Having spent a year here as a student I’ve really enjoyed coming back just for two weeks, finishing off the year by playing the role of a journalist. I really love the feeling that you’re doing something worthwhile, that you’re creating something which will inform people and perhaps even show them things from a perspective that they hadn’t perceived before. I love that as a journalist you have a legitimate reason for calling up the most important people, the most informed groups and can talk to them. Yesterday I talked to the Iranian embassy, interviewed a professor about North-South wealth disparities in Belgium, then talked with and organised an interview with Shell Oil. Oh, and went to an EU commission press conference. This all going on while sorting out a hellish mess with my Belgian bank.

Then, just to finish off the year in what might feel like a successful way, I plucked up the courage (sad, I know) and accepted my friend Julie’s kind invitation to a dinner party at her house. I was only hesitant because my French, though greatly improved from how it was at the beginning of the year, is nowhere near colloquial fluency level. In time it will perhaps be but I was worried about missing basically everything that was going on. I hate that! I shouldn’t have been worried though as the evening was really fantastic, Julie’s place is an absolutely beautiful loft-style space at the top of a house in Uccle. I’d never really ventured into Uccle though so going there was a treat.

Today’s been a bit of a bum so far as my German housemate who I was going to have breakfast with blew me off having said we’d mutually call each other when we wanted to go out. Sadly, when I called her she’d already finished at the café we were going to go to and was on her way to a Brussels tourist trap with a friend. A bit disappointing. Coffee though later with some Spanish girls for one last time.

The key, I think, is achieveable goals and personal goals. There’s no point in reaching for something that other people set you because there’s no real incentive. One you pass a certain age the pressure of other peoples’ expectations begin to count for less and your own aspirations and hopes for yourself count for more. If your goals are so outlandishly enormous in their expectations, your own demoralization at the challenge presented could well stop you achieving them. Essentially, one needs one’s own imputus, desire, and self confidence to propel oneself to succeed.

One of the hardest things about being in a place for only a year is the knowledge that all the great friends and relationships you create are going to be at the very least put on hold and tested to their extreme after a few short months. You know that although these friends are fantastic at the moment, once you leave the country and everyone disperses around Europe the world again, it becomes increasingly hard to continue the intimacy you’ve come to enjoy. That’s a tough thing to acknowledge. I said a kind of goodbye to a friend on Monday, a goodbye that had to be carried out over the phone because our respective exam (mine) and travelling (hers) schedules meant we couldn’t meet up. As we spoke I found myself saying “well, have a great trip…. and if I don’t see you in London like we discussed, then I hope your flight home passes well. And in that case I hope everything at school next year is great and I hope to see you sometime again in my life. I don’t know when I’ll next be in Canada, but I hope, in the next few years!”

This is the one downside of international friends: they can never be with you. The solidarity of a core group of friends who knows about that night in the bar, or that guy who you were flirting with oh, that time, is hard when they all live in different countries. It’s a form of cruel irony that once you pushed through the self doubt, fear, and language barrier, once you do find the friends who you know are amazing people, they go off a leave again. You leave them and they leave you. And you have to go back to being strong and self reliant again. Self reliant isn’t fun, and anyone who tells you otherwise is just kidding themselves. Relying on other people is great because it means you trust them and it means they can trust you back and rely on you when they need to.

Of course having international friends is cool, but it makes the off-the-cuff dinner party a little hard to plan. And planning does not lead to very off-the-cuff events. Obviously being instinctive and random has its limits and having international friends has a multitude of other benefits that you trade for. Like visits from abroad, if you happen to live in a desirable location. If you don’t then you’re screwed and will have to be the schmuck who has to fork out for the plane tickets any time you want to see these friends.

The worst thing, is that these friends you create, these friends I’ve created, I feel like I’m only just getting to know now. You can’t know someone in just ten months, but you can get a really good start. And now that I have that beginning I don’t want to lose it. But I will. We all will.

Even worse:

At around 10:30 last night I was randomly channel surfing and came across a promo for the news of TF3 (Télévision France 3). Because I was in that exhausted phase that I get for a while after a really good but hard run, I decided to wait around for this news program. While waiting for it, rather unexpectedly, I was presented with 15 minutes or so of political ads for the various Presidential candidates. I read the newspapers here a lot so actually catching these things was fascinating; even more so because I’ve been taking a class on Political Communication in which the professeur would each week give us a summary of the campaign and often show clips of the high profile interviews of each (main) candidate. A couple things that I thought of on seeing these ads:

• At times the fringe parties do themselves no favors. They use their allotted time to show themselves chatting with ‘representative’ citizens on the street. This doesn’t work because combined with people talking in odd accents and too fast, fast cutting of the film, the subtitles (show for all candidates) and the possibility of picture-in-picture to make room for someone signing the broadcast, there’s too much going on. It looks disorganised. Viewers don’t care about having to watch other ‘ordinary’ people question a politician: they’re not very good at it. We know this because we have professional interviewers who find it hard enough with training. ‘Everyday people’ doing their job just makes the citizenry stupid.
• The far left liberals don’t need to put everything they display on a red background. It’s already clear they’re the communist party. They did, however, have by far the best presentation, with ‘live’ text on the screen and short snippet-like responses: the kind of thing needed to keep a viewer interested. How many people will really wait for 15 minutes to see all of the broadcasts? I’m guessing, not that many.
• Ségolène Royal had active and lively graphics but instead of showing a lot of what she had done, most of the time, as when they had dozens of clips of her in bubbles flying toward the viewer, it made the production look amateur. She was also the only candidate who didn’t face the camera head on. She looked like she really meant to talk to somebody else on the other side of the room rather than the camera.
• There was no mention of the Iraq war in any of the broadcasts. The top topics were unemployment (‘le chômage est beaucoup trop haut’), tax on business , immigration (‘nous avons toujours la peur dans notre pays’) and nationalism (‘being a citizen should be an honour not a right!’), the environment, economic protectionism (I’ll tell Bruxelles to…’) and a need for a renewal of social values. Many of the broadcasts seemed to say absolutely nothing at all, or at least ten seconds after their end I’d already forgotten the content.
• Neither Bayrou, Le Pen nor Sarkozy were on tonight. Perhaps that’s a special treat for tomorrow.

In the news, the thing that really struck me (call me strange), is that the ads on political billboards put up in every town (normally outside schools and other public buildings) are put up by ClearChannel. ClearChannel, an American multinational that controls billboards all over the world, hundreds of radio stations in the US and a large number of concert venues and promotion vehicles. I just think it’s ironic that a company that stands for so much that France is actively against is the one actually promoting their political process.

There’s a Café not far from my house called Café Belga. It’s a nifty little place where the customers are cool, the bar staff are haughty and the beef is cold. It’s got massive big windows out onto the commune’s ponds and a large square that currently has a building work engulfing it. It’s been engulfed for the last four years as well: they don’t hurry on public projects in Belgium I guess. The clientelle simply pretend the building work isn’t going on and on Friday and Saturday nights the place is packed. It’s the place where ‘the intelligent’ people go, apparently.

I’m often there on a Saturday afternoon with my BFF Laura. We do the markets around the pond and then chill out in Belga for an hour or two, sometimes pretending to do work, most of the time not bothering. We get on so well, it’s a fun time.

Well it’s Easter and my university has a two week break. Most of my friends have gone off for what Jack McFarland would call a world-wind tour of Easter/Balkan Europe. Others have gone home to their various countries of residence; namely Britain, Italy, Spain, the Czech Republic and Switzerland. I’ve stayed behind in Brussels and, in an effort to not feel like an abandoned puppy, I went to Belga for lunch today. Seriously, the fastest lunch ever. I brought some work in an effort to stay longer, but having drunk my coffee and eaten, I found there was nothing else really keeping me there. It’s a nice place to go to, but when I have more purpose at home and fewer people wondering why I’m sitting all alone, I couldn’t drum up the courage to stay for more than about thirty minutes. It’s an interesting experience going to cafés alone, and something I very rarely do. Every time I recall why that is.

I would post a photo of the place, but having forgotten take one when my friend Caroline visited this week, I can’t since I don’t have a camera of my own anymore. Sorry.

This triggered a heated discussion during which the Brussels Airlines representative suddenly ran off, leaving the passengers to their fate. Brussels Airlines leaves 200 passengers to fend for themselves in Dakar

…She told a packed auditorium how the EU will convince its citizens to use low-energy lamps, and how no one will have to unscrew and throw away their existing light bulbs. Once again, the EU is fashioning one of its superb guidelines. Over time there will be low-energy lamps in every household, and no one will even have noticed. The world is being saved, and no one notices. Now that is something new. Spiegel Online: Merkel, the Queen of Europe

Univers, taken by Loutseu (stand by).

The image above comes from the Flickr photostream of a Frenchman, called Loutseu whose work I stumbled across earlier today. His photos are fantastic: a combination of macro, HDR, black and white, long-exposure and just well framed interesting shots. Of course I also appreciate the fact that there’s always a bit of french thrown in there. It makes learning easier!

I was in Leeds from last Friday. I took morning flight from Bruxelles that got me into Leeds for about 10:30. I had been planning to see my friend Helen that morning, as I was staying at her house, but she’d just started a new job the morning in question so that idea wasn’t possible. I killed some time by heading into the University and sorting out admin that I needed to do for my own piece of mind. Not completely necessary but good to do. That’s kind of how the whole trip turned out: not necessary but good to do.


Over the last couple months I had been pretty scared with myself becausem having broken up with my boyfriend at the end of the University term I was then pretty out of touch for about a month and a half. Then I came to Belgium. I had felt myself very isolated and alone at firstm compounded by a feeling that I was being completely forgotten by this boy I’d really fallen for. So part of my intention of the trip was to ask him if I’d somehow done something wrong. From two meetings we had, one uncomfortable one in a nice but loud and overpriced bar and another at his apartement I found out there wasn’t anything I’d done wrong. I hadn’t been a shit by leaving, by not being in touch enough, by doing any of the number of things that had been going through my mind. He said he’d simply been busy and his life (him being the same age but two years ahead of me at University) had been changing a lot with his new job. I really didn’t want to accept that reason but in a way I have to. When we were together I’d felt as though at times he was maintaining a form of distance between us and as a result was shocked by how upset he was when we went out separate ways. That hesitance on my part had always made me question whether I wasn’t hearing from him because he was busy or because he simply didn’t really care. I still don’t feel like I have a real answer to that. I told him that I’d missed him and that the silence had hurt. I told him that it surprised me, and that I was saddened by the way our meeting the previous night had felt like an awkward first date. I’d never really ever sat down with someone before and told them directly how I’d been hurt. I felt like I wanted to shout at him but could sense that really he didn’t deserve it. That was a shame because a bit of shouting would have done me good! I had been so angry! Not so much anymore because seeing him was a bit like some sort of absolution.

One thing that I learnt from that encounter was that if I want to be happy in a relationship and not just feel like I’m settling, I need to be prepared to complain more, to cause more trouble, to have fights but to get over them. A relationship without any arguements cannot be really honest for either person. Human beings whine, and I’m sure I need to vent just as much as the next person. Holding it in is like blowing up a balloon and never letting the air out: at some point the whole thing’s going to explode.

I found that I have some amazing friends who went out of their way to arrange to meet up, who are amazing people and who I love. These are people I may not have very much in common with but who are absolutely stellar individuals and who I know deserve to go far. The people address books are made for. I miss them already. I also saw some people who, even when I went to see them and met up with them were not that interested in seeing me, asking anything about what I’d been doing or even wanting to tell me what they’d been up to. I know some people who, perhaps, are not all that worth knowing. I find it really heartbreaking to think of evaluating friends in this way because they’re people who I know and have invested a lot of time in, but when I come back and see them again, from perhaps a slightly new perspective out of the context of daily University life, do not reflect the personality traits I thought I’d seen in them in the first place.

Some people I didn’t know that well to begin with but were unbelievably kind and generous while I was there. Friends of friends who (impressively) actually remembered my name! I wouldn’t have if I were them! Honestly, I’m not that big a deal. I’m really sad that some of my friends and the friends of friends will not be around when I return. That is really tough, but I know if we were real friends to begin with, we’ll stay in touch somehow.

I went to Paris on Friday mid-morning and arrived in Blvd Montparnasse expecting to meet a sweet, 70-odd year old French lady with a strong accent and not perfect English, smoking away non stop on her cigarettes. I found all of those things but instead of being a sweet old lady she was a horrible old lady who was opinionated and didn’t mind telling you about it, insulting your friends and language and manners and appearance. She was not agreeable or kind and made the 24 hour stay I submitted to a little slice of hell. I decided after those 24 hours that instead of staying until the Sunday afternoon as I’d planned that I would leave early. International trains from France to Belgium are not hard, they don’t even bother checking passports. I was not prepared to leave with my tail between my legs as though I’d done something wrong, so told her why I was leaving and my thoughts. I was not insulting or rude to her, save telling her I myself had never been so insulted in my life. She wasn’t impressed, but then I didn’t expect her to be. I felt bad though because this left Caroline high and dry and remaining in the fallout of my departure for the following 24 hours. That cannot have been enjoyable. But after her time of horror she came and visited me in Belgium, spending the rest of her birthday (the 4th this is) with me. It was an ultra-quick visit but still great to show her around ‘my’ town so that when I talk about certain people or places she at least has a clue about what I’m on about!

Two great visits and one less successful one. I’ve tried, while writing this, to think in the way Ellen mentions in this interview in W magazine. She talks about not being duplicitous, not publicly making fun of people. I get a deep feeling of empathy from her. In the interview she says:

I got to learn how to sit back and watch other people and learn what judgment was and have compassion. And learn that not only was I strong enough to make it in the first place, but I was strong enough to come back and make it again. How lucky am I to have learned that? That took a lot. I wanted to crawl up in a ball and climb in a hole and hide forever; I was embarrassed. That’s why I look at it as a blessing.

Today I don’t feel overly concerned about talking about anything in particular on this site. I’ll talk about that past relationship, discuss friends (though no specifics please), and even future ones. Hey, speaking of which, am going to a party thrown by some Spanish gay-guy tonight. He has a boyfriend. Shame. But all the same who knows what might happen!