Bienvenue à Bruxelles!

The day I arrived in Brussels it was dimanche sans voitures (Sunday without cars). I had been told about this before arriving but had forgotten about it, so when I was walking from Brussels Midi station to the city itself, everything seemed a little sedated. A few kids sailed by on bikes, the occasional bell tinkled and I saw a police car cruise down a quiet street: lights on, sirens off.

I started to get the feeling that maybe visiting Paris first was a mistake – that it was like eating the tastiest thing on my dinner plate first and then realising that all I had left now was broccoli (or Brussels-sprouts, even. Ha. I’m sure you couldn’t see that one coming!). But I hadn’t even reached the city centre yet, so I decided to withhold my broccoli pronouncements until later on. I decided that maybe once I’d cracked Brussels’ crème brulée lid with my teaspoon, I would see warm melting raspberries and smooth chocolate cake batter.

I was walking down Avenue de Stalingrad, heading for the Grand Place, when in the distance I heard the unmistakable promise of a melting raspberry: a rumbling of drums, a far-off trumpet. It was in the opposite direction to where I was headed, but there’s something about faraway drums that makes you feel you’re missing out on something big, so I turned down a side-street towards them, getting my teaspoon ready.

I was not disappointed. The crème brulée lid shattered into thousands of delicious lego pieces and the chocolate cake batter was thick and flowing. A band of 12 young people dressed in a mixture of black Cossack hats, fluoro yellow shorts, funky indie suits and black suspenders were dancing down the street, playing the liveliest, most enthusiastic and unabashedly happy music I have ever heard. There were drums, trumpets, accordions, saxophones, clarinets, trombones and one big, moody tuba. A trail of grinning people were following along behind them, and they lured us all into a big auditorium where they clambered their way up onto the stage.

The music was fantastic – it was fast-paced and. They took turns having solos and the rest of the band would creep up around them, staring at them in ‘mock’ curiousity and awe. The accordion player kept doing jumping splits like a rock star, the lead trumpet player looked like the kind of guy who would make embarrassing but witty speeches at wedding receptions, and the notes bounced comically along like a multicoloured beachball at a football match.

The best photo I could manage, unfortunately

They played for about an hour, and Brussels went from a broccoli side-dish to a place where people were ecstatic to be alive.

Later on in the same day, after discovering where all the tourists were hiding (they’re all around the Mannekin-Pis, which, truth be told, is not all that exciting. They dress him up in little outfits and it smacks sharply of people who put clothes on their pets…) and that a day without cars results in a day swarming with bikes (to the extent that crossing the road requires the skill and dexterity of the 2006 ‘Frogger’ champion), I heard a different kind of music.

Dimanche sans voitures = get your Frogger joystick ready

Near Bourse/Beurs station, there was a DJ playing emotional, intense and incredibly loud piano recordings from the top of an abandoned building. I stopped to have a sandwich at a little Dutch café and watched the hodge-podge of Brussels folk float by. There were people on rollerskates, a guy on a penny-farthing, and at one point a man in a medieval peasant outfit trotted by on a horse. As I was sitting there a group of what looked like African American rappers flounced by – wearing oversized white jerseys, straight-rimmed caps, silver sunglasses and straight faces, but they were speaking in French and had the soundtrack of Chopin’s ADHD cousin behind them.

The DJ near Bourse/Beurs

Here’s to discovering that, even though places aren’t Paris, that doesn’t necessarily make them broccoli.

P.S. Obviously I’ve been having trouble with the speed of my updates lately. I hope you’ll bear with me if I intersperse everyday junk with actual travel stories. Instead of writing about Amsterdam, which I was meant to be doing, I wrote about a rebellious piece of pavement near my flat. It isn’t because I don’t want to write about Amsterdam – it’s just that pieces of pavement keep getting in the way…

Ma Sœur, la Proustienne Involontaire

It felt almost like a pilgrimage. Strapping on my most serious and anticipatory navy-blue expression (and yet, being distracted by hedgehog chestnut shells), we trekked up the cobblestone path of La Père Lachaise. All of his twisting wine-bottle words and his swirling bedroom and his greatcoat and his folds of blankets like meringues and his coffee and his madeleines and his distant cathedral spires and his coach-seat meditations and the seeing of familiar faces in strangers… all of these things wove around the rain-stained headstones, pointing with silk-gloved fingers towards – of all things – a number. Plot 85.

One back from the road, in a shiny rectangular box, lay Proust. I stood there, awaiting the teaspoons and thimbles and buckets of melancholic satisfaction sure to hit me like a chestnut out of a Parisian tree.

I felt a vibration. But it was not the awaited chestnut. It was not the inner rumbling of a pilgrim’s joy. It was my Sony Ericsson W200i announcing an incoming call.

‘Hello?’
‘Hi, it’s Laura!’
‘Hi Laura! Where are you? You sound tired.’
‘I’m in bed.’

The seriousness fell off me like a liquid dress. There was a puddle of sentences at my feet. I could see my sister, phone to ear, lying in her absolute favourite place to be: her bed.

Proust would definitely have approved!

Another Slingshotted Sultana from Paris

I visited Paris with my friend Marc, who may or may not have been increasingly irritated by my futile outbursts of ‘why wasn’t I born here?’ every third pavement stone or so. I know it is an incredibly obvious observation to make, but these Europeans with their easy style, double-cheek kissing greetings and access to Hemingway cafés are just so… different.

I sat at a café in Montparnasse (where, like all Parisian cafés, all the chairs face out to the street, so you talk side-by-side watching the little posh dogs trot by rather than face-to-face (a setup making philosophical musings less likely)) and watched people coming and going – girls smoking and reading French papers, men having animated, hand-flailing discussions, darkly-dressed High School boys greeting each other with quiet, earnest expressions – and it wasn’t just the language barrier that made all of this frustratingly impenetrable. It was their mysterious lifestyle: their meeting friends at this café, strolling here from tiny unknown streets in their dark clothes and their assured, two-kiss mindset.

It was their childhood.

Earlier in the day we had walked through Parc Monceau and there was a group of school kids in navy blue uniforms jostling and scuffing their feet on the dusty white gravel and taunting each other in tiny French voices. It was just regular kid stuff, but as we walked out of the gold-rimmed gates and onto a boulevard leading to the Arc de Triomphe, I saw how the places people do their ‘regular kid stuff’ in can turn them into multilingual, darkly dressed, earnest discussion-havers, or confused, sunny Australians who can only say ‘I think we’re out of milk again’ in one language (and yes, these are the only alternatives. You’re either a French philosopher or an Australian in need of a quick trip to Coles…). Australian kids play Bullrush in grassless playgrounds off of the Northern Road. French kids play pétanque in a park off the Champs-Élysées. We went on excursions to Warragamba Dam or Questacon in Canberra. They go on excursions to the Loire Valley or the palace of Versailles.

Now, before all of my Australian friends get the wrong idea and call me an unappreciative cretin, I should say that I loved growing up in Australia. When Mum would stop off at Tony’s fruit and veg shop on the way home from school to buy us a Bubble-o-Bill, I really felt that life couldn’t get much better. But it is impossible not to compare, and to wonder about impossibilities.

Marc, for example, grew up in Basel: a region of Switzerland that borders France and Germany. Apart from the ability to say ‘we used to pop over to France for our lemons and to Germany for our baba ghanoush (incongruous as that may seem…), if you add to this happy location an Italian grandmother, English mother and Swiss father, you end up with someone who can speak about 16 languages fluently and who can walk down tiny but familiar streets to cafés where the girls are reading about politics, the hand-flailing men are discussing Russian history, and the darkly-dressed High School boys greet each other with quiet, earnest expressions because that is the way it is done.

Slightly different to a Bubble-o-Bill on the way home...

Digesting

It has taken a while to get things together since my last update, because I have visited Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, Hamburg and Barcelona since then and have been overwhelmed into silence. I’m like one of those Fritzl children finally emerging from the dungeon: wide-eyed, illiterate, lost, and about to shut down from sensory overload.

But even though I feel like I’ve just eaten ten mud-cakes, eighteen croque monsieurs and forty-six tubs of rum and raisin gelato (which may not be too far from the truth, so long as you add in twenty tapas lunches and seventy-eight espressos…), and will need to lie down for a few months to let them digest, I don’t want to wait until I’ve forgotten what a croque monsieur tastes like before I get started. So forgive me if I’m only serving you slabs of icing and then oozings of cheese, followed by a slingshotted sultana into the shoulder, but I need to let the flavours out in whatever way they come!

The first slingshotted sultana: Paris Perfumes

One of the first things I noticed about Paris was how nice it smells. As opposed to London or Sydney, where you get intermittent stabs of B.O. or that otherwise ubiquitous deodorant choice for men whose nostrils have been silenced in favour of overblown advertisements pushing the blatantly false idea that women will be yours by the aircraft-hangar-full if you douse yourself liberally in this eye-wateringly strong scent: Lynx body spray; on Parisian sidewalks you drift by the most foot-stoppingly, head-turningly, breathe-in-ingly good smells. They are always ‘just enough’. You only notice it once the person has already passed. A woman in a bright blue coat and leather boots passes you with a floral, woody, understated loveliness. A 20 year old boy is somehow mature enough to choose something subtle and appealing: like grey toasted hazelnuts. An old lady with the most well-coordinated, stylin’ outfit you have ever seen on someone that age makes you turn to follow a sweet, warm scent of hot milk and almond shortbread.

Sometimes there will be a group of three ladies talking on a street corner. As you go past, the perfumes rise and fall in polite competition, saying ‘you first,’ ‘no, after you,’, ‘oh thank you, but I will only be brief. It is your turn now, and then yours, my dear.’


More sultanas to follow shortly…

Whitechapel Yoghurt

Whitechapel is one of the cheapest squares on the Monopoly board, and now that I’ve been living here for a couple of months I understand why that is. BUT, I’ve been criticised for being too negative in this little blog of Proustian nonsense, so instead of peeling back the Whitechapel yoghurt lid and showing you the dark green fluff indicating that this place has been left in the fridge for a few weeks too many and should only be eaten if you have scant concern for your own internal organs, I will try to focus on the positives. Scrape off the fluff and dig deeper in! Maybe it’s still good at the bottom…

Positive #1: Smells

With its high Indian and Bangladeshi population, the smell of my Whitechapel neighbours’ cooking often sends spasms of jealous pleasure across my tongue. They are usually sharp, spicy, tangy scents that saturate the air completely and come dancing to my amateurish nostrils in waves of hot, thick perfection. They make me hover by the back door in a semi-delirium.

Positive #2: Sounds

There is a short old Bangladeshi man with a grey beard and a faded faruque cap who hunches over crates of green mangoes near Whitechapel station every afternoon. Barely opening his mouth (but opening it just enough for you to see his yellow teeth inside), he says ‘Ayyy mango, mango, mango,’ over and over again. I like his hard-selling tactics. I am growing fond of him.

Positive #3: Sights

Spitalfields Markets are clean, colourful and spacious. Likewise the Sunday Upmarket off of Brick Lane is well-structured and lovely. But it is the people who spread out their knick-knacks on blankets along Brick Lane that I like seeing most. Matchbox cars and size 16 shoes and folded chequered shirts and plastic pearls and battered CD players and tiny vases and lycra masks and two old pots and bouquets of green lighters and coat-hangers of multicoloured ribbons at 20p each and a framed picture of a German-Shepherd in profile are all spread out evenly on tartan blankets and their sellers lean against brick walls smoking and eating red liquorice.

Positive #4: Let’s skip taste and touch and go for the sixth sense: The Ghost of Nikolai

Nikolai was the guy who lived in my room for four years or so before I moved in. I get snippets of information about him from my flatmates, and, from what I’ve been able to piece together, it seems like he was a bit of a loner. He spent hours alone in his room, coming out occasionally to watch marathon screenings of The World at War on the History channel and never once having friends drop by for tea and croissants. Of course I could ask more questions about him, but I prefer to imagine what he did in this little room with too little natural lighting and too many broken power-points. Did he comb his fringe over his eyes, lie on his bed and stare up at the ceiling? Did he tap absent-minded, compulsive beats on the desk with his fingernails? Did he write long lists of Mario Brothers characters, from most favourite to least favourite? Did he find, as I do, that creative spirit is strangled by beige walls and paisley curtains? Ah, but here I’m being too negative again! For all I know he had the time of his life in here…

Positive #5: Let’s forget the senses altogether and turn to: The Irony of Whitechapel McDonald’s

This will take a little bit of research to verify, but I recently discovered that the McDonald’s that I pass every morning on my way to the tube station has an interesting history. It used to be a furniture store, and upstairs it housed the Jewish Social Club. In May 1907, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin and Gorky themselves all walked up those stairs for the congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. Apparently they came to London as part of their European tour, attempting to spread the seed of revolution. Some of them stayed on Fulbourne street, which I can reach in about two minutes from my front door.

Imagine that. From a place where people discussed the horrible alienation induced by the division of labour and made passionate speeches about capitalist control over the means of production, to the plastic-seated, fry-sizzling, fake-smiled epitome of modern capitalism: McDonald’s. How depressing. Perhaps I shall entrench the irony further and go eat a McNugget in honour of Lenin and Trotsky. I’ll dunk it in some Sweet n’ Sour sauce and try to come around to the view of many: that people will always prefer their right to work for chocolate thickshakes than equality.


And so it would appear my attempt at a positive post has failed. I do enjoy irony, though, so perhaps it’s not all bad! Here’s another sign that Whitechapel may have some hidden treasures:

File Me Away

My job involves a lot of filing. Today as I was slotting Olojharan Obolinko down in his rightful place between the dashing Ojoban Obolinka and the delightful Mohammed Obolezarak, I wondered about the likelihood of any of these people actually meeting one day, and the massive sequence of events that had to occur to result in them sitting flush up against one another in a London filing cabinet. Even if you forget that the Obolinko, Obolinka and Obolezarak parents all had to decide that a little Obolinko, Obolinka or Obolezarak would be a welcome addition to their families (except for Ojaban, who was a mistake), and cast aside the striking similarity of their uncommon (some may even say contrived) surnames, there are quite a few decisions these ‘O’ brothers had to make – and quite a few circumstances beyond their control they had to find themselves in – to see them rubbing their filey shoulders together in this admissions office.

Olojharan decided to take a year off after finishing school in South Africa to backpack through Eastern Europe and sample as much štrukli and viška pogača as possible before returning home to ‘real life’ selling phone credit and crisps to people in his father’s shop. That was the plan. But, after a particularly heavy night on the kruškovac in Croatia, Olojharan met Melania. She had a penchant for designer clothes and gourmet nibbles, and convinced our Olojharan that the only way he could fund his newfound love for Egyptian cotton sheets and Armani suits was to launch a career in high finance. So, upsetting his father (and at the same time impressing him more than he will ever admit), Olojharan applies to an economics degree. His details are sent, his photos attached, his numbers punched in. Into the filing cabinet he goes.

Ojoban was the seventh of eight children (his younger sister was also a mistake). He grew up in a tiny house in Newfoundland and always had to fight for his fair share at dinner time. His older brothers were rolling fat things with bad tempers, and, one night, as he watched Ajalan’s chubby fingers snatch the meatloaf from his plate and shove it between his grinning white teeth, he made the decision that he would show them all. He would eat the finest of foods some day. He would never have to share. And he would never get fat. A chef seemed an obvious choice, but, after a failed venture as a kitchen assistant in town (his boss told him he’d never seen someone so clumsy with a whisk), he realised he only wanted to eat food: not make it. Flipping through the Aubergine Quarterly he saw a job advertisement for a food critic. He applied, but was told he needed to know how to write with great panache and accuracy about the inner workings of soufflés. So, with a new sense of purpose, he applies to a combined Arts/Science degree, majoring in English Literature and Nutrition. His details are sent, his photos attached, his numbers punched in. Into the filing cabinet he goes.

Mohammed was born into a wealthy Nigerian family. He was pampered good and proper his entire childhood, snacking on caviar sandwiches and shark-fin soup with truffle dippers. The only ‘work’ he had ever done consisted of telephoning various international zoos offering 200.6 million nairas and 6.2 concubines in exchange for a bald eagle to add to his personal menagerie. So, when his father was jailed for tax fraud and his mother fled to Bulgaria with her lover, it came as quite a rude shock that everyone in the family turned to him to work back the Obolezarak fortune. After a family meeting, where Mohammed spent the whole time stroking Emerald – his blue-winged raquet-tail – it was decided he should enroll in a business degree. Mohammed has no intention of working or studying (quite frankly, he is incapable of either), but his uncle has already paid five times the tuition fees to secure his place. His details are sent, his photos attached, his numbers punched in. Into the filing cabinet he goes.

The ambitious South African sits next to the hungry Newfoundlandan who is next to the slothful Nigerian. They are connected by similar surnames and coincidentally colliding circumstances.

I close the filing cabinet, thinking about all the things that had to happen to result in my hands being the ones to alphabetise and file these three people I may never meet. Somewhere in Canada, maybe my numbers are being punched in, and I’m being wedged between a philandering German and a philanthropic Pakistani.

It may be a small but incontrovertible truth: we’re all next to somebody we don’t know in a filing cabinet somewhere.

A Red Soufflé in Hyde Park

I have often been criticised for my persistent lack of organisational drive. I thought maybe moving to another country might convince my new friends that I do act and not just talk, but unfortunately lately I’ve been acting with the same joie de vivre as a hibernating animal after a glass of warm milk. My new BFF noticed the snoring emanating from my cave and decided that the only thing for it was to burst inside with ice-blocks and waterskis, singing ‘Good Morning’ à la Gene Kelly and announcing the arrival of summer with timpanis and glockenspiels.

To prove to him that I can organise (and to thank him for reminding me that I am a young person in London and not a Grizzly Bear in the Alaskan wilderness), a plan was hatched. It was an organisational soufflé: for it to rise successfully it required a few days to prepare the key ingredients.

Before I impart my recipe, it may help you to know that this friend is also my French tutor, so there are many French flourishes involved. If you do not enjoy a good French flourish, you may substitute this ingredient with some icing sugar.

Sarah’s London Soufflé

Ingredients

1 x red beret
1 x black and white scarf
1 x quantity red wool (at least 150 metres)
1 x picnic blanket
1 x pack of chalk
1 x quantity home-made food labels in French (eg. ‘a knife’ = ‘un couteau’)
1 x quantity basic picnic food, including a baguette and camembert cheese
2 x functioning mobile phones with sufficient credit
1 x desperate prayer to Vishnu that it doesn’t rain

Method

You will need to select a fitting location to cook in. I selected Hyde Park, but feel free to adapt this to your own city or town.

1. Organise to meet in front of the Serpentine Art Gallery in Hyde Park at 1pm sharp on Saturday.
2. That morning, purchase all of your fresh food, don your red beret and scarf, pack your wool, chalk, picnic blanket and food labels. Before leaving home, drop in your prayer to Vishnu (you may have to do this the night before, also, and sprinkle more in – to taste – across the course of the day).
3. Arrive at the Gallery at midday so you have ample time to prepare. Once there, approach the Gallery staff to ask if they would mind you scrawling a small message in French on the pavement near the entrance outside. Take their advice and write the note on paper instead (even though you spent your lunch-break the day before on a cross-London chalk-hunt).
4. Get out your ball of wool and tie one end to a post near the Gallery entrance. Attach your sign that says ‘Suivre moi’ (‘Follow me’).
5. Unravel your wool, weaving it around trees, over footpaths and down hills until it runs out in a place not many people would choose for a picnic.
6. Set up your picnic blanket at this end of the string and affix your French labels to the food (eg. Le Fromage, Le Noix, L’eau, La Myrtille, Un Bol, Un Plat, etc.).
7. Send your friend a text message that says: ‘Quand vous être à le musée, chercher pour l’instructions’ (‘When you are at the gallery, look for instructions’).
8. Try to look as ‘normal’ as possible when strolling families and curious tourists notice your woollen trail and (a) stare, (b) smile, and/or (c) approach you to ask what on Earth you are doing.
9. Wait.
10. Wait some more.
11. Worry about the other end of the string.
12. Panic when your friend sends you a message, clearly having not seen your note.
13. Reply, telling him to look for a little red clue.
14. Keep an eye on the trees in the distance until you see your perplexed friend collecting the string: weaving around trees, over footpaths and down hills.
15. As he gets closer, try to look as nonchalant as possible. Fail miserably.
16. Eat, drink, and discuss steps 1 through 15.

(Serves 2).

The rest of my plan involved seeing The X-Files movie (which, I hate to admit, disappointed me immensely), having a drink in a pub overlooking the Thames in Bermondsey, then heading to the National Theatre in Waterloo to watch Bafta nominated short films which were shown outside up on the Fly-tower.

The hibernating bear has awoken…