The Brussels Flower Carpet – 2014

Every other year, Brussels decorates the Grand Place with a vast carpet of cut flowers. This year’s pattern was designed to celebrate 50 years of Turkish immigration to Brussels, and was made of begonias laid out in the pattern of a traditional Turkish carpet.

(Click on the picture to make it larger.)

The carpet was 75m by 25m, apparently 1800 square metres of begonias. The flowers are there all through the weekend of the 15 August, which is a bank holiday here in Belgium. This year, they were laid out overnight on the 14th, and were there until the Sunday night. The weather wasn’t fabulous, but that probably helped the flowers keep their colour for a little longer – and the amount of work that must have gone into them is astonishing.

The town hall opens its balconies to visitors for the occasion and for the small sum of €5, you can wander through the ornate building (well worth seeing in its own right) and see the flower carpet from on high. Well worth the money, I reckon. Plus you get a giant guidebook, that I haven’t yet read.

Here are some photos I took of the 2014 flower carpet and the town hall on the Grand Place:

International Bathtub Regatta, Dinant

So, last weekend was a bank holiday weekend, which means it was time for the annual International Bathtub Regatta, held every year on 15 August in Dinant. I don’t remember where I first heard about this tiny slice of madness, but I loved the idea immediately.

Dinant is a small town to the south-east of Belgium, in the French-speaking part of the country. It’s about an hour and a half’s train journey from Brussels. It’s also the birthplace of Adolphe Sax, who invented the saxophone – as this year apparently marks his 200th birthday, he was the theme for this year’s boat race.

The premise of the bathtub boat regatta is simple, if slightly reminiscent of team-building exercise on corporate training events: you must make a boat, capable of floating in the river, which can be powered by wind or people-power (including rowing or pedalling, or whatever else), but nothing mechanical. The boat must include a bathtub, which has to touch the water. You need to attach a long rope to your bathtub, so that if/when it sinks, it can be easily removed. And that’s about it. Other than that, the river is your mollusc and your imagination is your only limit.

I have to admit, before going, I had a suspicion this would turn out to be better in theory than in practice. But Dinant itself looked pretty, and we’ve wanted to go to that part of Belgium anyway, so we decided to go and risk it. At worst, we would have wasted an afternoon of a long weekend when I’d otherwise have been working.

And Dinant itself was pretty – a small town at the base of steep mountains, with a walled citadel at the top of the cliff, and a huge Gothic church at the bottom. And the all-important river Meuse is large and winding, making its way through the town centre.

Inside the church:

Outside the church, there was a band by the riverside:

And some flowers:

And a puppy:

I was wrong to worry: the boat race was excellent. The bathtub boats were imaginative, well-decorated, surprisingly well-constructed, and everyone looked like they were having so much fun! No one even sank, at least while we were watching! There was beer. There were battles between boats. There was a surprising amount of audience involvement (i.e. the boat-racers decided to throw buckets of river water and water bombs at innocent bystanders lining the riverbanks…)

And I’m already looking forward to next year; who knows, I might even enter a boat of my own one year!

MEPs freestyle rap, in-laws visit, Easter, and a rant about food banks and the Mail on Sunday

These things are not connected, I should start by saying. But it’s been a busy couple of weeks, starting with a unique event to encourage young people to vote, run by EU40 and MTV Voices, at the European Parliament.

As part of the event, MEPs and professional freestyle rappers worked together on ‘rap battles’ covering EU policy areas of particular interest to young people. They clashed over immigration, didn’t have much to say on innovation and competitiveness, and then broadly agreed that youth unemployment was a bad thing. They even had powerpoint slides.

Personally, I’m kind of of the view that if your freestyle rap includes the phrase “we need greater fiscal union”, you might need to rethink your life choices, and it turns out that freestyle rap on EU competitiveness is not as easy as you’d think, but the event as a whole was a courageous attempt at engaging with people in new ways. Credit to the organisers for getting everyone to take part, and look like they’re having fun. Particular mention should be made of the brave representative of the youth NGO for the last question, who rapped his question. Hopefully youth turnout will be higher than ever! You can watch the whole thing here, if you’re interested. (There was free beer at the event itself; I recommend finding an alcoholic beverage of your choice before watching the video, it does help).

I came across a website with a similar aim – to encourage people to vote in the upcoming European Parliament elections – set in Brussels, which I actually liked. It’s not freestlye rap, which is a bonus as far as I’m concerned. Plus you get to see lots of Brussels:

The first half of last week was taken up with my in-laws visiting us – it was lovely to see them (just in case they ever find this blog ;-) ) and we spent a few days doing touristy things and walking all over Brussels. (Seriously. Kilometres and kilometres. I had no idea Brussels was that big…) We saw the Atomium, and Bruges, and went to Pierre Marcolini, where I bought super-classy dark chocolate for Easter. (I can’t eat nuts, so all the pralines are out of bounds for me. I weep for the lack of praline in my life, especially since moving to Belgium. I’m still not sure if I can eat ganaches. I suspect not, because of the risk of cross-contamination. Woe is me. #firstworldproblems.)

Easter isn’t really a big thing in our household, so we haven’t done much over the long weekend, except eat bits of chocolate and enjoy not having to work. Which has been bliss. Sunshine, long lunches, sitting out on the terrace, it’s been lovely. I am not looking forward to having to go back to work tomorrow at all…

Lastly, food banks. Those of you on Twitter probably saw the outrage over the Mail on Sunday’s article in which their reporter lied to the Citizen’s Advice Bureau and took food from a charity running food banks, to try and prove that it’s possible to defraud a charity. Or something – I’ve tried to understand what the point of the article in question was, other than “MoS journalists are good at lying and able to con people who want to help them”, and I think it must be that the MoS believes that only some hungry people, specially deserving hungry people, should be allowed to have free food given to them, or else Armageddon will somehow occur if anyone who needs it can just get free food by asking.

I think we’re supposed to feel outrage that not enough checks are being done, and people are being taken at their word if they say they need help feeding their family. Because God forbid we try and treat people in difficult situations with compassion and kindness, rather than treating them like lying scum from the outset who need to prove themselves worthy of benefiting from generosity and support. The starting point should not be to assume people are lying in order to get free food unnecessarily – no one goes to food banks because they don’t feel like going shopping. (Unless perhaps they’re MoS journalists, who clearly don’t go there because they’re in need. But not everyone lies professionally, and the MOS is wrong to assume everyone is happy to behave like they do.)

These organisations are charities. People choose to donate to them, knowing what use will be made of their donations, and the ethos that the charity espouses – which, in the case of the Trussell Trust (the organisation that runs the food bank visited by the MoS), is made absolutely clear on their ‘mission and values’ page. They aren’t a part of government and aren’t subject to the same spending rules as government – though there is a discussion that could be had over whether this is a function that governments should be providing, through the welfare state, rather than leaving it up to charity and people’s better nature. But currently, these services provide help to anyone who says they need it, based on trust. That’s the kind of society I want to live in – it’s a shame it’s clearly something alien to the Mail on Sunday – and I applaud the people who give up their time and money to help organisations like this. if you want to donate to the Trussell Trust to support them in their work, they have a justgiving page here. One good thing that came out of yesterday’s shameful Mail story was that many, many people took a moment to give to charity – apparently 250ish people had donated previously via that page; in the last 24 hours that has shot up to 3800, with total donations of more than £43,000 so far.

Russell Brand, brunch and the bois de la cambre

This week has involved Russell Brand, the friendliest brunch in Brussels, and scouts in the bois de la cambre. Not all at the same time, naturally. (I’m now struggling to imagine Russell Brand surrounded by scouts on bikes in a forest, and I think this is all your fault. Yes, you, reading this now.)

Anyway. On Monday, Russell Brand came to Brussels as part of his tour round Europe with his Messiah Complex show. I was given tickets at the last minute, which was lovely, but meant I couldn’t find anyone to come with me. (I know, I know, #firstworldproblems) – but sitting through Brand’s very sexually graphic show, I was kind of glad I went on my own. I think I might have felt inhibited laughing at rimming jokes with a work colleague sat next to me. (A personal failing, obviously.) But the show itself was fabulous – two things we should all remember are 1) threesomes are better than shaving, and 2) public masturbation is a bad thing. And Russell is keen that we all remember that drugs and cold weather have an impact on the apparent size of your (his) penis. Life lessons for us all…

And then yesterday we had brunch at the friendliest café ever – if you find yourself lost on the streets of Schaerbeek one weekend morning, go to Les Trouvailles de Louise (290 rue Josaphat,1030 Schaerbeek) and have one of their giant brunches. I had the fraicheur version, which comes with pastries, bread, butter, jam, honey, muesli, yogurt, coffee and home-made juice. (I recommend the apple and strawberry juice, for what it’s worth.) And the ladies who run it were super-lovely and replaced the muesli with porridge for me, since I can’t eat nuts and they weren’t totally sure if the muesli was nut-free. Fabulous customer service, and just generally friendly people. You should all go there! I’m certainly going back!

I had my camera with me, so you can have some pretty pictures of brunch:

Then, since it was a nice sunny day, we went down to the bois de la cambre. We did not know that this was not the best weekend to go on a quiet visit to the woods, since all the scouts in the world (OK, possibly just Belgium, but seriously, thousands of them!) were camping in the woods. Google has since told me that this is because of the 24-hour bike challenge where scouts and guides come together to conduct a 24-hour relay race on bikes. As you do.

There were bike-floats, like the below:

And everywhere we looked, there were scouts and guides in all their different uniforms, of all ages, behaving so well! No beer, no cigarettes, no fights, it was positively astounding! (I’m not, as you might be able to guess, a scout person, so I couldn’t tell you what the different uniforms actually say about the wearers – enlightenment welcome in the comments!)

So, an unexpected interruption to our peaceful walk through the woods, which I had envisaged more along the lines of the next set of photos, which we took as we headed away from the heaving mass of humanity that was the scout camp.

(It did, however, lead to pretty much the only time I have been able to successfully give directions: someone asked me, as we were walking through the woods, if I knew where the “scout thing” was; I did indeed!)

And, lastly, some bonus pictures of flowers, since I’ve been practising taking close-up pictures:

Scharnaval 2014 – carnival in Schaerbeek

This weekend, our commune had its annual carnival – a tradition that has apparently been going on since 1903, with short breaks for periods of war. It had floats, dancers, children in costumes, unicorns, waffle-eating and cigarette-smoking bears, and beer. And confetti. And presents for the audience.

It was really rather good.

At Pride parades I’ve been to, the presents for the audience thrown out from floats tend to be condoms. This parade featured sweets and (somewhat more oddly) calenders and diaries. I got a very nice red weekly diary to help me plan my life, and a bunch of sweets; what more could one ask for?

Also slightly odd to foreign me was the amount of people taking part in the parade who were smoking and drinking beer. I don’t think I’ve ever been to a similar event in the UK (I don’t even know if we have similar events in the UK, truth be told), but I feel sure that people co-opted to take part in a parade like this wouldn’t be allowed to smoke and drink during a supposedly children-focused event like this. Symbolised most clearly by a somewhat unhappy looking grown-up bear, holding his little daughter’s hand, smoking his way through the parade stop I was standing at. It was cold and I totally sympathised with the guy! The numerous floats finishing up the parade drinking beer were also a surprise (except for the pub-themed float – also unlikely in the UK – where a man in a dress was repeatedly throwing a giant stuffed dog under the wheels of his float while drinking beer; that seemed almost reasonable, in the circumstances…) but everyone seemed happy and none of the children watching seemed particularly traumatised!

A selection of photos follows…

And a couple of bonus sunset photos, because we had a particularly nice sunset the other day:

Weird things about Brussels #1 and #2

This is the first in what is likely to become a regular feature on this blog, highlighting things that strike me as weird seen in Brussels.

Today, there are two.

The first is that my high street sings Christmas carols at everyone walking down it – this may not be unique to Brussels, but it’s the first place I’ve seen it, and I think I’d go mad if I lived on the high street, with the constant playing of Christmas carols through what appears to be a loud-speaker system attached to the outer walls of houses. Not least because they were the most depressing set of Christmassy songs ever when I was walking through it today, including such gems as Elvis Presley’s Lonely This Christmas

The second was more uplifting, but much more bizzare. A man walking his dog is normal – a man walking what looked very much like a fox on a lead, less so. (I’m willing to entertain the possibility that it was just an ugly dog, but it looked ridiculously like the fox that used to take over our garden in London…) It got weirder when he walked far enough that I could see that the man holding the lead was wearing knee high pink fluffy boots. An interesting fashion statement… I hope at least that they were warm!