Familiarity

I've stumbled across something quite dangerous.

I have found not one, but TWO, English bookstores in downtown Brussels. I've already spent pretty much a paycheck's worth of money at these shops and it's just the first weekend I've been introduced to them. Indeed...any bookstore in which I can find books written in English is quite dangerous. It doesn't help that I have a new favorite author, Bill Bryson, for whom I can seek out specifically when searching for new books.
This weekend, in fact, has been a weekend of language familiarity. Besides the bookshops, I have also attended a church service in English and saw the movie "Babel." It was almost, almost, like I was back in the states. I enjoyed the church service, primarily for my reacquaintance with traditional church music. We sang one of the hymns to the tune of "My God How Wonderful Thou Art," the song with which I auditioned for choir each year at Luther and I was brought back to the music hall at Luther, standing at the piano while Weston Noble accompanied me. I also enjoyed flipping through the music booklet and singing to myself all of the tunes that were at one point so familiar to me. I had forgotten how much I miss hearing those. I really don't attend church services often enough here.
The movie, as far as I could tell, was quite good, though I would have appreciated it more had I understood more of it. You see, the characters in the movie communicated with 5 different languages (English, Arabic, Spanish, Japanese, and sign language) and for each language there were only subtitles in French and Dutch. This left me, an English speaker, pretty lost for about 70 percent of the movie. There were some scenes that were easy to decipher, but it was a bit frustrating when the whole audience would start laughing and my friends and I were left looking at each other helplessly. I would feel a boost of confidence when I could translate some of the words in the subtitle, like "cake" and "the American" but found that my overall comprehension left much to be desired. I suppose I need to start being more careful about which movies I see in a French-speaking city.