memling, Jean Fouquet, those that i once convinced myself as my favorite, in the same manner as a fan boy / fan girl convinced of a young actor as his / her ultimate love. This belief also helped me persuading myself of why am i here, in this foreign, random and (for me) unrelated place.

After visited the first floor, i walked around the second floor -- the modern art section very briefly, i was quite fatigued, still at the last stage of the cold, with a runny nose (i had to blow my nose a few times in the very quite museum, while doing so, i hid behind the curtain leading to the terrace, and cautiously folded and reused the only few tissues that i've found in my pocket.) and a mild headache, and had walked many hours without eating dinner before i went there. Beside, i had almost entirely lost interest in a modern art work.

VI. ベルギー芸術の千年

The morning of the second typography class,

the class went to the academy library, to pick three books by only looking at the spines, i chose an extravagant looking old book with the only text on it wrote "Napoleon", a cute book with simple geometric decorations called "L'art de La Politique", and a japanese book with a beautiful book case, with a japanese title that i can only understand half of: ベルギー芸術の千年, one thousand years of ... art.

Out of the three,

We were asked to choose one to be kept, and the other two returned to the library. And with the one that we keep, we'll based the further development of the project upon.
I chose the japaneese book, for that it was the one that i liked the most, and wanted to read and keep.

For the interactive,

The John Cage thing continued, with the teacher Boris asking us to bring kitchen wares, to make a mushroom soup... because of John Cage. He didn't show up, and the class changed to do something based on the Fluxus instructions, supposedly a plan the substitute teacher came up with on his way to the campus.

In the afternoon,

We discussed about our plans for the afternoon / main assignment for Ronja -- Vernacular Typography. I was ill-prepared, for that i was busy with all the apartment searching nonsense, and couldn't read basically anything on the street in Dutch, apart from somthing like "Eten", "Dranken", "Te Huur" and "Te Koop".
I originally planed to do something about the doors, for that i thought there was no sign or instructions of how to open them written near the handle, presumably because there are significantly less frequency of people trying to open them, and open them wrong.
But very soon i learnt the word "duwen" and "trekken", which could be found everywhere, on the doors.
I ended up chosen menu as the subject, and later fell back to a plan that i always hated, something written in chinese, the only few things that i could read -- the menus from the chinese restaurants.

VII. Stadspark

During one of those walks near the hotel,

after the classes, i discovered Stadspark, not far from the Central Station and the tourist streets. The park is smaller than I thought it was when i first saw it, from the northern side with the world wars memorial statue, but it was still a happy discover, different from most of the parks that ive visited in china, most areas including the grass fields were opened to walk upon, and from certain standpoint and view angle, you can avoid seeing the cars and the buildings, and pretend you were in the nature, far away from the city, anywhere in the world, it gave me the calming feeling of still in Hangzhou, being a tourist, and had nothing at hand to do.

The park very soon became a routine stop for me,

as we finally found an apartment that was available right away to be rented, right beside the stadspark, on the Plantin en Moretuslei street.

VIII. Glabel BVBA / Gladis NV

We got this apartment recommended to us by a new chinese classmate of Ding,

she was planning to rent the place with somebody but because of some changes her roommate was out so she decided to search for a smaller one.
All we got at the time was a video recorded by her and an email, of which i quickly contacted, and surprisingly quickly got replied. The apartment is instantly available for rent, and also open to visit at anytime, by first getting the key from another location.
At this point, we decided that we wont gave up any chance of a deal, so we swiftly informed them our intention of renting it, and want to pay a visit.

The contract

of the rental agreement was sent to me with the first replying email, when we hadn't even took a look at the place, and the contract written entirly in Dutch, and in Comic sans.
Download the rental contract
The landlord(s?) had a very efficient way of replying emails, kind of like sending SMS messages, with no signature or name of the reciever, but simply, Dear,
I quickly adapted her / his way of writing emails, and reply to them in the same style. It was quite helpful, since i used to really struggle to find a fitting appellation while starting an email with some organisation with no name provided. Dear potentially future landlord,

Although with many doubts and worries,

about its legitimacy and many other things, we still made up the mind and chose to sign the contract.
Because of the super restricted new abroad transaction policies of the Chinese government at the time, we had a great headache with sending the money, each transfer made in a chinese bank account to abroad would be monitered, and manually operated -- passed or rejected by a staff of the local bank where one registered the bank account, so we had to send all the proof documents to them, from acceptance letter of the school to the translated contracts for renting and for deposit.
And during this process of checking all the documents, they (we) found this company signing as the landlord, Glabel BVBA, didn't actually exist (according to the company checking websites), but instead, at the location they provided as the address of the company, there was a Glabel NV, a diamond dealer. And the name provided for the transaction was yet another, Glasdis NV. Additional to all that, they didn't give any number for contact, other than the email address.
With frustration and confusion, we checked again and again through email with them, and was informed that Glabel was the name used before, and now the company is officially Gladis NV, as the name to be written as the reciever of payments, and with the reply was another contract with the corrected names.

IX. Two Bulgarian Leva

On the third typography class,

the students were asked to bring a coin to class, and to ask 20 questions to get the Yes or No answers by flipping the coin.
I brought a coin that i found in my backpack, a mysterious coin with cyril characters which i couldn't read or even type to search, but with the numbers -- supposedly the born and death year of this old man -- in arabic numerals, i found it was a bulgaria coin, 2 leva, approx. 1 euro.

Later on the class,

we were instructed to write a request of something, like a set of image, as the way we look for something on the search engines, and let the other ones on the class to fulfill it. So that was what i asked for, something about Bulgaria, as i knew basically nothing about, other than a brutal and weird story about a war fought between them and the byzantines.

We were given about two weeks to prepare for the requests.

The images for others requests

Something something Bulgaria

From the discussion about the result, i learned that with every yogurt sold in the world, you have to pay a pattern fee to Bulgaria, and the capital of bulgaria is called Sofia.

X. Kringwinkel

About ten-minutes-walk away from the apartment of my street,

Plantin en Moretusrei, there is a place called Kringwinkel, a second-hand shop chain in belgium, and this one is the larger one in Antwerp, another one is on the Meir street.
It instantly became one of my favorite place in Antwerp (although i haven't visited many places), it had a great atmosphere and many, many lovely items with ridiculously low price. The objects displayed at the place made me realized how easy and convenient it was for an european artist to form these nostalgic and pensieve looking aesthetic -- from their old house or from the thrift shop.

Things that i've bought from Kringwinkel

XI. Morrocan Tea Set

Around five street numbers away from our apartment,

there is a nice moroccan restaurant called Larache, with friendly owner and comforting dishes, i've never had moroccan dishes before, but they gave me a warming feeling of home.
With the dishes, Tajines and couscous, they also have moroccan mint tea, served in beautiful vintage looking moroccan tea set.
Soon after that i found a gorgeous moroccan tea pot set on the Kringwinkel biding site, including the tray, a large and a small tea pot, three cups and a rose water dispenser.

I was extremely happy to have found it,

but on the day of the biding deadline, i missed it by minutes, washing dishes after dinner.

XII. Poems

On November 15th we had a typography workshop,

With the graphic designer for the Danish Pavilion on the Venice Biennale, Line-Gry Hørup, about poetry of Hilda Doolittle, Robert Duncan, the imagism and more, I didn't have much idea about them, nor much feeling for their poems, but interestingly on found the name of the poet Ezra Pound and his poems weirdly familiar, and soon i realised i've found and read them during perhaps the junior school times, from my moms poetry books and her excerpt collection.
The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough.
I didn't get it, i still dont, i watched an interview with robert duncan but i found the way he read the poems and his flower arranging funny, i dont think i have the capability of appreciating english or maybe any other foreign poems, if there's something in them to appreciate.

Instead,

a profoundly beautiful thing to be shared through poems, a poem, that is possible and worth to make the effort to be made into translation, for me is the impossibility to share feelings, empathy or compassion.
A poem from Tao Hongjing is perfect to express this notion, it's written by Tao Hongjing, a Taoist hermit as a response to the request from Wu emperor of Liang, to tell him about his hermitage experience and stories:

Shan Zhong He Suo You
Ling Shang Duo Bai Yun
Zhi Ke Zi Yu Yue
Bu Kan Chi Ji Jun

(What are there in the mountains
— many white clouds above the hill
Only to be appreciated by oneself
Too vulnerable to be sent to you )