Hello readers. I am back in Brussels after about a month back in the UK, so it is about time that I start blogging about my life again. To kick it off, I thought that it would be nice to write about a band I have recently heard about because I hope to go to their London gig in October to see what they are like live. The band is all American and is called Warpaint. Now a masculine sounding name like that reminds one of ancient Britons charging against Roman legions with woad on their faces, however don’t forget that a famous woman called Boudicca was among them. So it should not be surprising that this band is an all female quartet with an unusual sound on offer. I quite like this group because, even though their name sounds like a heavy metal band, they have a smooth music genre and like a Brussels bar, it is quite smokey as well. The band creates songs which are both energetic, although you would not find them on my workout playlist, and mixes psychedelic rock with angelic vocals.



We can see this in their “Stars” song. The video opens the door to a bizarre dreamlike world and produces a good piece of visual art which is also quite haunting. But the song which got me interested in the band is called “Elephants” and as I used to study art and photography, I like the use of light and the large dark space in the video.



Billie Holiday appears to be their most popular song at the moment and would make a good relationship song for Warpaint’s female fans. As someone who is a bit of an artist, I really recommend this type of paint if you want a new all female band in your life. I will let you know how I got on at their gig in October.

Day one in Belgrade

On Thursday 17th June I went on a trip to Belgrade in Serbia and this is the first blog post about my short break. After the flight, which included a stop in Zurich, my friend and I caught a taxi to our apartment with a very friendly taxi driver who liked to talk about how great Serbian women are and how it used to be dangerous to support football, think of violent football-mad skinheads but with Kalashnikov’s. After having a quick tour of the city, which was a mixture of old communist concrete tower blocks and modern consumer advertising.
We arrived at our apartment and as we were not staying in a hotel, we had to travel to the local police station to have our passports registered. The station also seemed very old with cracks in the concrete walls and police officers walking around smoking, it was very far from being in a British police station in London. But then, I doubt that it has been refurbished since the collapse of the iron curtain. After we had our passports stamped and received a document which would stop us being thrown into a Belgrade prison when we tried to leave the country, we went back to our apartment to unpack. This did not take long as we were keen to go out and explore the city.

We walked over to the Kalemegdan Fortress (Калемегдан) which is in a park in an area of the city called Stari Grad and it looks out over the Danube. Kalemegdan derives from two Turkish words, kale (fortress) and meydan (battleground) (literally, "battlefield fortress"). Kalemegdan is said to be the oldest section of the urban area of Belgrade and for centuries the population of the city lived only within the walls of the fortress.

The first mention of this city was by the Celtic tribe of Scordisci in the 3rd Century BC, who defeated the Thracian and Dacian tribes who lived in and around the fort. Later on the city was conquered by the Romans and it became part of ‘the military frontier’ on the border of the Roman Empire and the ‘unknown barbaric lands’. The Romans called this fort “Singidunum” and it was defended by the Roman legion IV Flaviae, but not very well during the period between 378 and 441 BC when the fort was being repeatedly destroyed by the Huns and the Goths. There is a legend that the grave of Attila the Hun is under the Fortress. In 476 AD the fortress-city again became a borderline between the Western Roman Empire, Eastern Roman Empire and the Slav-Avar Kingdom in the North.

The fortress remained a Byzantine stronghold until the 12th century when it fell in the hands of a newly emerging Serbian state. It became a border city of the Serbian Kingdom, later Empire, with Hungary. In the 11th Century, the Hungarian king Béla I gave the fortress to Serbia as a wedding gift because his son married Serbian princess Jelen (most people just give cutlery or champagne!) but it remained effectively part of Hungary.

In 1521, the fortress, like most parts of the Serbian state, was conquered by the Turks and remained under the rule of the Ottoman Empire (with short periods of the Austrian and Serbian occupation). It remained part of the Ottoman Empire until 1867 when the Turks withdrew from Belgrade and Serbian. During the period of short Austrian rule (1718–1738) the fortress was largely rebuilt and modernized. The fortress suffered further damages during the First and the Second world wars. So after almost two millennia of continuous sieges, battles and conquests the fortress is today known as the Kalemegdan fortress.

After we walked around and explored the fortress, we went for a walk along the Danube, which I really wanted to see because it flows from Germany to the Black Sea and it is believed that Homo sapiens sapiens used this river to navigate their way across Europe on their long migration from Africa.

Then we walked to ‘Kneza Mihaila’ which is a busy pedestrian area, full of shops and galleries. The commercial and cultural center of the city is along Kneza Mihaila and the pedestrian street is dedicated to Prince Michael, the first ruler of a fully independent Serbia. I brought the Serbian flag from here because I collect the national flags from every country I visit and then we went to have something to eat and try out the local beer. I had a nice beer called Jelen and a pizza with eggs and bacon called a ‘Serbian’.

After the relaxing meal, we walked over to ‘Republic Square’, which I believed would look like Tiananmen Square but when I arrived it looked more like Trafalgar Square. Many people consider Square of the Republic to be the center of the city, it has a large bronze statue of Prince Michael on a horse, which was placed there in 1882 and the square has seen many protest’s from the first anti-Slobodan Milošević demonstrations on March 9, 1991 to the student protest during winter 1996-97 and the pro-democracy rallies in September and October 2000. For this reason, the opposition leader Vuk Drašković of the SPO party insisted on changing the name of the square to Trg Slobode (Freedom Square) but this was never officially done...shame.

musical instruments, football and a bike ride.

I think that this week has been more interesting than last. On Monday evening I went running with a group of people in the woodlands south of Brussels for about an hour. It was very different from my normal Sunday afternoon run along the city streets because we had to follow a trail to complete the run, which also included false trails, so there was a lot of running around to try to find the correct path to the finishing point. I also liked this run because as it was mostly in woodlands, there was a lot of running up slopes, through bushes and jumping over fallen trees. It was even better because when we all reached the finishing line; we started to sing some songs. The only one which I knew well was the Lumberjack song from Monty Python but with different lyrics, but a good song for when you are in the forest I guess. We also had a few beers and reviewed everyones performance during the run. I got a bad review for having the weakest beer at the rest point (for more information about Belgium Beer please check out this blog http://sudsucker.blogspot.com/) but overall I did quite well and I looking forward to running with this group again.

On Wednesday I went to an interesting talk on the result of the UK general elections and the state/complete mess of the British economy. I find it hard to picture our universe which is around 12 billion years old and must be billions and billions of miles across, so I find it even harder to picture billions and trillions of pounds. Adding the word ‘debt’ to this also makes it as scary as a super-massive blackhole, which is where most of the public finances must have gone over the past couple of years. Anyway it was a good speech and being a Brussels expat, it is always nice to hear about news from back home.

The next day I was booked on a cycling tour around Brussels in the afternoon. It was arranged by the lefty Greens in the Parliament as part of the ‘Green Week’ to try to get people out of cars and instead use environmentally friendly means of transport. So it must have taken a couple of vans to deliver all the bikes and about 20% of them were used. I signed up to this only because I love cycling and I plan to buy a bike soon and I thought it would be good to have a go at cycling around the city. The President of the European Parliament came along, who is the most important political figure that I have cycled with. I had to try to avoid bumping into him a few times; it would not have been good for my political career if I failed.

On Friday the World Cup kicked off and after work, wearing the new England kit, I headed down to a place called the World Cup Village which is showing all the games. It was very busy, obviously, and we had to stand outside because all the tables inside were already booked. It was a good night but it was really just killing time until the England game the next evening which I choose not to mention in this post in any way, shape or form!

So skipping Saturday, I will move onto Sunday and I spent most of the day doing some housework and went to the musical instrument museum in the afternoon with one of my housemates. It was very good and had instrument from different countries and different historical periods, from the panpipes of Peru to the music of pre-communist China and lutes from the medieval world. If you are ever in Brussels it is well worth a visit.

Nanotechnology and a plastic teapot

Not much happened on Monday and Tuesday this week, apart from not going to the gym when I was meant to (yet again!) But on Wednesday I went to a conference on Nanomedicine in Europe, which is a topic I find interesting because I believe that it can massively improve the early detection, diagnostics and cure of diseases. It can also detect diseases before a person starts to show external symptoms, so I have no problem with these little nanos swimming around inside me. But being at the European Parliament, most of the conference was on the political, social and industry side, which I do not find as interesting as the medical and biological aspects of this medical science. I could go deeper into this subject but I think it is too heavy for a Sunday evening.

On Thursday I gave one of my flatmates a tour of the Parliament and went AWOL from the gym again as I decided that it would be a better idea to go for a drink in the glorious sunshine. Friday was pretty much the same as it was one of my colleague’s leaving drinks. But I also went for a lunchtime picnic in the park and I have therefore been out in the sun a fair amount have I have started to turn as golden-brown as the coffee I am drinking while I write this.

On Saturday I did my usual trip to the supermarket and then walked into town with one of my flatmates to do some shopping. This resulted in the purchase of a pasta pot and a teapot, which (if I may be honest) is a horrible plastic thing that does not seem to do the job very well. I need to find a nice china one...

In the evening I watched a film about Joan of Arc and Sunday was almost as relaxing, apart from going for a quick run. Well I say run, but I spent most of it talking about food I need to get for my British themed evening. I also made another very nice chicken tikka malsa curry with rice for dinner tonight while watching Dr Jacob Bronowski. Maybe curry might be a good idea for the evening...

Waterloo

Today I had the day off work because it was a bank holiday in Belgium, so I got up late in the morning, after listening to relaxing panpipe music from Peru. One of my housemates are moving out in a few days, so an American girl was having a look around. There is also a French girl and a Dutch guy who is interested in the room, but it would be nice to have at least one non-European in the house. After breakfast I played a little Playstation 3 before I was invited to go to Waterloo for the day, I decided to go as it would be a nice trip on my day off.

I have been there before so I offered to be the tour guide, my housemates seemed happy with this. But I think they may have regretted it in the end. We left the house and caught the train to Waterloo, after trying to find the correct ticket office and platform. Buying a ticket in Brussels is sometimes not as easy as the UK! We arrived in Waterloo and found it under a grey sky but there was no heavy rain, it was only spitting (which is a new word I introduced to Monrose).

I remembered how to get to the battlefield and I started to lead the way. We had a quick stop at a memorial church for the soldiers who fell at the battle. It was quite a nice church with a classical appearance on the outside. Then we continued to walk along a road towards the field, which was much longer than I thought! After about half an hour walking we asked who long it was until we arrived and was told that it was another 15 minutes...by bus.

It seemed much closer last time and this is way I think my housemates regretted believing me on the distance. However we kept on walking and finally got to the field at around 4pm. We brought our tickets to enter the museum and I was happy to sit down in the theatre after all that walking to watch a film and documentary about the battle. I knew a lot about it anyway from my many years studying history. Then we were hoping to do the battlefield tour but the bus was broken so we started to climb a big hill which has a statue of a lion at the top which was built around 1823 as a memorial to the battle. You can see the whole field from the top but anyway who has been there will know about the amount of stairs you need to conquer first.

Then we made our descend back to earth and we all voted to catch a taxi back to the station to begin our journey back to Brussels, it was almost one of the best things I have ever voted for. I had better stop it here as I need to have some dinner and start packing as tomorrow I am going back to the UK to catch up with the Borneo Team in Birmingham.

In a little place called Antwerp

Today I had the choice of going to either a flower show in Brussels or to Antwerp for a few hours. Even with a bit of yesterday’s headache leftover, the decision was easy and I left Monrose to catch a train to Antwerp in an excited mood. Most people I had spoke to have said that it is much more superior then Brussels so I had high expectations of this place. I caught the Metro to the station, fully equipped with a jumper and camera but no food or drink, and decided to get a coffee while I waited for my train. Now those of you who know me know that I love takeaway coffees at stations, especially Caffè Americano’s around London, so I waited in line for my cup of hot beaney goodness. I ordered my drink but all I got in return was a confused look “Americano?!? What is that?” A coffee shop that has not heard of an Americano...strange. Come to think of it, if anyone knows a shop that does sell this drink in Brussels please do let me know, thanks readers.

Anyway, I marched down to the platform with something called a Latte and waited for my train. At one point a man with a child came up to me and started to ask what language I spoke and before I know it he started to ask me to fill his cup with some coins. Maybe I should have offered him some of this horrible coffee. It was about a 50 minute journey into Antwerp, I spent most of these minutes looking out at the countryside or checking my Facebook to see if anyone commented on my announcement of this trip.

I arrived into Antwerp station and started to ascend the three floors to the street and spent most the time exploring the streets and market squares but I had to pick the day when there was a large bike ride for charity going on, so I spent most the afternoon trying to avoid being run over by the phalanx of bicycles that raced by. But I must admit that I am starting to miss cycling!

After I was finished (which was not long as most of the shops are closed on a Sunday over here) I headed home. I will have to visit here again soon but with my flatmates and on a Saturday.