Not so Rum and Raisin after all...

For those of you who have been following this blog as closely as a dog’s eyes follow a piece of camembert cheese from the cutting board to the cracker (or for those of you who are so technologically savvy you can perform the impossible feat of scrolling down), you will know that in Paris I felt sort of ‘out of place’. I was a Bubble-o-Bill in a land of Rum and Raisin Gelato.

Once in Brussels I was expecting more of the same. I thought I would meet some Tiramisu or possibly Pistachio flavoured people, so it came as a surprise that my Couchsurfing host turned out to be what the French might call ‘une Bulle-de-Guillaume’*.

It only took a quick scan of his bookshelf for me to realise that, although we’re all made in different factories with different ingredients and different lazy managers who sometimes put strawberry labels on people who are clearly double-chocolate-fudge crunch, deep down, we’re all made out of ice-cream.

This analogy is rapidly falling off the rails, so I will stop. Julien’s bookshelf was full of all my favourite books (only with French titles like Sur la Route) and I had only been there an hour before we were listening to John Coltrane and quoting Monty Python sketches. If I had known that it was possible to say ‘This parrot is definitely deceased!’ to a Frenchman and have them laugh and throw in ‘I’m Brian and so is my wife’, I may have found the people in those Parisian cafés a little less impenetrable.

Julien (who also has a blog, as all of my new friends seem to do (if you speak French you can access it here: http://www.oeuillet.be/)) and his girlfriend Salomé took me to second-hand bookstores, introduced me to French comics (Arthur De Pins is a new favourite), led me around the Tin-Tin bedecked streets of Brussels, had tea and philosophical discussions with me in a tiny pub off the Grand Place, and let me indulge in one of my favourite foreign destinations: the supermarket!

But the icing on this tub of ice-cream was a discovery I made in their flat on the first night I arrived. Attached to their tiny baby-blue TV was an object out of my own childhood: an integral part of my upbringing: the source of my renowned ability to jump over turtles and collect coins with my head: a Super Nintendo. And, if it wasn’t already enough that they owned this grey box of dreams, they also had the game that I probably spent more time on than my honours thesis: Mario Kart.

And so it was that in a little flat above a Brazilian shop in central Brussels, I played 26 rounds of Mario Kart battle-mode with a Monty-Python loving Frenchman.

At the risk of sounding like a marketing ponce for Couchsurfing, I am happy that there is a website out there that can put you in touch with people like this.

We called it a draw at 13-13 (apologies for the bad photo quality).

A more traditional Brussels image.

*many thanks to my personal translating service, JMRAK, for providing this one.

Instead of travel tales, some nonsense about a rebellious paver...

Around the corner from my house there is a piece of pavement. It looks just like any other paver* in this area: grey and rectangular, with a black smudge of old gum on its back. But this paver is different. This paver uses its ‘ordinary’ looks to disguise a mischievous temperament. This paver is tired of being stepped upon and has discovered a way to wreak revenge.

He enjoys doing it (you can tell from the bricky ‘kerplunk’ of his laugh) because it is both immediately destructive and yet so ‘tiny’ an irritation that the victim almost immediately forgets about it. Looking identical to his innocent cousins (who adhere to the paver status quo), he is able to outwit the same set of forgetful feet again and again.

On rainy days, when most pavers close their eyes, put on a grim face and let the water drops fall on them and then roll away like clear marbles, he wriggles and shimmies between his neighbours, opening up his borders and letting the rain tickle his sides and work its way down to fill the grubby pots and pans he keeps underneath his belly.

Once the rain stops and the other pavers get on with the job of waiting to be stepped on, he stops wriggling and tries to blend in. He pretends that he is waiting to service a suede-booted foot with a compliant solidity, but really he is quietly manoeuvring a series of pumps and spouts into his pots and pans.

He is well practised. Even his neighbours can’t tell that he’s doing anything, and the approaching suede boots (or sometimes the ballet-flats with inadequate border patrol) assume that this upcoming patch of pavers will exercise their civil service as quietly and uncomplainingly as the last.

He is also helped by his position. Somehow he was able, years ago, to negotiate his way into the enviable (yet long-winded) real-estate position of ‘Central Paver on Well-Frequented Corner of Street Leading to/from Tube Station’. He is popular because of this location – like an all-you-can-eat dinner buffet at a tiny airport where the only other option is cold sandwiches of questionable freshness at a newsagent.

So the suede boots and under-prepared ballet flats tramp his way. He is the most convenient option.

He sees them coming and readies himself. He stiffens his back and lowers his hand to the pumps in the pots. The feet clomp closer, stepping without a care in the world across the obliging grey backs of his cousins. Once they are two pavers away, he sucks in his breath, swirls his stockpile of water marbles and then, when the foot lands on him, he releases his breath, opens all of his borders and squeezes his pumps, spurting a backwards waterfall of brown liquid up into the air. His technique is so well perfected that this waterfall never fails to perform three or four quick somersaults before landing – with the same inevitability that Wednesday follows Tuesday or regret follows a rampant Terry’s Chocolate Orange binge – squarely on the unsuspecting shoe.

He realeases his kerplunk of a laugh at the same time: his pavery equivalent of a criminal’s calling card: letting those suede shoes know they’ve been had yet again.

It echoes in the ears of the boots, and they curse their rickety memory and vow to themselves that next time, next time, they will remember this anarchist paver and re-route their steps.

But here they come again, on their way home from the shops, and the paver stiffens his back, shakes his head and chuckles.

It’s always just too easy.


*Apparently the British don’t say ‘paver’. I have had arguments over whether this word can mean ‘a piece of pavement’ alongside ‘one who paves’. Well, one argument. According to the infallible yourdictionary.com, both meanings are correct, so I’m going to stick with my colonial language perversions and sprinkle ‘pavers’ all over this blog entry with my giant pavery salt-shaker. Paver.

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: