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Cheerio!

We move house this coming Saturday. We are moving to a place where, so I am told, the local people speak in a strange accent and are difficult to understand...regular readers may want to add their own punch line below:

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Boom, boom!
Because of the move, I decided that I would visit a few old haunts. It didn't get off to such a good start yesterday morning when I made the mistake of taking a different road to the one I usually take and promptly got lost. I've written about this before, but the roads do not work properly in Belgium. They mess with your mind. The road I wanted was shut off for road works and so I could either turn back or take the next road which seemed run parallel to the one I wanted to take. Well, it was a lovely early Autumn day and so I took the next road. Anyone who watches the tv show Lost may find the idea of being able to move an entire island a bit far fetched. Anyone who has enjoyed a walk in the Belgian countryside wont find it so strange! That's the only way I can explain ending up where I did!
I arrived on a busy main road that I didn't recognise, I could either go left or right-technically I could go back the way I had come but I had passed a group of shifty looking farm workers earlier and didn't want to look like I was lost. Lucky for me I chose the right way and 15 minutes later found myself in Oostmalle, which surprised me a lot because it seemed as if I had reached it in no time at all.
I took the bus into Antwerp this morning with the intention of stocking up on some hard to get Asian cooking sauces. It continues to be a really pleasent month here in Belgium and after 30 minutes on a very full bus I just had to get off because I was sweating in a very alarming way! Also I thought that the long walk into the centre of town would be an inexpensive way to experience the delights of Morocco without actually leaving Belgium! I have found over the years that once I move out of a region I very rarely go back unless I really have to. We are moving a fair distance away and I don't think I shall be seeing much of Antwerp in the years to come. It could be said that in my mind I had already moved away from the area because today I only saw it's bad side and not it's good. I bought my goods from China Town and walked on down to the Groenplaats, popped into Fnac to have a look at the new English books, walked past the waffle sellers and realised that I would never have the waffle and cream I'd always promised myself and then spent a penny in the Staadfestzaal, surely one of the most beautiful shopping Malls in the world and well worth a visit if you are ever in need of a toilet!
The photo that accompanies this post was taken in the central train station in Antwerp, another beautiful building and worth 15 minutes of your attention should you ever visit the city.

Video of the Day

A blast from the past, the first of three posts this week. Steptoe and Son is a muched loved sit-com from the 1960's and 70's. Enjoy!

Signs

It's common knowledge that Belgium is made up of those that speak Dutch and those that speak French and there is also a small corner where they speak German. The official language's of Belgium are Dutch, French and German.
If you pay a visit to the cinema then you will be treated to both French and Dutch sub-titles and television stations are split into the two languages. Dutch broadcasters show programmes in Dutch and English whilst French broadcasters show programmes that are dubbed into French or are originally French.
I still find it strange that a country should be split by 2 languages, but what is really strange is the fact that place names are sometimes completely different.
If you squint at the photo above then you may just see the name Mons, British people will be familiar with this name as the place where a big World War 1 battle took place; the same can be said of Ypres. However, in Flanders you will not see Mons or Ypres on any road signs. Instead you will see Bergen and Ieper. Any football fans driving to a match at Standard Liege would be well advised to look for Luik, because that is what Liege is called in Flanders. Looking for Antwerp? Then you may want to head towards Anvers.
I could go on.
I'm lucky that I usually have my wife with me when we drive anywhere, but I can imagine that if you don't know about this then it could be quite confusing. Of course with GPS systems so popular then it is hard to get lost...but not impossible. We borrowed a GPS from a friend when we went to Sweden. It's a great bit of kit, but it does have a habit of telling you that you need to turn in 100 metres and then seems to take forever to count down to zero, leaving me driving past the junction I should have taken because it was still on 40 metres to go when I reached the turn off! I blame the fact that it is a European GPS and uses metres and kilometres rather than the much better Imperial system of feet and miles. By the time I've worked out how many feet to a metre we are heading somewhere else!

Video of the Day

Cook

I like books. I like book shops. A few weeks ago we found ourselves in Waterstones, which is not unusual as we always try to visit whenever we are in England. I was busy trying to decide whether to buy 2666 by Roberto Bolano - the book is this years must have novel. I did buy it, and think that if, as some reviewers said, this book is the novel reinvented, then god help us! I found it boring and lacking in any soul. Maybe it lost something in the translation from its original Spanish.

So while I was being impressed by the wonderful reviews of 2666 my wife was flicking through the new Jamie Oliver book and occasionally showing me a recipe, which I was glancing at with little interest at first, but found myself drawn to after having my senses slowly bludgeoned by photo after photo of very tasty looking dishes. At half price it seemed too good an offer to miss and so we bought it. Back in Belgium it was soon tested out, we had a pack of macaroni that needed to be used and so my wife made his macaroni cheese dish. Quite nice indeed.

Over the weekend it was decided that we would try the Jambalyo. I was waiting for the Liverpool v West Ham match to start on tv and so I decided to prepare the different bits, of which there was quite a lot; smoked sausage, salami, chicken and chilli peppers amongst other things. Well one thing led to another, I poured myself a big glass of Aussie red, my tribute to Keith Floyd, and actually cooked my first ever dish straight out of a cook book!

I do have a small repertoire of culinary delights, my chilli con carne is quite spectacular...although I'm far from earning my first Michelin star!

It was quite easy to make, but it was touch and go for a while because there was a period of about 15 minutes when I didn't have to do anything and so to amuse myself I started flicking through the pages of Jamie's book and found a dish called southern sausage stew, or something like it. I started to read what it involved and realised I had to add some more ingredients to my Jambalayo. Then the football started.

Football + booze = attention elsewhere.

When I returned to the cooking, it took me 5 minutes to realise that I was no longer following the Jambalayo recipe but the southern sausage stew! Being a little bit squiffy, I was only a little bit surprised when the book told me to add things that I had already added. It was my wife who saved the day because I couldn't find the flour, which wasn't needed in the recipe I was supposed to be cooking! In the end it was a success, not perfect, but another dish to add to my expanding list.

Video of the Day

Want

Nice logo. Sadly, here in Belgium we are not allowed to use Spotify. Not available in our area...apparently. Why not? Something to do with copyrights. That's a bit weird in this day and age but is something that is happening more and more on the internet.

Spotify allows you to listen to almost any track you want to. Simple but wonderful. You can create your own playlists and listen to your favourite tracks to your your hearts content. But not in Belgium.

Playlist is another piece of software that allows your to create...erm, playlists. It's actually what I used to use for my extremely unpopular Radio Free Belgium blog. I went to put some new music up a few days ago only to find that it is now no longer available in my area. What's going on? Belgium hasn't ceased to exist. We haven't suddenly found ourselves in the 1970's like the time travelling show Life on Mars...although it feels like it sometimes. So why isn't it available in my bloody area?? The joke of it is that people can illegally download the songs that they WANT to listen to legally if Spotify was available!

The record companies should be working hand in hand with sites like Spotify to get peoples music to the masses. When I listen to music online I like to discover new groups, I don't want to listen to Coldplay, Elbow, U2 or The Killers because I have their cd's already. I wouldn't have discovered artists like Josh Rouse, Ryan Adams and The Decemberists if it wasn't for the internet. You wont hear their music often if at all on British radio stations but after hearing their music I bought their cd's...The Hazards of Love by The Decemberists has to be the cd of the year in my opinion.

To tie in with my reference to Life on Mars, there is one great website I have found which while it isn't the same as Spotify, it is still excellent and my favourite music site at the moment. It's called 8tracks and is just jam packed with good music. People upload 8 songs from their own music collection and complete strangers like you and me can listen to them. Some of these mini albums are really rather good and to clarify an earlier point, I have been listening to a few 8tracks as I've been writing and found 2 groups, Mimicking Birds and Miracle Fortress, that I will be looking out for in future!

http://www.8tracks.com/ but be warned people of Belgium, I don't know for how long it will be available in our area...

Video of the Day

"I've not felt this well in ages..."

As last words go "I've not felt this well in ages" has to rank up there with:
"Some of us are trying to sleep, you know!"- my great great Uncle Alfred who was camping in the next field at Little Big Horn and went to complain about the noise.
Keith Floyd died yesterday at the age of 65. His famous last words were spoken after a meal which included champagne, oysters and an after dinner fag ( that's English slang for a cigarette).
Floyd was a tv chef.

Printers! Are these things deliberately made to annoy us? I have spent the last half hour watching two members of the household trying to get a printer to print. I gave up on printers a good few years ago after buying my 3rd one and getting it to work well for maybe a few days and then...nothing! What's worse than silence is when the printer will make a noise as if it is going to print and then either falls silent again or just sucks in the sheet of paper and it rolls out the other side completely blank! Printers...as annoying as Swedish car parking machines!

Video of the Day

Me (Cleese) and the car park machine (car)

In Sweden - Park

I like to think that I'm fairly up to date with modern technology. I can programme a VCR and work a fax machine just as well as the smartest University graduate. I may not know what an mp1 or mp2 is, but I'm listening to an mp3 right now, as I write this...ok, so it is The Beatles, but they are all over the news media at the moment and you do have to admit that some of their stuff is still very fresh, even 40 years after it was written.
Over the years I've used hundreds of different car parks and I've never had a problem paying for my ticket. The machines are all pretty much the same, sure the slot where you put the money in might be in a different place on some versions, but generally they are familiar to the car park user and designed so that even the hard of thinking can use them. Our hotel in Stockholm had decided to sell their car park to someone else, so even though the car parking spaces were right outside of the hotel entrance, they denied all responsibility for them.
My wife and I decided to get the cases up into our room and then I went down to pay for the parking. Armed with a pocket full of credit cards I went to a machine exactly the same as the one in the photo which accompanies this post. Looks innocent enough does it not?
1. Insert credit card
2. Look at screen
3. Scratch head
4. Remove card

Hmm....
1. Insert credit card the other way up
2. Look at screen
3. Scratch head
4. Swear
5. Remove card

REPEAT ALL OF THE ABOVE FOR THE NEXT 15 MINUTES.

There are not too many combinations of things to try when it comes to credit cards. I am always under the impression that the further away I am away from Britain, not only will it take longer for the transaction to go through but occasionally the data that is read from my card may get a bit scrambled. Also, whilst I am willing to accept that artificial intelligence may well be superior to my own, I'm not willing to give in without a fight.
The real problem was that I couldn't make head nor tail of what was written on the screen. Even the diagrams were unhelpful and seemed to bear no relation to what I wanted from the machine.
I finally had to swallow my manly pride and go and ask the receptionist for help. She rather unhelpfully directed me to another machine which was located about five minutes walk away. It was exactly the same as the other machine and to be honest, one attempt at getting a ticket from it should have been enough...my wife found me on my knees, beating my head against the button which was supposed to deliver me a ticket.
My wife speaks 4 languages but unfortunately she doesn't speak Swedish...she does however speak common sense and she led me back to the receptionist and she asked her to do it for us, which she happily did, all the while wondering why I had a round indentation in the centre of my forehead.

Video of the Day

England qualified for next years World Cup Finals, last night. Ok, so I know it's not a comedy video but seeing my favourite teams win always makes me smile!

More Greetings...

A few days ago we were invited to a small soiree, my wife's nephew was celebrating his 19th birthday. I didn't feel like celebrating anything and when I am in that mood then it's best to just lock me away in a darkened room. Way back in April I wrote a post about greeting people and the problems I have with this simple procedure. The same can be said for saying goodbye to people as well. When I can get away with it, I say goodbye to people with a small smile and a slight hand gesture that is not a wave but is meant to leave the person I am gesturing to in no doubt that I am leaving and I am indeed saying goodbye to them and them alone. The hand gesture would be similar to the one I give to car drivers who stop for me at a zebra crossing. It's a friendly gesture, I think, and quite appropriate to use on people you don't know or only know slightly.
This was the way I said goodbye to my brother-in-laws mother a few weeks back. Unfortunately she was already half rising from her chair and holding out her hand. Disaster! She saved the moment by saying something funny about 'Englesman' and I reacted by exuberantly hugging her whilst apologizing.
Still with me?
Cut to Monday.
Me. Grumpy guts. Face like a smacked arse (as my wife said to me).
Enter party.
I have to say now that I'm not the type of person who goes around introducing myself to strangers..."Hi, I'm Mike, Englishman". If there are strangers about then I wait to be introduced and generally ignore them until such time arises.
I was aware that there were people at the far end of the table that I didn't know and so kept my attention firmly fixed to the centre of the table where I was amongst family. Our hosts were busy doing stuff, as you do, and I never actually got introduced to any of the new people. I didn't have a problem with that because I was just happy (in a grumpy sort of way) to just sit there quietly. However, after about 20 minutes it became clear to me that one of the people sitting at the other end of the table was...my brother-in-law's mother!
It's not such a disaster I suppose, but I was in such a foul mood that I felt unable to rescue the situation and of course not being able to communicate adequately made it worse. Even such a simple comment like 'oh hello, I didn't see you there!', is difficult for me. So I just sat there in all my grumpy magnificence and slowly stewed...all night.
I managed to say goodnight to her but was firmly blanked as she left, due I am told, to a hearing problem.
Something else happened that night that happens a lot. When someone learns I'm English, I get treated the same way some people treat people in wheelchairs. It seems to be a rule that if you are in a wheelchair then people will talk to the person pushing it rather than the person sitting in it, as if the wheelchair user is either incapable of speech or incapable of thought. Well I get treated the same way.
I can't speak Dutch too well, but sometimes I do understand with remarkable clarity what is being said and if people talk slowly enough and try not to use long words then they might be surprised to get a response from me...in Dutch...or something like it!

Video of the Day

Loo

We have a small but growing collection of photographs bearing the title ' Public Toilets in Beautiful Places'. So far we have 3, the first was taken in Abel Tasman National Park on New Zealand's south island. Close to a beach, but far from people and houses it was as unexpected as it was welcome. Last year we chanced upon a toilet on a long trail in Bryce Canyon in Utah, surrounded by trees and the red stone buttes common to the area. Whilst in Sweden we came upon a toilet nestled between some trees and close to a hidden cove on one of the many islands that lay off the west coast of the country. Ok, so it's a small collection, one that we don't actively try to build, merely add to it when the situation arises. An even smaller collection was started this year as well, when we visited the small harbour town of Fiskebackskil in Sweden. This would be titled ' Beautiful Toilets in Public Places'. We had spent a few hours visiting the town, and, as you do, we paid a visit to the public toilets before we left. These were the first we had to use in Sweden and I'm not saying you can judge a country by the state of it's toilets but when I walked into mine I was taken aback by the sight of not only how clean it was but also the wallpaper and painting hanging on the walls! I just had take a photo(see photo). I met my wife outside and it was clear that her toilet had been just as nice as mine!
It did make me think about how different it would have been if they had tried that in Britain. I may be wrong, I suspect not, but I don't think a toilet decorated in such a fashion would last 2 hours without some idiot scrawling his name in thick black pen all over the walls.

In England

We ended our honeymoon with a few days camping in the Lake District of England. I enjoy walking. I especially enjoy walking in places of outstanding beauty. In the past few years I have been lucky enough to walk in some wonderful places like the canyons of southwest America and north and south islands of New Zealand, even if England can't beat those places for natural beauty, I believe we can match them. The Lake District in Cumbria is one such place.
There is a real feeling of connection with your environment when you walk in these sort of places, which I think most people never experience. For some people a good walk is the one they take from the supermarket car park to the supermarket.
Hill walking can be exhausting, but the sense of achievement you get from reaching the summit is well worth the effort...and the views are not too shabby either! For the most part, the hills in Cumbria are very 'do-able' for anyone with an average standard of fitness and, I think more importantly, the desire to reach the top. However, we chose to climb two of the more testing hills that the Lake District has to offer.
Helvellyn is the most popular hill or fell, in the Lakes and everyone climbs it for one reason...Striding Edge. Striding Edge is a ridge that, if you chose to walk it, gives the walker a great scrambling experience. Scrambling means that you have to use your hands at some point to aid you as you progress along the route. Sadly, the fell's popularity makes for a less than pleasant climb. It was so busy at times that a bottle neck was created at certain points, with people wanting to progress in both directions! A local man told me later that day that because of the crowds, they only climb Helvellyn in winter. Having said all that, it is still a fantastic fell, and the views are stunning from the top.
For an even better scrambling experience we climbed Blencathra. I have never climbed it before but have long wanted to try my hand at Sharp Edge. Sharp Edge for me was really squeaky bum time, I had never climbed anything like it. We actually descended it, walking down was so steep that you almost felt that you were stepping off the side of the mountain. My wife loved it! She is a natural at scrambling, even though it was only her second time doing it. However, she is svelte like and I am about as athletic as an armchair. We took our time, and met a few people who were even more nervous than me, coming up. As the descent progressed I started to appreciate the complexity of Sharp Edge and by the time we reached the bottom I was no longer a quivering wreck...just quivering. It was amusing really, because we stopped for a rest and some food and suddenly turned into experts on Sharp Edge. People had seen us walking down and were eager to hear how hard it was. I said at the time that I was glad I had done it but not sure if I would like to do it again. Sitting here now, almost a month later, I agree with my wife who said it would be nice to try it from the other direction.
We were blessed with good weather, the north west of England can be very wet. Our camping experience turned out to be a positive one, we found ourselves a really nice campsite with stunning views of the fells and good facilities. The on-site cafe became our regular feeding hole, so good was it's food.

In Denmark-Part 2

As I said in part 1, Copenhagen was a bustling, busy city and I'm sure it wasn't all down to the Gay festival. Of course it was the height of summer and a weekend. We found ourselves walking to the botanical gardens and it was here that we found some peace and quiet. Close by the the gardens was the royal palace of Rosenborg. I admit ignorance concerning Rosenborg. It was a large but uninspiring building who's appearance belied the fact that inside was a veritable cornucopia of treasures! Although the throne room was rather special, we particularly enjoyed the paintings that lined the stairways. Portraits of royalty (I think) on leaping horses were laugh out loud funny and well worth the entrance fee alone. I would recommend Rosenborg for a visit, we found it charming and also crowd free. The Tivoli is probably Copenhagen's second most famous landmark after the little mermaid statue. The park contains restaurants, bars and a fun fair...and lots of drunk people! I have never seen such a lot of drunk people in such a small area, even in England! When I say drunk, I mean floppy leg drunk, the kind of drunk when most of your motor skills have been put on stand-by by your brain. I don't mind admitting that we enjoyed a cold beer and some nachos there, and bloody nice it was too! But just the one. We had a nice walk round the place, it is well worth a visit even if, like us, you just go in for a walk around and a beer. We ended up having a good time in Copenhagen, ending the day with a visit to an Italian restaurant before returning to our hotel.

In Denmark is dedicated to Anne, thanks for everything!

Video of the Day