Saturday, March 05, 2011

Kots in Louvain-la-Neuve

In Louvain-la-Neuve, many students live in a "kot," student accommodations. That's a Belgian word. The kot where I lived in 1981-82 was a pleasant apartment with seven small bedrooms, bathrooms, a kitchen and a dining/living room. There was no theme to our kot, except maybe hanging around drinking coffee and shooting the breeze. Some kots have projects, such as Kap Contes, the storytelling kot that put on the festival this week. I didn't see a sign for that one, but I saw plenty of other kots à projet:
This was no alien idea to me: at the University of Vermont, I lived in the Living Learning Center for two years, in Russian House. Well, not a house, but a suite of rooms in which we attempted to speak Russian as much as possible. The first year, Russian House was downstairs from the mimes and fire-eaters. The second year, we moved upstairs from German House. The Russians and Germans got along well.

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