Tapis de Tulipes

Every year, the Brussels commune of Anderlecht has a "carpet of tulips" in Place de Linde: I had never been to see it before this year and was a bit disappointed, I was expecting something like the flower carpet we have in the Grand' Place every other year. The blue flowers aren't tulips anyway, but hyacinths - you could almost smell your way there from the metro station (St. Guidon)!

Living in the Low Countries (of course the Netherlands is the place to see the best displays, e.g. Keukenhof), tulips seem quite commonplace but in fact they are rather exotic, their name comes from the Persian for "turban" and they originally came to Europe from Turkey - although apparently the Turks call them lilies! I don't know any poems about tulips, unless you count this:

I threw my love a tulip,
She caught it in her teeth.
She threw me back my tulip,
I threw her back her teeth.

Bharati

What to say about Bharati? Well as photography was banned you have to look at the picture gallery here for photos of the show and here for a video and the main song.

I did enjoy the spectacle, the musicians and singers were superb and I don't think I've ever seen better filmi dancing. Bhavna Pani is excellent as Bharati; Gagan Malik makes a handsome Siddharta, though he only gets a couple of dance numbers; Rahul Vohre (who was in Monsoon Wedding and Swades) does a good job as narrator.

But. The plot (allegedly based on the film Swades) is rubbish - not that I was expecting Great Literature but it's basically boy (NRI) meets girl (adopted daughter of Domraja), girl is to be the subject of an arranged marriage, boy overcomes father's opposition (quite how is unclear, unless it's because he seems to become a Bollywood actor at one point) and ends up being allowed to marry girl - and off they go on their honeymoon in an autorickshaw.

The whole thing smacks of someone sitting down and making a list of what the world knows of India and then cramming it all into a show: yoga, meditation (audience gets to do "ommmm" or as they spell it in French "aum"!), holi, Kathakali dancers, kalaripayat (martial art), non-violence, Mallakhamb acrobatics, cricket, making Bollywood movies, a wedding.... only 3 common clichés were missing: snake charmers, hijra and the Taj Mahal. The programme says it is "an Indian spectacle created in Bombay". Well the producer (Gashash Deshe), who apparently got the idea for an India-themed show after seeing certain Irish and Brazilian ones, is a Belgian-born Israeli citizen currently living in Brussels, although of course he did put the show together in India. It was first shown in Israel, for an Indian take on that show, see here and here.

I am being churlish, after all why not rush about from Varanasi to Rajasthan to Kerala to Punjab, via (a dream sequence in) Khajuraho...? It's a good excuse for some excellent singing and dancing, and as a whole it's hugely colourful, entertaining and well-executed. I had a good time.

Snow flower/flower snow

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride,
Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Fifty will not come again,
And take from seventy Springs a score,
It only leaves me twenty more.

And since to look at things in bloom,
Twenty Springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go,
To see the cherry hung with snow.

by A.E. Houseman
(almost - I had to invert the figures fifty and twenty!)

Magnolia fubuki?

Super cities

Dateline Seoul notes the 2006 ranking of cities by Mercer Consultants on the basis of "quality of life" in which Stockholm scores highly at no. 20 - to which I would add that Brussels comes in at no. 14 and Seoul, at no. 89! Some other cities' positions in this list are: 1 Zurich, 2 Geneva, 3 Vancouver, 9 Sydney/Bern, 13 Amsterdam, 24 Dublin, 26 Hamburg, 27 Helsinki, 28 San Francisco, 33 Paris, 34 Singapore, 35 Tokyo, 36 Boston, 39 London, 45 Madrid, 46 New York, 53 Lisbon, 55 Tsukuba/Birmingham/Glasgow/Los Angeles (!), 62 Rome, 73 Prague, 78 Buenos Aires, 103 Shanghai, 107 Bangkok, 108 Istanbul/Sao Paolo, 117 Rio de Janeiro, 122 Beijing, 131 Cairo, 150 Mumbai/New Delhi, 160 Chennai, 178 Tripoli - and last and definitely least, 215 Baghdad.

Pelle's blog links to Mercer's site, but as it requires registration, the top 53-odd cities are listed here and you can find the complete rankings below the article here.

Of course "quality of life", measured according to Mercer's criteria, is different from "quality of living" which is a subjective issue - but I must say some of my favourite cities are places I might not want to live in for any length of time! All the same, the idea of visiting Istanbul, for example, sets the heart racing in a way that Zurich does not (not mine, anyway).

Brussels in bloom

While I was in Libya, the cherry-blossom front (sakura zensen) reached Brussels. Apart from tree-lined suburban streets, we mostly have isolated trees here, not the masses you can see in parks in Japan - but they are still very pretty. These ones are brightening up the office buildings in Square de Meeûs.

Blogorrhea?

My friend M. recently asked me why people blog: she thinks 99% of blogs are deeply uninteresting and that their authors are basically megalomaniacs. As it happens I was already thinking about this because Sabine just asked the same question - but Friday's Economist has more-or-less answered it for me! As the article says, there are as many reasons as there are blogs but in my case:
- because I can, especially having a broadband internet connection and a digital camera - I had been reading other people's blogs for months, then started using the blogging software to resize photos, from there to actually creating a blog was only a tiny step. It's taught me a lot about IT stuff, I've even struggled with html code (largely failing, as you can see from that bright blue box on the right, which I can't change without altering the colour of the one below, which happens to be the way I wanted it..);
- because it's fun! I prefer typing to writing by hand, so I like this better than a journal, also because I can put photos in it, and link to content elsewhere on the web;
- because it links me into a worldwide community of bloggers, some of whom comment on my ramblings, and whose own thoughts set me thinking about things I might comment on myself;
- because I don't know where else to put those things I want to comment on, but can't remember to tell everyone I meet, or even remember myself beyond a week: it might be a cute cat I saw in a shop window, or a pretty building, or a funnily translated menu, or just something I thought or heard and wanted to record.
Not that I have anything interesting to bring anyone today, except the worst music video of all time which you can see here.

The Main Man

Some pictures of The Leader (as he is called in official Libyan newspapers and sites like this one) for La Carioca - who is off to Norway tomorrow!
















In case anyone was wondering, the 36 refers to the 36th anniversary of the 1 September (1969) revolution by which Gaddafi came to power, which the Great Jamahiryah celebrated last year.

Gadding about in Gharyan

Gharyan, on a plateau about 800m above Tripoli in the Jebel Nafusa or Western Mountans, is visited for two reasons: pottery and underground Berber homes (see pic in Sunday's post), similar to those you can see at Matmata in Tunisia, where Monty Python's "Life of Brian" was filmed (as was "Star Wars").





I was interested to note that one of the pots on offer was effectively a "tandoor", used in Libya for bread-making in just the same way as it is to make naan bread in India. In fact, it seems from the Wikipedia article that the word "tandoor" originates from Arabic, which I hadn't known..

Strolling about Sabratha

I preferred Sabratha to Leptis - the city of Septimus Severus, who became Roman emperor in AD 193 and died in England in 211 A.D. - partly because it was built of honey-coloured soft sandstone, whereas Leptis is built of limestone, but of course, for the same reason, it has also weathered a lot more and much has been reconstructed by (mostly Italian) archaeologists, in particular the theatre.

Sabratha was originally a Punic city (settled from Carthage), then Greek settlers arrived and after a violent earthquake in the 1st century A.D., it became a Roman colony in the 2nd century A.D.. The rocket-like structure is the "Puno-Hellenistic Mausoleum of Bes" (Bes being an Egyptian god).












The 10,000 seater amphitheatre was the venue for the usual "feeding Christians to the lions" type of entertainment, and is not on the normal tourist trail so it felt almost as though we were the first to discover it.

Looking around Leptis Magna

Ambling around Apollonia

Apollonia (now Sousa) was the port of Cyrene, both founded by settlers from Thera (modern Santorini), and essentially Greek until it was destroyed in the Jewish Revolt of AD 115-117, after which it was partly rebuilt by the Romans, under emperor Hadrian.

Sight-seeing in Cyrene

Tripping in Tripoli

Libya was the first foreign country my father visited, at the age of 18 when he did his national service in Tripoli in 1949-50, before the country's independence in 1951. (I think the first one I set foot in, at the age of 8, was Sri Lanka - don't remember getting off the boat before then, anyway.)




According to him, what he learned from his time in the army was 1) to type and 2) to swim, in the Mediterranean! He described how they would go running down to the sea for a dip and rapidly run out again when they found it full of jelly-fish. It must have been an incredibly exotic experience for a young lad from Belfast and Lancashire in the North of England.

As a child, I was fascinated by a collection of black-and-white photographs of Tripoli, many featuring a corniche bordered by luxuriant palm trees - I would guess this was where there is now a beach-front recreation area, and that the only parts of the city he would recognise - if he was still around - are the medina and the Italian quarter.



It's a shame I didn't quiz my father more about his time in Libya before he died unexpectedly in 1988 - I would have loved to have discussed it with him now. Among other things, I had always assumed he served with the Irish Guards who went to Tripoli when the British left Palestine in May 1948, but it seems they returned to the UK in 1949, and the Tripoli garrison was manned by the Coldstream Guards, 1st Battalion until November 1950 and 3rd Battalion after that (British troops left Libya only in 1969).

Lovely Libya

Just back from Libya. The trip - with a mixed French-speaking group - wasn't without its problems but I enjoyed it enormously and the weather was lovely. Brussels seems very grey by comparison (guess what? It's raining!) and in my absence, a pigeon had taken up residence on my back terrace, grrrrr (I hate pigeons).

Mangled menus

I always eat my plugs with apples! (some others eat them with cake, apparently)









"Wood" you like a log of lamb?
Are you (or would you like to eat) a "prepared American"?






I'm not eggsactly sure how you furnish an omelette...




Courtesy of the Pullman Restaurant, Place du Luxembourg.

P.S. I'll be away for a week or so, so HAPPY EASTER!

Lost in translation

I love this site - I really must get around to re-loading my Windows software so I can read characters in text!

Cloud

A band of white cloud

flying across the blue sky

trails a thousand tails

Another personality test

I have to laugh at the illustration used for (female) 5s, given what I was just saying about books... But, I wouldn't have called myself innovative or isolated - so if I am, I can't be very perceptive!


free enneagram test

IQ OK?

According to this, not only the Dutch and Germans but also the British and Belgians score more highly on IQ tests than the French (who were probably thinking of what they were going to have for dinner when they took the test). From their scores, Belgians are more French than Dutch, although given the differences between language communities/Regions (which have separate education systems and ministries, the Flemish one being rated by the OECD as among the best in the world), I wonder how the tests were done.
I'm not sure I believe IQ tests truly reflect natural intelligence in the first place, let alone that it makes sense to compare scores between whole "nations", but in any case it's worth noting that:
a) the spread between highest and lowest scores is not all that great, basically all the countries listed fall in the "normal" range, and
b) some education systems might make less intelligent people appear more intelligent than they naturally are, and I wonder whether the opposite isn't also true: thinking of some Germans I have met, if they have a high IQ their - incredibly long - education seems to have trained them to conceal it, and
c) it doesn't necessarily matter anyway how intelligent someone supposedly measures as being in IQ tests, if they are completely lacking in practical common sense and/or qualities like empathy, integrity...

Spring is sprung II

I forgot one of the most important signs: the fountains have been turned on! Winter is over (I suppose it will snow, now that I have said that...).

Spring is sprung

You know it's Spring when....

* the Spring flowers are out









* the pigeons are courting (unfortunately)

* the cafés in Place du Luxembourg put out their chairs







* the terrace cafés fill up all over town




* the tourists are out in force









* the chocolate shops have Easter eggs in the windows


It must be Spring! Yes I know it is supposed to have started on 21 March but it hasn't felt like it till now.

Note to self

When I was at school, it was a common punishment to be made to write "100 lines" e.g. "I must not be late for school" x 100 - these days I suppose we would call these positive - or negative - affirmations! Of course I don't remember being punished this way myself... but I think perhaps I ought to start writing:
I must not buy any more books
I must not buy any more books
I must not buy any more books
I REALLY must not buy any more books.... (for now!)

Picture is of the Galerie Bortier in Brussels, the arcade of the "bouquinistes" - can't think what I was doing in there!