Boring lecture

I'm trying to sit through a boring lecture, fighting not to fall asleep. Although the course seems interesting -Foreign Policy Analysis- the guy giving it is soooo dull.

Most English lecturers tend to be quite witty, making funny dry remarks so typical for English humour. But this guy is a German, so besides a horrible Schwarzenegger-like accent he really lacks every sense of humour. And besides, his whole lecture is put on slides and available on the web, so no need to take notes.

So I just put my laptop on the desk and pretend to take notes in an attempt not to fall asleep.

Oh yeah, you might think it's a bit ridiculous to sit in course with a laptop (I still think so as well in fact) but it's a very common thing here. Loads of people do it, and that way you can read the paper in a boring lecture without anybody noticing it, if they're not sitting behind you of course.

A weekend back home

Last weekend was really nice, exhausting also because I had a lot to do, but I had a great time. After a month in London, I went to Belgium basically to get some more stuff over here to get through the year (and the winter!)

And at the same time I saw a lot of friends, really heartwarming to see you all turn up. Brussels really feels a bit like home after two years there. I just spent one day there and I already ran into several people by accident. Incredible! I just got off the Eurostar and I ran into Ruben. The next day I met Inge in the city with her two weeks old baby and afterwards in cafe Fontainas I Lore and Kristof suddenly came in (one of the things we talked on was this very good new tv series 'Lost', of course I had never heard about it, I'll get back to it later). How nice to see them all.

And then of course all the people that came to have dinner and drinks afterwards in the Monk and the Beurscafe; Joke, Soen, Maria, Nico, Delphine, Piet, Yin. There I also saw Ines, Dorien and a couple of others. It was nice to see you all back, although I've only been gone for 1 month.

Saturday I went to Hasselt to see my parents, brother and Indy (the cat). My father spoiled me by preparing delicious 'mosselen friet' for dinner!

At night I went for a drink with Pieter and Nele in Hasselt, and we were joined by the newly weds Marijke and Huub, and Saartje, Marijke's sister. It was very nice to go for a drink in good old Hasselt with it's nice cafe's and cosy nightlife.

The night still had a very nice surprise for me. I was talking to Huub about playing saxophone. I knew he also plays and told him that, as I am in London now, I can't rent a sax anymore in the music academy in Brussels. I've been looking around if I could buy a cheap or second hand one but all I found was far out of my budget or bad quality. So I just wanted to talk that over with a fellow sax player and suddenly he offers to lend his sax for a year! He had not been playing for over 3 years and the next year he'd would not have the time because of the works in his new house. And besides it's better for the sax to be played. I really couldn't believe it and was a bit hesitent as well, you know, the responsability over someone else's sax. So we agreed to both sleep over it and that I'd just come by the next day to see.

So Sunday I went there and we agreed on it! So I took Huub's terrific and beautiful Selmer tenor saxophone with me to London. It's a very nice sax with an incredible sound.
Huub, echt bedankt, ik zal goed zorg dragen voor "je kindje", hij is al veilig en wel in Londen aangekomen en ik heb er daarstraks al een uurtje op gespeeld, mmmmh.

As Huub and Marijke live just around the corner of Andres and Isa I taught I'd just try if they were home, and yes they were, so I went in for a nice coffee and to admire Andres' new dark room for printing his own photos at home.

Then I still had to go through my stuff to get everything I wanted to bring to London and pack it, it got a bit stressy as I still had to catch the train back to Brussels that evening. Heavily loaded with a backpack, two bags and a sax I took off. Thanks to the help of some nice people along the way I managed...

And then the next morning at a very undecent hour I took the Eurostar again. I was a bit afraid they wouldn't let me take so much luggage, but luckily they didn't say anything. In the train I checked out what my brother Peejay had been doing with my laptop all weekend. I came with almost nothing on the HD and I went back with 40 Gb worth of films and music. Wow! Thanks bro! Now at last I have some music in my room in London.
And then I saw he put almost the whole first season of 'lost' on it. So I started watching this series' Lore and Kristof were so full off in cafe Fontainas. Damn, once I started I couldn't stop anymore, I just HAD to know what happened in the next episode. So I saw them all in 2 days only to discover that the season was not complete on my laptop. Horrible!! It stops after episode 10 with an enourmous cliffhanger, damn, I really want to know what happens next ;)

Okay, enough typing, I've still got some studying to do today...

Some strange facts about the English

1)

You know the type of fast food joints that are seemingly alike and interchangeable all over the world. Here in the UK you’ve got those as well of course but besides those there are also some local chains, like ‘Subways’ for example.

So one evening after a long day of classes, I thought I’d do something what I don’t do so quickly, I went for some easy, cheap, fast food. And if I’m at it, I might as well do it properly and order the whole package deal, you know, hot sandwich, chips and a huge drink with loads of ice cubes.
The kind of deals you get EVERYWHERE, so you think you know what you’d get. Well, not here in England!

The sandwich was prepared before my eyes, fresh veggies etc. -so far so good-, the drinks I was supposed to get myself –great! I could take as much coke as I like without the watery cubes-, and then I was patiently waiting for them to come up with my damping hot, freshly baked, crusty potato chips… but I should have gotten suspicious earlier already because there was no ‘friture’ in eyesight.

So I asked for my ‘chips’, the man looked behind me and pointed at the stacked boxes with packages of ‘Lays’ chips besides the entrance. What the fuck!!! Okay, those things are also called ‘chips’, but I consider them as a kind of candy that happens to fill you up a bit as well, but not as chips as in ‘fish and chips’. ‘Des frites’, ‘French fries’, ‘frieten’ weet je wel! The kind we Belgians consider as our national pride and we so proudly claim to prepare in the best manner in the world. Nope, not the English, they weren’t that famous for their ‘cuisine’ and eating habbits anyway, and this surely doesn’t help either.

But I must be honest and give‘em some credit as well, London is a fantastic place if you like good food and a diverse palate of choices from all over the world. From Thai, Indian, Chinese, Japanese to Korean cuisine, prepared in the most authentic ways. Italian, French, Spanish, Scandinavian and even several quite good Belgian restaurants can be found in this city. Really, you can’t imagine it and you can find it here… At least, if you have the money for it, I only now it from my guide ;)

2)

Another one about food. At the LSE campus there’s this student restaurant (a kind of Alma for those who studied in Leuven), handy in between courses and the food is decent.

But… here they don’t serve food as one dish or meal for a certain price. Nope those English like to complicate things and make their menu and policy so ambiguous that you only find out the price at the cashier with all your food already on your plate.

So last week I took the “fish dish” that was on the menu for £ 3.50, that makes +/- € 5,25. Enough for a very decent meal at the “Alma” I taught.
Well no, for that I only got a piece of fish on my pathetic empty plate.
But then I moved on to discover that 2 meters further in the buffet they had a ‘great deal’: I could choose two extra items from the buffet for only £ 4.55 in total and thus upgrade my meal with potatoes and vegetables. Well, I had no other choice, did I ?

With a damping full plate I proudly and hungry went for the cashier. The woman looked at my plate as if she was putting an estimated value on it, and that seemed indeed to be what she was doing.
“£ 5.05” she said,
“Excuse me?”, was my surprised answer, “I taught it said £ 4.55 on the menu”.
“Yes it does”, she replied me, “but you took more than one scoop” (een schep in schoon Vlaams).
I beg your pardon!!!
I still tried: “I saw that price on the menu, how could I know”,
but she rebutted me with “You can go and see, it’s written underneath. And it’s only 50p.”, she added, trying to ridicule me.
I murmured something like, “Yeah, it’s only 50p. for everything here in London!”, but paid without further protest.

Lesson for the next time: also read the small print in restaurants (back home only banks and telephone companies try to rip you off through their small prints, you know).
My € 7,50 “Alma” meal filled me up alright but without any enjoyment. Paying per scoop, have you ever!
Next time I’ll insist them to count my peas, measure my steak and weigh my coke!

3)

One more to get it over with. It’s about English sinks and water taps, you know the things in kitchens and bathrooms to wash up in. You would think those things are the same all over the world.
Yeah, they are, except for the English of course. Just like driving on the left side and sticking with the pound, they’re one stubborn people those Brits.

A lot of international students are surprised by the taps on the sinks here in England. Whereas in most developed countries most houses now have those taps where you can mix cold and warm with 2 knobs on the side of one tap -so you can have the ideal temperature-, the English have two separate taps on their sinks.
Okay, you can find those also in other countries, and you can also find those mixing taps here, but it is striking that the majority of the taps are of the non-mixing type.
So that means one steaming hot tap (it’s really hotter than in most Belgian households) and one freezing cold.

You might think what a trivial, stupid fact but a lot of foreign students here have noticed this and they ask themselves how the English wash e.g. their face. You can’t mix the temperature! So or you burn yourself or you get a headache from the cold water, or you have to mix it in the sink all the time. Really not that handy!

After the fun...

I can't have you guys think the previous blog is representative for how I spend my time here. So in short: today it's study day (like most of the rest of the week).

The education system is quite different from what I (and most of you) am used to. A lot more personal study work and a lot of time to spend in the library. I'll get back to that more in detail later.

So now I am reading texts and books to prepare my seminar on 'Islam in IR'. Very interesting.

Oh yeah, next weekend I'm coming over to Belgium to get some more stuff over here (and to see you guys of course...;) Friday night I'll probably be in Bxl, the rest of the weekend at my parents place in Hasselt. Maybe till then

Laurent Garnier

This is London and besides the British capital, it is also the worlds financial capital and... the capital of clubbing. So last night Laurent Garnier came over to play an olympic 8-hour set at the end.
We couldn't let that occasion pass by so me and my Dutch buddy, Max, went down there to find ourselves in a 45 minute queue to get in. Well ok, it wasn't raining nor cold and we already had some drinks so alright, we stood and watched the crowd around us. One lesson for next time; buy advance tickets well in advance so we can take the short queue.
You know, the English just love to queue, they're famous for it and it is true. Everywhere they form these lines and go and stand civilized one after the other, and whoo they who try to jump the queue. The bouncers see it all and or they pick you out of the line, or they'll just let you wait the whole line, only to send you back to the end when you taught you were finally about to get in (it's so much fun to see them being sent back!).

So after our long wait we finally got our full body search, could donate a vast amount at the poor cassier and could go down in the end! So there he was, the world famous deejay Laurent Garnier, approx. earning my whole savings in one single night. Laurent was playing great, a wide range of styles from trad. house and techno over rock-inspired pounding music to drum & bass and very jazzy stuff. You could see he was in the mood and we, 2 meters from him, were sweating in the masses, going where Laurent guided us.

One serious down-side: way too much testostero in the venue, it was about a ratio of 1 to 4, and most of the girls that were there... well, they could as well have stayed home as far as I was concerned.

That's the problem with the well-known clubs and a famous deejay. So we'll have to find better next time and go more underground.


Friday evening we had a drink offered by the school where we had a chat with the professors and our fellow students. After the necessary glasses of -fairly decent I must say- South African LSE house wine, we ended up looking for a place to go.
So first we, some 15 IR students, followed a french guy who claimed to know 'a cool place'.
I should have known, never trust a frenchman on music taste or for your nightlife. He took us to Covent Garden, seriously overprized and you can't get more touristic in London. I hope the guy will discover another side of London over the year.

After the group thinned out Sebastian (from Berlin) proposed to go to Bethnal Green, an area in East London that's coming up the last couple of years. I have been there already a couple of times and I really dig the area. People from Berlin are a lot more trustworthy for your nightlife. Bethnal Green kinda reminds of Berlin though. A bit rough, a higher cool factor and more underground. That's the way Sebastian and I like it.
So we took the lead and took Alex (americanized frenchman), Matts (americanized Swedish guy) and a Norwegian girl over there. Big mistake, 4 guys and one girl, never do that again in London. You can't get in any decent place (at least without entrance fee), "only couples" is the answer we got at the 'mother bar' (also here) and they see that in a very narrow sense. Only people from Liverpool are worse off, they can't get in anyway.
We didn't feel like paying 10 quid for a venue that we didn't know so we ended up in some place playing rock and old skool whitemen hiphop. The gig was fair enough, except for our Swedish friend, until Sebastians bag was suddenly gone.
Fuck!!! There were thieves operating in the joint. I had put my jacket on a bench besides me and some guy tried to go tru my pockets as well. Nothing worth taking but anyway I spotted him and he came up with some lousy story about his bag being nicked and he was trying to find his stuff.
Yeah right! But Sebastians bag was still missing, nothing in there except some books that are worthless for anybody but mean a fortune for an IR student. And luckily his iPod was in his jacket.

To shorten up the story, we turned the place upside down but didn't find the bag. Then we waited for people to come out and asked people with a big bag if we could see in it. They guy who I saw going through my pockets earlier got thrown out after being caught doing the same in some girls purse. At 3am the place closed and we watched everybody coming out. Finally, Sebastians bag was found at the other end of the place. Clearly the thieves saw there was nothing in there besides books and left it there.
No need to say how relieved Sebastian was.

My new home

I'll quickly tell you a bit about my new home and so I can also lighten these pages up with some pictures.

My new cell, sorry room I mean, is in the Great Dover Street Hall of Residence of the LSE. That's in the South Bank of London, south of the Thames, about 3km from the School and more or less 4 km from Leicester Square or Soho, centre London. A good half hour walk, fair enough for me!



From the outside the building complex looks like this, though most of the time less sunny and theatrical (I just got these pics from the internet).



I'm in a little standard room in an ant hill with some 450 other students, most of them postgrads. There are pros and cons about it, and a couple of times the cons already took the upperhand but for the time being it's probably the best option.






And then this is the courtyard.



And then now some pics of my room, if you're interested. It's not my actual room and I do have some stuff on the shelves etc. but as all the four hundred and fifty rooms look equally dull I just took these from the net (in fact, the building next to ours is exactly the same thus it's even 900 identical rooms). So we have to differentiate us from the 899 others by our personality *ahum*.

This is the corner where I'll wear off my trousers this year, i.e. I'll spend a lot of time there doing what students are supposed to do.



And then, all the way to the other far end of the room is my bed. It's hard to capture it on photo as you can hardly distinguish it due to the enourmous size of the room. It's what they call "the loft feeling" in fancy magazines.



I've also got a luxury hyper modern bathroom for myself! It's designed for the rush of modern urban life. You can take a shower, take a leak and brush your teeth/shave at the same time. How convenient!






For those of you willing to admire this huge penthouse flat in the centre of the world's most vibrant and multicultural city irl, there's only one address: (or if you want to send me a package of reasonably priced and decent quality beer, bread and chocolate)

L B
Flat D309.1
159 Great Dover Street
Southwark
London
SE1 4WW
England

My private extension number is +44 (0) 870 7546905 (for the cheap bastards; calls on a fixed line)
Or +44 (0) 791 0465739 for those who call with company phones (my mobile)

If you'd like to come over to discover underground London at first hand, please contact me asap as the residence regulations are quite strict on the guest policy and I'll have to arrange things!!!

Cheap travels from Brussels:
www.eurostar.com (Brussels midi/South to Waterloo international station: 2h15 - fair prices on return tickets if you book on time and are a bit flexible)

and if that's not fast enough yet, why not try the Vlaamse Luchtvaartmaatschappij. Before you can finish your sandwhich and order your free drink you're in London. 1h from Zaventem Brussels to London City airport.
www.flyvlm.com

Making new friends

Ok, it's been a while since my last post on these pages. But as soon as I got into my new home, a hall of residence of LSE (ne peda in schoon dutch), everything shifted a couple of gears and I got into the fast lane.
But that doesn't mean I'm not gonna keep this blog updated, I'll keep on posting stuff on an irregular basis.
The main thing I've been doing the last couple of days is: meeting people, meeting people and once again meeting people. I just can't keep track of it anymore... And I thought an Erasmus year or living in Brussels was alreay quite international, well here it's even a lot more! The last 2 weeks I've litteraly met people from every continent.

And at the same time, things are starting to get on speed at university as well, it's quite different here from nice and easy 'leave-me-alone-for-the-first-couple-of-months' Leuven student life. People actually come here to learn something, can you imagine! So as from the first week the library is loaded. Ok, I thought well what can you do in between classes after your 5th coffee and when you finished your magazine. Indeed, you might as well go and check out the library.

It's a huge and modern library and they claim to be one of the biggest in social, economical and political sciences in the world, and as I'm studying here this year and thus kinda identify with LSE *ahum* I totally agree with them. There's about 1200 pc, over 200 laptop point and most of the campus is also wireless. And still you have to queue for a free pc... Ok, a lot of these people are just checking their mail, are on msn or write blogs like yours sincerely, but there's a lot of people already starting writing papers, searching for materials. The first week of the academic year, while the freshers forthnight is still going on! This is unseen in my academic career in Leuven, Madrid and Brussels until now. Jeeeeez!

So it's all about finding the right balance, that's what we've become good at in all these years, isn't it? I'll tell a bit more about the other side of the balance next time. (now I'm off preparing my seminar for tomorrow...)