Bonjour from Namur, Belgium. Yes, they speak French in Belgium and no, I didn’t know that either. Well, a little less than half the country speaks French while the other half speaks mostly Flemish, which is Dutch. I’ve been here for a little over three weeks now and it has been a blast so far. We practice on Tuesday and Thursday and coach younger kids on Wednesday and Friday. We have games on Saturday and Sunday which leaves Monday as our day off.
On the field everything is similar to baseball in the US except that they bunt a lot more. I am enjoying some initial success, winning my first two games on the mound and even hitting again which I haven’t done since sophomore year because of a flaw in my swing. Our team is currently in second place in what they call the 1st round or regular season. The top four teams advance to the 2nd round and play twelve more games. The two teams with the best records from those four play in the championship. We have already secured a spot in the next round as one of the top four teams with two games remaining in the regular season.
Off the field has definitely been a learning experience for me. The guys on the team are great and really make me and my roommate, Todd Emr (Johns Hopkins), feel very welcome. Most of them speak at least a little bit of English with a good amount being fluent. Strangely enough my teammates appear to be the only ones in the city who do speak English. If Todd and I go out alone we have develop a technique of kind of attempting French and then just pointing at what we want at a bar or restaurant. If only I had taken French in high school instead of Spanish (which I failed a couple times anyway). Todd and I have gotten along well so far, he was an applied math major at Hopkins so we really have something in common…baseball! It has been an easy adjustment living with him after spending three years with a roommate like Kevin Simpson, (which is not a shot against you Kevin because like I said, you made the adjustment easy for me). The biggest adjustment besides the language has to be the fact that they do not have window screens here. No joke. It has been a little bit hot so when we open the window, in come the bugs and they are determined to keep me up all night which they do successfully. That’s all I have for now but I will be bridging the world again at some point soon. Until then, au revoir (had to look up the spelling on freetranslations.com).
- Brian Hurld
