Travels without my spaniel

Summer

2011-08-07T18:21:00.000+02:00

Am I the only one who hates the summer holidays? No work, combined with potentially long periods of confinement indoors due to terrible weather, plus lack of company as everyone else flies off to fairer climes.

I know I should enjoy it, and consequently feel guilty when I don't. There's nothing like that creeping feeling of dread at the start of July when people start disappearing and 'closed for holidays' signs start to pop up on shop windows everywhere. I love hot weather, don't get me wrong. But as a British woman living in Belgium, chance'd be a fine thing.

For years now, the summer holidays have been a long, tedious stretch of socially-barren thumb-twiddling.
They almost always involve separation from someone I don't want to be separated from, often with a significant body of water and a frustratingly slow internet connection standing solidly between us.

Summer holidays also belie their name by being a traditional period of hard labour: for students, stuck behind the checkout at Sainsbury's, and for interpreters, at Polish language schools.

Almost all your friends will go on holiday at the same time and then on language courses, and by the time everybody's back it will be September again and time to go back to work (with a sigh of relief). The consoling charms of retail therapy and comfort eating are rendered virtually inaccessible by the lack of shops and restaurants actually open in Brussels in July and August.

Why not go on holiday? I hear you cry. You must be joking. There are two options here - no, three. One: you holiday with your nearest and dearest, resulting in bickering, tears and cries of 'I'm not a fucking GPS!', not to mention the unknown quantity of the acoustics in the hotel bathroom. Two: go away with friends... actually this isn't such a bad option, except that it's hard to find single friends of a similar age to go away with - plus any kind of girly holiday inevitably leads to excruciating hangovers and embarrassing sunburn. Perhaps best avoided. Three: go away with your parents...

Ideally, I'd like to kidnap several of my favourite people in the world and hole up in a converted farmhouse in Tuscany (so very home counties), spending daylight hours reading by the (tastefully designed) swimming pool and evenings chugging Chianti in the cool of a hilltop terrace.

In reality, I'm in Kraków, mainlining Tok FM podcasts and trying not to get into trouble with the police (long story). At least the sun is shining. For now.

weekend

2011-04-17T23:15:00.000+02:00

Wow. My browser no longer remembers this URL address.

Recently I read an article* about how addicted we are to mobile internet: to the extent that we're no longer able to bear being on our own and automatically reach for the phone/iPod when left alone. I realised I do the same thing: check facebook on my phone when waiting for the metro, read the news on my iPod when it's not my half hour at work, etc.

So... is it possible to spend time alone without recourse to a phone-full of virtual company? For purely scientific purposes, I've analysed my own weekend, containing a fair amount of loner-time. Here we go (it's likely that the hours will not add up, maths is not my strong point and time is at best a hazy concept):

- Writing/checking an achingly dull Italian legal translation with two Technical Annexes: 9 hours

- Reading The Blessing by Nancy Mitford: 4 hours
- Daydreaming about being picked up by a French duke while weeping on my suitcase in the Gare du Nord (I know that's a different book): about 45 minutes

- Running: 45 mins
- Washing, showering, grooming in general: 2-3 hours

- Cooking (surprise entry because normally I have trouble even finding the kitchen): 45 mins
- Shopping (just for food, Mr ING branch manager): 1 hour
- Compulsively checking bank account for arrival of late payment: total about 20 mins

- Drinking alcoholic beverages in the company of real (as opposed to virtual) people: total about 6 hours, but can't remember exact going-home times. Drunk text messages in my 'Sent' box may give some indication though.
- Rather awkwardly admiring other people's babies/photos of babies: 20-ish mins
- Daydreaming about having sweet cuddly babies of own: maybe about 30 mins
- Wondering whether my mutual fund includes maternity cover: 10 mins
- Thinking wistfully (and not without a touch of envy) of generous fonctionnaire healthcare package: 15 mins

- Sleeping: a blissful 9-ish hours, all at night-time, not a hint of an afternoon snooze on the sofa.
- Watching imported American TV series and Trinny and Susannah (it holds a morbid fascination: you almost can't help watching. The best episode is the one where they go to Flanders) on the Flemish channels: 5-ish hours, probably, but a lot of the time it was just on in the background while I was doing something else.

- Messing about on the piano: about 20 mins
- Messing about on the internet: hours and hours and hours. I'm not sure that this has worked at all...

* In Wysokie Obcasy, so I am at least still trying.

Museum Night Fever

2011-02-27T22:12:00.000+01:00

This is a bit like Noc Museów in Kraków, except that the wristband costs nine euros, instead of the token one złoty for a stamp.

Last year we played dressing up at the City of Brussels Museum on the Grand Place, then traipsed around a crowded costume museum before queueing 20 minutes to get into the Musical Instrument Museum for a swing dancing workshop.

This year, we stayed in Ixelles: the Ixelles Museum, which is currently hosting the works of Olivier Debré

... alongside its permanent collection. I'm not sure whether I'm allowed to show pictures of individual works or not but these tiny Rodin cherubs touched a chord. This is called 'Idylle d'Ixelles'. From this angle you can see how softly the little girl cherub is kissing the boy. Why is her arm in the air? Is she about to fly away on those tiny wings? Is he trying to catch her and pull her back down to earth?

And then there's tons of classic art nouveau posters (I am crap and can never remember which is art deco and which is art nouveau).

After a burger stop at Le Comptoir on Place St Boniface, we went to the dinosaur museum. Oh all right, the Natural History Museum, but it's basically all about the dinosaurs, right?

And then we trekked into town to finish the evening off with a beer on the top floor of MIM and to steal a few minutes on the dancefloor before chucking-out time...

late snow

2011-02-21T23:13:00.001+01:00

... et la neige fait son apparition...
said the taxi driver, wryly, as the car swooped in and out of the undulating tunnels of Brussels' inner ring road last night.
Later, I stood at the window (on the step stool, on tiptoe, with one foot balancing on the radiator - my windows are lunatic-asylum high) and watched the white flakes calmly falling through the dark of the deserted square. There's something soothing and healing about watching a gently incessant fall of snow: something magically reassuring, a sort of continuity in the universe.

I've made a bad start to the week with some spectacularly inept attempts at schmoozing (I tried to come up with something a bit more convincing than 'can I please have some cash to go and spend a few months mainlining tatankas with my mates in Pauza') and am trying to comfort myself by feeding my running-away fantasy on Skyscan.net. In my dreams, this would involve escaping to Venice incognito and getting a Saturday job in a flower shop, à la Pane e Tulipani (a Silvio Soldini film which goes by the catchy English title of 'Bread and Tulips'). In reality, it may well involve several afternoons watching films in a three-quarters empty Kino Pod Baranami and talking to strangers at bus stops in a desperate attempt to acquire vocabulary.

In the meantime, I am watching Homes under the Hammer and trying to work up the energy to go downstairs and buy some chocolate. I am plucking up the courage to check my bank account after a fairly typically irresponsible weekend with extra shopping (I need a new winter/spring jacket and a pair of black boots but invariably end up buying dresses and posh lipstick).
After last week's efforts with the washing machine hose, I'm now feeling confident enough to replace the broken loo seat upstairs. Soon Brico will be my second home.

And finally: here's a video that will appeal to anyone who has ever spent their afternoon off on hold to Mobistar.

Back then

2011-02-09T23:54:00.001+01:00

2002

I am sitting on the carpet, leaning up against a very tatty sofa, in a two-up, two-down semi in a student town, on a tiny estate five minutes from the main street (there are only three streets in the whole place), ten minutes from the sea. When you go outside the air is sharp and salty and takes your breath away. There is a gas fire in the hearth. We are watching 'Real Genius' (an 80s film about geeky physics students). There is wall-to-wall carpet, in some garish brown-and-beige pattern. Four boys live here, two New-Englanders and two Glaswegians. The flat is littered with mouldering sports kit and there is a strange shrine in one corner built out of used pizza boxes and beer cans. I am twenty-one, and utterly - unthinkingly - in love with the long-haired American boy that I have been going out with for a couple of months. Three girls - one of whom is me - also live here, unofficially. There is something festering in the kitchen sink which may once have been porridge. I have enough money in my savings account for the whole year. I feel stable, and content, and - possibly - happy, and am aware that at some point this will end and something else will begin, but not yet...

Memories. And grammar.

2011-01-29T00:09:00.002+01:00

So I'm one of three. Belgian Waffle (right-click to open in a new tab) talked about having an odd number of kids to make things easier. I say this is wrong, wrong, wrong. The reason my parents only had three kids was because in 1986, the only option for large families was the Mitsubishi space wagon. And my Dad vetoed it almost from the start. Some parents think that having an odd number of children saves you from being the adjudicator. I say start from five. Especially if you regularly make twelve-hour journeys to Inverness in an Austin Montego. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory on BBC audiobooks was the only thing that saved Britain from World War Three circa 1990.

I promised grammar. I know you love it. But not Polish this time.

Today, I went to the bakery down the road to order a demi-baguette to go with my smelly francophonic cheese. 'Demi' in French is masculine. I swear. I went to the bakery and mumbled something about 'un demi-baguette'.

- Une baguette.
insisted the baker. Une baguette!

I repeated that I wanted a demi goddammit. She offered me cheese and ham to go with.

Bad French days. They happen. However long you study the damn language, I guarantee it...

Best thing since

2011-01-24T01:10:00.000+01:00

Sliced bread in Belgium comes without the crust slice on the end. This is a huge disappointment, because everyone knows that the crust is the best bit.

I'm sad again because my stats tell me this blog attracts people who have typed 'I hate Belgium' into their search engines. I have to admit that I complain a fair bit about the rather surreal little country that forms my adoptive home, but it's usually just frustration at something unflexible and service-related. Brussels is actually quite nice, sometimes. Here are some pictures:

Place St Boniface, the Ultime Atome on the right and one of two father-and-son-owned camera shops on the left

More Place St Boniface

Place de Londres

Eglise St Boniface. I'm not sure what the statues are

Christmas lights and sunshine. These pictures are from late November: the lights have been taken down now.

Over the hill

2011-01-08T22:12:00.002+01:00

Bouncer tapping P on shoulder: Excuse me...

Pino turning round: Yes...?

Bouncer: Oh. Never mind. I was going to ask for ID, but...

2011 sucks already. Pass the gin.

Resolutions

2011-01-06T02:10:00.001+01:00

I have been at my parents' house for almost two weeks already. In that time, I have completely abandoned the sensible Polish and French literature that I brought with me and made serious inroads into my Dad's Robert Harris collection instead. I have not studied all that much for my exam next week (it's like deja vu all over again), but I have downloaded an RTBF 1ère app onto my new iPod touch, so that counts as practice, right?

I have been up to London and back several times on the train and am thinking of buying shares in Connex South Eastern, not to mention Caffè Nero.

I have done far more shopping than my tremulous bank balance allows (which isn't all that much).

I am more than ready to go back to Brussels and was already itching to get back to work by Sunday afternoon: there are only so many re-runs of Midsomer Murders* one can take in a week.

My sister is coping by baking. There has been copious brownie consumption in the Pinocorp household over the past 48 hours. Incidentally, six of us (excluding dogs) managed to get through a tin of Cadbury's Roses by Boxing Day evening (opened on Christmas Day, in case anyone was still feeling peckish after lunch). That's nearly a kilo. Is that bad? Is anyone else's family that gluttonous?

To continue my ever-deeper slide down the literary slope, I ransacked the bookcase in my old bedroom and came up with a copy of Bridget Jones' Diary, bought when I was sixteen and had absolutely no idea what any of it was about. It now seems scarily, prophetically accurate and I hardly dare to turn the pages for fear of reading my life in minute detail on the next leaf. Sadly, my parents have yet to introduce me to any top human rights lawyers, but one can always live in hope. In future, when reading, I resolve to stay firmly away from romantic comedies and safely in the action/crime thriller zone, to prevent maudlin before bedtime (what is the verb form of 'maudlin'? Maudlin-in'?).

Ugh. Resolutions.

I Will Not:

- even pretend to give up drinking as this will only result in a terrible binge some time like next weekend and a lot of guilt.

- buy a pair of scales. My jeans still fit (even after washing), so it can't be that bad.

- go near a boy ever again because they are all emotionally immature and a big waste of precious time, energy and emotional investment.

- go out with friends who coerce teenagers (well, more or less) into taking my phone number by lying about my real age to the tune of about seven years and get us all into trouble for not leaving the pub when it's clearly closing time already

- beat myself up over any of the following:

drinking too much;
eating too much;
not eating enough;
being single and alone and over the hill and unloved and unattractive and generally an utterly unappealing old hag;
not acting my age
f*cking up at work
not beating myself up enough for f*cking up at work, thus demonstrating lack of gravitas in professional context

I Will:

- cook regularly, like at least twice a week, with real vegetables and everything.

- stop wasting time on Facebook

- learn all the jazz scales, chord progressions and other technical piano thingies, since I now have all this free time as a single unattractive old hag, and become brilliant - albeit single and unattractive - jazz pianist (this has been my resolution for about the past ten years)

- start a turkey-baster fund, in case of emergency to be used by 2017 at the latest

- travel and do stuff outdoors and try to enjoy life in general

- buy some furniture already

- talk to people more and stop looking at the ground

- go to Italy more often because I love it but always forget how much

- speak Polish to strangers (who actually are Polish, obviously)

- write more on the blog (and possibly also off the blog)

- sort out my accounts, since I am a highly streamlined and professional twenty-first century businesswoman

- lie about my age: the teenager looked (almost) convinced

- fall in love. Probably with a puppy.

*That's Inspecteur Barnaby to all you francophonic types.

Things I did last year

2011-01-04T00:25:00.000+01:00

Basically I haven't written anything for almost a month because I'm alternately too sad or too drunk. Here are some pictures, to cheer us all up.

Cafe 'Chez Tintin'

The banks of the Congo river

The hotel pool and bar - many hours spent here preparing hard for meetings, ahem.

Street food: barbecued kid (as in 'cabri', not child). Comes with yummy fresh offal sausages, mmm.

View from the hotel. With palm trees. In December.

Painted adverts

Street scene on the way to the airport

Catch-up post

2010-12-11T13:14:00.000+01:00

I haven't written anything for ages and ages and ages. So here's a quick résumé of the week, just to prove to you that I didn't get eaten by crocodiles in the Congo (are there crocodiles in the Congo? I didn't like to dive in and check) or succumb to Dengue fever or traveller's tummy or something equally awful. Photos to come...

Monday: flying into a snow-dusted Belgium via Rome, Addis Ababa and a gratuitously long, hot and stuffy sojourn in the Salon Business at Kinshasa airport. I realise I've lost the little red slip from La Poste that would have enabled me to pick up a package waiting for me at Porte de Namur. Now I'll never know what it was...

Tuesday: getting back to work in Brussels is a bit of a culture shock. I calmly inform my listeners that there are more than five million villages in Morocco. No-one bats an eyelid.

Wednesday: starting to get used to the temperature again. Unfortunately not enough to remember the need for sensible footwear. I nearly stack it several times running down the hill to work and have a couple of near-misses cutting through an iced-over Jardin de Maelbeek. In Other Business, I've also re-discovered the gym. There is a painful bruise on my hip-bone from where I stepped off the cross-trainer, slightly stunned, and staggered into the wall.

Thursday: an afternoon off! Bliss! Choir practice is one hundred per cent Rutter from now until January. In the morning, no-one notices when I tell them that Victor Hugo - in an impressive feat of longevity - managed to attend a summit in 1948. The meeting ends with a rousing chorus of Ode to Joy and everyone standing to attention. This is exactly how I imagined working for the European Union would be.

Friday: Work lasts well into the darkening afternoon. Lights go off one by one in the other booths as delegates slope off to catch their planes. Eventually it's only us and the French left. The chair finally calls it a day. We manage to track down some mulled wine in the Hairy Canary and the rest of the evening is a bit of a blur.

Polski update: oh gosh... I haven't spoken Polish for ages. I'm forgetting important words and expressions (I had to look up 'mam kaca'). I carried an increasingly battered copy of Wprost around Kinshasa for a week - which was lucky because I forgot my sunhat and it came in really handy keeping the sun off my face by the pool. I've been trying to finish Gra na wielu bębenkach for almost six months. Worst of all, I can no longer take my Tantanka. I need a trip to Kraków, and fast!

Far from home in a hotel room

2010-11-28T21:59:00.000+01:00

I'm on mission again, which is a direct calque from the French and which sounds a lot more exciting in English than in the original. Although I suppose if it were really exciting then I wouldn't be able to blog about it. No-one else is here yet and the conference doesn't start til Tuesday, so I'm at a loose end, not doing anything except sitting in the hotel room not catching up on sleep and blogging.

I travelled here on Ethiopian Airlines. For a child of the 80s, Ethiopia means Band Aid, Bob Geldof and 'eat your carrots, there are starving children in...'. At the time, I could never understand why my Mum wouldn't agree to physically send the carrots where they might be appreciated a bit more. Imagine my consternation when the cabin crew came round to collect the dinner trays. I almost apologised over the tell-tale carrots lying sheepishly uneaten in the gravy.
On landing, we were treated to tantalisingly spectacular views over the plains and mountains surrounding Addis Ababa. Unfortunately the rest of my Ethiopian experience consisted of dozing in the business lounge, in spite of the interest piqued by leaflets depicting pyramids, markets and ancient ruins.

And now here I am, in a rather different country that is not Ethiopia. I have inadvertently managed to do more or less everything I need to do to catch malaria: opening the windows on arriving in the hotel room (it's an automatic reflex, I just wanted to see the view), walking outside by the pool, sitting by the pool after dark eating pizza (because that's where the hotel bar food was). There's a winged insect that looks like a fly in my bathroom. I hope it is a fly. In a few weeks' time I expect I will know whether it was or not. And I accidentally drank from a glass of coke with ice, before I'd really had time to think about it, so I'm clearly well on the way to a nice bout of tummy trouble, if not full-blown cholera.

If I manage to survive all that, I may even take some photos...

Winter chills

2010-11-25T00:19:00.000+01:00

I still have a good twenty-eight or so posts to get through by the end of the year. This is going to be tough. I feel a lot of photos coming on.

It's starting to get really cold in Brussels now. Not just ordinary cold, but damp, foggy cold that chills you through and through. The radiator in my bedroom doesn't work. I've heard that you need to bleed radiators. This sounds like one of those rather disgusting but secretly fun things - like picking scabs or pulling out hangnails - that you do as a child sitting cross-legged on a rather dusty floor waiting for assembly to start. I realise that's probably a rather over-detailed simile but I have a very, very clear image in my mind here of the boredom and the floating dust mites and those disgusting curtains decorated in a fetching pattern resembling psychodelic spools of Marmite. Once, I unzipped my summer dress all the way down the front and couldn't zip it up again. I was marched out of assembly and had to change into an abandoned dress from the spare clothes cupboard. My Mum never dressed me in zips again. What do you expect, giving a seven-year old easy access to zippable fashions?

I did tell the landlord about the faulty radiator and he sent round a plumber. When I say 'plumber', obviously I mean the landlord's sister's cousin's brother-in-law who's a bit handy with a spanner and used to watch Home Improvement quite a lot. The plumber stuck a little Allen key or something in the corner of the radiator, there was a loud, satisfying hiss and some water dripped out. I'm sure it's something I could do myself...

I also need to put blinds in upstairs. My flat has attic rooms with beautiful, big skylights, perfect for lying back on a snow-white cotton duvet and dreaming that you're floating on a cloud. Unfortunately, at three in the morning when there's a full moon they're not so good. Yesterday I snapped awake and lay in the chilly moonlight, trying to sink back into a lovely dream where I was catching up with an old friend who's recently moved back from Australia. The only thing is, it's not my flat. And I resent investing in something that I'm going to have to take down and paint over in three years time. The flat is definitely my home, but I still feel that I'm camping to some extent. The kitchen especially doesn't feel like mine (although it's miles better than the old place, which looked like this:

)

The new one is a definite improvement in that it has actual work surfaces. And more than two hobs (which I never use because I am lazy and useless and don't have a dining table yet and haven't found my local veggie market). And no cockroaches whatsoever.

Note the tasteful tiling in my old kitchen. I have to admit I probably failed to appreciate its full splendour, largely because I was utterly bedazzled by the subtle charms of the bathroom:

Now, I've commented on the weather, written something vaguely amusing about my childhood, given you an update on the flat and some photos of real estate failures past. That's my blogging duty over for the day, bonne nuit!

Oh wait. Polski update. Uh. I have one lesson a week with a very patient Polish lady and we are going through a fascinating textbook on economics. I am also trying - and failing - to remember the difference between siedzieć komuś na głowie and zawracać komuś głowę, and many other such expressions, also from a textbook.

On a fairly regular basis, I bump into a Polish person at a party and have a long and apparently fluent conversation with them which in reality probably consists of:

- oh wow, you speak such great Polish!

- thanks, I make lots mistakes. I live in Kraków two year.

- How did you learn?

- I go language school and then UJ, Cen-tre foooorrrr Po-lish langu-age and cul-ture iiiiin theeee world (I have to say that very carefully otherwise I get the endings wrong)

...etc, etc, for another half-hour or so. But it all sounds a lot better after vodka.

One in three

2010-11-18T00:26:00.001+01:00

I have to admit I'm strangely, uncharacteristically fascinated by the royal engagement. Normally my interest in the royal family is limited at the best of times - probably largely due to sheer rage at the Daily Express crowd.

HRH hit the scene in my second year at St Andrews and the atmosphere there changed dramatically. Suddenly, the nicest bars in town (and it's a small old town) were packed with expensively-highlighted American girls in fitted rugby shirts and pink pashminas, while security was tightened to within an inch of its life. Woe betide the student who tried to get into the Union (or even the library) on a Friday night without an ID card. After second year, he moved out of halls and the hoo-hah died down a bit. Or maybe it's just that I moved to France for a year, returned briefly for the first semester of third year and then absconded to Italy for spaghetti, spritz and snowboarding. I definitely passed WW a couple of times on the street but couldn't distinguish him from the other posh boys wearing navy baseball caps over floppy blond hair. At least until someone hissed - 'but wasn't that...???', forcing me to admit my ignorance. My sub-standard celebrity spotting skills make me glad I'm not a gossip columnist.

But what interests me isn't the romance, or the dress, or the media circus, or even KM's lack of career (these days, who's really managed to achieve anything by 28? I certainly hadn't got very far). It's the reality. It's hard for a relationship to survive the first tough years after graduation. They've been together eight years. What keeps two fast-changing young people together that long, throughout their turbulent early twenties? How did they cope with separation? Why did they split and what brought them back together? Are they really 'in love' or just good mates who fancy each other and get on ok? What does in love mean after eight years? Is the spark still there?

They both seem so modern and normal - insofar as a prince and the daughter of millionaires can be. They look and sound just like the other posh boys and girls I know. What makes their relationship a success? Do they have a real bond or is it just PR?

One in three St Andrews graduates marries another St Andrews graduate. A sign of a small, inbred community or of salt-soaked romance on the bracing Fife coast?

By all appearances, this is not a whirlwind romance, but a tough, tried-and-tested bond, with the battlescars and laughter lines of eight years to prove it. Does this mean there's some hope for the rest of us?

Experiment

2010-11-15T22:11:00.000+01:00

Leave the lights on in your flat. Put your coat on, go downstairs and sit out in the square under the trees and look up at the warm glow in your own windows. Imagine it's not your house but that some other girl lives there. Think about that girl - does she live alone? She must have some kind of wonderful job to live in that big flat by herself. Maybe she worked hard to get there but I bet she loves it, doing what she always dreamed of. Perhaps she gets to travel to exciting places and see things she'd never even imagined. A girl like that is clever, good at what she does: she never doubts herself for a moment.

She'll have a sweet boyfriend who is crazy about her: he'll come around on his day off and help her fix pictures to the walls of the new apartment and together they'll buy a huge rug from some hippy shop in St Gilles and carry it home on the metro, giggling and beaming at each other. The warmth streaming from the windows carries with it the growing warmth of the flat as it slowly becomes a home. Another armchair, a tall plant in a ceramic pot, a dining room table. A Sunday afternoon spent drinking coffee after coffee on Place St Boniface or the Parvis de St Gilles, stealing kisses and pretending to be shy when nobody really notices them at all. They'll take pictures of each other and make silly faces and laugh at how goofy they are. Secretly they'll both imagine tottering infants with ginger hair and huge dark eyes and a dewy garden in the spring sunshine some time in the hazy future. Their lives spread before them full of love and laughter and everything looks perfect.

And there you are, sitting out alone in the square in the cold and the dark, pretending.

Disasters

2010-11-02T00:29:00.000+01:00

Standing by the printer, on Thursday evening. Work (or at least this part of it) closes at midday on a Friday. I have a meeting starting at 9am. The whole of Belgium will be closed on Monday and Tuesday. I leave on mission on Wednesday morning.

- So... says the guy from the office, conversationally - when are you flying out?
me - Wednesday morning
- oh! *sudden face of doom* But you'll be far too late - the bus leaves the hotel an hour after your plane lands. You need to change that flight. We're all going on Tuesday evening.
me (turning pale) - are you sure I won't make it? Even if I get a taxi or something?
- I think you need to change it.
- But... but... on Tuesday I'm in London renewing my passport...

The next two hours were a blurred mess of running from office to office, shedding e-ticket printouts in great paper sheaves in my wake, trying to find the right person to authorise my flight change, trying very hard not to burst into tears and spending a puzzling fifteen minutes looking for a lift that would take me to level 2 (apparently there are several which pass it by altogether).

Tomorrow starts at quarter to six and ends at ten in the evening and includes an ambitious itinerary of changeovers so nail-bitingly tight they would produce grey hairs in a skeleton luge driver.

Wish me luck.

Kryzys tozsamosci

2010-10-30T00:29:00.000+02:00

It's been ages since I wrote anything. So I should write. Since I live in a francophonic country - or at least a francophonic region of a tri(at least)lingual country, it should have distinct existential leanings.

Ever since I left Poland - the first time around - I've been looking for an angle for the blog. It's clearly not about a British expat learning Polish in Poland any more. It's about a British expat, who is (still) learning Polish, but in a different and equally strange country. But should it be about learning Polish? Or about coping with the surreal/endearing/at times utterly frustrating experience that is life in Belgium? Or about being a - more or less most of the time - single woman in her (very) early thirties (Bridget Jones-stylie)?

Someone I spend a lot of time with recently quoted at me: 'I don't want to be a character in a movie of your life'. But that's not why I write. It's not supposed to be a blow-by-blow description of my rather dull existence. I write a blog because I like to write, because I feel that I might be good at it, if I did it enough, and because I do a job which is challenging and interesting but - in theory - not creative and I want to be able to form something which is my own, and writing a blog is a series of exercises preparing for what one day might be an article, or a short story, or even a very modest novel. Maybe. One day.

But maybe it is all just vanity. Maybe this is just one more thing that I'm not good at - except that there's no-one around to tell me to pull my socks up.

It's October, so there is a lot of work, and for this I am grateful. I am living by the skin of my teeth: running to work in the mornings usually almost late (or almost on time), with messy hair and smudged mascara, looking like a cross between a dressed-up schoolgirl and a nervous breakdown waiting to happen. On days when I'm not working, I sprint across Brussels trying to organise appointments and administration and learning of various sorts. My fridge is more or less permanently empty and I need to borrow an electric drill to fix a mirror, a row of coat pegs and a Japanese print to the wall. My flat still looks as though I moved in yesterday and I still haven't bought a bed, or a dining table. Through the bathroom skylight, I can watch the sun rise while I shower in the morning. Occasionally my hormones short-circuit my brain and I spend the whole day thinking about babies, although I'm nowhere near responsible enough to look after one. I've managed to divide all my paperwork into 'in' and 'out', in two big piles on the coffee table. I'm secretly pleased my boyfriend is away at the moment, because I will be able to spend the whole weekend asleep, or being quietly and unashamedly crazy by myself, or out with friends, hoping to forget everything.

I love late autumn and winter for no reason: for the coolness and freshness and crispness of everything, even in the city. I'm happy to change my life for three months and run in the dark and drink mulled wine in the kitchen instead of cold beer on a terrace.

There we go. A whole post of 'I'. Selfish? Indulgent? And wrong for these reasons? You decide.

Rainy days and Mondays

2010-10-12T00:36:00.000+02:00

I must have written a post with this title before. I'm sure I have. It's actually not rainy at all but brilliantly sunny, and has been for the past few days.

Here are some random observations about Monday, in no particular order.

- today I sat in a meeting almost entirely in English, German and - a surprise late entry - Polish, which I am fortunately not yet qualified to do. I switched the microphone on a grand total of once and thus escaped a quality control report due to scarcity of evidence.

- the fates were clearly on my side with the quality control thing because I had finally rolled into bed the night before at about 2am. Please don't think that this is because I had anything particularly exciting to do: I've simply discovered that having to climb up stairs to go to bed when you are even only slightly tired is hardly worth it when you could just doze on the sofa in front of BBC3. My evenings involve messing about on the interweb, tinkling away at the piano, flipping channels, occasionally doing something vaguely productive like reading a book or writing a blog post (rarely).

- I ran around the park three times instead of two (in the dark you can be tricked into thinking you haven't run as far) and had a bath for the first time in over a year. Please note that I have washed myself by other methods in the meantime. I reckon that since I'm here on my own and I've already cleaned the bath at least twice since I moved in* it's probably relatively hygienic. Also, I finally have a bathroom which has a window. I've always found it singularly dreary to sit in four inches of tepid, scummy water in a windowless box room, but the fact of being able to lie back and look up at the sunset reflecting off the clouds through the skylight is somehow much more appealing.

- I bought shoes. I can't decide whether I like them or not. I am fed up with the ubiquitous ballet pump slipping off my feet all the time so I bought some rather flimsy tan leather plimsoll-type things - as unlike a trainer as I could possibly find without risking toe cramps. I have not yet paid my accountant. Accountants, since I actually have two, one in Belgium and one in the UK. I owe money to both, but not as much as I would owe to the respective revenue and customs services if I did not pay an accountant to do it all for me.

- I am unable to organise a piss-up. It's meant to be at my home, not in a brewery, but since I live in Belgium I'm sure there must be a suitable brewery relatively near by. This is partly social ineptness, more than partly shyness and a large helping of anxiety, plus I don't really understand how these things work. Do people really want to come and drink wine at my flat? Do I have enough chairs? I certainly don't have enough wine glasses. If people don't have fun, is it my fault?

- I am in the throes of a crise sentimentale, which pretty unclear to both of us. I think at the moment it is back on, largely due to the soothing influence of gorgeous autumn sunshine for the whole weekend and a long, slightly hungover romantic walk in the woods. Maybe Belgium and its meteorology are on my side after all.

- I keep forgetting to water the plant. He gave it to me. I only have to water it once a week. The designated watering day is Wednesday and I keep missing it (Wednesday is an easy day to overlook, with all those other things going on to distract you, like Tuesday and Thursday). He says that this is ironically symbolic, or symbolically ironic, or something like that.

Right. Time to tackle those stairs.

*nearly two months ago, so not so good after all.

Evensong blues II

2010-10-06T01:32:00.000+02:00

Singing today, I realised what it is that gives evensong its melancholy edge. The dimly-lit chapel late on a Wednesday afternoon, the shadows drawing closer, the few hardy members of the austere Scottish congregation hugging their winter coats around them as the dark falls ever earlier and we slip into the gloomy tunnel that is November. The wind howls around the stone walls and sheets of rain dash against the windows.

Turn not thy servants empty away, for we have thee as our only hope

Defend us from all perils and dangers of this night

Save us, O Lord, while waking and guard us while sleeping

The night creeps closer and the candles flicker and sputter in the draft - an echo of the gale whipping up the waves outside.

Bare branches rattle against the panes, trees are stripped and contorted as though with grief.

At this time of year, we are alone - deep in the night we listen to breath coming in gasps and cannot reach out to comfort the sleeper. We are the wrong person in the wrong place at the wrong time and the dark is all around and winter is coming.

Sofa, so good

2010-10-02T02:05:00.001+02:00

The sofa has become the central focus of my indoor life. It's a good place to flop down and pass out after work, it's the best place to sit and eat breakfast in front of the BBC (actually the only place, since I don't have a proper dining table yet) and it also doubles as a handy filing cabinet and coat stand.

As you can see, there's still a little way to go on furnishing the flat. Currently life is full of boring adult responsibilities, such as trying to work out how to do last year's UK tax return. Since I'm not very responsible and have trouble remembering that I'm supposed to be an adult, this has been a bit difficult to take on board.

Instead, I've been exploring the various procrastination options. Such as cooking.

Here's my recipe for vegetable soup. Don't thank me now.

- scrape together all the leftover vegetables from the bottom of your fridge.
- cut and/or peel off the slimy bits.
- heat some oil in a pan and add garlic and lots of chilli (to hide the taste of the vegetables)
- add veg and pour stock over the top - preferably Oxo veggie stock, for that authentic Pot Noodle flavour
- turn up the heat, and go and watch ER on Vijf TV until you hear the saucepan lid rattling as the stock boils over.
- turn down the heat and leave to simmer until vegetables have lost all shape and consistency or until the Flemish news comes on
- turn the heat off, get out hand-held blender, and blitz until mushy.
- add a bit more stock to make it look more like soup and less like baby food
- add generous helpings of strong cheese.

Smacznego!

Aux petits riens

2010-09-27T00:11:00.000+02:00

An ambivalent weekend full of showers and flashes of sunshine. In Schaerbeek last night there was a huge explosion that demolished three houses and killed three people. My first thought was 'but for the grace of God', and my fear of leaving the gas on is back with a vengeance, even though I've lived with electric cookers for over a year now. The iron is also a serious cause for concern.

I'm more or less settled in the new flat now. It finally has a sofa (after a very long Saturday afternoon in Ikea with the new boy, culminating in a desperate stress-binge on Swedish cinnamon rolls), as well as television, wifi and a tumble dryer. My happiness is complete. I can look forward to long afternoons spent sprawled across my sofa in front of Grey's Anatomy on Vijf tv, with the blogosphere at my fingertips and the sweet scent of freshly-tumbled towels in the air.

However, I should probably get some grown-up furniture. By grown-up, I mean sensible things that you can store stuff in. Store as in 'put away in a tidy manner' as opposed to 'leave in the box it came in and pretend it doesn't exist let alone need to be filed'. Specfically a sideboard, a chest of drawers and a dining table with chairs. With this in mind, I set out towards Porte de Namur as soon as the rain held off for a few moments and was very quickly distracted by shoe shops and Fnac.

Eventually I managed to steer myself down Avenue Louise, past Place du Châtelain and onto Rue Américaine. This is home to Les Petits Riens - essentially a five-storey jumble sale.
Now, I always thought that St Andrews was the undisputed capital of charity shops: all those rich kids casting off last season's Armani or last term's ball dress translates into some serious bargains. But Petits Riens is on another scale entirely. Once I'd wandered around two floors of furniture and got bored I found myself climbing up to the top floor: crockery, old toys and electrical equipment among other things. It's like my parents' loft on speed.
You can browse through shelves and shelves of highly useful objects, such as...

... Irish coffee glasses ...

... elderly (and therefore extremely romantic but highly unsuitable for blogging) typewriters...

... record players like my Mum and Dad used to have in the eighties...

... and things like this that I can't even identify.

It even has a book store section. All it needs now is for Costa coffee to move in and the rainy Saturday afternoon experience will be complete...

Evensong blues

2010-09-23T16:33:00.000+02:00

Apart from the fact that it can be typo-d into 'evensnog', which is intrinsically, childishly amusing, autumn evensong (nearly did it again) is a melancholy time of day.
Late September to early October is a time for sitting in church organ lofts, watching specks of dust suspended in the fading rays of the autumn sun. It's a minor key time, slipping back into the vaguely-familiar cadences of liturgy and response, soft notes glowing faintly like the cooling embers of the dying year. Outside, the waves break unseen against the rocks in the dark and we huddle in the empty chapel, cold shivers mimicking a frisson of anticipation: for what? The cool touch of salt-soaked grey stone, the scent of old oak, distant woodsmoke and freezing mist. Darkness falls and the sea cradles the town in huge grey oblivion.
The cycle ride downhill in the blackness, no lights, no helmet, slicing through the searing air to burst into the house tingling in the sudden warmth.
It will be several weeks before Christmas music begins, and the perils of this night are still all too real. And yet - somehow - you wake with a feeling of boundless possibility: a hot shower, a walk to lectures in the fresh, early morning air. You are not yet set in stone, you stand poised to ride whatever wave may carry you: life is a vast ocean of limitless potential.

Transitions

2010-08-31T22:18:00.000+02:00

This month, I have two houses (and so far no plague on either of them - the intervention anti-cafards seems to be holding plagues at bay for the moment).
I'm moving endless boxes and cases between them via a combination of borrowed parental cars and a half-walk, half-scurry through Parc Leopold. From tomorrow onwards, I will be able to use car-sharing (technical term 'Cambio'). This means I will be officially able to drive in Belgium, whenever I like*. I suggest staying off the roads tomorrow.
The new place has the advantage of space, a bigger bathroom and (as of yesterday) my own duvet. On the other hand, the old flat has a sofa, hot and cold running Telenet and a washing machine (I have one coming in the new flat but not for another two weeks). There's also rather a lot of useless clutter silting up the old place: I've been contemplating it in despair and wondering just how much I can get away with simply throwing in the bin**.

Moving, proszę państwa, is apparently a learning experience, helping you to develop many useful skillz which can transferred to other areas of your life. In terms of numerical reasoning, I've learnt - for example - that it takes more than two people to lift an electric piano up six flights of stairs where the console of said piano weighs more than one of those two people. Regarding cultural diversity, I have discovered that buying frites in Brussels after nightfall during Ramadan is a task that requires a great deal of patience, good local knowledge and a fast car.

Teambuilding is another valuable competence often learnt in house-moving. Especially where this involves the lifting of heavy objects.
We all know about teamwork: we all use our skills to communicate effectively whilst at the same time taking time to listen to others; we are all highly motivated and welcome the opportunity to pass on our enthusiasm to others; we are all able to cooperate but not afraid to take a leading role and convince others of the plausibility of our ideas. On paper anyway.
I recently discovered what role I really take on when trying to solve a complex problem - such as extracting a 160 x 200 cm sprung mattress from its position wedged in a tiny attic stairwell. I play a very important part: in fact I'm the one collapsed in the corner, giggling helplessly, liable to say things like: 'ok never mind, let's try Ben's idea now', 'yep, that sounds good to me' or 'does anyone want another beer?' I see it as a motivating, cheering role. In other words, largely useless...

*Subject to availability, terms and conditions apply.
** note to self, file glossaries before going away for the summer, while I can still remember the name of the meeting.

Home again

2010-08-09T00:10:00.001+02:00

I am back in Brussels now - swimming against the tide as usual, since everyone else has just finally downed headsets and skipped off to warmer climes.
Ah Poland: once again the meat counter defeated me and I ended up ordering three hundred grammes of szynka wiejska when actually I wanted 3 decas. Or indeed 13. 130 grams, dammit. About half as much as I eventually got anyway.

Pino: proszę 3 deka szynki wiejskiej
Pani sprzedawczyni: Co?!
Pino: proszę 3 deka szynki
Pani: ...?
Pino: ok proszę trzysta gramów szynki...
(Pino's friend: who on earth buys 13 dekas of ham?! That's just weird)

In any case, now I'm back in Brussels. Trouble started on the Eurostar when my seat was occupied by a teenage French brat:
- but weee wanteed to seet togezzer...
I tried to calmly blag an upgrade from the train manager, but she was having none of it. I suspect that had I been a forty-something businessman in a grey suit she would have granted my request.
Every time I get the Eurostar I can feel the tension rising as I anticipate having to fight to keep the seat I've already paid to reserve. Possession is nine tenths of the law, and once someone else's bum is firmly planted on your seat, you're in a lose-lose situation: give in and you have to find yourself another space, which you then risk losing at the next French Deluge getting on at Lille. Insist on having your original seat, and you expose yourself to awkward, resentful silence from your neighbour after having ousted her indignant friend. I never have this problem on any other route so the only logical conclusion is to blame it on the French. Disclaimer: the author of this blog has nothing against francophonic persons and insists that Some of her Best Friends Are French. Honestly.
Fellow Eurostar travellers! If you really must sit together then jolly well book your tickets together and sit in the seat you've been assigned to. And that way you will help prevent frustration and high blood pressure disorders in otherwise mild-mannered conflict-averse persons like me.

Miraculously, no-one broke into the flat while I was away, the internet still works, my taxi got from Midi to My Place in a record ten euros and I found a whole can of beer in the fridge. There were a few other items in the fridge as well. One of them may have been a tomato, but resembled a very tiny, mouldy round of goat's cheese. My unwashed coffee cup in the sink sported an interesting fungal structure that steamed when I ran the tap into it.

Tomorrow will be a day for opening bills and paying bills and checking bank accounts and getting keys to new flats.

Better get a good night's sleep then.

Wszystko gra

2010-08-03T22:02:00.000+02:00

I went to meet New Boy off the night train at Warsaw Central. We decided to spend the day in Warsaw and leave his bags at the station.
The przechowalnia was run by a rotund, middle-aged Polish man, who persisted in staring into the middle distance somewhere past my right shoulder so that I couldn't tell whether he was talking to me or to the guy behind me.

Pino: Dzień dobry proszę Pana, czy możemy zostawić bagaż tu?
Man (speaking to somewhere vaguely beyond P's shoulder): Ile sztuk?
Pino: dwa
Man (realising P is not Polish): Ah. Two!
Pino: tak, dwa.
Man: yes! Two!
Pino: (takes out purse) Ile to będzie?
Man: No! Pay after. After!
Pino: ok, dziękuję bardzo
Man: Please! Thank you.

New Boy (casually): Wszystko gra?
Man: (with broad smile of manly recognition): Taaak, wszystko gra!

Pino: Fine. From now on you can do the talking.

And another thing

2010-07-30T01:18:00.000+02:00

I forgot - there's one more thing you can do in Poland in the rain.

12/ Go and buy ice-cream from the legendary lodziarnia on Starowiślna. Take advantage of the fact that almost nobody else but you will be crazy enough to eat ice-cream in this weather, and get your ice-cream fix without having to queue in the street for half an hour.

I recommend chocolate, borówkowe, poziomkowe...

Things to do in Poland in the rain

2010-07-28T19:59:00.001+02:00

After two weeks of complaints about the oppressive heat, Poland has finally answered all of our prayers: on Sunday the heavens opened and rain has been pouring down ever since. It's dark, everything feels permanently damp, and I am constantly chilled to the bone, having packed only flimsy summer clothes and shoes.

For the umpteenth time, I appreciate what inspired the Slavs to invent vodka.

But before I drown my sorrows in apple Redds and chocolate, I'll share a little list I've been mentally compiling, of Things To Do In Poland In The Rain.

Here goes:

1/ Complain about the weather. It's a well-known fact that complaining (narzekanie) is a national sport in Poland. Roll up your sleeves and get stuck in.

2/ Drink. I think this needs no further explanation. There's nothing like a few shots of ice-cold Wyborowa to make the world feel like a better, warmer, altogether more glowy place.

3/ Eat. Especially stodgy food, like pierogi, bigos, and other things that contain lard. This is to coat yourself with a nice layer of fat in preparation for a long, long, hard winter.

4/ Pretend your pop-out umbrella is She-Ra's sword. By the Power of Greyskull! Sword to Shield! (Na potęgę Posępnego Czerepu, mocy przybywaj! - ok not exactly the same thing, but the only one I could find on Wikipedia)

5/ Do your Polish homework. Brush up your biernik. Dust off your dopelniacz. Polish your Polszczyzna. No, you're right... I'm sure we can think of something else to do before it gets to this stage.

6/ Go to a museum. Poland's history is a long krwawy kalendarz of violence and tragedy. This has had a significant impact on present-day Poland... notably in the form of lots of cool museums. Try the Galicia Museum in Kazimierz or the Warsaw Uprising Museum in Warsaw for a start.

7/ Go to the optician, have your hearing tested, make an appointment at the dentist. It's cheaper here than in the UK or Belgium, and you get to learn new vocabulary for free. What's not to love?!

8/ Watch the entire first series of Teraz albo Nigdy on Onet video on demand. Or Magda M. Or Kasia i Tomek... you get the idea.

9/ Go and watch a pessimistic Polish film. You probably won't enjoy it as much as Teraz albo Nigdy, but you will feel more virtuous.

10/ Hide in the back room of Massolit, drink coffee, and read books you have absolutely no intention of buying, from sections you would never normally dream of checking out, like World Religions, or
Sociolinguistics.

11/ Sit at home and listen to Coldplay. Pour another shot of vodka...

Moving on up

2010-07-27T01:03:00.000+02:00

I think I've written about Polish yuppies before. A couple of years ago maybe.

I just spent the weekend in Warsaw, visiting my old flatmate* and hanging out with some of her friends. My flatmate moved to Warsaw to work for a consulting company and she rents a studio of a rather similar size and layout to the one I rent in Brussels.

We took the tram out to her friends' place in the suburbs. The sky was overcast, rain threatened, blocks loomed grey and relentless out of the dusk. Then, after about twenty minutes, the blocks thinned out and started to look tidier. Some of them were painted in pastel colours. Sloping gables were added and frosted-glass balconies.

We stepped off the tram and scuttled across the road after waiting several minutes in vain for a green light at the pedestrian crossing. The directions led alongside one of the blocks. There were no pavements alongside the roads, only - in some places - gravel edging rather weedy land which may or may not have been destined for landscaping or lawns at a later date. This was not a place for pedestrians. On the ground floor of the block we passed two banks, a hairdresser, a sushi restaurant, a dental surgery. We crossed another road and walked alongside another block (this one so new that some of the flats still had tape on the windows) until we reached the furthest entrance.

Inside, the block of flats resembled nothing so much as a smart hotel. The concierge was seated behind a smooth, gunmetal grey desk. We called the lifts which - in stark contrast - were still lined with chipboard (my flatmate's friend later explained that this was because people were still moving in heavy items of furniture and they didn't want to damage the inside of the lift).

Inside the apartment was immaculate (although the owners and their kitten had moved in only a week or so before), pre-furnished, fully equipped. We were awestruck.

We ate courgettes with mozzarella, fried chicken, garlic bread. Washed down with Polish beer of course. The conversation touched on the housing market, flat pack furniture, Warsaw, work. The same things that young professionals in London and Brussels talk about. Although in London there's now an undercurrent of tension - young people work long hours, everyone is concerned for their job, their mortgage, their student loans.

Why did this strike me so much? I suppose because in London no-one I know can afford a fully-equipped new build: in London, even half an hour from the city centre is still more or less in the city centre and therefore too close to be affordable. Also all the old-fashioned stereotypes about Poland: that people live in tiny apartments, earn peanuts, are strict Catholics who would never dream of getting a mortgage with someone without the social and moral security of a wedding ring apiece first. Oh and the firm conviction that all young professionals have, that determination and hard work are enough to get you a good job and a comfortable lifestyle and that anyone who can't manage this is just lazy. Rather like the French, back in 2007...

I'm not so sure on this last point. I feel that I'm very lucky finally to be able to do what I've wanted to do at least since leaving university.
- yes, said my flatmate - but you did work hard to get there.

Yes, I did, but I was also born in Sevenoaks, in a country where women are free to get an education, leave the house unaccompanied, wear whatever we like. In a region where there was decent state education in the form of grammar schools. Lucky, right?

* warning: it's in Hungarian. Frustratingly, Google Translate is no use at all...

The modern young woman's guide to dealing with emergencies. Part V...

2010-07-26T23:44:00.000+02:00

... the noisy children's toy.

I think we can all agree that nothing is quite so appealing as a Toy That Makes A Noise. Better still - a Book That Makes A Noise. Especially the kind that Really Annoys Grown-Ups...

Let's imagine for a moment that our pioneering young heroine is subletting a nice apartment from friends of friends who happen to be away for the summer. Naturally she is extremely careful to keep it clean and tidy and barely dares to open a kitchen drawer for fear of breaking something. However, in spite of all her good intentions...

- Early evening. Our enterprising young woman returns from classes and tandems and coffees, throws her bags to the floor and flops onto the bed.
- dust clears.
- strange wheezing sound becomes apparent
- did I break the vacuum cleaner?!
- tries to locate source of strange wheezing noise
- it's coming from the hallway
- noise resembles a sort of Clanger-like in and out wheeze, starting from a low pitch, whooshing up high and then swooping down low again.
- traces noise to bookshelves in hallway
- what on earth is going on?!
- carefully draws out one book, then another
- noise continues
- throws caution to the winds and pulls out whole handfuls of books at random

- finally!!

- a toddlers board book about a baby aeroplane...
... with a round metal sound-effect button on the front.

- relieved, pushes button to make it stop

- wheezing continues

- pushes button again. Maybe it's stuck.

- wheeze continues

- tinkers around with metal button for a while. No dice.
- gets fork. Pokes around to try and dislodge sound circuit. Noise stops...

... and then starts again.

- Time to go out to dinner. Surely book will have worn itself out by the time she gets back?

several hours later...

- opens door...

- wheezing sound.
- picks up book and - very, very cautiously, holds it under the kitchen tap. Lets a couple of droplets drip directly onto the noise mechanism of the book, careful not to cause any actual damage to the book itself...

... wheeze continues.

- opens tap a little further. Water gushes onto book. Cardboard begins to swell. Noise weakens...

... but doesn't stop.

- opens patio door. Puts book on back step. Shuts door...

... wheezing still very audible.

- takes hairbrush. End of hairbrush handle is roughly the size of the noise mechanism on the book.
- steady-handed, and with a precision worthy of a bomb squad, raises hairbrush and hammers it down on the mechanism...
... nothing.
- hammers again, a little less carefully.
- nothing.
- hammers harder, twice in quick succession. Book is starting to look a little dented.
- Wait! ... blessed silence.
- Goes to bed.

Three days later

- wakes to wheezing noise. It is one in the morning.

- hits book twice with hairbrush and shuts it in the tumble drier.

- promises self that she will buy the family a replacement book before she leaves...

*see parts 1-4 on gas leaks, getting locked out, moving house and losing bus tickets...

One week

2010-07-17T23:25:00.001+02:00

A week! It's been a week! And sadly my brain power is so zapped by five times four hours of Polish interpreting (not to mention language classes, tandem, cinema and plain old day-to-day survival) that I have been incapable of crafting the witty missives that I so hoped Kraków would inspire in me.

Instead, I've compiled an A-Z (well, roughly) of this week. Probably not even in alphabetical order...

Arbuz - watermelon. Essential for keeping cool in Polish heatwave. And definitely not from French* (which explains the bewildered looks at the fruit stand in Brussels when I asked for 'une arbouse s'il vous plait')

blada - look, by my standards this constitues a tan, ok?!

kabina - a hot little soundproof box where you put on a pair of headphones and try to piece together
something plausible out of the spider's web that constitutes Polish syntax.

kamieniołom - quarry, especially abandoned quarries formed into a beautiful, clear-blue lake in the middle of the city, surrounded by steep cliffs. It is absolutely forbidden to climb down the cliffs and swim and none of us would ever dream of doing such a thing...

lącz - meal eaten in the middle of the day, after classes.

Magda M - ok, ok, I gave in and bought series 4 from Empik.

piwo - something I can't drink anymore without getting migraines in the heat

upał - it's too bloody hot. When I visited in January, the thermometer on the wall showed minus 15 degrees and I had to go out and buy extra woolly socks to stop my poor toes freezing off. Now the temperature is in the 30s and I've just spent most of my Saturday languishing on the sofa with a packet of frozen spinach pressed melodramatically to my forehead. When I finally managed to stagger out to the pharmacy - swaying a little under the sheer weight of the warm air - I noticed a teenage boy loitering about on the street corner, dressed only in knee-length shorts, playing Polish rap** from his mobile phone. On my return, about twenty minutes later, he was still there, pacing about aimlessly, skipping between rap tracks, pale torso baking in the heat.
As I passed, I realised that he was probably trying to sunbathe...

*it's pasteque in French. I always forget this because I've never been in a French-speaking country in hot weather. I never, ever forget the Italian or Polish versions.
** plosive-heavy Polish consonants are perfect for spitting out angry rap lyrics: I can't believe this idea hasn't taken off more widely. The music is terrible, of course.

You know you're in Poland when...

2010-07-09T20:10:00.000+02:00

... guys you don't even know carry your bag up the steps at the train station. With no prompting on your part.

I could get used to this...

So very Sevenoaks

2010-07-08T21:52:00.000+02:00

An apparently normal scene: a child refuses to hold Mummy's hand and stomps away, hot, furious tears splashing his cheeks. Yet another frustrating blow to his fragile four-year-old dignity.

NO, Mummy! I want SUSHI!!

I don't think we're in Kraków any more...

A lot of faffing about

2010-07-07T22:16:00.001+02:00

It's hot in Kent. Since I came back, many beautiful things have happened. There was a gorgeous fairytale wedding. There was a radiant sister and her new husband glowing with happiness and looking every bit as besotted with each other as the day they met*. There was a centenarian grandmother miraculously fished out of the gloom of dementia for one lovely wedding day. There was a New Boy who bought the last seat (first class) on the Eurostar to make it in time for the last two hours of the gorgeous fairytale wedding reception. There were gloriously sunny, cloud-free skies and one black and white springer spaniel utterly delighted at having so many strange new guests to play ball with.

And now?

Now I am at home, in Kent, listening to birdsong in the fading evening light, trying desperately to get through my To-Do list before skipping up the orange-painted easy-boarding-steps on Friday morning, racking my brains (and the Economist.com) for two to three speeches per day for the next three weeks.

I have visited a grandmother, drunk wine with friends in London (pretending not to be able to smell the stinking brown Thames lapping sluttily below the terrace), gone shopping far more than my work schedule (which is empty until September) allows, admired a fit-to-burst baby bump, gone for long, sunny, ravenous walks to country pubs (with closed kitchens) and subjected a New Boy (who is admittedly still far too new for this sort of thing) to a veritable legion of curious friends and relatives.

I feel calm here. My trip is organised, my flat is - mostly - organised, and now I just have to let things roll along as they should (apart from a few last-minute items on the To-Do list oh help).

I'm ready for you, summer.

Bring it on...

*obviously I wasn't there that day: it's a quote from the best man's speech.

Graffiti

2010-07-06T16:48:00.000+02:00

Seen on the back of a cubicle door in the ladies' loos of the Thameside Inn, near London Bridge:

'Staśka Rzondzi'

I was about to get out my correcting pen when I started to wonder. Is this really a case of dysortografia, or is it a deliberate mistake for stylistic effect: a sort of Polish 'I woz 'ere'...

... any ideas?

On being Grown Up

2010-06-20T09:44:00.001+02:00

I just lost an entire Saturday to a hangover, something which hasn't happened to me since at least... um.. well, since I left Poland anyway. As far as I can tell, I have a critical mass point where alcohol, lack of sleep and proper food are combined, and after which a full-blown vomiting migraine is guaranteed, regardless of how much I have actually drunk. On days like these, I can feel my brain swelling against the inside of my skull and I can't even keep down water. When I was a child, I used to get these attacks without the help of alcohol at all, so, looking on the bright side, at least these days I get to do something fun to deserve it first.

- but I didn't think you drank that much last night...
- *writhing* It's not really about how much.
- can I use your coffee machine?
- do whatever you like (but stop talking to me)
- would you like some baguette?
- *starts to retch*
- it's really fresh. mmm...

I am sure that by now I should know better. I should be able to listen to my instincts, and refuse that last pintje. I should eat sensibly, go jogging in the morning instead of last thing at night, and pay my bills As Soon As They Arrive, and not three days after the deadline (guilty). My life should be organised in all departments: but it's not...

- Work: I should go to bed at 10pm on a school night. I should file my glossaries Straight After The Meeting, and not three weeks later, when I'm looking for something else altogether, and when I can't remember which stray page belonged to which working group. I should not be flying down the hill at 9.50 am, with my hair only half-dry and make-up smeared on haphazardly, scattering a trail of scarves and documents and access badges behind me.
It is not grown-up to be childishly excited about working in the Parliament, which feels overwhelmingly like Darth Vadar's Death Star, or on the secret top floor of the Commission, which resembles nothing so much as the command bridge of the Starship Enterprise, poised to launch itself out over a - probably largely apathetic - Brussels. I resolve also to develop greater lift management skills. There must have been trainee Storm Troopers who leaned against the alarm button in the Death Star lifts on their second day and were startled by a disembodied voice saying 'Deespatcheeng bonjour?'. Fortunately the lift stopped at my floor before they had a chance to come and dispatch me and I left my fellow traveller explaining that 'oui, c'etait une erreur, il y avait une dame qui...'

- Housework: I am officially a slattern. I don't think I've vaccuumed the flat since before my sister's hen party in Edinburgh. The bath has a greasy grey scum ring around the plughole. I've run out of shelf space for books, so any new acquisitions (which are frequent) are piled up next to the sofa. I can't put down my keys or glasses on any surface because I won't be able to find them again. I am fielding gentle hints like: 'that bin looks ready to take itself out' and 'you know, it's so much nicer when things are tidy'. A lot of colleagues have cleaning ladies (mostly Polish), but I'm too embarrassed to admit that I can't keep fifteen square metres of studio clean all by myself. Plus I'd never tidy the flat in time for her arrival. And I seem - however improbably - to have inherited some hugely misplaced working class pride from somewhere. Possibly from my mother, who would have got it from her mother who spent most of her life as a maid, companion, dinner lady, etc. I'm faintly ashamed at the thought of someone else coming in and scrubbing my loo (in any case I would do it better: bordering on the obsessive).

- Luurve: uuf. I should be able to play it cool, instead of ... um... holding hands on the second date. I should not send drunk text messages. My mobile phone (and facebook) should come equipped with breathalysing devices. I must learn not to break out in a cold sweat or to visibly shudder at the sound of the words 'boyfriend', 'girlfriend', 'relationship' or 'children'. Eek.

- Food: I will finish a lettuce before it goes all slimy in the bottom of my fridge. I will do the washing up properly, and not leave it out until brackish dishwater stains the plates and I have to wash them all over again. I will eat fruit. Every day.
In my Masters year at Bath, things got a little competitive, and even the lunch table was not exempt from the madness. We would sit down together, sneak furtive glances across at our dining companions, and then whip open our lunchboxes. Out would come neat sticks of celery, chunks of cucumber, carrot batons. At particularly stressful moments, I would take a wholemeal pitta stuffed with lettuce, sliced tomatoes and the most fragile of reduced-fat cheddar shards scraped from the edge of the block. Mineral water was the order of the day, and there was a fierce contest to see who could get their full five-a-day into their packed lunch.
Oh, and the following do not constitute a healthy breakfast: chocolate cereal, waffles, Speculoos spread, leftover pizza.

Summer: I must organise a) my Poland trip b) a place to live in September. Before I leave in two weeks...

I will also go to the dentist, some time, definitely. Oh crap, and pay my social security.

Above all, I must stop splashing in puddles when it rains. Which after all in Brussels is pretty much all the time.

You see my problem?! Are you grown-up yet? Would you be afraid of your cleaning lady?

New entries in the Uxbridge English dictionary

2010-06-18T19:53:00.000+02:00

cohesion - heasing for two

harmonisation - doing it Harriet's way

sustainable... but don't bother feeding the cows

implement - sung by a sad pixie

Presidency - kind of like a Presidence

Polish - a little bit like a pole

Leuven - Brummie romance

Parliament - supposed to go in the parlour

ramification - ovine cardinal sin

strategy - multi-level pony

CAP reform - shaped like a goat...

On the move again

2010-06-18T01:00:00.000+02:00

I am planning to move house. Not far, this time. Although the thought that I may well stay in one place - and not just any place, but Brussels - for more than a year at a time scares me more than the Polish Pani in the ground floor newspaper shop.

When I arrived in Brussels in September last year, everything was uncertain. I had no money, knew literally three people, and had no idea what work would be like and whether I would be able to support myself in spite of the Belgian tax monolith. My house-hunt took in studios, garrets and even one or two cramped 'kots d'etudiant' (one was more or less a corridor with a single bed down one side, above a Thai restaurant on rue Dansaert).
I eventually plumped for a small studio next to the park, about five minutes walk from work. It is largely dominated by a huge 'lit mezzanine' - basically a double bunk bed. Without a lower bunk. So exactly like a bunk bed then. It's very sturdy actually and withstands - um - all kinds of testing. On the outside wall is a huge sliding patio door overlooking a garden (where no-one goes except the guy with the lawnmower and - once - a strange gentlemen with a large black poodle) and leading out onto a long balcony. It faces south, so when the sun shines it feels bright and airy (even though in reality it's small and poky).

However, now I have what I can hazily pass off as a Real Job, I want a bit more. I'd like a separate room so that my guests and I don't trip over each other in the morning when I have visitors to stay. I'd also like space to put a sofa, a dining table, maybe a larger desk... space to dance in.

I'm tired of living with a stranger's smelly old furniture: I have decided to take the plunge and go unfurnished. It's amazing how much clutter can silt up your house in just a few months: my tiny studio is overflowing with old electricity bills, piles of used notebooks filled with the incomprehensible scrawl that passes for note-taking in my world, scuffed shoes and endless cardigans worn once and big binders full of printed-out glossaries that I don't have anywhere else to keep.

I have seen three empty flats in the past two days. Each time, I climb to the top of the stairs, step through the door and marvel at the light and space and freedom of a flat without furniture. I want to spin with my arms out and fly across the floor in a string of extremely wobbly foutté turns and not-so-grande jetés.

But usually I have no desire to frighten the nice agency lady.

It's so exciting and overwhelming. Each empty space I can imagine as my new home: in my mind I fill it with sofas and a piano and friends and loaded wineglasses, and I trace my steps around the quartier, look to see which would be my local shop, which my favourite café. I can barely believe I might be able to afford a Whole Flat to myself. It is terrifying, after years of living for the next invoice to come through. I am afraid that someone will come along with a big clipboard and say: 'Stop! Who do you think you are? Who said you could live in a Real Apartment all of your own? Don't you know there's Super Tax to pay?! Go directly to Jail, do no pass Go.'

Can I really do it?

Shoes and pain

2010-06-16T20:17:00.000+02:00

I love summer. I love wearing skirts and feeling the sun on my legs (always a novelty experience for a British person) and I love the way the heat makes you slow down as you walk, sinking back into the sweltering air, slowing your breath and relaxing into the cushioning warmth.

I hate wearing socks and tights and anything clingy or elasticated.

This means that in the morning I slip my bare feet into pretty high-heeled sandals and in the evening I have to coax my bruised toes out of them again, the skin all cut to ribbons by straps and rubbing leather.

It hurts.

I first discovered summer sandal pain at the age of about seven or eight.
I have very oddly-shaped feet: narrow at the heels and ankles, high arches, broad at the toes. I always thought this was extraordinarily shameful and ugly until I first bought blocked ballet shoes and discovered that my feet best suited Freed shoes, which had the nicest (to my taste) satin colour (more salmony and not too pink).
Trips to the shoe shop were a nightmare: I would slip my foot reluctantly into the slide measure and wait for them to pull the tape around my toes, hoping and praying that my toes had suddenly got miraculously slimmer... but no - I always took the second-biggest width.
The sales assistant would then pick out the ugliest, roundest, most sensible shoes she could find for me to try on. I remember looking down and seeing a pair of round, navy, clomping school shoes that made my feet look like they wouldn't be out of place on a baby elephant.
Remember that this was in the late eighties, when pointy shoes were all the rage.

At a certain point, I rebelled and refused to wear anything but sandals. It was a good compromise: they were usually open enough not to squash my hated toes, and pretty enough to satisfy my vanity.

One day, in the summer holidays, we went on a day trip. Probably to Bodiam Castle but I don't really remember. Bodiam Castle was by far our favourite place to go: it's a ruined twelfth-century castle with spiral staircases and crumbling walls that are perfect for climbing onto and jumping off. For obvious reasons, clambering about on the castle walls is strictly prohibited, but we saw this as a mere formality. Besides which, there were three of us, and only one Mum. She never stood a chance.

I remember buckling on a shiny brand-new pair of pink leather sandals with great pride, before setting about scrambling around the castle. It was a hot day, and socks were for sissies.

By the afternoon, all the knuckles of my toes were skinned raw. I distinctly remember crawling out of the end of a large concrete pipe (don't ask), peeling back the sandal strap and seeing red, broken, weeping blisters.

Nothing has changed. I refuse to wear tights in the summer, I can't bear those awful shoe-protector insert things: they crumple and stick out and look disgusting, and socks are simply not an option.

So for now, I'm persisting, walking to work in trainers, wearing Birkenstocks wherever possible in the evenings, and buying all the shares I can in Compeed...

Out of Office

2010-06-09T18:58:00.001+02:00

Thank you for your message. I am currently out of the office. Please leave a number and I will get back to you...

A Productive Afternoon

2010-06-07T17:40:00.000+02:00

All you need

2010-06-05T12:12:00.000+02:00

We were just leaving my sister's flat: my sister, her fiance, her best friend/bridesmaid and me, when suddenly she stopped short:

- I've forgotten my phone!

- So what? said her friend: You don't actually need it. Everybody is here.

'Everybody is here'.

What do you think: who counts as 'everybody'? Who are the people that you really need the phone for?

So you had a bad day

2010-06-05T12:07:00.000+02:00

After quite literally inventing a twenty-minute presentation on macro-economic recovery* read at breakneck speed by an excitable Italian economist, I was more than ready to slink off at lunch time and commit Hara Kiri in a neighbouring spare booth**.

I gained the lift and to my horror, just as the doors were closing one of the meeting's co-chairs slipped in behind me.
- what did you think? he asked
Desperate to disguise my terrible French, I replied simply that it was interesting.
- what do you do?
- I'm an interpreter, I mumbled sheepishly, hoping he'd been listening to our French colleagues.
- Ah. Well, I thought it was formidable! Brilliant!
- Merci, I smiled automatically and then suddenly realised my mistake.
He got out at the third floor and the other woman in the lift turned to me - Nice to get compliments, no?
- Umm... I said... I think actually he was talking about the speakers...

*It may not have been about macro-economic recovery actually. I'm not really sure what it was about.
** For reasons of prudence, it is not recommended to perform ritual disembowelment in your own booth as this tends to upset relationships with colleagues. Plus it makes a terrible mess of the carpet.

Ceci n'est pas une Hen Night.

2010-05-31T00:29:00.000+02:00

We know all about hen nights (or at least Stag Nights) in Kraków. They involve large herds of British males or females (almost always exclusively same-sex groupings) roaming around the streets after dark, drinking beer, wine and/or vodka by the litre. Normally, individuals in the group will display similar characteristic markings, often in the form of white T-shirts bearing slogans or L-plates. It is thought that these markings have some significance in the mating process, but it is not understood exactly how.

My sister is getting married in about a month, which is utterly brilliant in every way. If it just so happened that several of her closest friends were - quite by coincidence - to find themselves all in Edinburgh on the same weekend, all booked into the same hotel, all with dinner reservations at the same Extremely Posh Venue (hen parties strictly prohibited, of course), you couldn't really call it a hen night, now could you?

Hen Party?? Who, us, officer?!

Just to make the difference perfectly clear, I thought I would write some instructions on how to be definitely not having a Hen Party. Just to make sure, you know.

- Afternoon, Day One: Go with bride-to-be to Tesco to stock up on food and booze. Wear hair down and no make-up. Have checkout lady ask both of you for proof of age. Walk on clouds for rest of afternoon.
- Evening, Day One: Attempt to get a table for dinner when Sex and the City II is on preview in the cinema next door. Fail and go for a drink. Be refused entry into pub for failure to produce proof of age. Feel even more thrilled and continue to neighbouring pub with rather less scrupulous bouncers.

Day Two:
- attend surprise cheerleading workshop. Help bride-to-be pretend she didn't find out the secret content of the ~~hen-night~~ very sophisticated accidental gathering a month ago. Find cheerleader pom-poms strangely comfortable and start to wonder about your hypothetical position in the American high school popularity tree.
- return to bride-to-be's flat for wine, make-up and hair straightening. Groom-to-be is waiting by the door with golf clubs.
- Try to understand the principle behind hair straighteners and fail utterly. Feel old.
- Groom-to-be slopes off to the driving range.
- Drink a lot of pink wine and marvel at the prettiness of everybody's shoes. Especially your shoes.
- Order taxis to Very Posh Venue. Try very hard not to act like a hen party. Suggest alternative themes such as 'early retirement' and 'baby shower', both vetoed by bride-to-be.
- Drink more pink wine, take photos and fail to finish pudding course. Attempt to totter to loo wearing very high (but beautiful) high heels without skittering on Very Polished Floor. Try to maintain an air of decorum appropriate for a ~~drunken hen party~~ very sedate gathering.
- Start to lose track of the evening. Forget that you swapped your Belgian SIM card into an empty phone with no contacts, and commence drunken text roulette with unknown numbers. Paranoia ensues.

The morning after:
- Eat large Scottish breakfast (this includes haggis) and sleep on sofa.

- Give bride-to-be a big, big hug for actually organising quite a lot of it herself not to mention ferrying people to and from airports...

In the park

2010-05-23T21:40:00.000+02:00

Hallelujah! Finally the sun has come to Brussels. I wandered out to the park with book and iPod and settled down with my back against a tree to read a little and daydream a lot.
After about half an hour, I heard 'Excusez-moi' from over my left shoulder.
- Excuse me, said the guy, 'can I sit down with you? Maybe we could talk for a bit?'

I got up hurriedly, gabbled that I had to meet someone and rushed away.

But... as I was walking away, I wondered why I was so reluctant to talk to the guy. He was perfectly polite, he seemed clean and didn't look particularly odd in any way. He had tanned skin, dark hair and a strong accent: perhaps it was a case of a deep-seated racism I was hardly aware of? I slowed my pace and started to think it through. If the guy had had blonde hair, would I have talked to him? Had I ever dated a guy who was not a white European? If I had been approached in the same way by a woman, would I have found her as threatening?

I thought about how many intriguing conversations with fascinating people I was missing out on by refusing to speak to strangers in the park (on the train, in a cafe, etc). After all, isn't that how most romantic comedies start? Boy bumps into girl at random and conversation starts?

A few years ago, I went on an Erasmus exchange to Trento in Italy. I remember, six months earlier, having returned from a worthwhile but often disappointing assistantship at a small town in Brittany and I was determined to do it better this time around. As I strode out of baggage reclaim, chin held high, I decided that this time, I would be completely open to new experiences: I would talk to everyone.
I struck up a conversation with the woman sitting next to me on the airport bus (clearly a backpacker). It didn't hurt one bit. I was encouraged.

I only spent five months in Trento, but in those five months I learnt to ice-skate, snowboard and read mediaeval musical notation. I ate Melinda apples in the Val di Non; drank Fragolino in Verona; bought fresh pastries from the bakery window before dawn on the way home from a night out; accepted lifts to concerts on impulse; spent long, lazy afternoons sunbathing with my flatmate in the park behind the flat and long, lazy evenings cooking huge, slow pots of pasta with friends and drinking litres of red vino da tavola. I gained a few kilos and near-fluency in Italian (both of which I subsequently set about losing).

What do you think? Do you talk to strangers? Where do you draw the line between a harmless conversation on the train and something more threatening? When would you stay and talk, and when would you up sticks and leave?

I'm curious: just how far should I trust my instincts?

Common language

2010-05-21T00:42:00.000+02:00

Last night, after the concert,* we went en masse to a nearby Irish pub to celebrate. Since we were such a big group, the manager came over and started moving tables.
- something something something... tafel
...he muttered.

I turned questioningly to a Belgian friend and then said to the guy 'I'm sorry, I don't speak Flemish'

- I'm Irish.

... said the bar manager.

Things were so much simpler when everyone just stuck to Polish.

*There's another one tomorrow, I gave you the link, what are you complaining about?!

Back seat driver

2010-05-18T00:46:00.000+02:00

I love Kent, it's ever so pretty. We have a family wedding coming up (not guilty) so Mum and I decided to hit the shops, in our case Bluewater. The trouble is, I don't drive all that often, so Mum normally takes the wheel.
Kent - as I said earlier: a pretty place. Full of narrow little lanes, lined with pretty hedges. Some of them pretty tall too. Tall enough to hide - say - a tractor.
Mum was just describing her friend's new living room when:

Car cuts around blind corner, swerves to avoid oncoming Transit van.

Pino (gripping the door handle): Mum!! Don't cut corners when you can't see around them!
Mum: Yes, yes, I saw him!

Later, the red tops of two huge delivery lorries loomed into view above the hedgetops on a turn up ahead.
Sure enough, after a few moments we met the first of the two very abruptly on another blind corner.

Mum: Ooh gosh, what's that doing here?!
Pino (eyes closed, knuckles white on the door handle): Did you not see that before?!!
Mum: All under control...

Kent has a big problem in that it is located squarely between the South East coast and London. This makes it fair game for Central European GPS systems possessed by Czech and Polish lorry drivers everywhere. And we all know how GPS systems work. The minute that commanding female voice rings out we are helpless: we have to obey. All logic is swept aside as we trundle across fields, swerve into slip roads, cut across lanes - unthinkingly following the order to 'Turn Left!', with clear disregard for our own sense of reason.

We survived the journey and carried out extensive research into the effectiveness of retail therapy before heading back to the twisty Kentish lanes. In any case, tonight I will be checking for stress-induced grey hairs...

Comparisons

2010-05-16T17:04:00.001+02:00

This:

....is an English springer spaniel.

And this:

... is me.

I've been thinking about this theory that people are like their pets. And I've come to the conclusion that the spaniel and I actually have quite a lot in common.

For example, we both like to work. The spaniel came from a gun dog breeder in Kent, and she likes nothing more than to play endless, pointless games of fetch. She is at her happiest when hunting some pesky tennis ball out of big bed of stinging nettles. When she is too tired to play, she carries the ball or the toy in her mouth and chews it until she has got her breath back. If there is no-one to play with, she takes the ball to the top of my parents' sloping front drive, drops it under the car, and runs around to catch it as it rolls out on the other side. I have a really great video of this but it has my sister's voice on it so I will post it as soon as I've worked out how to remove the sound.
The dog is obsessed with tennis balls and bouncy toys, and I am obsessed with pens, highlighters, glossaries and my laptop. When there is no-one around to play with, I will happily make notes in the margin of Polityka, or listen to clips on Repubblica TV.

Also, we are both a bit shy. The spaniel is scared of strangers and often growls at people who just want to be friends with her. I can definitely see where she is coming from, but fortunately human social protocol does not admit that sort of behaviour.

We don't like it when people shout. When my Dad knocks over a big tray of paint on the hall carpet, or when I stub my toe on a chair, the spaniel slinks away to hide with her tail between her legs. She also has a horror of the vacuum cleaner, which I think is very reasonable.

And lastly, we are both easy to please: a long walk in the woods on a Kentish spring day will bring a smile to both our faces

Are you similar to your pets? How?

Blocked

2010-05-13T00:51:00.000+02:00

I stumbled home from work at about 5.15 pm, climbed into bed, read half the Financial Times and about two pages of my Italian detective novel and fell asleep for two hours. Finally I have found a job that mops up all the excess brain activity and leaves me with no energy to write. On the one hand, I love the job, I'm thrilled to finally be doing what I've wanted to do for - ok - the last maybe only two or three years. But on the other hand, I'm aware that I'm spending all day voicing someone else's opinion, trying to concentrate on a meeting that I knew nothing about yesterday and that will mean nothing to me tomorrow.

My - admittedly rather rather boring, 'let's please everyone' nice girl - personality wants to assert itself. I want to do something for ME. I sing an awful lot*, but the one activity where I really feel creative and feel proud of myself is writing - even when it's just a silly little blog post.

It's funny: I arrived in Krakow over three years ago, in April 2007, and there was almost too much to write: I couldn't cram it all in. I was grappling with an impossible language (and still am for that matter), a Slavic, Catholic culture that was largely unfamiliar and my first full-time job in a very different country. Every day I was presented with situations that could be either terrifying and discouraging or utterly hilarious. I chose the latter option. And I got there by writing about it. Had I not taken all my terrifying experiences with banks and Urzędy Skarbowe and the genitive case and Bad Obwarzanki Ladies and made them sound all cute and quirky and funny, I would have thrown myself into the Wisła after the first couple of months.

Here in Brussels, things are a little more familiar. Yes, the bureaucracy is a pain in the arse. Yes, customer service is if anything worse than in Poland. Yes, there are weird traditions (peeing statues, the Zinneke parade, a Kriek & Frites festival that resembled nothing so much as a family wedding in the country), but I tend not to get so involved in them. I find myself less inclined to take sneaky photos. I hang out with other ex-pats and have little contact with the locals. Language is not a problem: I speak fairly craptastic but at least serviceable French and have no intention - for the moment - of learning Dutch because languages are work now and do you have any idea how many Polish words I still have to learn?! One thing at a time, people!

So, for the moment my posts are cursory, summary, lacking in creative flair.

Here's a quick round up of the headlines, just in case you were wondering:

- Election: I'm so pleased that there's a Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition. Apart from anything else, I couldn't decide who to vote for. And DC and Clegg look so cute together...

- Ash cloud: I have a couple of flights planned over the next two months so I'm really hoping it stays away from Brussels. Besides which, I blame it for the freezing weather that Belgium is currently 'enjoying'. I swear I could see my breath condensing in front of me as I walked past the park this morning.

- Polish update: I've been branching out into detective novels and just finished Tęczowy Cocktail by Helena Sekuła (thanks Peixote). I'm at the stage where there are still a lot of words I don't know, but this doesn't prevent my following the story. This means that I carry on reading and probably miss essential details of the plot. I put this down to sheer laziness - but on the other hand, if you spend too long looking up words, you lose concentration and your understanding of the whole sentence is affected. In any case, I have a Polish dictionary on my phone and use it whenever... well, whenever I'm not too lazy.

Talking of too lazy, I think it's bedtime.

Oh - and a resolution: I will try and find just one little thing to comment on each day - even if it's only a few lines. One tiny, quirky or interesting thing about Brussels, Belgium, languages, Polish culture, and all the other the things we like to mull over here. (By we I mean me and people who comment - I'm not giving myself the royal 'we' yet, far from it...)

*http://www.brusselschamberchoir.be/agenda.php among other things

Election 2010

2010-05-07T03:07:00.000+02:00

Fun fact: in Poland you are not allowed to write about elections for a certain number of days before and after the election. This is to stop people being influenced by the press. Can you even imagine this happening in the UK?! (see 'it was the Sun wot done it', 1992)

The first time I got excited about a General Election result was in 1992 when I was eleven.

When I was little, the world was ruled by two powerful women with very similar haircuts. I found it hard to tell the difference between the two but it was clear that women with granny perms ruled the world. This was right and good and exactly as things should be (I have already selected the colour for my purple rinse).

By 1992, everybody thought Mrs Thatcher was crazy and there were cartoons of John Major in all the papers wearing grey underpants over his trousers.
I was terribly concerned that Labour might win the election, because I had taken the eleven-plus exam* and was desperate to go to the local grammar school. If you didn't get into the grammar school, you would go to the secondary modern, where your head would be flushed in the toilet and nasty big girls would threaten you with knives in the playground. Other girls from my primary school who had visited the secondary modern on an open day said that you got to make pizzas there, but I was still suspicious. It sounded like a ruse to me.
Labour were the dark demons of socialism who would abolish the eleven-plus exam and insist on comprehensive head-flushing for all.
My friend's Dad wrote for the Independent and she had explained to me that the Liberal Democrats were the real good guys. When we played 'Members of Parliament' in the school playground, she was always Paddy Ashdown.
But that was a side issue: as far as I could see, only a Conservative victory could save me from a life of head-flushing and knife crime.

On the morning after the election, my Dad woke me up and said 'grammar schools are safe'. My desperate eleven-year-old soul was flooded with relief. My head would stay dry and my ticket to a university education was in the bag.

I have never found myself quite as excited about politics since.

* an exam kids take to decide whether they go to a more academic school or an ostensibly 'more vocational' school.

May Day! May Day!

2010-05-05T11:23:00.000+02:00

Summer has come to Brussels. I have discovered that my work capsule wardrobe of about three jersey dresses plus opaque tights is woefully not up to the job. It's been a sticky few days. My one skirt suit and three cotton shirts are looking sadly inadequate now. Shopping in Brussels is not that great either: there's a choice between rue Neuve, to the north of the city centre. Classy it is not: think Bromley high street on a Saturday and you're pretty close. The pedestrianised street itself is always heavily packed, even on a Monday. You'd think unemployed people would have better things to do with their time than go shopping. However on closer inspection it's just the street that is crowded: if you slip into one of the shops (not counting H&M or Hema - a sort of Belgian Woolworths) it tends to be fairly empty. Sisley (an Italian high-street brand related to Benetton) do cute blouses and suits that are slightly nicer than Next's rather boxy offerings, so I may have to venture back there and stock up. French chain Promod are ok for pretty skirts and cardigans. But I still haven't found a decent place to buy shoes. I arrived in September with one pair of black flats, one black heels, running shoes, trainers, hiking boots, birkenstocks and slippers. I have since been home and collected knee-high brown boots, black evening sandals and a pair of pink ballet-style heels that I love.
Clearly though this is still not enough.

The second shopping area in Brussels is Avenue Louise. Avenue Louise is broad, posh and lined with boutiques. I am somewhat afraid to go there, plus it's on the wrong metro line (here you are either on 2 and 6 or 1 and 5). I wonder though whether it may hold the key to my shoe worries...

Gosh what a boring post! Let's publish it, get it out of the way and move on.

The Other Dog

2010-04-27T23:48:00.000+02:00

On Sunday, my Dad Skyped me to say that The Other Dog was suddenly very much worse than before. On Sunday night, the vet rang to say that the kindest thing would be to put him out of his misery. My parents waited until their usual vet came in on Monday morning and by the afternoon it was all over and The Other Dog had slipped away to raid the Big Kitchen Bin in the Sky.

The Big Kitchen Bin in the Sky is a great place for dogs like The Other Dog. In this happy place, it is permanently lunchtime and there are always builders sitting outside the house, eating sandwiches. It is a place where children eat biscuits and drop A Lot of crumbs. This place has a big back garden with plenty of gaps in the fence to escape through. The kitchen door is never shut and dustbins have ill-fitting lids which are never quite securely on. For a dog that likes to lie in wait under the breakfast table, a real treat is in store: no-one ever wears slippers in the morning and deliciously cheesy feet poke in under the tablecloth. Nobody complains or squeals when a warm, slobbery doggy tongue slurps between their toes. The Postman visits four times a day.

The words 'No', 'Sit!', 'Drop it!' and 'Diet' do not exist there.

He was a very lovely, friendly dog and good with children and elderly people (coincidentally also the two demographic groups most likely to spill food). With the rest of us, he was a grumpy git who stole other people's sandwiches and hid behind the sofa at the sound of the word 'walkies' after dusk, but still we loved him lots and we miss him terribly.

Things to do...

2010-04-24T13:48:00.000+02:00

... when all your work has been cancelled due to the ash cloud.

- First up, know your enemy. Learn to pronounce its name. That's 'Eyjafjallajokull'. Tip: Icelanders pronounce 'll' as 'tl'. I know, it seems odd. But the French pronounce 'll' as 'y' (sometimes - I've never quite worked out when). Not so weird now, right?
Alternatively, laugh at other people trying to pronounce it:
(see, I told you Icelandic would be useful!)

- Lose track of time (the clocks going back has really thrown me: how can the sun still be shining at 8pm?) Take your watch off. Read a book. Forget to go to bed. Turn the alarm off and roll over. Set your email to 'out of office'. Be late. Sit on the Grand Place and watch the stranded tourists. What day is it again?

- Practice your Polish: altogether now: 'Poproszę trzy razy Zywiec z sokiem imbirowym. Dziękuję bardzo'. Was that so hard?

- Forget to do basic household tasks. Ignore that ironing pile. Who needs clean socks anyway? The sun is shining (through the ash)! There are terraces to sit on! What are you still doing here?!

- Brave the Belgian pharmacy. Somehow, there are three or four Belgian pharmacies on every street. I am not sure how they make a profit but I suspect heavy subsidisation. In any case, most of them have a tiny pharmacy counter at the back, and a cavernous front section packed with shelf upon shelf of expensive skincare products. What they are all for is a mystery to me. I am a relatively girly girl, but as far as I'm concerned, skincare consists of a decent cleanser, make-up remover, moisturiser and spot cream. It was going to buy this last that led to my downfall.
I went to a pharmacy I've visited before, one where there is a bustling, overtly-discreet middle-aged lady behind the counter. The type who revels in embarrassing problems. Go in for pre-holiday Immodium and she practically rubs her hands with glee.
- I need something for blemishes please. I said, hoping for something strong and medical.
Mme Pharmacist puffed out her chest in delight... 'I have just the thing....' she said in a loud stage whisper, and bustled out to the front of the pharmacy, towards all the expensive beauty products, before I could stop her.
- This is the best cream. And you must get this as well. And you'll need this for the daytime, this lotion for the night... If you get two products you'll get five euros off now and then they'll send you a third free, so I recommend you get this, this and this and then order this one...
I was overwhelmed. I let myself be carried along by it all.
- And now I just need a second address, it can be anyone: your sister, your aunt...
- But my aunt lives in...
I gave in, wrote my UK address, paid and found myself standing on the pavement, almost out of breath, with a neat little paper bag full of Vichy face-potions.
It all happened so fast...

- Do your accounts. This involves a lot of long phonecalls to the Ministry of Finance, a lot of being passed around between different departments, a lot of 'Je vous entend tres mal!' and more than enough bad hold music. All before midday, which is when the Belgian Ministry of Finance closes. And they wonder why there's a constitutional crisis...

- Become a drunk. The prerogative of people in 'stressful' professions everywhere. And the only thing to do on a Wednesday night when you don't have to go in to work the next morning. I've noticed however that Belgium is the only place where I get disapproving looks for tottering home late at night on my own. I'm starting to get a little paranoid. Hmm, maybe I'll have a little gin and tonic to help with the stress. Make that a double...

... and it's Monday again...

2010-04-19T22:28:00.001+02:00

... how did that happen?

The żałoba for the presidential air crash is over (although Gazeta Wyborcza is still in black and white). I watched some of the funeral, cried a bit (mostly because of the fantastic music and footage of lovely Kraków in mourning, not to mention Jarosław Kaczyński looking pale and sad on his own - it must be awful to lose a twin) and wondered who was providing the interpretation. Burial at Wawel castle is a bit of a controversial issue, since this is an honour reserved for Polish kings and heroes. I think the generally accepted view is that burying the Kaczynscy on Wawel hill symbolises all the victims of the crash and by extension the memory of the victims of Katyń. In any case, emotions have been running high: reactions from the Krakowian side have been largely anti-Wawel, not least because the President preferred Warsaw as a city anyway. In any case, it's done now.

Ash cloud: I can't see any sign of the ash cloud. There have been clear blue skies over Brussels for at least four days now, all the more so for the lack of vapour trails. The balcony door has been open all day and the sunshine is flooding in. It's weird, for Brussels, but I'm not complaining...

I would, however, like to book trips to a) Kraków - for the blogmeet and b) Italy, somewhere, anywhere, for a few days of linguistic and cultural immersion and a reminder of why I love it all. So please, ash cloud, disperse yourself! I promise to study my Icelandic pronunciation diligently (for strictly musical, not professional purposes).

And lastly: I genuinely thought that by the age of twenty-nine my Clearasil days would be far behind me. Sadly not. Sigh. What's the French for Benzoyl Peroxide?

By lamplight

2010-04-12T23:41:00.001+02:00

My love affair with all things Polish began in 2005, on a university choir tour to Kraków. Actually it was around the beginning of April 2005. The weekend after Easter. I wouldn't normally remember the date of a student trip, only this one was a little different, and not just because we brought winter vomiting flu to Luton airport (that, I feel, is a story for another time).
While we were in Kraków, at the end of March 2005, an elderly Polish gentleman (whose parents are buried in the Rakowicki cemetary in Kraków) lay dying in hospital. This elderly Polish gentleman was also known as Pope John Paul II, and, while we were enjoying the bright spring sunshine in the Planty, all of Poland (or at least all of Kraków) was out in the streets keeping watch for him and lighting candles. There are a lot of things about Polish Catholicism that make me uncomfortable, but one thing that I find striking in a positive way is its emotional side. That week in spring 2005, I and several other of the choir's excitable Catholics (and non-Catholics) went to kneel in Kościół Mariacki at one o'clock in the morning, stood outside what I now know to be the famous window on ul. Franciszkańska, lit candles and held hands with Polish strangers in the middle of the night and listened to them singing with tears streaming down their faces.

I was enchanted by a people that would go out on the streets to pay their respects to a man they may never have met, but who none the less was a son of their city. Leaving aside a budding fascination (or at least the sense of a challenge) with the language, my lasting impression was of a beautiful city flooded with cool, sharp sunshine and, by night, of people keeping watch and praying in the street.

Strangely - and possibly hypocritically - I feel cynical about patriotism and public displays of emotion in the UK, while in Poland I find it moving.

On the eve of All Saint's Day in 2007, I visited the Rakowicki cemetery and saw the lamps crowding the memorials and lighting up the darkness of the graveyard. I learnt that even empty plots are sometimes given lamps because no grave should be left out and it's a collective responsibility to make sure that no-one is forgotten.
When I was home for Easter last weekend, my Mum told me that she went to look for her father's grave and was upset that she couldn't find it: more plots had been added and the landscape had changed. Maybe we just have other ways to remember people and to pay our respects. Maybe not. I would like there to be lamps though.

By Saturday afternoon there were already flowers and candles outside the Polish Embassy. When I came back later in the evening, lamps were burning and there was a crowd of people standing outside keeping vigil. More flowers were there today.
Politically I was not a big fan of Kaczyński but no-one deserves to go like this; a lot of people died in the plane crash and it's especially awful that among them were representatives of the Katyń families, who have already suffered more than enough.
Incidentally, there are books of condolence at the Embassy if you live in Brussels and want to pay your respects. The doors are open from 9am until 5pm, until Saturday.

Not a great photo because I felt a little disrespectful taking pictures, but Polish mourners were (very discreetly) snapping away as well so I thought it was probably ok.

Condolences

2010-04-10T14:13:00.000+02:00

This morning the Polish presidential plane crashed near Smolensk in Russia, on the way to a ceremony commemorating the 70th anniversary of the Katyń massacre. It is estimated that 96 people were on the plane, none of whom survived. Passengers included Polish President Lech Kaczyński and his wife as well as MPs, senators, commanders of the armed forces and the head of the Polish Institute of National Remembrance.
A whole swathe of major figures in Polish public life was killed, with bitterly poignant timing. On Polish blogs and news sites, the 'comments' boxes teem with conspiracy theories: old tensions with Russia are easily reawakened. Questions have also been raised about the age and condition of the presidential aircraft and the wisdom of transporting so many important people in the same aeroplane.
Now is not the time for speculation though. Now is a time to offer deepest sympathies and condolences to Poland and its people and to all who lost family or friends in this tragic accident.

BBC Article

Gazeta Wyborcza

Why I am such a rubbish blogger at the moment

2010-04-05T17:40:00.000+02:00

Many things. The last post that I wrote - and have not yet published - was about being attacked in the town centre last Friday, and I decided that it was too angry a post to actually publish. I am toning it down, but I want it out there so that other ex-pats are aware that the Belgian police are not necessarily on your side.

I'm in Sevenoaks at the moment and I don't use the computer as much here, mostly because there are Real People to talk to, dogs to walk, etc.

Things (in no particular order)

Easter - Easter at home is all about daffodils and roast dinners and going to church a lot. I don't attend church in Brussels: there's something about francophone Catholicism that I find hugely uninspiring. Probably the fact that people go in, listen and stare with glazed eyes for an hour, take Communion and then flee the scene. There is no participation, no sense of connection or enthusiasm and worst of all No Music, apart from the usual nasal chanter leading responses that no-one joins in.
On the other hand, I am loath to go to one of those suspiciously friendly ex-pat churches, where well-meaning but overbearing parishioners zoom in on unsuspecting newcomers like hawks and before you know it you are on the coffee rota and attending evening songs of praise and signed up to goodness knows what else.
I am just starting my third decade on the planet, I have grey hairs (only two) and lines on my forehead and am increasingly wondering what it will be like to die. If I am going to be religious, I need it to engage me on an intellectual level, because at the moment I'm afraid Dawkins and the like have a pretty strong rational argument.
In the church that my parents attend, there are intelligent, professional people, whom I admire, and who have very strong beliefs, and I want to know where it all comes from. What do they know that I don't?

Katyń: I rented the DVD and finally saw this film, monopolising my parents' television and lounge for a good couple of hours (by the time I'd got 36 minutes into the Andrzej Wajda interview at the end I think they had had more or less enough).
I'm not a film critic and I tend to get emotionally involved in films, rather than making a detached analysis. I do however watch films set during this period with a great deal of caution, knowing how easy it is to be carried along and to become incensed about an issue which is not my battle.
One thing I will say is that the English subtitles on my rented DVD were appalling. Obviously my Polish isn't good enough for me to be able to catch everything on a film soundtrack (nor for that matter are my French and Italian, sometimes, if the accent is difficult, the dialogue fast and the background music loud). So I wasn't checking the translation. In any case, there's a fair amount of Russian and German dialogue in the film. And I'm not a trained subtitler, although I'm aware that there are certain time and space restrictions.
But: every time I looked down, the quality of the English was poor. It had clearly never even been checked by a native speaker. Subtitles are a way for foreigners, in this case English speakers, to access a film and a story that they would never otherwise have heard. What a betrayal of Wajda and of his subject matter to use such bad quality subtitling! Why, for the umpteenth time, is no-one prepared to pay for decent Polish to English translation?!

The Other Dog is very old and grumpy now and almost completely blind. He was diagnosed with diabetes some time last year and in the time it took to get it under control he lost his sight. He also has liver failure and is still not putting on weight, for no apparent reason. My parents have had him insured from the outset, which is lucky because the tests and consultations and overnight stays at the specialist vet's have already run to thousands of pounds. He seems perfectly happy, although he walks into cupboards a lot and occasionally trips over bumps if we forget to say 'step!'. He still eats and enjoys going for short walks and snarls at us if we tread on his tail. His ears prick up when you call him and he trots along with his tail in the air like a flag. My theory is that if he's still bright enough to try and raid the kitchen bin then he's far from ready to go yet. But I'm sad for all the people who have to put down pets which are still relatively healthy because they simply can't afford the vet's bills.

Things: my parents' house is full of things. Things they have collected over more than thirty years of marriage, things their grown-up children have left behind, things they have inherited from elderly relatives who have moved on in any sense. Some of the things are interesting: the tub chair my paternal grandmother used to sit in to have her hair set, a mysterious pastel portrait known only as 'Mrs Harford', boxes and boxes of old slides and photos. But all the interesting things are smothered in piles of linen and papers and old clothes and crumbling plastic bags full of ancient children's toys.
When somebody visits, they have to rearrange the things to make room for the extra person.

When I stay here, I feel as though I am suffocating under the weight of all the old things.

bad punnage

2010-03-28T13:08:00.000+02:00

I am watching The Politics Show and wondering just who are all these Poles who are apparently in favour of David Cameron?

'polls', geddit? oh please yourselves...

very dull summing-up post

2010-03-23T23:41:00.000+01:00

I suppose you want to know what I've been up to.

Maybe you don't. Maybe all three pinolona readers have long since sloped off to look at something more interesting.

I would like to write something, I really would. However, my brain is ever so slightly more or less short-circuited at the moment, meaning I'm not really able to string a sentence together, let alone pen the witty yet perspicacious missives to which you have become accustomed.

Yesterday, I fell down a rabbit hole and up three lifts and across possibly two bridges as far as I remember and worked in a New Place. I think it merits a decent blog codename. We're talking about a highly-complex, self-contained anthill, with its own food supply, retail outlets, hair stylists, border-control system... a little like that huge thing in Star Wars. Oh wait, isn't that the Death Star? I can't call it the Death Star. I'd rather like them to ask me back.

*** long pause while author looks up more appropriate Star Wars reference. It is a revelatory but fruitless search***

We could call it Wonderland for the moment, and ignore the naughty little voice in the back of my mind whispering 'Death Star, Death Star, Death Star'.

A lot of the day was spent being shown around. At the end of it, I was none the wiser. For example:

- This is the XXX building, but it's known by the acronym XYZ. Here's the main XXX bar, but everyone calls it the 'xxx' bar, because of the XXXX.

Or:
- To get to X room, go up in the lift to floor 3, then take another lift to floor 5, then go down one floor on the fire escape, and so on and so forth ad infinitum.

Oh gosh, being discreet about work makes for boring writing. Maybe I should go underground, close pinolona, and open a Truly Secret Blog.

Frighteningly, I have discovered that colleagues often know who I am before I have met them. Similarly, I also 'know of' people that I do not yet actually know. The world seems to have suddenly become very, very small, and I am terrified of speaking to anyone in case I say something inappropriate and everybody hears about it.

In fact, I'm just generally terrified. Let's change the subject.

What else is new? I have yet to go back to the Commune. I do however have a new Special Piece of Paper at my disposal, and I am quietly hoping that this is the key document that they will want. With luck, I will hand over my new attestation, all the pieces will fall into place, the sunlight of common sense will break through the eternal cloud of Belgian public administration and all will be well with the world.

Who am I kidding?!

This morning, I slept through my alarm for the first time in years. Last time my body pulled this particular trick I had just come back from a week in New York and was properly jetlagged.

It is Tuesday. This does not bode well.

Any other items?

Oh yes: I'm taking a break from the Slavic to learn a little Icelandic... in a musical context of course. It's quite cool actually. What is it about? Your guess is as good as mine:

Music, underground, continued.

2010-03-15T19:47:00.000+01:00

I've just realised I entirely missed the point of my last post.

What I meant to write was a systematic analysis of the economic interest behind accordion-playing on the metro, given that the accordion player in question is generally greeted only by dismayed faces and desperate, vain door-banging on the part of anguished commuters trying to escape the cacophony.

Surely the persistence of accordionists on the underground rails of Brussels points to an underlying demand for accordion music? If so, who are these lovers of squeezy, wheezy folk music? Just who is paying the piper? I have never in my whole entire six months (ahem, I mean two-and-a-half weeks Mr Belgian VAT Man) in Brussels seen anyone give them money. Not even to stop. Perhaps there is some fabulously wealthy Euro-millionaire who regularly buys peace and quiet on the way home with a fat euro-cheque, but I very much doubt it (surely these people would have drivers?).

And if nobody is paying them, then why continue? Is it a highly-sophisticated distraction technique, intended to leave the poor commuter hunched in pain while the accordionist's child accomplice pinches their wallet? Or is there some other profit of which I am unaware?

I would be very interested to know who or what creates a demand for such a product in such a location.

Is it you?

Music, underground.

2010-03-13T16:20:00.002+01:00

I found Brussels metro surprisingly tranquil for the first few months after my arrival. However, it seems that the little accordion guys have found a way to sneak the bastards on board: you can tell an accordionist by the suspicious bundle, carried at chest height and sheathed in black plastic bags or a large black cloth. No sooner have the doors swooshed shut then, with a triumphant grin, they whip off the cover and start to force a wheezy caterwaul out of the poor battered instrument.

As soon as you see the smile spread across his little face, your heart sinks and you try to get as far away from the awful noise as possible. It is bad enough that your ears are already assaulted by canned music at each metro stop without also having to sacrifice the relative peace of the train carriage.

Now, I am not against accordion music per se: I rather admire the Ukrainian accordionists who play on the Kraków Rynek (although they have a repertoire of three - Mozart's Turkish Rondo, Bach's Toccata in Hammer Horror minor and I forget the other one. Maybe there isn't a third one). But what I appreciate most is the choice: stop and listen, or walk on by. I do not like being stuck in a tin box hurtling down a tunnel, crammed into a corner with a bloody accordionist for heavens' sake, and no 'mute' button.

The selection of platform muzak at Brussels' metro stations is eclectic to say the least. I have heard - regularly, uncensored, at Arts-Loi - a sweet little ditty from Lily Allen's latest album, entitled 'Bless you'. Well, something like that anyway. Put it this way, BBC Radio 1 can't play it: there would be no lyrics left in.

Are you kidding, Brussels? Does nobody at STIB/MIVB actually speak English?! And even if they don't, surely the One English Word that everybody knows (apart from 'ok' and 'coca cola') is precisely that one?!

In any case, at around six in the evening (at least at the weekend), the piped pop is replaced by soothing classical music: presumably to ward off the Belgian equivalent of hoodies. The classical selection is actually not too bad. Sometimes it's better than Klara Continuo (maybe it is Klara Continuo).

One of the best things about living in a pedantic country like Belgium is the sense of triumph you get when you finally find a way of undermining the system. Stand up for your rights! Refuse to submit to metro muzak! Fight fire with fire...

... by singing along. We wouldn't judge you.

(altogether now...

Va pensieeeero! sull'ali dora-a-a-te!

I HATE Belgium

2010-03-09T10:25:00.000+01:00

I HATE Belgium. Officially. I HATE the constant summons to the Commune, to be snubbed by some fat, pea-brained Belgian local government pen-pusher with a large salary and no sense of initiative*. I HATE being asked to provide a different document each time and then when I arrive being told that it's the wrong one and I am late and I should have brought Annex X blah blah blah.

I HATE that I have to pay over two thousand euros in social security per year - effectively paying the salaries and child benefits of the fat, brainless local government penpushers - when I have absolutely no intention of retiring here or withdrawing a Belgian state pension.

I HATE the look of simple contempt I got from the fat local government penpusher this morning, simply for being a foreign woman who dared to speak up to him in his own language.

P: Here, my declaration of revenue for last year. Hands over tax declaration.
Fat official: That's no good. I need a monthly declaration.
P: Divide it by twelve! It's a valid declaration of my earnings.
Fat official: It doesn't count. You need a monthly declaration.

Please note, that the Fat, Stupid Official simply kept repeating the same words, over and over, without attempting to explain or justify anything. Because when your salary and social security contributions are guaranteed for life by the Belgian government, you don't have to be polite to people or to think outside the box. No-one is going to fire him, it's too difficult. All he has to do is slump like a fat dollop of stoemp in front of his computer all day and be obnoxious to foreign girls.

See what I mean?! Fat and stupid, all of them. I spend my hard-earned euros here, in their country, paying their extortionate sales VAT rate, and there they are, treating me like a piece of dirt on the bottom of their shoes!

I HATE that - although I have every right to be here, as a European citizen with freedom of movement - they decide to make it as difficult as possible for me to function here. Why do I need to register anyway? I pay my rent, I have enough to eat, why do I need one of your silly little identity cards when I have a perfectly good British passport thank you? And what makes you think I'm so desperate to be a Belgian resident anyway? I would love it if work were located in London and I could simply bypass all this ridiculous bureaucracy altogether. Believe me, I am not here for fun!

I HATE that the 'Capital of Europe' has to be this bureaucratically pedantic little city, when it could be in Paris, Florence, London, Kraków, Berlin... Europe has so many beautiful and lively cities. Why does it have to be hateful Belgium?!

I HATE Belgium!

*what did you think I was going to say?!

Ghent

2010-03-09T00:20:00.000+01:00

Finally, I got to look around Ghent. At least, I almost did.

For some reason, temperatures in Brussels have once again plummeted. After finishing work I went to meet up with a friend. Ghent is known for being pretty and cool and for having canals. We tried to walk along the canal towards the main square. Icy winds whipped our coats open and our hair around our faces.

- Let's go for coffee. Somewhere indoors.

We found a great café, somewhere that used to be a Socialist Cultural Centre, and stayed there for two hours. Then my friend had to go. I tried hard to visit the centre of Ghent, I really did, but I was dressed to sit in front of a microphone and not to battle with the elements.

The final sign that it was destined not to be came on the threshold of the cathedral. Resolving to do Something Cultural before escaping with relief on the next tram to the station, I decided to go in and have a look around. There were two or three shallow steps up to the main doors. A wedge of rather splintery plywood formed a makeshift disabled access ramp. To one side sat a stout Roma lady with a begging bowl.

You can see where this is going, can't you?

As I approached the door and started up the steps, the Roma lady called out to me. I turned to look at her and at the same time quickened my step...
...causing me to lose my balance and trip on the disabled access ramp. I sprawled forward, one shoe flying off and one knee smashing down hard onto the stone step.
The Roma lady began to chatter urgently. I snatched back my lost shoe and lurched hastily and dramatically into the cathedral, giving what must have been a pretty fair impression of the hunchback of Notre Dame.

I hate to say it but I'm a coward with injuries, especially my own, and once inside my head began to spin and colours flashed in front of my eyes. Relinquishing my last shreds of dignity, I sank onto the floor with my head between my knees, looking for all the world like a four o'clock homeless drunk.
The church floor was cool and smooth and the air dry and clean. The spinning began to subside... and then along came the Sacristan and shooed out me and the other tourists and vagrants so he could close the church.

I gave up and headed for the nearest tram stop.

I promise to go back and take pretty photos of Ghent, some other time. Preferably once Belgium stops behaving like the Siberian steppes and the sun comes out again.

VAT actually

2010-03-02T00:21:00.000+01:00

After several months of wavering between one side of the Channel and the other, I finally bit the bullet and joined the dark side. I am taking the plunge and becoming a Resident here. This means I have to pay VAT, even though my turnover is laughably low.

To pay VAT, you first need a VAT number (stay with me, this gets better, I promise). And indeed you have to pay to receive this magic number (why? Do they calculate it by rolling some kind of solid gold dice?), at a place called the Carrefour d'Entreprises. In practice this means your mutualité. Probably.

I went to the counter and took a ticket. It read 520. The number on the display was 739.

- Excuse me... excuse me!
The receptionist glared at me.
- I don't understand: this says 520 but the counter is already at 739.
- There are different series. Yours starts with 5.
explained the receptionist, as if this were obvious.

My turn came, about half a Tok FM podcast later.

The guy behind the counter was a smiley sort of Belgian. He smiled hello, did a double take and smiled again.
I explained my situation and he started tapping away at the computer.

- You seem tracassée
He observed, oozing charm, smiling some more.

- uhhh non, non, pas tellement...
To be honest, I was pretty damn tracassée. I was about - voluntarily - to sign up for significantly higher social security payments (largely due to a state pension that I will never receive, plus child benefits that everyone in Belgium pays, for everyone else's snot-nosed offspring), with no hope of a rebate for the first three years, not to mention all the administrative burden of a quarterly VAT return. And - thanks to major delays from the last French translation company I worked for* - I didn't even have the 75€ in my Belgian account to pay for the bloody VAT number.
I was coming out of the woodwork, while all my instincts were telling me just to lie low and hope no-one at the Comune came round to check. Here I was, volunteering to pay major extra tax, willingly moving from a small-business friendly economy to a bloody-unfriendly-let's-be-frank-here one. Just the thought of it brought me out in a cold sweat.

The guy was very smiley indeed. He took my passport, copied it, clocked that it was British and came back talking in English. I think they may be trained to do this. I certainly don't mind, and if I then rattle off at lightening pace in my native tongue, dropping in some juicy idioms on the way, is it my fault if they don't understand me? You want to speak English? Bring it on**.

Suddenly, to my great alarm, I realised that Smiley Belgian Guy was actually flirting with me.

He started to go through the social security form. Name, Surname, Place of Birth... oh no.
I could see what was coming.

- Are you married?
- Oh gosh no.
- Ah ha! slightly too-loud laugh, coquettishly raised eyebrow 'So you are all alone?'

No! No, I have a really, really tall boyfriend who works out a lot.

- Well, yes, I mean, I have a dog.
more laughter
- not here, obviously, at my parents' house. I can't bring her here, she doesn't have a passport. Can you go over this social security thing for me again please?

And - get this - now the guy calls to his colleague: 'Hey, how's your English? Can you come over here a minute?' Even though we had been speaking in French up until the moment I handed over my passport.

- Mais il n'y a aucun souci, je parle français!
- Vous parlez français?! (why does he seem so surprised?!)
- Je suis interprète quand même ...

This is a phrase I find myself using relatively often; I'm never quite sure how rude it sounds to a francophone... but it normally sorts out the English-speaking problem. He did look a bit affronted though.

- Sign here.

All this above-board business was starting to get to me. A twitch had developed in my left eyelid and the pen felt slippery in my hand.

- Anything else I have to do?
- Just e-mail me your diploma*** and pay for the VAT number.
- And where exactly should I email the diploma to?
- Oh yes... another smile - here's my card.

Very smooth.

* I came this close to adding a hyperlink to their website, but now is not the time nor the place.
** Although I realise I should be practising my French while I'm here. I find a foolproof method for being spoken to in French is very blatantly to read a very large book with a very obviously Polish title.
*** In Belgium you're not allowed to be a self-employed professional unless you can prove you're qualified for it.

Are Belgians shy?

2010-02-28T23:07:00.000+01:00

I haven't actually had the pleasure of meeting all that many Belgians, now you come to mention it. I've chatted to several at parties, I've met a few in various choirs, but I really haven't actually got to know all that many.

This could be my fault. I am - when not outright shy - at least reserved, in a bordering-on-the-reclusive old-fashioned British way.

But I don't think so. I mean, in Kraków I certainly met plenty of Polish people...

And, now I come to think of it, I probably know more Polish people here than Belgians. Even the slightly scary lady who sells the newspapers on the ground floor at work is Polish (sort of makes sense, doesn't it?). It's rather comforting actually, but that's beside the point. I've been here for almost six months and I only have two Real Belgians in my telephone directory.

I mentioned this to my friend in Antwerp, who has been here a bit longer than me.

- oh yeah, she said, Belgians are really shy.

I have to admit that the Belgians of my acquaintance have not struck me as particularly shy.
Especially the new Belgian friend with whom I hitched a ride back to the UK, across snow-covered Belgium and ice-bound northern France, after I missed my train home for Christmas. Note that she was just popping over to the UK to do a spot of shopping. And made it back - through fresh snowfall - within forty-eight hours. I have a lot of respect for Belgian women now.

However, my Antwerp-dwelling ex-pat friend described the awkward silences in the lift at work, the lack of eye-contact reminiscent of Monday morning on the Tube. One day, she said, two Dutch members of the management decided to play a joke on their shyer netherlandophone colleagues, by putting up posters encouraging employees to greet each other and make conversation in the lift.

The awkwardness must have been excruciating.

At least in Britain there's always the weather to fall back on.

Are Belgians really shy? What do you think?

oh gosh... (again)

2010-02-21T22:23:00.002+01:00

I am Working tomorrow, like, properly working, outside, with other people!
This means I have to:

- have a bath
- get dressed before midday
- put make-up on
- leave the flat

On the other hand, it also means that I must not:

- talk to myself
- check the blog during office hours
- take shoes off
- eat hair/pick nose/pick toenails* at desk
- get up every ten minutes to make tea
- mention Poland/my dog every other sentence.

oh gosh... it's going to be hard.

*not that I actually do any of those disgusting things, who me? What were you thinking?!

Freelancing pour les nuls

2010-02-17T21:58:00.004+01:00

A friend recently dived off the solid rock of in-house employment into the icy (often shark-infested) waters of the freelance market.

We were discussing the various aspects of working from home, cancelled contracts, weekends spent hunched over a hot laptop, a slave driver of a boss who has you up at all hours to meet a deadline (psst - by the way, that boss is You).

- But doesn't it drive you a bit nuts working from home on your own??
- No it's fine, really. I only ever go two or three days at the most without speaking to anyone.
- Two or three days?!
- It might be a good idea to get a television...

I've been going it alone for about a year and a half now, but only then did I suddenly realise how horrifying it all sounds.

Fortunately, I've found this helpful - if rather patronising - brief guide on how to be a freelancer. All you need to know on how to work from home... and not go utterly nuts.

1/ Make sure you eat properly. Properly means high-fibre breakfast cereal, lean proteins and green vegetables. You will be a lean, mean translating machine. It does not include Liegois waffles, Leffe brune or Nutella.
Eat at a table or - if no table is available - in front of the television. Munching over the computer keyboard (especially while Skyping) is strictly disgusting and we would never dream of doing such a thing.

2/ Leave the house once a day. Checking your letterbox does not count. Good excuses for leaving the house include: running out of milk, buying European Voice (I know you can read it online, but just pretend), visiting the Bureau des Etrangers, going jogging. If you are having trouble getting out of the house to do exercise, try buying new sports shoes or a high-tech sweat-absorbing hat. The prospect of sport is far more enticing when it involves outfits.

3/ Speak to at least one (real) person a day. This can be the lady at the Post Office, the bloke behind the counter at the 24-hour corner shop, the customer services staff at Mobistar, etc. NB Skype chat absolutely does not count.

4/ Maintain your sartorial elegance. Try to be out of your pyjamas by noon. Make sure you own more than one pair of sweatpants. So that you can wash them at least once a week. Remember where you left your hairbrush. Compensate for lack of grooming by wearing very girly earrings.
If you find yourself pulling on a pair of old comfy jeans every day... well done. You still haven't hit the bottom. Real home-workers find jeans formal and restrictive and are longing to ease them off and hang out in baggy tracksuit bottoms.

5/ Try to moderate time spent sitting in front of the computer screen. Do not on any account spend your evenings checking Facebook, scrawling on Twitter or writing blog posts. That is what office hours are for.

6/ Build up a good network of colleagues. You can then meet for regular lunch and coffee breaks. This is an excellent procrastination strategy as it will take you at least twenty minutes to get to the meeting point and back. Plus it counts as work (especially if you speak in foreign).

7/ Build up a good network of ~~other layabouts~~ people who like to drink during the week. This is a lot more important than you would think: Monday morning deadlines are pretty common, which tends to put a damper on your weekend. Then, when you get to Wednesday and are gasping for a G&T, you have someone to call on. This network may include other freelancers, students, the long-term unemployed, musicians, British people.

8/ Remember what time of day it is. This is trickier than you might think. Investing in an alarm clock is probably a good idea. If you can, try and remember the days of the week. It's nice to have an Actual Paper Diary, with little paper corners you can tear off. When things become chronologically distressing, it gives you something comforting to hold on to.

9/ Remember that none of the following are abnormal: talking to yourself, talking to the television, jumping when the phone rings, giving names to household appliances.

That's about it.

Thank goodness for that.

Fear

2010-02-16T18:12:00.000+01:00

I am currently in a paradoxical position. I'm about to start the job that I've always dreamed of (not that I would ever do anything so sentimental as dream, but let's pretend). Or in any case that I've dreamed of since that amusing little game in French conversation class where one lectrice pretends not to speak English and the other not to speak French and it's all terribly jolly.
The contradiction is that I'm absolutely terrified. My first day won't be for a little while yet and I'm avoiding all work-type buildings as far as possible. When I do go in (usually to fill in forms) I find myself unthinkingly edging along the corridors, close to the walls, as if I'm in some bizarre Eurothriller, with gun-toting enemies waiting around the corner. I end up standing in the front corner of the lift, nearest the door, not making eye contact with anyone and hoping no-one with heart trouble steps in on the next floor. I peer around doors before entering. I wish I could become invisible.
I am also frightened of colleagues. Even (especially) the lady who sells newspapers on the ground floor. I can just about manage consecutive practice with a Polish colleague. Meeting with English colleagues is slightly fraught but not impossible (all text and email correspondence is edited repeatedly: some people eat under stress - I correct grammar). I am Absolutely Petrified of the boss - quite irrationally because he is actually very nice.

The other day I got what appeared to be a medical bill written in Flemish. It took me a little while to work out what it was and then I remembered.
In about my second week here, I went on a date in Antwerp. I don't often go on dates, for fear of causing harm to myself and to other people.
Some time in the early evening on this date, I begin to feel a slight ache in my stomach. I had skipped lunch (because I was a/ nervous and b/ late for my train) and drunk a beer on an empty stomach, so this was not entirely out of the ordinary. We decided to go and get something to eat, and found a table at a rather posh Thai restaurant.
The food arrived. I ate a little. The stomach ache got worse.
- This is really great, said my date, 'you should try some'
I shook my head.
- Mmm, yours is really good too! He reached over with the fork and speared several chunks of chicken and cashew nuts, while I turned a fetching shade of pale green.
- I think I need to go home. I said.
We paid up and headed for the station.
The pain got worse.
I started to drag my feet.
- Maybe you should see a doctor?
- No, I'm fine, really, I just need to go home. Sorry.
We moved on, me hunched over and shuffling.
- Just give me a second... I said, and sank to my heels for a few moments.
And then the guy decided to play knight-in-shining-armour.
- I'm taking you to the hospital. Come on, we're getting a taxi.

I wasn't going to argue, and it was a huge relief to sink into the back seat of the taxi.

So that was how I ended up spending half a night in the emergency room of Antwerp hospital. Nothing was wrong with me. When I get nervous, my guts play up. And I was nervous, because I liked the guy.
They bundled me into an x-ray machine, asked me at least fifty times whether I was pregnant and whether I was sure I wasn't pregnant, and then gave me some horrible purgative thing, and I felt worse. It was far from dignified. I missed my last train back to Brussels and had to throw my contact lenses down the sink and stumble home half-blind the next morning (afternoon).

Needless to say, there was no second date.

And now - four months later - a hospital bill for seventy euros, reminding me of what an idiot I am, reminding me that I need to sort out my health insurance and transfer some money into my Belgian account, reminding me that I should really simply not date, at all, for the health and well-being of everyone.

And that fear and nerves have a way of sabotaging everything.

Just when you thought it was safe...

2010-02-11T23:43:00.000+01:00

I was going to publish a half-written post about a very eerie trip to the British Consulate, but in the meantime, I woke up yesterday morning to scenes rather like this:

Yeah, I know. Again.

Normally I'm a big fan of snow, and the incontestable fact is that Brussels under snow is a far prettier and less doleful place than Brussels under drizzle, but this is starting to get ridiculous.

Yesterday morning I went to see a man about a pension policy (I know!!).
- oh you managed to get here all right then?
I must have looked surprised because he added:
- all the buses are cancelled.

Welcome to Belgium.

Last night I went out for a quiet, mid-week beer with a couple of friends. That is, I tried to go out for a quiet mid-week beer. The place looked easy enough to find: follow the big road from the station and then turn right.

Only... somewhere along the line I took the wrong road.

The pub was less than ten minutes from Central Station and I managed to arrive there via an impressive detour which took in the Bozar, the Palais de Justice, the lift at the Palais de Justice, Brussels Chapelle station and the Eglise des Minimes.

On the way back I missed the last metro and fell over twice on the packed snow slipping and sliding my way home down Rue de la Loi.

Enough snow now. Thank you. Mamy dość zimy!

Luck

2010-02-08T13:51:00.000+01:00

It strikes me that I am extraordinarily lucky. Firstly, to have been born and to be concious and thinking and existing at all. I mean - what are the chances of that?
Not only to have been born but to have been born in a country where there is solid infrastructure and relative wealth and freedom in a relatively well-off family in an area with decent state schools, before it became utterly impossible to get into one.
And however much I worry and complain that I am going to run out of work and out of money and be unable to pay the rent, so far everything has been fine. I am not living in a cardboard box. I - miraculously and by some incredible fluke that I still don't really understand - have a work situation which will continue to get better (unless I go deaf or get tinnitus or lose my voice completely or have a premature stroke or get permanent tonsillitis - oh my goodness the list is endless).
Come to think of it, the Student Loans company has been ominously quiet recently. And I haven't started saving for tax this year yet. Plus I have yet to get my full electricity bill for the year... so there's still time for everything to part en couilles.
I and my immediate family all seem to be more or less ok health-wise: I mean, any one of us could be hit by a bus or catch swine flu or be frazzled to a crisp in an electrical fire or discover a terrible underlying illness any day now but... all right, all right, this isn't helping.

What I mean is that there are very few places in the world where a woman can live alone and support herself and be free to go where she likes, drive what she likes (bank manager allowing - so in my case a pair of rollerblades) and not have to get married or be forced into domestic or sexual slavery.

I am very, very lucky.

I am terrified that one day it will all go horribly wrong...

Kraków in winter

2010-02-06T17:32:00.001+01:00

Perhaps you are wondering why on earth someone would be crazy enough to go to Poland in January.
Well, it's actually rather pretty.

Here are some pictures:

Snowy saints outside the church of St Peter and Paul on Grodzka

The Wisła was totally frozen, how cool is that?!

Not actually a concentration camp, but leftovers from the film set of Schindler's List

Although Wikipedia says there was a labour camp here during the Second World War.

Interesting obwarzanki-based hanging decorations in Nowa Prowincja. Incidentally Polish Christmas decorations stay up long past Epiphany and were very much in evidence around town.

... and we're back.

2010-02-02T21:58:00.000+01:00

I'm sitting at the laptop, trying to puzzle out a long letter with a lot of information on it. I see documents to procure and send and photographs to scan and passwords to confirm and online forms that have moved to another web address.
In about ten minutes I will print it out so I can see the whole thing at once, and then I will ignore all the extra words and extract the bits that constitute things I actually have to do and write them down in a nice long list like the tasks of Hercules and lastly I will put numbers on them in order of urgency from 'could be put off until ~~tomorrow~~ ~~next week~~ August' to 'oh holy crap should have done this ~~yesterday~~ ~~last weekend~~ shortly after graduation' with a special priority boarding category for 'oh help will not get paid EVER unless I do this!'.

Aren't lists great? The worst thing about lists is ignoring them until eleven o'clock in the evening when it's too late to do anything about them, and then panicking all night. The best thing about lists is that feeling of satisfaction when you can strike something off, done, finished, accomplished! The most frustratingly common thing about lists is coming to the bottom of the page, taking all the items which are still not crossed off and copying them onto the new list on the next page.

My lists usually start like this:

'To Do - ~~Monday~~ ~~Tues~~ ~~Thurs~~ ~~Sat~~ SUNDAY'

It would help if I could think a bit more clearly but unfortunately I've been sitting on public transport since six minutes past six this morning.

Shortly after I had boarded the Wizz Air Party Bus and snuggled into a warm corner of the back row, a group of young, largely fair-haired guys stumbled into the bus and squeezed into the remaining back seats. The flight after mine was to Eindhoven (which - comfortingly in the event of missed check-in - is probably not all that much further away than bloody Charleroi), so I guessed where they came from. The young blond guy next to me turned, wafting a distinctive odour of stale brewery my way.
- Sorry for the stink! he said carefully 'but I have an excuse... it's my last night in Kraków'
- Mine too. I replied. 'but I didn't drink anything*'
It was 6.20 in the morning. Witty replies were not forthcoming, certainly not on my side. He turned back and after about five minutes on the road fell asleep and spent the next hour and fifty minutes slowly slumping further into my lap.

I suspect I am thoroughly cured of Dutch guys.

* a shameful lie, I had one mug of grzaniec.

Encounter on Szewska

2010-02-01T22:02:00.000+01:00

Walking down ul Szewska, face turned down against the cold, I was accosted by a man in a navy blue uniform.

- Zapraszam do rece i nogi!

-Excuse me?!

I pushed back the hood of my ski jacket and nudged my hat up a fraction so I could pull the headphone out of one ear.

- Zapraszam do rece i nogi!

- Przepraszam?!
My interlocuteur was wearing a heavy navy blue outdoor jacket and matching trousers, with stripes on the shoulders in the style of one of the many private security firms working in the city centre. He could well have been part of the Straz Miejska - a civil order service in the city. Was he inviting me to hit the floor? Was I about to be subject to a strip search?!

- Zapraszam do rece i nogi, repeated the guy, a little exasperated: 'do klubu!'

Finally the penny dropped: he was trying to advertise a club, on ul. Szewska, well known for being a party street. 'Rece i nogi' was the name.

I declined and moved on, wondering a little: nothing about the man's outfit or general attitude did anything to evoke the party atmosphere. And why on earth accost a lone girl (even that doubtful from a distance, given my thick winter clothing), wearing a ski jacket, jeans and hiking boots and listening - although he could not have known this - to Mozart. What on earth was he thinking?!

Zimno mi

2010-01-27T17:10:00.000+01:00

Wizzair airport bus, around four in the afternoon:

Eventually the bus pulls away and, sitting in the corner of the back seat, I can see colours and shadows outside but little else. The window steams up quickly with the passengers packed so close inside and when I try to wipe it clean, I find that the condensation has frozen on the glass. Ice has actually formed inside the bus.

Somewhere near Teatr Bagatela:

My friends live in an old kamienice with high ceilings and tall windows and a storage heater system which doesn't stand a chance against the sub-zero temperatures of a Polish January. The old thermometer on the windowsill outside shows minus eleven, but it seems to have been like that all day. The cat has not moved from the top of the heater since morning.
I take my teacup in shivering hands to the window and look out, over the silent snow-clad rooftops, towards the pale echoes of the sunset. Trails of chimney smoke curl gently into the dusk. Through the blackened branches of the bare trees, the sky is a wash of soft lilac and salmon shades and wisps of dove-grey cloud.
I stare past the houses and trees and catch a glimpse of a lost winter fairytale, long-forgotten, or perhaps never told...

Off on hols...

2010-01-26T08:39:00.000+01:00

... wearing three jumpers because my miserable Wizzair cabin baggage allowance only lets me take 10kg in a suitcase the size of a jumbo matchbox. Why oh why am I going on holiday to a country where the temperature is averaging around the minus 15 mark?!

All right, I'm going, I'm going!

did I leave the gas on??

January! Still here?!

2010-01-26T01:21:00.001+01:00

Monday. Monday in January. Not a lot has been going on in January - after Week One that is - as you may have already guessed from the turgid streams of drivel trickling through this blog over the past couple of weeks. My favourite Waffle (apart from the yummy Liegois ones with lumps of sugar inside) says that she can write a post in less than an hour. With no editing.
It takes me all afternoon to write a blog post. Often I leave them to marinate overnight. I edit compulsively.
And it's not just blog posts at issue here. I can't even write a wall post on Facebook in less than half an hour. Admittedly I do other things in between and come back to it, but still. So much for the instant gratification society.

But maybe I should just blurt it all out. Thirty mins max and then *Publish*! Say exactly what's on my mind. Nah... you don't want to hear that. Really? Are you sure? Right then, here goes.

Embarrassing shopping. Namely at the hands of an overtly, gleefully discreet lady pharmacist.You know when you're thirteen and you go shopping for feminine hygiene products with your Mum and she refuses to pronounce any of the operative words above a whisper? 'Do you need any - you know - *whispers*?' 'Sorry Mum, did you say TAMPONS?'. Lobster-faced shame. It's that dramatic, stage-whisper type of discreet. 'No, not the cream! I want the pessary! Single dose! Not that I... I mean, it's just in case, you know.' 'Anything else Mademoiselle?' *sigh* I'm about to go to the land of pierogi and precle and other low-fibre treats, and my stomach hates travel. I pronounce the relevant item and her face crinkles up in delight. 'Absolutely! We have our own special preparation'. 'Not too strong!!' I call urgently as she bustles off into the back room of the pharmacy.

Bills. It's so confusing being a grown-up. I had to pay tax, all by myself, for the First Time Ever. On Sunday night, having put them off until the Very Last Minute, I lined up all the bills, opened the unopened ones, juggled money from account to account, took a deep breath and clicked on 'Pay'. All this without even touching the emergency Pain Quotidien chocolate spread Noir or the emergency frozen Absolut.

Urgh, I told you. This post has been open in draft for about five hours already. It is now 1am. Typically, I am not able to sleep before travelling, to give me more time not to forget anything (or to make me sleepier in the morning so I do forget things).

Goodnight, see you all in Kraków tomorrow. Oh did I not mention that?

*edit - 1.20 am.

French

2010-01-22T11:43:00.000+01:00

Oh dear, I really don't speak French at all. The tap in my bathroom has been dripping for ages and eventually I got my act together enough to email my landlord about it.
About a week later, the landlord's wife comes round with a handyman (they call each other 'tu', so I assume he's a relative or something).

All finished, they ask me for a 'torchon' and I, who learnt to speak French in France, handed over a tea towel.

Confusion and amusement.

- No, no, don't you have a mop or something? For the floor?

Oh dear, I really don't speak French at all. As French wikipedia points out, a 'torchon' is a mop in Belgium. Why can't they all just agree on these things?!

Is it really still January?!

2010-01-20T10:58:00.008+01:00

This blog has been going for quite a wee while now. To start with it was a travel blog. Then a 'learning Polish' blog. Then a sort of student interpreter blog in a very discreet way because interpreters are bound by all sorts of unspoken confidentiality rules (I'm still not clear on whether or not I'm crossing the line simply by owning up to actually being one). After that it briefly mutated into a sort of personal therapy whinge centre, a phase which is thankfully now over. It occasionally moonlights as a half-hearted satire wannabe. One thing it's never been though is particularly girly.

In fact I can only apologise for the almost total lack of love interest on these pages. It must make for very dull reading. What kind of a human being would rather stay in on a Saturday night and read about the genitive case than sit awkwardly in a cinema and engage in circular conversations of the 'ça t'a plu?' 'oui, ça m'a plu, et toi, ça t'a plu?' type. There's probably a grammar issue there to do with agreeing feminine endings come to think of it but I can't be bothered. The great thing about blogging is that sooner or later someone else corrects your grammar (usually someone else Polish).

When most girls talk about what they'd like to see in a potential partner, the list generally includes tall, dark, handsome, good sense of humour, near-saintly tolerance of lateness, familiarity with a washing up bowl, etc. Personally, I'd like to improve my spoken French, maybe learn German, and absolutely nip in the bud an unexpected and highly perverse taste for Dutch boys because, like it or not, the Dutch language will never be useful for work.

(Overheard in a bar near Merode:
Anonymous Female Ex-pat Blogger no 1: Dutch boys are SO nice! They're so tall...'
AFXB no 2: 'oh yes, and really athletic!'
AFXB no 3: 'and they have these rosy cheeks like they've been out sailing a boat all day'
AFXB no 1: 'and they all have funny accents like Sean Connery. In Bond I mean.'
AFXB no 2: 'I had a Dutch boss once *sigh*...' etc.)

In any case, the situation is not going to change now. Love interest on these pages will continue at an average rate of little-to-none, largely because any eligible men within a half mile radius tend to get frostbite. I can't help it... I just can't be nice. It's against my upbringing.

That's not true actually. It can't be my upbringing that is at fault. My Mum is very nice indeed. She stays at home and looks after the kids (which now means only my 26-year old brother) and cooks, and puts up with complaints about the food, and always kisses my Dad goodbye when he leaves the house (out of an irrational fear that he may be abducted by aliens or have a nasty accident with the space-time continuum or simply not come back). My Mum is nearly sixty, but when she can't start her car in Tesco carpark hundreds of dashing young doctors flock to her rescue. Many of them probably Dutch.

Oh dear. I was going to go all girly and talk about bikini waxing and why small bra sizes only come in virginal white, but I appear to have reached the standard recommended post length. Actually the bikini post I had in mind was rather funny. Maybe tomorrow.

This week...

2010-01-19T17:50:00.001+01:00

... I am mostly doing a lot of this:

January

2010-01-12T20:36:00.004+01:00

These are white, muffled days, curled up in the flat, with blessedly little to do. The freeze is over, but the outside world is still blanketed in snow.
My fifty pages of translation for the end of the month fit neatly into five pages a day: a morning's work, even at a fairly relaxed place. The flat is small and warm with plenty to read, TV in five languages, fast internet and a piano with headphones. I go out once a day and walk about, sometimes as far as Park Woluwe, sometimes to meet friends for coffee, sometimes to Carrefour for an arbitrary series of items, added to and ticked off the shopping list as they occur to me.
In the evenings, I drink cinnamon tea, watch the BBC and try to learn about current affairs. I am making very, very slow inroads into my To-Do list. I have little concept of time and am physically incapable of punctuality.
I am being kind to myself for a few days, after three years of pushing and working and saving and worrying. There will be plenty of hard work again soon.

oh gosh...

2010-01-09T16:49:00.005+01:00

... I should write something.

You know when you have a really big important thing to do, like an exam or an interview or something, and other things come up which are clearly much less important, like health insurance and tax returns and cable TV bills, but you just leave them to one side to deal with after the big important thing is over?

Well, I did the big important thing and spent the rest of the day wandering around like a loon in the snow and the sunshine and drinking too much pretend champagne at choir practice. Then the next day was a write-off due to abovementioned pretend champagne, plus some extra bits of translation that I accepted and then forgot about, plus the inevitable sudden post-stress brain fail.

And now it's the weekend, so of course I can't deal with the Big Long List of Things I Put Off Til Later today because everything is closed until Monday, so that's a relief!

Instead I bought a mop, and some spray anti-cafards, when what I meant to buy was a plastic toboggan. I suppose at a push I could slide in the mop bucket. Or on my Carrefour eco-bag.

I also found the fève in the free samples of galette des Rois at Pain Quotidien (a cross between a bakery and a coffee shop which always gives me a sugar hangover). Quite why they were giving bits of galette away I'm not sure: the big buttery pastry rounds were piled high in the window display, so maybe they're having trouble shifting them in this weather (I bought a dense, almondy slice the other day and felt sick for the rest of the afternoon).

- ah vous avez gagné! said the guy behind the counter (actually he probably didn't, but I've given up trying to reproduce accurate, realistic French dialogue here), produced a crown made of gilded card, and tossed it flamboyantly in the direction of my head. I smiled and very quickly handed over the golden crown to a tiny girl whose parents were next in the line, with a placating 'wow, qu'est-ce que c'est jolie!' or something equally un-French like that. She scowled at me hard while her parents and the guy behind the counter made similar cooing noises, and we left the shop.

Joyeuse Fete des Rois everyone!

Better start opening bills now I suppose.

Obligatory New Year's Resolutions Post

2010-01-01T22:26:00.005+01:00

I seem to recall we originally learnt the future tense (niedokonany) in Polish by writing out our New Year's resolutions, for example:- w przyszłym roku będę uprawiać częściej sport, nie będę pić piwa, nie będę palić papierosów, będę się uczyć polskiego codziennie itp.

I'm not going to do it in Polish.

But I am going to do the very obvious start of the year list of resolutions post because my creativity is sapped and I'm low on imagination, at least for the next few days.

- I will start lying about my age. I'm getting fed up with the shocked looks, and with being asked what I'm studying (and referred to as 'jeune fille' or 'Mademoiselle'). If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. I reckon I can get away with about twenty-four.

- I will stop complaining about terrible dates and join Meetic already. I will also find a use for the three Durex Avanti in my bathroom that are due to expire in March 2010. Even if it's just filling them with helium and releasing them from the balcony into the sunset. Or stretching them over a phonebox. Did you know you can stretch a condom over a phonebox? I think the tough part is probably making sure that the caller inside doesn't notice. Or finding a caller who still uses phoneboxes and hasn't succumbed to the now ubiquitous iPhone.

- I will concentrate more on the pretty sunshine and not worry about pension plans until I am actually in a position to start one.

- I will pay as little tax as I can reasonably get away with. If I were a British MP, I would definitely have claimed my mortgage on expenses and I bet you would've too.

- I will resist the temptation to try to learn Dutch and/or German for as long as humanly (or rather language-geekily) possible.

- I will eat chocolate and drink beer and find a place to go rollerblading in Brussels.

- I will go away for weekends more (credit card and Easyjet allowing), and visit friends who live in exciting places.

- I will learn to improvise on the piano, for the purposes of Career Plan B (move to Paris, become jazz pianist, live in garret).

- I will stop being shy. It's just inconvenient. I will also talk to strangers more and not look at the ground all the time.

- I will accept that my life will probably always be more of the hippy studenty vagrant variety rather than the get a proper job, get married, buy a house variety and I will stop feeling bad and admit that secretly I prefer it that way.

Ok, your turn now...

Gloom

2009-12-30T15:11:00.004+01:00

I know there's a fair amount of melancholy on these pages but really, it's not too bad and most of it is all in the name of comedy anyway. No, really my default setting is 'life's not that brilliant but - ooh look over there at the pretty sunshine!' Not so much positive thinking, more enjoying the distractions as they come.

Work is not always brilliant but then again I only started out a year ago, so logically things must still be on an upward curve. As for la vie sentimentale, well, the only way is up really. I mean, it certainly can't get any worse. So the future at least has potential.

However when I'm back in the UK I'm beset with doom-mongering on all sides. This is not helped by the old copies of the Daily Express lying in headline-screaming piles all around my parents' house. There's something about the British press that is peculiarly, sensationally pessimistic.

The latest one is that within ten years the entire Thames valley will have flooded and London and much of Kent will be under water. Now I know this is a fairly standard 'effects of global warming' scenario, but surely if a submerged City were a mere ten years away the financial industry would already have started moving out of... oh wait a minute.

When I'm in Brussels or Kraków, my outlook is relatively (and I mean relatively) sunny, but when I come back to the UK, I suddenly become convinced that I have no chance of getting a pension or health insurance, I'll be living in a bedsit for the rest of my life and my dotage will be spent rocking spasmodically in a corner of the orange-painted EasyNursingHome or - worse still - my arthritic fingers piecing together components in a European-outsourced Chinese munitions factory.

If only it would stop raining.

Mid-holiday challenge: what's the worst apocalytic scenario you can find in a British tabloid today? Answers on a postcard (or in the comments box) please...

The Christmas riddle

2009-12-28T19:42:00.004+01:00

[continued from previous - very previous]

World-famous eminent demonic symbololo-ologist, Dr Roberto Kowalski, chewed his lower lip, his hands trembling.
The tension in the room was palpable. You could have cut the atmosphere with a knife, thrown it in the blender and made eggnog.

Across the table his opponent, icily beautiful and clearly - like all the bad girls he ran into these days - attracted to him in spite of herself, twirled the fragile paper clue between long, lazy fingers, a mocking smile playing around her lips.

Debris from the explosion littered the tablecloth in flashes of coloured metallic paper. The acrid scent of gunpowder hung in the air like sage and onion reflux the morning after a roast turkey dinner.

All the codes he had ever learnt flashed through his mind in mere seconds. But none fit the puzzle this time. His maverick American brain grappled with the riddle and yet...

Could it be?

Surely not?!

And yet the solution hovered elusively just out of his grasp.

A bead of sweat trickled down the Doctor's pulsating temple. He felt the tissue paper hat slip down over one greying, yet somehow still irresistibly attractive brow.

It was no good. The game was over. This was one riddle that was beyond even his vast crime-solving experience.

- I give up... he breathed... tell me...

... what IS the difference between a viola and a trampoline?

French word of the day: neige

2009-12-20T13:15:00.004+01:00

This can be a noun, as in 'aeroport de Bruxelles fermé a cause de fortes chutes de neige'. Or the third person singular of the verb 'neiger' as in 'bordel je reste bloquée a Bruxelles et je ne sais pas rentrer chez moi pour les fetes de Noel parce que ce f***u neige ne cesse pas de tomber!' Actually I didn't use the verb there, did I? Well spotted. Ummm how about 'Il neige', tout court. There we go, nothing like stating the obvious.

Yesterday, there was Bach. There was Bach for two hours and an amazing bass soloist and gorgeous cor anglais and French horn and a sold-out Palais des Beaux Arts and it was fabulous.

My parents were supposed to come and watch and listen to said Bach, and I was to return with them to England via the Eurotunnel. Last time they came to visit I insisted that they use the ferry (because I like slot machines and Nescafé and I like my wipe-clean lounge chairs to come with a lovely sheen of chip grease. oh and those vacuum-flush loos.), so this time it was their turn to choose (my Dad gets seasick).
I'm sure you've all heard about the Eurostars that broke down in the tunnel because the sudden change of temperature between snowed-under France and the warm dark tunnel made the electronics crash or something like that. And the evacuations and the lack of water and electric light and the overflowing loos and so on.
Anyway the upshot is that my parents couldn't get on a shuttle and they had to go home, and I am now joining the mad rush to get out of Brussels before Christmas.

Ooh it isn't half dramatic. We do love a bit of drama here at Pinolona.

And this all seems somehow awfully familiar.

I'm left with a choice (here comes the interactive part!).
I could book a flight back for a couple of days time, trusting in the Belgian Météo; and hoping that Brussels international airport will reopen tomorrow and that amazing and lovely British Airways will get me home in time for Christmas Eve (I also need to book a flight back come to think of it).

I could get on a ferry somewhere as a foot passenger - this is a slightly risky strategy. It's certainly possible to get to Calais but it's a lengthy process. Trains are still running though so we could be on to a winner here. I could try and sail from Oostende, which has the advantage of being much more reachable by train (and doesn't involve going to France, for extra bonus points). However, TransEuropa Ferries calmly informed me that they don't take foot passengers, for insurance reasons. So I would have to count on being able to make friends with a British (or Polish) truck driver and hitching a lift onto the boat. A risky strategy.

I could try Eurolines, but their website doesn't specify whether they go via ferry or tunnel. Again a risky strategy.

I could hitch hike...

Or... I could stay in Brussels over Christmas, watch the Pasterka on TVP Polonia and brew up some of the barszcz recipe that The Polish Chick sent me. I have hot chocolate, I have a duvet, I have over 200 cable tv channels in at least four different languages and I have an emergency bottle of Absolut in the freezer compartment. Joyeuses Fetes indeed.

What do you reckon?

ps, here's my balcony snowman. It doesn't even compare to Laura's but I was a bit pressed for time. Will try again this afternoon. Wait. It is afternoon. Later this afternoon.

Seems familiar

2009-12-17T22:53:00.003+01:00

Rattling old trams, snow in the park at night, people speaking Polish in the metro... this all seems strangely... familiar...

Bach

2009-12-17T16:34:00.003+01:00

Bach's Mass in B Minor is a dark, brooding work of enormous depth and myriad layers. It is a work you sing maybe once in a lifetime, if you are a lucky amateur. It lasts a whopping two hours (topping even the highest of the high Anglicans for stamina in church) and builds from a quite literally spine-tingling opening Kyrie, trips joyfully over the Gloria, through a complex, emotional Credo and sweepingly majestic Sanctus to finish with a quiet, simple heavenward plea - Dona nobis pace.
Bach well understood the human condition: the despair of the Crucifixus is all too human and the closing Dona Nobis is a humble expression of hope.
The Mass soars and swoops from ecstatic to destitute to elated, as do we all.

I recommend finding somewhere to listen to it, maybe this weekend.

"Madame, Monsieur...

2009-12-16T23:28:00.002+01:00

Votre technicien Telenet vous a rendu visite le [handwritten] 16/12/09 a [unspecified] heures

afin de...

[cocher s'il vous plait]

[X] desactiver votre télévision"

So no more free digital TV for me, thanks Telenet. When I called them, I didn't even recognise the tenant's name that they gave: clearly my predecessor had managed to blag free telly for the whole duration of his residence.

The good news is my new contract has TVP Polonia on it! (and TVP2)

The bad news is I have to pay extra to get a special box in order to receive this gem of Polish broadcasting quality* (not to mention -finally - Italian channels which Are Not Rai Uno, mamma mia ma che sciocchezze...).

Sadly my beloved Mobistar is the one telecoms provider in Belgium that does not offer TV in its communications package, meaning I'm possibly the only person in Belgium to have separate TV and internet and this is Almost Certainly more expensive. It must all be Belgacom's fault. Since they're the dominant market operator and former monopolist, I'm pretty certain I can open infringement proceedings against them for passing on the administrative burden to the end user.

Take that, Belgacom!

*very poor English, do not use this for work.

still here

2009-12-16T17:57:00.002+01:00

I am still here, honest. I haven't thrown myself into the... well into a big vat of Chimay brune yet.

Although that's not such a bad idea.

I'm just busy...

If you feel like a little relaxation, why not take a trip to the Palais des Beaux-Arts this weekend? Just, well, just in case. You never know who you might bump into.

There's a lot to do. And not enough hours in the day to do it. I think we are going to need a montage. (Even Rocky had a montage).
Listen to the music and then fast forward to next week.

happy post! (about obwarzanki)

2009-12-09T09:17:00.004+01:00

oh gosh, I don't want the sad post to be the last thing I wrote! At the same time, I'm too busy to write another one.

Tell me happy things!

Or listen to the Belgian Song again.

... as I'm walking down the street, eating mayonnaise and frites...

Talking of street food...

One thing you may have noticed if you've been on board since The Poland Days is how much obwarzanki form an integral part of the Kraków diet. Especially as a student, with only fifteen minutes to eat between classes: just about time to run out to the pretzel stand and to queue by the coffee machine. I miss Kraków.
An Obwarzanek (the Kraków type, not the dessicated little pretzel-rings you get on strings in Warsaw. And indeed Brussels) is a big round bread twist, about the same size as a bagel, but without the heavy chewiness or sugary coating. It's crusty on the outside like bread and dipped in either poppy seeds (z makiem), sesame seeds (z sezamem) or big salt crystals (z solem) like a German pretzel. Some obwarzanki sellers offer versions with melted cheese (z serem), cayenne pepper (pikantny) or pizza herbs and tomato (pizzowy). I've also seen a rye version (ciemny) with oats on top, yummy.
I want one. They are stomach-filling (and possibly also bowel-stopping, since they consist exclusively of refined carbohydrates) and good.

Yesterday I plucked up the courage to ask the Pani in Kuchnia Polska on Avenue d'Auderghem, taking care to specify 'Krakowskie obwarzanki'.

- excuse me, she said, but what do you mean by 'krakowskie' obwarzanki?
- you know, the big ones, I explained.
- oh no, I'm sorry: they're like bread, they'd be awful the next day. You'd probably have to order them specially.

Proszę Panstwa, to jest dramat.

I am going to have to call the Polish Embassy...

Sunday 6am life assessment

2009-12-06T07:29:00.002+01:00

As you may have guessed, Sw. Mikołai did not visit my flat to grant my wishes this year (I blame lack of chimney).

I can't sleep, and since it's Sunday morning, I have at least 24 hours before I can do anything pro-active.

I do not want to spend another six months translating at home in Brussels.

It's not that I don't like the city. I actually feel pretty at home here. And please don't tell me I'm just being negative. I am not a negative person. I have been an ex-pat on and off since 2002 and I know the Happy Strategies: I go running, I exercise regularly, I play music, I listen to music, I joined a choir, I take the scary or miserable parts of my life and I fashion them into amusing little blog posts to make myself laugh at things that would otherwise probably have me cowering under my desk in despair. I look at the tiny things, the leaves and the sunshine in the park and I think how lucky I am to be here. I hate it when people who have easy jobs and have never moved out of their home town talk about how they can't stand 'negative people'. Everyone is sad sometimes and that's human.

But: I don't want to sit here alone, waiting for the possibility of a hypothetical exam.

I'm not the most extroverted person, but I am a human being and I like contact with people. I like solitude but I am not happy that it has become the norm for me to go for whole days without speaking to anyone. I can't do this for another six months. It feels wrong, it feels as though I am fighting against the current and I don't know what to do.

I know that I am lonely and unhappy and I can't bear the thought of another six months of the same.

There is no shame in admitting that things are not going to plan.

Since I can't call my parents at this time of the morning, I am turning to you, O oracle of the internet: tell me what to do!

Belgian Weird, part deux

2009-12-05T12:51:00.003+01:00

I totally forgot Speculoos!

Not something scary wielded by your gynaecologist but rather a type of caramelised, cinnamony biscuit served with coffee. You know, the free ones that people in other countries just ignore.

Belgians are obsessed by them! To be honest, I've never seen a Belgian person actually go out and actively buy speculoos to dunk in their tea, but this may be because I live in Brussels and have rarely seen a Belgian person do.. well... anything.

It is traditionally eaten on St Nicolas' day (i.e. NOW) and the supermarkets sell it in big festive slabs.

But that's not where the obsession ends: speculoos crops up in desserts, ice-cream flavours, even a sort of speculoos-nutella.

Speculoos on Wikipedia

Gosh, isn't it great to be a Belgian?

The Belgian Song

Year end pre-report

2009-12-04T15:31:00.004+01:00

I'm going to do it: I'm going to use my blog as a big soggy pillow and have a good cry over all of your operating systems (or Blackberries, or iPhones, or whatever you technologically-advanced folks have nowadays).

To cut a long story short, there have been peaks and troughs at both professional and personal level, resulting in a marked slump for PinoCorp at the start of this festive season, and a general ambience of Pino Grigio. We are considering restructuring in early 2010, potentially sending the majority of the workforce on extended leave in the UK and keeping only an (exo-)skeleton staff on in Brussels (under the sink, until the next intervention anti-cafards).

Plus invoices are late this month and it hasn't stopped raining for a week.

Our short-term recovery plan involves duvets, ice-cold vodka-tonic and Friday Night with Jonathan Ross.

But we all know what happens when we make plans.

Which is why I will - instead of cowering under the duvet (or indeed making up for translation time lost to admin this week) - be singing 'This little light of mine' in the basement of the local Church of Scotland.** I am not entirely sure how this happened but it is almost certainly a combination of my pathological inability to say 'no' and the effects of a half-finished biere brune. Without a doubt it is all that I deserve for daring to venture out on a school night.

It is a small comfort to me that my pitiful existance serves to provide mirth and good cheer to so many in these otherwise dull and unforgiving times.
Normal service will - probably - resume on Saturday.

**EDIT: It was actually pretty cool...

List do Swiętego Mikołaja

2009-12-02T13:52:00.005+01:00

Szanowny Panie Święty Mikołaju!

Proszę Pana bardzo... ja na Mikołajki chciałabym dostać zaproszenia na egzamin akreditacyjny.
Byłam przez (prawie) cały rok grzeczna; poza tym, ćwiczę codziennie konsekutywki, czytam Economista i Monde Diplomatique i śpiję z książką o notatkach Jean-Francois Rozan'a pod poduszką. Rzadko piję wódkę (bez soku) i (prawie) nigdy nie chodzę tańczyć w klubach czy gadać z chłopakami (nawet nie pamiętam, co jest 'chłopak').

Jeżeli Pan nie jest w stanie pryzchylić się do mojej prośby, byłabym również zachwycona stażem przez trybunał sprawiedliwości, lub kucykiem.

Dziękuję uprzejmie (chociaż rozpaczliwie) i serdecznie pozdrawiam,

P, tłumacz z Krakowa...

Sto lat!

2009-12-01T00:28:00.005+01:00

On 29 November, 1909, my Granny was born in a small mining town in North Wales.
One hundred years ago and an entirely different universe, she was fourth in a family of six: four sisters and a brother. Their mother died while she was still a child and their father was injured in a mining accident and left unable to work. The two littlest girls were fostered by other families in the village while the others stayed behind and were looked after by the eldest daughter, a slight thirteen-year old.
Her childhood was spent in a culture wholly different to that of my own: milk was a precious commodity, English was a foreign language learnt at school and leeks were pinned to fronts on St David's Day*.
At the age of fifteen, after finishing school, my grandmother and one of her elder sisters moved to the foreign lands of darkest Tunbridge Wells to go into service at a maternity hospital.
(Several years ago, after I ran away - desperately unhappy - from an awful summer job working as a live-in barmaid at an Italian hotel, she looked at me knowingly: I knew you wouldn't like it, she said, it's hard, I know that. I was twenty-one though and it was only a summer job.)

It's hard to imagine one hundred years: as a young girl growing up in Wales, could she ever have dreamed up television, aeroplanes, the internet, whole symphony orchestras stored on a pen drive and instant communication with family living halfway across the globe? Of miraculous drugs that might have saved her mother, her husband? What if I live to be one hundred? What unimaginable wonders will humanity have produced by then? How fast will the time fly by?

Happy birthday Granny (for yesterday) - here's to the next one.

*Although I suspect that she may be having us on about this one.

Crisis

2009-11-24T20:10:00.004+01:00

Kryzys, la crise, la crisi, whatever you want to call it.

No, not that one. In the self-absorbed world of the western twenty-something there is only One Great Crisis and that is THIRTY.

It has recently occurred to me that I am twenty-nine.

To be honest, it happened not long ago and I managed to cheat myself into overlooking the whole thing by conveniently having the same birthday as that of another friend who is four years younger. Effectively this meant I ended up celebrating the last birthday of my third decade by getting inelegantly wasted with a very large number of very young students (many of them Polish).

Classily done.

So, since it's Tuesday night and we have nothing better to do than practice our note-taking skills and proofread Italian legal translation, let's take a cheerful moment to reflect on all the things we didn't achieve. All those 'When I grow up's that never made it past the drawing board. All those trips round the world we forgot to book, novels that we never started, flat deposits that we really on reflection oughtn't to have frittered away on kir petillante and crepes nutella on the rue St André des Arts...

All the things we thought we might have been...

... but aren't.

I'll start the ball rolling.

I thought by now I'd be...

1/ At the height of my professional career. I had little inkling, ten years ago, of what that professional career was to have been, but it would have been exciting. Something like a spy, or an investment banker* or an ambassador in the Foreign Office. In any case, it would have involved expensive tailored suits and wine-bar lunches.

2/ Living in a nice apartment. Possibly on the Lamarck-Caulaincourt side of Montmartre. There would have been a Very Deep Bath that you could swim in, plus a terrace (I do have a balcony actually but since I live in Belgium it's too cold to use it).
I was never clear on the specifics but one thing is certain: it would not have involved a 'lit-mezzanine'.

3/Gorgeous. Seriously: I never thought I'd have any use for benzoyl peroxide cream past the age of twenty two. I mean, who gets spots and wrinkles? Ok, I don't actually have wrinkles: I have three lines on my forehead and That Is All. But spots? Oh and how. And let's not mention the uncontrollable hair, the wonky glasses, the fact that I can't wear office clothes without looking like the temp waitress...

3-bis/ In possession of a generous set of assets. Up until the age of about twenty-three I still believed that one day I might wake up to find that they just appeared overnight. I genuinely thought I'd magically grow up to have a knockout figure, and that chicken fillets would be items that belonged in the fridge and not at the bottom of a B-cup. Dads of the world! This is what happens if you watch Baywatch with your daughters on a Saturday afternoon. Switch It Off.

4/ Able to cope with guys. Somehow I thought I'd have worked it out by now: how to be just the right degree of cool, rather than careening wildly from Desperate to Ice Queen; how to slouch seductively in a figure-hugging black dress, long blonde(ish) hair swinging - instead of twisting from one foot to the other, chewing my nails and talking at a good four hundred times my normal rate. Oh and I never predicted Twitter, G-talk, Skype, text messaging, Facebook... all simply a big digital mass of potential misunderstanding.
I would also have learnt to let Mr Wrong know the score in a grown up way, from the word go, instead of telling myself, with no small degree of cowardice, that just one more drink won't hurt and maybe he just wants to be friends after all.

4-bis/ A lesbian. As a teenager I was pretty certain that I would end up living a sedate and highly PC life devoted to intellectual pursuits and novel writing in a cottage near Cambridge with a female companion of a similar disposition. I read Orlando and Colette's Claudine novels and dreamed of a tweedy, steamy, forbidden existence.
But somewhere around 2001, in the vicinity of St Andrews University Students' Association Bar, something went horribly wrong.
I blame the intrusion of heterosexuality (and possibly also modern languages) for my failure to publish any great works of literature so far.

5/ Confident. I mean really - not aggressive, not obnoxious, just calmly assertive. Able to mingle. Well-versed in the school of Good Chat. Self-assured. Not plagued by the nagging suspicion that any minute now someone will suddenly Find You Out and tell everyone that you are Faking It and banish you back to the hot damp little corner of the pot wash where you belong.
If anyone knows the secret to this one, do let me know.

So... what did you think you'd be by now?

Answers in the comments box, please!

*my Dad used to work in the City and travelled to exciting parts of Africa a lot so I grew up thinking that this was the height of sophistication. I remember being asked in church once what I wanted to be when I grew up and replying 'I want to work in a bank like Daddy'. Oh Mrs Thatcher, what have you done?

Belgian weird

2009-11-17T19:21:00.005+01:00

I suppose it's about time for one of those '101 bizarre things about living in Belgium/Poland/a cardboard box under Pont Neuf/etc.' posts.

Here we go then.

1/ Proton: I still haven't worked out what this means. It appears to be some kind of monetary transaction management company, like Visa. Although it could just as easily be a brand of washing powder or a bodybuilding supplement. You can use it in shops which display the 'Proton' logo. I did try once: - no no - said the cashier - you haven't got any money on your Proton. You have to put money on it first. Lo and behold, next time I put my Belgian card in the cashpoint there was an option to withdraw cash to my Proton account. From there, you use the cash in your 'Proton account' to pay with your bank card. I don't understand. Why not just get the cash out straight away? Or pay directly with the bank card?
It makes no sense.
Only In Belgium.

2/ Madame Pipi: In most European countries there's a small charge to use the powder room and this may be more or less widespread in proportion to the publicness/relative cleanliness of said facility. For example, in the UK you normally only pay to pee in railway stations.
In Belgium, I discovered, there's no such thing as a free wee. In a country which produces over 8000 varieties of beer (thanks Wikipedia), this defies logic. My first encounter with Madame Pipi was in a bar near Antwerp Central Station. I tripped down the stairs to the loo, only to find a wizened little old lady sitting at a table with a tray.
- 50 cents please.
- What? oh no, you've got me wrong, I'm a customer (because normally customers can use the loo without paying, right?)
- That's not my problem. I don't work for them. Pay up. Or cross your legs: up to you.

3/ Labels: When you move to Belgium, you have to go to the commune and declare your residence. I inadvertently bypassed epic queues and frustration by ringing up and being given an appointment (albeit several weeks later, but who's counting? I'm quite happy to put off the evil hour where administrative procedure is concerned).
Once you've showed up, handed over your passport, and fielded the inevitable awkward questions about your source of income, lack of social security number and so forth, it all passes relatively quickly until they get to the

- and then the Police will come and visit you

bit.
- But I haven't done anything!
- No no, they just have to check you actually live there.
- Excuse me?!
- It's ok, you just have to make sure you have your name on the letterbox and by the doorbell, otherwise you'll never be able to register. (I have yet to work out why this would be a disadvantage)
I eventually tracked down some sticky labels in the far aisle at Carrefour, and now both my doorbell and my letterbox have crappy peeling stickers by them with my name on.
Sure enough, two days later there was a knock at the door. I opened it in my pyjamas (so what?! I'm a freelancer. 'Dressed' is a highly culturally-subjective concept), handed over my passport and resumed normal 'slumped at desk' working attitude.

4/ Bilingualism: Go to any concert or public event in Belgium and there will be two MCs. Obviously: one in French and one in Flemish. Inevitably, the French speaker will be playing the straight man while the version Flamande will have everyone in the auditorium helpless with mirth and weeping gently into their popcorn.
Everyone except you, the foreigner, because you didn't bother to learn Dutch, did you? Thought you could get away with a mere postgraduate degree in French?! Hah!
- uhhh il a dit quoi en effet?
- heheheheh mais il est dingue ce type!
- mais qu'est-ce qu'il a dit??
- mmmph *hic!* c'est trop marrant...

It's a conspiracy, I'm sure of it.

5/More labels: Belgium doesn't actually have two official languages.
It has three*.
For this reason, standard regulatory labels on food and everything really are Simply Enormous.
This must seriously cramp the style of Belgian marketing execs, who have to find room for all that text somewhere.

*****

Only five things?! Maybe Belgium isn't as weird as I thought. Must try harder...

*German! Back of the class, go on.

Language etc.

2009-11-14T17:33:00.003+01:00

I changed my mind: I don't want to learn the art of mating with Europeans. I'm getting old now, and I remembered that normally mid-way through an evening out I find myself making uncomfortable small talk and wishing I were at home watching Strictly Come Dancing with an enormous gin and tonic.

Instead, let's learn some Dutch. Namely from the Belgacom advert.

I don't really understand this, but whenever I'm in Antwerp I feel like the guy speaking 'English'...
My friend wrote a funny post about how Dutch is English spoken by LOLcats.
My interpretation is that it's more like Yorkshire English spoken with a Somerset accent by Sean Connery. Anyway. That is all for today.

Of birds and bees

2009-11-11T22:31:00.009+01:00

Sigh.
They say that were it not for alcohol there would be no British people. And I am coming to realise just how ill-prepared my British upbringing has left me for the world of dating outside the UK.

For those of you not in the know, the traditional courting ritual of the British mating pair involves nervously avoiding each other for anything from one week up to six months (in rare cases this phase of the mating cycle may last for years), a wary circling which sooner or later culminates in one frenzied night of passion, largely fuelled by any one or combination of the following:

- Stella tops
- Bombay Sapphire and Tonic
- Snakebite and Black (students only)
- Sainsbury's Valpolicella

etc.

After fleeing the scene - normally within twelve hours of copulation, and often in haste leaving behind appendages of varying degrees of essentiality (shoes, bras, contact lenses - known as 'Cinderella syndrome') - Phase Two, or Sub-phase One, 'secondary avoidance', begins. The tension begins to build again, eventually reaching its climax - excuse the terminology - in a second night of liquid-laced activity. At this point, the couple in question is generally no longer able to fend off probing questions from members of their social circle, and - somewhat sheepishly - a relationship begins.

As the relationship progresses, the volume of alcohol required prior to mating may vary in either direct or indirect proportion to its duration.

Typical mating calls of the Anglo-Saxon female may include:
- God, I'm so wasted!

***And they all lived happily ever after***

It has become clear that this method ceases to be effective across the Channel.

Now in Belgium, the avoidance and booze technique is simply getting me nowhere. Ultimately it results in my sitting at home in front of Spooks with a bottle of Cotes de Rhone, inadvertently avoiding more or less everyone.

I wouldn't mind all that much (I'm starting to get into the new series, and 75cl of Carrefour red is an awful lot cheaper than going halves on a candlelit dinner for two), only the effects are starting to show in other areas, namely that I tend to channel pent-up - ahem - physical energy into feverish yet futile mental activity.

I have two degrees, speak Polish and play the organ and can't believe it's taken me this long to work that one out.

So, to save my neighbours from the inevitable insanity that can only come from frequent repetition of pages three and four* of Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody on organ setting; to prevent my floor becoming completely lost under a pile of old copies of Polityka and to stop me missing most of Grey's Anatomy by trying to read the Dutch subtitles, I'm enlisting your help. Teach me how to date in Europe! That's all I ask.

In return, I'll avoid you for a month and then come round with a bathtub full of snakebite and black...

*the only two pages that I can play.

Autumn leaves

2009-11-10T20:53:00.007+01:00

I've always loved autumn: it's always been my favourite season. La rentrée, back to school, whatever you call it. Autumn is where the air tastes fresher and the leaves are crispy underfoot. Couples walk hand in hand and giggle like teenagers and cheeks are rosy and steps springy. Autumn is full of hope and new starts: schools, universities, new jobs, new friendship, new love...
Trees crowd together in excitement, merging, laughing, in a cloud of russet and gold.

Then suddenly November comes, and night falls and with it silence and the trees stand stark and bare of leaves and twisted in grief, their branches not even touching.

Mobistar

2009-11-09T10:02:00.003+01:00

I've been using Mobistar for my mobile phone (including mobile internet) and home broadband - both essential for my business - since I got here, and it is the least reliable telephone company I have ever had the misfortune to be involved with. (Incidentally Mobistar is part of Orange, or the France Telecom Group and I have to admit that Orange UK are slightly better: this is to neutralise the fact that the pedants among you will probably point out that they are one and the same thing and therefore it can't be the worst company I've ever used, etc.)

For starters, the internet connection quality is rubbish. The speed of streaming at home is appalling: you can't listen video speeches in any language and YouTube is a write-off.

On the mobile, I can only connect to the web via 'Orange World', which is constantly on the blink, meaning my mobile internet service is unreliable to say the least.

And finally you simply can't get through to Customer Service. I've actually got up during a Mobistar call, walked to the Mobistar shop on Rue de Tongres, and still been on hold on arrival (although that's only about ten minutes).

Bizarrely, every so often someone from Mobistar will call me, for some unfathomable reason, with some totally irrelevant question about how I am enjoying my subscription. I tell them it's pants, and they inform me that a customer service representative will call me back in a few days.

They never do.

Mobistar, your service is crap. Call me.