So it's come to this

I’m springing this on you a little, but tonight is actually my last night in Belgium. I’ve finished up my contract, and am heading off for 2 or 3 months of travel, gadding about Europe, and then Indonesia on the way home; I'll keep you updated on my adventures as they come to pass. However, I have to admit, it’s come as a bit of a shock to finally be leaving. When I first got here, in the depths of a European winter in a very small town, I thought it would never end. I had already had serious misgivings before I came, and when I first arrived I spent a lot of time looking for the escape hatch.

Truly, I never saw sunshine, and those evenings … long doesn’t quite cover it. I read a lot, and I wrote, and when nothing I was writing turned out to be fit for human consumption, I started to blog. I read a lovely quote early on, funnily enough, on another blog, where the author said that he was in danger of becoming ‘less a struggling writer, than someone struggling to write’; perhaps I hope that when everything else has been mired in the tarmac of my brain, this blog has, thus far, kept me on a bit of an even keel, creativity wise. Perhaps.

One thing I haven’t done on this blog, however, is paid my dues to the people I’ve met here. Now, very few of them know I write this, and I’m fairly sure that none of them check it, but I think that even under the cloak of anonymity, they are owed. After my time here, I’ve realised that you never understand how important the basics are until you're physically divorced from everything that is 'yours'. See, believe it or not, no-one actually has to be nice to you. They don’t. They can be pleasant enough, they can be actively un-nice, or, they can just try and do whatever they have to do in order for their own lives to go on untrammelled. And this is all fair enough; we all have our own courses to run.

But none of this is what I’ve experienced here. I’m not sure if it’s a small town thing, or a Belgian thing, but whatever it was I will always be eternally grateful. See, people weren’t just nice, they were welcoming, they were kind, and they were generous. And for no real reason except for the fact that I was alone, and I was new. It’s an incredibly humbling experience. I feel so very privileged to have met so many kind souls who really just wanted to make sure that I was happy, surviving, and not just living on canned soup. I will always be thankful that, in a time when I could have been utterly isolated, I lived and worked in a place where it wasn’t an issue for people to say good morning, ask about your day, and perhaps grab a beer with after work.

It really is the simple things.