A Surreal Weekend
This weekend, Nicholas came to visit me in Belgium -- his last trip before I move to the UK at the end of August!
On Friday we had a drink at the Bouffon du Roi, a lovely bar just up the road from my place. It was extremely hot that night, but the next day we got up and went market shopping, and then wandered around Namur, stopping at the Musée Félicien Rops to look at the collection there of his fantastic drawings and paintings, the most famous being his erotic art.
This is a photo of Pornokrates, one of Rops' most famous paintings:
Apparently the blind woman (in her dress and stance, a femme fatale) is being drawn along by sexual passion over the arts, or pomp and egotism, depending on what you read.
Anyway, the museum was full of other interesting drawings, many of them depicting cherubs like in Pornokrates. The cherubs were a little freaky, since they seemed to somewhat swarm in some pieces, up to some sort of mischief. But the exhibition was very cool, and paved the way for the rest of the weekend (though not the next part exactly).
Sunday we popped down to Luxembourg, where we explored the "Casemates" (fortified tunnels) through the city. Luxembourg is an interesting place. The centre reminded me of many other European cities, except it was exceptionally clean and tidy. Apparently it's one of the richest cities in Europe though, so perhaps it is not so surprising. Anyway, the casemates were pretty awesome, although there was a huge disparity in presentation from one set to the other: the first we went to (closer to the centre) was run by two girls in a rundown underground office in a rather disorganised fashion; the second we went to was all high-tech ticketing and explanatory signs. The latter were much longer too, and involved a lot of climbing of spiral staircases to dead ends. It would be quite easy to get lost in there! But it was a lot of fun, and provided some beautiful views over the city and surrounding areas:
There are many more photos of Luxembourg in my gallery.
The more I travel through Europe the more I become jealous of their amazing multilingual capabilities. Even the McDonalds workers in Luxembourg could speak German, French, and English. I'd like to see that sort of ability back in Australia!! My French is coming along though, I am now having more complicated interactions with people (especially shopkeepers) and am able to stumble my way through some conversational stuff. I find "real" French accents a lot harder to understand than the Belgian French accents though, so watching the World Cup or Tour de France with the French commentary has been a bit hard for me to keep up on (also because they tend to get excited and start talking really quickly). Knowing French is actually really helpful though; over here it sort of feels like the default other language if people don't know any English :) It's especially amusing when someone asks me what language (in French), and I respond "Anglais", and they then keep talking to me in French without realising it, lol. Fortunately I have understood what they were saying so far though so it's been fine :)
Anyway, back to the weekend. After our day trip to Luxembourg we had a yummy Thai dinner locally (the woman tried to explain to us that the green curry we'd ordered was very hot and perhaps we would like the red one instead, to which I said "we're Australians, we understand hot!" and she laughed and we ended up getting a hot but not King-St-Newtown-hot curry which was quite delicious). Nicholas also baked his amazing vegan banana bread, which was even more delicious.
Monday we went to Brussels. WHAT A BAD IDEA. Don't go to Brussels on a Monday. Everything vaguely museumy and arty is CLOSED. For NO REASON. The best we got was a Dali exhibition at the Grand Place, which felt (to me) a bit more like a Dali print art sales attempt with an entry fee, since the art was all for sale, were mostly prints (though original numbered prints, and many with low numbers), and were all sort of squished together in a slap-dash manner (the Divine Comedy series was all out of order, and spread in a rather poor way across several boards that were at odd angles to each other, so you couldn't get a sense of the whole thing). However, the art itself was rather nice, and mostly things I had never seen before. I think I'd seen maybe one of the paintings out of the entire collection before, so that was quite good. Also, if you want a Dali print many of the smaller ones are quite affordable (€550) which I wasn't expecting for a "name brand" artist. Personally I'd love one of the statues of the stilty rhinoceroses he did, but those were a lot more expensive! :)
Anyway we didn't get to see the Magritte museum, which was a shame. Instead we ate frites, walked around in the rain, visited the royal library (more like royal boring -- it was basically a bunch of offices and reading rooms where you requested the books you wanted and people would go get them for you), and then went home. Oh yeah, and Nicholas found some UBUNTU COLA:
Unfortunately for him it wasn't free.
Monday night I made dinner, then dismantled my spinning wheel so that it could be put in a suitcase along with the wii and various other things so that Nicholas could take it and its wool-filled partner over to the UK for me. It was quite difficult! I think I'll need a few more trips across to get everything there, but if I can foist most of my unneeded things (homegoods, mostly) onto friends here then it'll be a lot easier. We also played a lot of Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. This game is stupidly addictive, and Nicholas and I are in a slightly friendly point-war with it. Here's my best, which Nicholas just beat last night:
Transmuters are awesome. Especially once they get Blade Hands.
Tuesday we went into Brussels to get Nicholas on the Eurostar at some ungodly hour. In doing so, we missed the excitement of the Tour de France coming through Namur, which is a bit of a shame, but when I came back the streets were filled with people and it looked like it would have been a pain to get to a place where I could have seen something, so I didn't mind too much. Also, I'm not really following the Tour this year since it requires a long attention span and the only commentary I can get is in French, so it makes it a bit tricky to know what's going on.
Anyway, I had a fun weekend. This week I'm on holidays, which is great. I have a lot of things to do before I move, but more importantly, I need a bit of a break too :) I've been working very hard getting some large documents done for work, which have worked quite well but were very tiring to complete. I have a paper to write for a summer school this week though, which I didn't realise was due (oops) but that should be easy to finish up, since I already wrote a long abstract and have done most of the actual written work already. My list of publications is becoming quite long!
As for my future, I'll be moving to the UK at the end of August, and starting a new job at a university in London working on a project that is quite technical, but requires the "gentle" touch of some ethicists. I'll be working with someone that I'm currently working with on another project, which is great, because I think we'll get along quite well. I'm so excited by the whole thing, since it works both my technical brain as well as my philosophical brain! :D
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