happy post! (about obwarzanki)

oh gosh, I don't want the sad post to be the last thing I wrote! At the same time, I'm too busy to write another one.

Tell me happy things!

Or listen to the Belgian Song again.

... as I'm walking down the street, eating mayonnaise and frites...

Talking of street food...

One thing you may have noticed if you've been on board since The Poland Days is how much obwarzanki form an integral part of the Kraków diet. Especially as a student, with only fifteen minutes to eat between classes: just about time to run out to the pretzel stand and to queue by the coffee machine. I miss Kraków.
An Obwarzanek (the Kraków type, not the dessicated little pretzel-rings you get on strings in Warsaw. And indeed Brussels) is a big round bread twist, about the same size as a bagel, but without the heavy chewiness or sugary coating. It's crusty on the outside like bread and dipped in either poppy seeds (z makiem), sesame seeds (z sezamem) or big salt crystals (z solem) like a German pretzel. Some obwarzanki sellers offer versions with melted cheese (z serem), cayenne pepper (pikantny) or pizza herbs and tomato (pizzowy). I've also seen a rye version (ciemny) with oats on top, yummy.
I want one. They are stomach-filling (and possibly also bowel-stopping, since they consist exclusively of refined carbohydrates) and good.

Yesterday I plucked up the courage to ask the Pani in Kuchnia Polska on Avenue d'Auderghem, taking care to specify 'Krakowskie obwarzanki'.

- excuse me, she said, but what do you mean by 'krakowskie' obwarzanki?
- you know, the big ones, I explained.
- oh no, I'm sorry: they're like bread, they'd be awful the next day. You'd probably have to order them specially.

Proszę Panstwa, to jest dramat.

I am going to have to call the Polish Embassy...

Sunday 6am life assessment

As you may have guessed, Sw. Mikołai did not visit my flat to grant my wishes this year (I blame lack of chimney).

I can't sleep, and since it's Sunday morning, I have at least 24 hours before I can do anything pro-active.

I do not want to spend another six months translating at home in Brussels.

It's not that I don't like the city. I actually feel pretty at home here. And please don't tell me I'm just being negative. I am not a negative person. I have been an ex-pat on and off since 2002 and I know the Happy Strategies: I go running, I exercise regularly, I play music, I listen to music, I joined a choir, I take the scary or miserable parts of my life and I fashion them into amusing little blog posts to make myself laugh at things that would otherwise probably have me cowering under my desk in despair. I look at the tiny things, the leaves and the sunshine in the park and I think how lucky I am to be here. I hate it when people who have easy jobs and have never moved out of their home town talk about how they can't stand 'negative people'. Everyone is sad sometimes and that's human.

But: I don't want to sit here alone, waiting for the possibility of a hypothetical exam.

I'm not the most extroverted person, but I am a human being and I like contact with people. I like solitude but I am not happy that it has become the norm for me to go for whole days without speaking to anyone. I can't do this for another six months. It feels wrong, it feels as though I am fighting against the current and I don't know what to do.

I know that I am lonely and unhappy and I can't bear the thought of another six months of the same.

There is no shame in admitting that things are not going to plan.

Since I can't call my parents at this time of the morning, I am turning to you, O oracle of the internet: tell me what to do!

Belgian Weird, part deux

I totally forgot Speculoos!

Not something scary wielded by your gynaecologist but rather a type of caramelised, cinnamony biscuit served with coffee. You know, the free ones that people in other countries just ignore.

Belgians are obsessed by them! To be honest, I've never seen a Belgian person actually go out and actively buy speculoos to dunk in their tea, but this may be because I live in Brussels and have rarely seen a Belgian person do.. well... anything.

It is traditionally eaten on St Nicolas' day (i.e. NOW) and the supermarkets sell it in big festive slabs.

But that's not where the obsession ends: speculoos crops up in desserts, ice-cream flavours, even a sort of speculoos-nutella.

Speculoos on Wikipedia


Gosh, isn't it great to be a Belgian?



The Belgian Song

Year end pre-report

I'm going to do it: I'm going to use my blog as a big soggy pillow and have a good cry over all of your operating systems (or Blackberries, or iPhones, or whatever you technologically-advanced folks have nowadays).

To cut a long story short, there have been peaks and troughs at both professional and personal level, resulting in a marked slump for PinoCorp at the start of this festive season, and a general ambience of Pino Grigio. We are considering restructuring in early 2010, potentially sending the majority of the workforce on extended leave in the UK and keeping only an (exo-)skeleton staff on in Brussels (under the sink, until the next intervention anti-cafards).

Plus invoices are late this month and it hasn't stopped raining for a week.

Our short-term recovery plan involves duvets, ice-cold vodka-tonic and Friday Night with Jonathan Ross.

But we all know what happens when we make plans.

Which is why I will - instead of cowering under the duvet (or indeed making up for translation time lost to admin this week) - be singing 'This little light of mine' in the basement of the local Church of Scotland.** I am not entirely sure how this happened but it is almost certainly a combination of my pathological inability to say 'no' and the effects of a half-finished biere brune. Without a doubt it is all that I deserve for daring to venture out on a school night.

It is a small comfort to me that my pitiful existance serves to provide mirth and good cheer to so many in these otherwise dull and unforgiving times.
Normal service will - probably - resume on Saturday.

**EDIT: It was actually pretty cool...

List do Swiętego Mikołaja

Szanowny Panie Święty Mikołaju!

Proszę Pana bardzo... ja na Mikołajki chciałabym dostać zaproszenia na egzamin akreditacyjny.
Byłam przez (prawie) cały rok grzeczna; poza tym, ćwiczę codziennie konsekutywki, czytam Economista i Monde Diplomatique i śpiję z książką o notatkach Jean-Francois Rozan'a pod poduszką. Rzadko piję wódkę (bez soku) i (prawie) nigdy nie chodzę tańczyć w klubach czy gadać z chłopakami (nawet nie pamiętam, co jest 'chłopak').

Jeżeli Pan nie jest w stanie pryzchylić się do mojej prośby, byłabym również zachwycona stażem przez trybunał sprawiedliwości, lub kucykiem.

Dziękuję uprzejmie (chociaż rozpaczliwie) i serdecznie pozdrawiam,

P, tłumacz z Krakowa...

Sto lat!

On 29 November, 1909, my Granny was born in a small mining town in North Wales.
One hundred years ago and an entirely different universe, she was fourth in a family of six: four sisters and a brother. Their mother died while she was still a child and their father was injured in a mining accident and left unable to work. The two littlest girls were fostered by other families in the village while the others stayed behind and were looked after by the eldest daughter, a slight thirteen-year old.
Her childhood was spent in a culture wholly different to that of my own: milk was a precious commodity, English was a foreign language learnt at school and leeks were pinned to fronts on St David's Day*.
At the age of fifteen, after finishing school, my grandmother and one of her elder sisters moved to the foreign lands of darkest Tunbridge Wells to go into service at a maternity hospital.
(Several years ago, after I ran away - desperately unhappy - from an awful summer job working as a live-in barmaid at an Italian hotel, she looked at me knowingly: I knew you wouldn't like it, she said, it's hard, I know that. I was twenty-one though and it was only a summer job.)

It's hard to imagine one hundred years: as a young girl growing up in Wales, could she ever have dreamed up television, aeroplanes, the internet, whole symphony orchestras stored on a pen drive and instant communication with family living halfway across the globe? Of miraculous drugs that might have saved her mother, her husband? What if I live to be one hundred? What unimaginable wonders will humanity have produced by then? How fast will the time fly by?

Happy birthday Granny (for yesterday) - here's to the next one.






*Although I suspect that she may be having us on about this one.

Crisis

Kryzys, la crise, la crisi, whatever you want to call it.

No, not that one. In the self-absorbed world of the western twenty-something there is only One Great Crisis and that is THIRTY.

It has recently occurred to me that I am twenty-nine.

To be honest, it happened not long ago and I managed to cheat myself into overlooking the whole thing by conveniently having the same birthday as that of another friend who is four years younger. Effectively this meant I ended up celebrating the last birthday of my third decade by getting inelegantly wasted with a very large number of very young students (many of them Polish).

Classily done.

So, since it's Tuesday night and we have nothing better to do than practice our note-taking skills and proofread Italian legal translation, let's take a cheerful moment to reflect on all the things we didn't achieve. All those 'When I grow up's that never made it past the drawing board. All those trips round the world we forgot to book, novels that we never started, flat deposits that we really on reflection oughtn't to have frittered away on kir petillante and crepes nutella on the rue St André des Arts...

All the things we thought we might have been...

... but aren't.

I'll start the ball rolling.

I thought by now I'd be...

1/ At the height of my professional career. I had little inkling, ten years ago, of what that professional career was to have been, but it would have been exciting. Something like a spy, or an investment banker* or an ambassador in the Foreign Office. In any case, it would have involved expensive tailored suits and wine-bar lunches.

2/ Living in a nice apartment. Possibly on the Lamarck-Caulaincourt side of Montmartre. There would have been a Very Deep Bath that you could swim in, plus a terrace (I do have a balcony actually but since I live in Belgium it's too cold to use it).
I was never clear on the specifics but one thing is certain: it would not have involved a 'lit-mezzanine'.

3/Gorgeous. Seriously: I never thought I'd have any use for benzoyl peroxide cream past the age of twenty two. I mean, who gets spots and wrinkles? Ok, I don't actually have wrinkles: I have three lines on my forehead and That Is All. But spots? Oh and how. And let's not mention the uncontrollable hair, the wonky glasses, the fact that I can't wear office clothes without looking like the temp waitress...

3-bis/ In possession of a generous set of assets. Up until the age of about twenty-three I still believed that one day I might wake up to find that they just appeared overnight. I genuinely thought I'd magically grow up to have a knockout figure, and that chicken fillets would be items that belonged in the fridge and not at the bottom of a B-cup. Dads of the world! This is what happens if you watch Baywatch with your daughters on a Saturday afternoon. Switch It Off.

4/ Able to cope with guys. Somehow I thought I'd have worked it out by now: how to be just the right degree of cool, rather than careening wildly from Desperate to Ice Queen; how to slouch seductively in a figure-hugging black dress, long blonde(ish) hair swinging - instead of twisting from one foot to the other, chewing my nails and talking at a good four hundred times my normal rate. Oh and I never predicted Twitter, G-talk, Skype, text messaging, Facebook... all simply a big digital mass of potential misunderstanding.
I would also have learnt to let Mr Wrong know the score in a grown up way, from the word go, instead of telling myself, with no small degree of cowardice, that just one more drink won't hurt and maybe he just wants to be friends after all.

4-bis/ A lesbian. As a teenager I was pretty certain that I would end up living a sedate and highly PC life devoted to intellectual pursuits and novel writing in a cottage near Cambridge with a female companion of a similar disposition. I read Orlando and Colette's Claudine novels and dreamed of a tweedy, steamy, forbidden existence.
But somewhere around 2001, in the vicinity of St Andrews University Students' Association Bar, something went horribly wrong.
I blame the intrusion of heterosexuality (and possibly also modern languages) for my failure to publish any great works of literature so far.

5/ Confident. I mean really - not aggressive, not obnoxious, just calmly assertive. Able to mingle. Well-versed in the school of Good Chat. Self-assured. Not plagued by the nagging suspicion that any minute now someone will suddenly Find You Out and tell everyone that you are Faking It and banish you back to the hot damp little corner of the pot wash where you belong.
If anyone knows the secret to this one, do let me know.


So... what did you think you'd be by now?

Answers in the comments box, please!



*my Dad used to work in the City and travelled to exciting parts of Africa a lot so I grew up thinking that this was the height of sophistication. I remember being asked in church once what I wanted to be when I grew up and replying 'I want to work in a bank like Daddy'. Oh Mrs Thatcher, what have you done?