After much thought, largely done in the Australian outback; and much more paperwork, largely done without a computer in a sweltering Taipei summer, I have come to Leuven, Belgium to study astronomy. I will be skipping many parts of the story to get here, but I like the idea of picking this blog back up with what I'm doing now. So, I landed in Brussel's International Airport three weeks ago, and got on a bus out to Leuven. I was tired, and had 100 eur from the ATM by the arrivals gate. The bus had a plastic screen blocking the driver's area from the passengers, Belgium had been hit hard last spring by Covid-19. There was no cash option on the machine by the door, and the bus driver didn't speak English. I was hoping some ticket attendant was going to step on before departing the airport, but the door closed and I already felt like a lowly bus-fare thief. I got out to the residence at 4:
00pm, which was perfect for a Friday afternoon, because I would not have been able to get my key had I come after 5:00pm. A sleepy jetlagged weekend ensued with an odd venture out into a nice evening to find a bottle of water; first, to find that everything closes quite early in Belgium (or at least Leuven), and then for a much later second, the tap water here is perfectly safe to drink. It wasn't until the Monday or Tuesday after the weekend that I got internet and reconnected with the digital world--I will always remember the complete isolation I felt in the small forests near my home that weekend, no classes, no friends, no phone. Fast forward three weeks and I can say that it's this 10-years graduated chemist collaborating with just graduated physicists on tensor mathematics, quantum mechanics, and statistical thermodynamics. I have been treading water, but last week it was a little easier. Goodnight!
