Recently we decided to go on a daytrip to Liège, one of the largest cities in Wallonia and birthplace of Georges Simenon, Justine Henin and (allegedly) Charlemagne.

But we weren’t interested in history or culture, of course. We wanted to see the fancy new Médiacité shopping centre. There has been much media hoopla about this project which, along with the equally fancy recently renovated train station is intended to spruce up the image of a rather glum city more associated in most people’s minds with unemployment and depressing movies by the Dardenne brothers.

Much to our surprise (imagine that last phrase with a sarcastic tone of voice) it turned out to be…just another shopping centre, with the usual selection of shops (and a lot of empty space which has yet to be rented). The roof is pretty, though.

We made our way into the centre of town which, by stark contrast with the gleaming modernity of Médiocrité was quite picturesquely run-down and full of “character” (i.e. dirt). We found ourselves in a series of narrow, quiet streets full of Turkish restaurants – a kind of Little Istanbul, I guess you’d call it – and so we stopped for lunch at Le Raki Turc, which turned out to be really rather good.

We had a tasty mezze with some meltingly tender veal.

Then we headed back into the streets for some window shopping, ogling the macaroons…

roasted meat and potatoes…

toy alligator warriors…

and “reality wear”…

So a mixed bag, but not unpleasant overall, and I wouldn’t rule out a return trip someday if I’m in the mood.

Oh, and at least we got to see Mickey Mouse:

From Tim Parks’ “Europa“

“I reflected, leaning against a post forbidding parking, that every major monument in Europe is now cleaned and floodlit. Everything ancient and medieval has been appropriately sandblasted, cleaned and illuminated. It is impossible even to imagine these stony martyrs being in the gloom now, impossible to imagine these angels and gargoyles in a dark wind or under moonlight. Impossible to see them as part of our lives, our nightmares, potent in the gloom, sacred in darkness or starlight. These monuments have been neutralized by the light, I thought, by the light and by carefully researched detergents. They have been made part of the modern city. They have been subtracted from us and made possible for us. Squares where people hanged and lynched and guillotined each other and, in general, committed all sorts of irremediable crimes, are now attractive areas of floodlit public art, I thought, emptied of their potency precisely by the zeal with which we have focused on them, cared for them, illuminated them, absorbed them into the on-off neon of our intermittent modern night.”

Having met friends for lunch at our local Ikea and consumed far too many Swedish meatballs, we tottered back to the car. Baby needed feeding, so as my wife attended to his needs, I let my gaze wander around the carpark. I noticed a man fiddling with the row of trolleys, trying to get something out of one of them in the middle of the chain. He glared at me and basically told me to mind my own business, but I kept a surreptitious eye on him anyway. After much faffing he eventually succeeded in recovering a receipt left in the bottom of the trolley. He then made his way along the rest of the column, seemingly checking all the trolleys for stray receipts. Then he moved on to the next trolley park and started the search again. He found a second one. He pocketed it and headed into the shop.

Our theory is that once inside he he picks up off the shelf whatever’s listed on the receipts and then goes to customer service and claims that he’d just bought it but has changed his mind and would like an exchange or a refund.

We recently attended the fourth annual Thai festival in our neighbourhood. It’s been going from strength to strength recently, and the best Thai restaurants from all over Belgium come along and set up stalls to sell their food. There are fruit carving experts, Thai masseuses, dancing and martial arts displays, etc. It’s all very enjoyable and tasty and gives you a warm glow of tolerance and multiculturalism, but this time I started questioning the whole idea a bit.

Brussels is a strange town in this regard. Plenty of other world capitals are home to immigrant populations, and I don’t think Brussels is any more multicultural than, say, London or New York, but it feels different. For one thing Brussels is relatively small, with a larger proportion of expats and immigrants than other towns its size. For another, a large proportion of those expats come here to work for multinational organisations, and there’s a large infrastructure and support network which allows you to live in a comfortable expat bubble and not really integrate or even speak to the natives if you don’t want to. Now obviously plenty of people do learn the language, make local friends, etc,  but I get the feeling that the different communities here are a little more self-contained, and I think this shows in the cultural festivals.

The Brussels festival calendar is pretty full – at any one time there’s bound to be a Thai or Peruvian or Lichtensteinian cultural initiative of some kind, and it’s great to have this kind of stuff on offer and that people take an interest, but it feels more like a slickly-rehearsed display for tourists than an opportunity for intercultural dialogue and exchange.

Sure, people will drink a Singha, devour a plate of pad thai, politely feign interest in the traditional dances, and maybe pick up a leaflet about package deals to Phuket, but I’m sceptical that there’s any real contact or learning going on. On the other hand it’s often more successful as a chance for Belgium-based Thais to get together and re-connect with their own culture, perhaps reminiscing about life back in the old country, and complain about the weather in northern Europe.

Festivals are fine and have their place, but I increasingly find them slightly unsatisfactory. Basically what this makes me think about is what’s really important to me when I travel in terms of having a memorable, meaningful experience of another culture. Now I’m not one of those travel snobs who’s constantly in search of the most “authentic” or “genuine” thing, as this implies that Thais all live, eat, worship and act in one particular way and if you don’t get a piece of that during your two week stay, ur doin it rong. But what I get from visiting a country (and what I don’t get from cultural festivals in another country) are those little differences of detail and sense impressions: the feeling of dust and exhaust fumes in the back of my throat in Agra, the bustle and noise of a square in Marrakesh, the press of sweaty bodies in the streets of Seville during Semana Santa, frost in my nostrils and eyelashes in Lapland…

[photos below from a tour of Thailand taken in 2002]

You know how it can be: you get an idea, you research it, draft it, feel very pleased with yourself…and then find that someone has beaten you to the punch, and probably done a better job than you would have.

So go and read this; it’s pretty much exactly what I wanted to write.

So, we’ve reached the end. I’m a little ashamed to admit that I had to cheat for Z. Zakir Hussain should technically go under ‘H’, but I couldn’t find anything else suitable on YouTube from the one or two other Z-artists I liked.

We were lucky enough to see Zakir and his “Masters of Percussion” live in concert in Dublin in 2000. He’s considered to be one of the best (and fastest) tabla players in the world.

The Easy Life catalogue which fell out of my Sunday newspaper this week may not have been quite as wacky a collection of nonsense as Skymall or Maison et Confort, but it contained at least two amusingly silly products.

First up, vapour cigarettes:

How many times do you think you’d be able to blow “realistic” vapour “smoke” at people in a public place, while insisting that it wasn’t really smoke and was perfectly safe, before you grew tired of the endless confusion and aggravation and just went outside to smoke a real one?

Secondly, the hearing aid disguied as an “expensive” Bluetooth headset:

Personally I’d rather be seen wearing a traditional hearing aid than be mistaken for the kind of person who walks around with one of these plugged in 24 hours a day.

I first heard this during an episode of Six Feet Under, when Nate goes to visit an old girlfriend, and this song plays as he walks up to her house. It struck me immediately, and so I went to the HBO website and found the music listing for that episode. I’d never heard anything by Yo La Tengo before, but I soon got my hands on a copy of the relevant album, “And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out”; a woozy, hazy dream of an album.

I have about 40 blogs in my feed reader. Is that a lot? I have no idea. Then again, about half of them post pretty infrequently, so it’s not like I have to catch up with 40 people’s doings every day, or even every week.

Of these:

• 4 are people I knew in real life (I hate that phrase - is the internet just imaginary?) before they started blogging
• 5 are people I met in real life after following their blogs
• 6 are people with whom I’ve had no contact, and I read them regularly but never comment (often because they don’t permit comments)
• 3 are well-known writers who happen to have blogs, rather than well-known bloggers
• 21  (the largest group) are people on whose blogs I regularly comment and with whom I’ve also had some other kind of direct contact; email, facebook, twitter or flickr. In fact if I like your blog it’s highly likely that at some point I’ve tried to make contact with you in some way, if only to say that I like your blog.
• I haven’t counted “blogs” in my feed reader which are part of magazines or news sites. I’m talking about people who just decide to share their thoughts online for free, not journalists.

Not an easy one, this. I don’t own any music by an artist beginning with X, but a little research threw up the name of a little-known group who once collaborated with David Byrne on a single I heard once on MTV.

The only alternative was an old XTC song which turned out not to be as good as I remembered it to be. Plus this one has a fun video.