Cherry trees are best by night

This isn't the best road for cherry trees in Brussels, but lit up by streetlamps this white cherry tree looked pretty funky (I'm lying on my back).

The main cherry tree area in Brussels (see here http://mikeinbrussels.blogspot.com/2009/04/schaerbeek.html) has a joint Belgo-Japanese celebration every April. The commune Schaerbeek produced cherries for the famous Kriek beer and so I guess that's why they planted loads. This road Avenue des Cerisiers is split between two communes one of which is Schaerbeek - you can tell the border because the street signs change.

Bucharest fast food

This chicken outlet in the centre of Bucharest is fairly hard not to miss.

In identity terms, it testifies I suppose to Romanian humour (in the light of bird flu), which I also saw in an exhibition (can't put photos on here for fear of copyright) of cartoons, for example showing Romanians taking over Covent Garden with big stars on stages and Roma beggars at the door. We were talking in our tutorial the other day about whether minorities use humour as a kind of strategy - I think Romania isn't really a minority, but it maybe feels kind of on the edge or something (as far as one can generalise).

Two alternative takes on Killer Chicken - this one http://viapontica.wordpress.com/2009/02/25/hilarious-name-killer-chicken-bucharest-fast-food-outlet/ from an ex-LSE man turned property market analyst, contrasts with the more sybaritic http://therockmother.blogspot.com/2007/06/you-say-roumania-i-say-romania.html

Presumptive stuff

Here is a café in the Avenue Livingstone in Brussels, just down the hill from the main EU buildings, appropriately called the Livingstone. Livingstone has a connection with Brussels via Stanley and the Congo, so there's a kind of colonial echo and reflection here. The café though is in competition with a big Irish bar called the Wild Geese (that has its own resonance I guess), a Tesco metro type supermarket, and used to be near a couple of German beer bars that have closed down. Now if you want to have a German beer and ambience you have to go out to Wezembeek-Oppem, near the German School.

Tourism tropes

We were talking about this in connection with my European Studies course - different views of countries as expressed through tourism literature.

This is a poster in Bucharest two and a half years ago - note how the concept of the grand tour is still with us, how more expensive the UK is, and how Tower Bridge is an enduring icon (also used in Eurovision 1999 by Israel).

As always, click on the picture to make it larger.

Eutopia.........

........is the ironic title of an exhibition in Brussels all about deconstructing, reconstructing and maybe even re-instructing Europe. http://www.rhiz.eu/artefact-23765-en.html gives you one or two photos.

What happens is go into the gallery (a converted power station, but only a baby one, not like Tate Modern), try not to get told off for taking photos, and then look at a few watercolours, some videos and the main bit of the exhibition, which is a kind of mock European landscape you enter through a kind of Checkpoint Charlie place. You can also vote and comment on the Lisbon treaty.

I haven't described that very well, but that's partly because of the unsettling effect of the exhibition - if things like the EU flag lit up by a flashing police lamp or a blank white aeroplane revolving over a bleak black landscape appeal, you should like this. It was the price of a cup of coffee to get in - just off the Place Sainte Catherine. You can peek into the exhibition if you go up the Rue Dansaert - it's just next to an oversized underwear shop. A good antidote to the saccharine excesses of Europe Day.

Fonko rules OK

Here's the label from the wine we had last night at our local Serbian restaurant (scallops on blinis was nice). The wine is actually Macedonian and as you can see it's named after Bucephall (ox-head - strange) Alexander's horse, who ended up in present-day Pakistan http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porus - not bad for his selling price of thirteen talents. Talking of talent, I think Miss California is great - not many people could stand on stage in front of all America wearing next to nothing and say anything at all about gay marriage, and she has helped the gay marriage cause no end.

Mountains and seas

That's the name of the resto last night we went to. We were interrrupted by some strange text messages that I cannot go into here! This food was good (escalope pizzaiola - here's a recipe http://www.paperblog.fr/511187/escalopes-de-veau-a-la-pizzaiola/ basically it's veal bashed up and a sauce made up of bashed up bits of tomato, garlic, capers, origano and white wine - really it should be called bashed up cow). It also made me take off one and a half pounds. On the way back I lay on the pavement and took pictures of cherry blossom illuminated by street-lamps, but I won't put them here because I'm in anti-flower mode.

Fluid borders again

Marianske Laszne (Marienbad, and sorry about the accents) is one of the first towns you get to once through the Czech border near Bayreuth. Fluid? Maybe not, unless you mean the spa water. It's kind of a show town (very nice beer and food as well as parks), and when we went it was really really really peaceful.

Fluid borders

Today a tutor posted a link to photos of East Germany in 1990 http://www.spiegel.de/fotostrecke/fotostrecke-41629.html which basically celebrates perceived dilapidated difference. By way of contrast, here's how the city of Erfurt looked just under a year ago - not sure if it is still recognisably the East, or if the Cuban (?) band symbolizes globalization, but there's lots to decode, not least the eye of the Western tourist.

The MED (Mike Easy Diet)

If you look at me on Facebook I often look like a big orange greasy ball. Round about early March I decided to do something about it (fat, not Facebook - how could I do anything about Facebook?), particularly as I was getting to the 'can't run to catch a bus' phase.

All the advice says that you need to change your lifestyle but maybe only in small ways. So you could chop off a leg and lose weight, but it's better to just file it down gently over a number of weeks. The best book I found was Fat Bloke Slims by Bruce Byron. He said a couple of things that rang true for me: first of all, you're likely to put on weight after bereavement (I think that's potentially a big cop-out, but I guess you are likely to shut up shop metabolism-wise and think it's OK to eat and drink a lot as life is short) and also most people have one weakness that kind of tips the balance. In his case, it was drinking every day - not very huge amounts, but still enough to pile on the kilos. Add into the mix less exercise, the effects of aging and voilà - a big orange greasy ball.

Anyway, this is my plan:

- two to four days a week off alcohol
- exercise of an hour each day (must not involve any equipment or going outside - do stuff like climb the stairs four at a time - but must involve good music)
- don't take it seriously
- change the scales over to stones and pounds rather than kilos because progress seems faster

The results:

- 15-20 cm off the waist (depending on how hard you breath in)
- about a pound lost a week (i.e. eight pounds) - but it's more like bumping down into certain brackets where you can go three or so pounds each way.

All I need to do now is spin this out for another 150 pages and I can write a best-selling diet book.