Museum Night Fever

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...

Moving on up

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...

In the park

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?

Are Belgians shy?

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?

Stress

I used to be shy. Very shy: being scared of shop assistants shy; twisting up my hands and feet and not looking people in the eye shy; acting like a moron at school to deflect the abject terror associated with social interaction in all its forms.

Then, I grew up, I left home, went to university - discovered the relaxing powers of alcohol - and it all got better.

Only... it's come back...

Now that I'm effectively running my own business, I'm writing emails and talking on the phone all the time, in three different languages did I use the right formal register, was I too familiar, did my quote overstep the mark, should I really have asked that question or does that make me look inexperienced?

and I'm feeling a pressure at my temples and in my jaw and I'm holding my breath

Then - coming back from Poland - I'm plunged into social circles where just having a funny ex-pat story isn't enough. I'm being respectfully interested with my parents' friends, pretending to be grown up with new acquaintances of my own age, trying to fit back in comfortably with old friends
do we still talk about that? did I forget to ask about so-and-so? have I said something inappropriate? did I offend someone? am I talking too fast, did I interrupt?

tension, pressure, stress-stress-stress, breathe ... breathe...

And then, to cap it all, I read that Stress Makes You Fat

Not only are young women expected to live their lives in a constant state of worry about their figures, their careers and the size of their student debts... we're now under continuous pressure to RELAX! AT ALL COSTS! ON PAIN OF... FAT!!!

make it stop make it stop make it stop...