A personal alphabet for 2005

A - AICHI, Japan: visited Expo 2005 (March); Ecole d'AQUARELLE: attended Jan-June; ALLERGIES, multiple : discovered following blood-test (November); ALI: my Turkish teacher.

B - BULLET TRAIN (Shinkansen): travelled Kyoto-Nara/Nara-Nagoya (March); Le BOSS: this year, also le Birthday Boy (October); BODY BALANCE: weightloss/health improvement programme I started this year (October); BLOG: started this one (December) ; BOUNCING CZECH, coffee companion.

C - COMPUTER: died (May), replaced (June), seem to have spent an inordinate amount of time in front of it all year; LA CANEVA: best restaurant discovered this year (July); CLEARWIRE: my new ISP (September); LA CARIOCA: Anglo-Brazilian friend; CAT-LADY: French friend; CARPE DIEM: restaurant I frequent weekly with P.

D - DIGITAL photography: converted to it, with purchase of Nikon Coolpix 5200 (Feb); DAUNT BOOKS: favourite London bookshop (March); DIAMONDS exhibition at London's Natural History Museum: they closed it 3 months early, before I got there, the b*****s!; DOG-LADY: Italian friend and former Japanese classmate.

E - EXPO 2005, spent 2 days there, based in Nagoya (March); EUROPALIA Russia (September -December); ELLINIKON: probably my favourite restaurant in Brussels.

F - FUJISAN: I saw it ! (March) ; FIREFOX: I installed it (July); FABERGE exhibition: I enjoyed it (September); 43 THINGS website: I discovered it (December).

G - GUBBIO: visited the day before the Corsa dei Ceri (May); la GLOBETROTTEUSE: Swedish friend currently based in Seoul; GALERIE DU CINQUANTENAIRE: I must pass through it about 1000 times a year.

H - HANAMI: cherry-blossom viewing (March); HAKONE: went on pirate boat and cable car (March); HORLICKS: had to give it up (August); HELSINKI, Finland: travelled there by catamaran from Tallinn, Estonia (September); HERSEL', Scottish friend.

I - INSTITUTE OF LINGUISTS: sat exams (January), received Spanish-English translation diploma (April); ILMH: where I study Turkish (since September); L'ITALIANO café aka "my office".

J - JAPAN: this was the year I finally got there (March); JAPANESE: gave up - again - for now (May); JEWELLERY: still a passion, though not the obsession it used to be (even if I still lust after a blue diamond, and have not forgotten a black one I once saw ...).

K - KYOTO, KAMAKURA, KIMONO : among highlights of Japan trip (March); KOREA: visited LG in Seoul (April); KARINE D.: my favourite art historian, accompanied trip to Umbria (May); KEYCARDS: new electronic locks fitted in my building (September) - already lost one of the cards and had to be let in by concierge.

L - LATVIA and LITHUANIA: completed visits to 25 current EU Member States (September); LEGO-LADY: Danish friend and former colleague; LUNCH COMPANY: birthday treat from the Wiz - with LEMON TART (October).

M - MAR ADENTRO: best film I saw this year (Feb); MANGOES: bought the biggest ones I have ever seen in my life at Shinsegae department store, Seoul (April); Alexander McCALL SMITH, novelist: gave a hilarious talk for St. Andrew's Day at Scotland House (November); MADEIRA: where I will be spending Christmas (December); MOELLEUX AU CHOCOLAT: yum!

N - NARA: took some lovely photos (March); NAGOYA: lost camera containing lovely photos, including of the Expo (March); NIKON COOLPIX 5900: bought new camera in Tokyo (March); NaNoWriMo: couldn't hack it! (November); Les NANAS: café where I often meet M.

O - ORVIETO: fine town, fantastic Duomo (May); OZ aka the Wizard: another good friend, not to be confused with the OZZIE, aka Cerise, in Sydney.

P - PHONE-CHARMS: accumulated a bunch of these (March/April); PERUGIA, capital of Umbria and - though not while I was there - of Eurochocolate (May); (Au) PALAIS DES INDES: another favourite restaurant and venue for dinner with LC and family (June); PROXIS: keeps me supplied with books; PANNACOTTA: my favourite dessert, enjoyed this year at Mezzanine, La Caneva, La Fattoria del Chianti and Multi-Culti.

Q - QI GONG, went to classes (Jan-March); Q&A, by Vikas Swarup : best book read this year; QAMINARI, QAMINANTE: my internet aliases.

R - RAINBOW seen in RIGA, Latvia (September); ROUGE-CLOITRE: Brussels park/nature reserve within the Forêt de Soignes, starting point for several walks I got around to exploring this year.

S - SEOUL, S. Korea: visited LG at plum-blossom time (April); SCHLEIPER: art supplies store where I regularly spend a fortune to no good purpose; SMALL ROCKETS MAH JONG, SPONGEBOB COLLAPSE: terrible timewasters; SUZI-WAFFLES my oldest friend (not chronologically), in London.

T - TURKS - A Journey of 1000 Years: exhibition at Royal Academy, London (March); TAI CHI: went to classes with M. (Jan-March); TOKYO: Tokyo Tower, Ginza, Asakusa, Kaminari-mon (my gate, see Q!), Akihabara, ... loved every minute of it except the Tsukiji fish market! (March/April); TEA FOR TWO: tea-room with excellent scones and Nilgiri tea - now off limits! (last visited in June); TURKISH: started evening classes (September); TRANSSIBERIAN exhibition, Musée du Cinquantenaire (October).

U - UMBRIA: trip to "il cuor verde d'Italia" (May); URBINO : visited this beautiful Renaissance town in Le Marche (May).

V - VIDEO-entryphone: installed (March), still not working properly! VILNIUS, Lithuania: last stop on Baltic trip (September); Cercle des VOYAGEURS: one of my favourite haunts.

W - WATERCOLOUR-PAINTING : did hardly anything outside classes (Jan-June); WRITING: didn't do enough of that either; WOLUWE PARK: venue for WALKING, yet another thing I didn't do enough of.

X - XP, Windows: finally installed it (June); XPATS: website I waste a lot of time on.

Y - YAMAMOTO-SAN: my Japanese teacher, organiser of wonderful trip to Japan (Mar-April); YONGSAN: area of Seoul where I stayed with LG (April)

Z - ZAO: one of my favourite shops in Brussels; ZORBA: dining companion.

Où sont les neiges d'antan?

Today my friend La Carioca showed me some photographs of herself from almost 30 years ago, and lamented that in those days she thought she was fat and ugly. Now, comparing her former to her present self, she sees that she was really very attractive, and it is such a shame she didn't realise it at the time!

We women so often feel dissatisfied with our present selves in comparison either to other women (including unreal images of women as idealized by someone else, most notably the fashion industry) or our former - read, younger! - selves. I don't know how things are now, but when I was young we wanted to look older than our ages: it was a big thing to graduate to high heels, and to start wearing make-up (at least with the knowledge of our parents)! Then before you know it you are buying hair-dyes and anti-wrinkle treatments, fighting several spare tyres and wondering why bits of your body seem to have developed this sudden attraction for the floor, to judge by how hard they are trying to reach it. I don't remember reaching any point of equilibrium - after getting rid of spots and puppy fat but before encountering the first wrinkles and white hairs - during which I was happy with my looks. And so we don't appreciate that we were in the bloom of youth until we aren't, any more.

Then we wonder what happened to the beautiful young women we now realise we were. Where are the snows of yesteryear, indeed?

As for the snows of Brussels, they have been and gone (again), but we still have the Christmas decorations and son-et-lumière in the Grand' Place.

Ooh, snow!

And aren't we all
"like snowflakes falling in the river,
one moment bright, then lost for ever".....?

Turkish non-delight

Today the Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk went on trial in Istanbul, the city he loves and describes so well. He is accused of "insulting Turkishness" by acknowledging - in an interview with a foreign magazine - the Ottoman genocide of Armenians. If he is convicted, I hope the EU suspends negotiations on accession, as the Turkish government's refusal to allow any discussion of the events of 1915 is unacceptable in a Member State. It is also unhealthy, where would Germany be if it allowed no discussion of its past - or indeed my own country of its history of colonialism?

Such restrictions on freedom of expression are unworthy of a great culture.

I hope one day to be able to read Orhan Pamuk in the original, but having only studied Turkish for a few months, this seems a long way away!

A walk in the park

Poetry in (/and) motion

Yesterday in "The Weakest Link" one of the questions was: "Which poet wrote the line "Oh I wish I'd looked after me teeth?". Contestant's answer: "Tennyson"! Now, we certainly never studied Pam Ayres at school but we did have to learn several of Alfred Lord Tennyson's poems by heart, such as: The Lady of Shalott, Mariana, Break, Break, Break and The Charge of The Light Brigade. This is also one of his, which could almost apply to the so-called Capital of Europe (though I assume it was written about Paris):

Beautiful city, the centre and crater of European confusion,
O you with your passionate shriek for the rights of an equal humanity,
How often your Re-volution has proven but E-volution
Roll'd again back on itself in the tides of a civic insanity!

I'm fond of poetry, and not only in English, this is one of my favourites by the Spanish poet Antonio Machado, from which my blogging name is derived:

Caminante, son tus huellas
el camino, y nada más;
caminante, no hay camino,
se hace camino al andar.
Al andar se hace el camino,
y al volver la vista atrás
se ve la senda que nunca
se ha de volver a pisar.
Caminante, no hay camino,
sino estelas en el mar.

Traveller, your footprints
are all that create the track;
traveller, there is no road,
as you walk, the track you make.
By walking you make a road
and when you turn to look back,
the path you see stretching behind you
you never again can take.
Traveller, there is no road,
just the trail you leave in your wake.

I discussed poetry today, among other things, over lunch with The Wizard and La Carioca at the Pomo d'Oro. We got onto discussing the strange names of destinations of certain buses in Brussels, like Konkel and Hunderenveld (field of dogs!). There is a bus that goes to Transvaal, where you will find only a rather boring residential district, and not the African veldt, while in Ghent you can take a tram to Moscow! Of course public transport, being among the more mundane concerns of life, tends to inspire verse, not poetry, which brings us back to Pam Ayres - although I don't know that she wrote anything about buses or trams. The verse that comes to mind is the one attributed to one A.D. Godley:

What is this that roareth thus?
Can it be a Motor Bus?
Yes, the smell and hideous hum
Indicant Motorem Bum!
How shall wretches live like us
Cincti Bis Motoribus?
Domine, defende nos
Contra hos Motores Bos!

Whining and Dining

Lunched - at Poivre et Sel - with Lego-Lady, whose Director apparently can't understand why Ukraine is not a candidate for membership of the EU on a par with Turkey: I have to wonder whether he has ever read any of the documents that have crossed his desk over the last years. My only visit to the Ukraine was to a border crossing point at Chop (also Čop, or Czap in Hungarian, Чоп in Ukrainian), some 4 years ago in the context of Hungary's pending accession to the EU. It was memorable for several reasons: for the size of the hat worn by one of the border guards (similar to the one in the second photo here but with an even larger crown), for the quantity of alcoholic beverages they attempted to ply us with - after inviting us to "coffee" - and for the fact that the common language we managed to find to avoid interpretation from Ukrainian into Hungarian and then from Hungarian into English was Spanish, some of the Ukrainian officials having spent time in Cuba! At the time, both sides of the future EU border were building border facilities with Community funds, but of course from different budgets under different regional programmes: TACIS for Ukraine, PHARE for Hungary.

Had dinner with The Wizard and Zorba, at Il Divino - indifferent antipasti followed by a quite acceptable "fondant au chocolat" - and discussed EU trade policy and who doesn't get on with Peter Mandelson, the EU's trade Commissioner, as well as our respective Christmas holiday plans.

Talking of Christmas, here are a couple of pictures of the decorations in the Grand' Place.

Promenade du Chemin de Fer

To do penance for some of my over- indulgences this week I decided to take advantage of the slightly less cold weather today to walk the 5 1/4 km track (that's just over 3 miles) that follows an abandoned railway line, the Promenade du Chemin de Fer. While it isn't always the quietest walk in Brussels, running alongside a major road for part of its length, it is nicely placed for public transport, with metro stations at the beginning and end, and even a tram passing below it half-way along, for the days when I don't want to do the whole thing.

Seeing the world

The map below showing the parts of the world I have visited is from World66, for some reason it only shows the countries I've been to instead of the ones I still want to visit, which show up in (a darker) grey on the World66 website. However, it's better than nothing, although it would be nice if I could work out how to resize it to fit this page!

I have so much of the world left to see, and my planned trip to Libya this Christmas was cancelled, grrrr.. Anyway I'm now going to Madeira and am looking forward to that even though it doesn't increase my "score" in terms of numbers of countries - I have another 28 to visit before reaching 100 which I reckon is a decent number of countries to have been to. I am including countries that don't exist any more, like East Germany, but not, of course, those where I didn't actually set foot outside an airport or get off a ship.

It's hard to establish priorities but top of the list for new countries to visit are: Libya, Lebanon, Croatia, Russia (St. Petersburg), Costa Rica and the rest of Central America. There are also lots of places I still want to visit in countries I have already been to, such as Italy (Genova, Cinque Terre, the Lakes), Spain (Toledo, Cuenca, Salamanca, Avila, Ciudad Rodriguez), India (Darjeeling, Hyderabad, ..) and Greece (Thessalonika, Santorini, Mykonos, Corfu, Kefalonia,..), to name but a few. The top 43 are listed on Qaminari's 43 Places, with another world map.



create your own visited country map

Day 1, Blog 1

Strange day to begin a blog, but where else am I going to put down all those random thoughts, in this electronic age?
Today has been an indulgent day, especially food-wise. Tried a new restaurant for lunch, called Multi-Culti (horrible name!), in the now white-painted former premises of the Rimbaud café on the corner of Avenue d'Auderghem and Avenue Nerviens, diagonally opposite the Breydel. A rather pretentious place, but it has excellent desserts, even if they can't spell them - panaccota??! Had dinner with P as usual on Fridays (chicons au gratin - not the best day for the diet but it is cold!) in the recently opened upstairs rooms at Carpe Diem, at Mérode. What is clearly a former apartment has been turned into a series of cosy rooms, all with fireplaces (not working) and weird green crystal lampshades in the non-smoking section - the smoking section on the other side of the stairs is painted red, and twinkly at the moment with Christmas lights. Although the room we were in was not especially crowded, our conversation was occasionally drowned out by the braying, from a neighbouring table, of an extremely loud and well-lubricated gentleman, I would guess a local lobbyist, trying to impress (in English, of a sort) a young lady I took to be from Central Europe, possibly a stagiaire (intern).

In the afternoon, I went for a walk in the Cinquantenaire Park, the centre of which has now been fenced off for renovation work, in particular removing diseased trees. According to the notice not very prominently displayed anywhere near the fences, the work is to last 400 working days, or two years! I took the time to examine the rather odd work of sculpture placed next to the entrance to the restoration service of the Royal Art and History Museum, the Institut Royal du Patrimoine, which bears no information whatsoever as to sculptor or title, and also to appreciate the "sgraffiti", if that is what they are (they look to me like ceramics), on the fin-de-siècle façade of a building across the road from there, that I remember standing for years propped up by metal struts after the apartments behind it were demolished.


Sometimes Brussels' policy of "façadism" does pay off, providing of course that the old façade that the builders are required to preserve while effectively constructing a new building behind it doesn't "accidentally" fall down during the process...





New building, old façade





Also met M for coffee at the café in Habitat in the Woluwe Shopping Center (sic), called "Les Nanas" - this could be translated as "the chicks", in the sense of "girls", don't know whether this is supposed to refer to the likely customers or to the serving ladies. Thrown out at 6 when the café closed, we went looking for Christmas presents - also finding presents for ourselves, in my case an Alain Manoukian t-shirt and cardigan in teal blue, or is it green, anyway my favourite turquoise colour. On n'est jamais mieux servi que par soi-même!