WELCOME PARTY AT ARCHIVES

Today at the archives Toon and Elly organized a little welcome party for us and invited all of the workers at the archives. The archives are closed to the public on Mondays so they decided today was a good day. The employees at the archives are a little, as Elly says, afraid of us. So we thought this might break the ice some.

Toon and Elly bought some delicious cakes and pies to share and also some drinks. They said that the archive employees would be offended if we only served water and lemonade, so they bought some alcoholic beverages (champagne, etc.) and also had fruit punch and sodas.

Elly and Angela are serving. The man in red is the head archivist, Laurent. The girls on the couch are students and giggled a lot.

The head archivist, Toon and various archive employees. The man standing was very friendly and enjoyed speaking to us in English.

It was a little awkward as they did not know how to react to us. Most of them do not speak any English, and Elly says that sometimes if you have an accent the Belgium people are very slow to warm up to you. Several of the people were very gracious to us, however, mostly those who spoke a little English. The main archivist was especially nice to us as he is impressed with the work we are doing and we have a good relationship with him already. He has a newborn daughter the same age as Madeline, which gave us something in common to talk about. Although it was not perfect, it was a good start to becoming integrated into the archive family.