Belgium

My girlfriend and I went to Brussels last weekend for a short break. It's not an obvious holiday destination for a hip young couple, but it was discounted, and there is a recession on.

If you consider that the things Belgium is famous for are waffles, beer, and chips with mayonnaise, then it starts to make a bit more sense!

The bad stuff was that the exchange rate is almost painfully bad, the weather was positively Welsh, and lots of places open apparently when and if they feel like it, especially at weekends. That aside, we had a good time!

Ellen and I are veteran mini-breakers. You learn quickly that whatever you plan to do, you won't get to do most of it in just two days, so the only planned cultural visits were to a music museum and a chocolate museum. The former was obviously much more for me. I love seeing the weird, dead evolutionary branches of various intruments, and this place had eight floors filled with them. Seeing violinophones and things that look like a cello having sex with a piano reminds me of dinosaurs and dodos and all things stuffed in natural history museums.

The chocoate museum had a bunch of information about the origins of cocoa beans, preparation of chocolate, principal exporters, traditional methods and suchlike stuck all over the walls, but everyone was ignoring all that to watch the live demonstration of how posh chocolate is made, complete with free samples, by an elderly Belgian chocolatier. Win.

I wouldn't want to mislead anyone into thinking that we spent a great deal of time absorbing Belgian culture, because we spent a lot more time drinking it. It's not an exaggeration to say that nowhere around the centre had fewer than 50 kinds of beer available, and that most of those were delicious. I'm a born-again beer drinker, blond beers are ace. Ellen is a vodka/wine drinker by disposition, but jumped right in at the deep end with a Bush Tripel, weighing in at 10.5%. It was good, and now my girlfriend drinks beer! In fairness, she mostly drank girly fruit beers after that, but kudos to her, nonetheless!

It was an expensive weekend. However, once we realised that Belgians do not check tickets for anything, we were able to save money by not buying any. I used the Belgian metro for free for 48 hours!

Another cultural difference is that Belgians don't know how to queue. This is angering, and surprisingly shocking to a Brit. It was nothing that muttered curses weren't able to solve, though.

Cardiff Half Marathon!

I finished! I didn't die!

The full details on my time are here. Long story short, I finished in 1:56:57. That's a personal best. Yesssssss!

It's not too late to sponsor me, just follow this link. Retrospective sponsorship has the benefit of knowing that I've done what I said I would!

My legs ache and my underarms are chaffed. What an unusual pain..

Rob

Update

I tend to leave ages between blogs, the have brief periods where I blog a lot, just because of a waxing and waning level of enthusiasm. Also, because I've been doing proper band blogs on The Automatic's website (I haven't even done any of those lately so that doesn't hold much water..that's pretty much a lie, in fact).

I've sort of abandoned my year of doing new things, because I fell behind and I'd rather catch up than add to the list of half-finised projects I already have. I have a small notebook, which is gradually filling up with ideas for short stories which I actually want to write, that's the main one I want to complete. I continue to learn Esperanto, my interest in which has grown beyond a hobby into something else. It is more than a second language because of the movement around it, so mentions of it or articles about it appear frequently on the web. These have led me to develop a big interest in languages and to discover some cool podcasts as well - I have to recommend the "Stuff You Should Know" podcast from howstuffworks.com. Their last edition was about zombies! I regularly meet with two other south-walian Esperantists, one of whom is denaskula (one who has spoken Esperanto all her life), so she's a handy person for a lernanto like me to know! We somewhat grandly call ourselves the Cardiff Esperanto Society.

My attempt at making air conditioning ended with mixed results. These included frustration, a wet floor, and the sense that thermodynamics doesn't want to be my friend. It sort of worked, but I couldn't find suitable copper tubes, and they were really quite important.

The Cardiff Half Marathon is less than three weeks away now (donate at http://www.justgiving.com/robin-hawkins, you know you want to. Go on, you'll basically be buying good karma) and I'm not really ready. I ran 8.2 miles two days ago (thanks, phone GPS) at my own leisurely pace and found it surprisingly bearable. I only stopped because I got hungry. That was, however, with quite a few random stops to enjoy the scenery and pet random dogs, so I need to up my game a little, maybe even use a performance-enhancing montage.

While I was on that run, I went up to Llanishen reservoir, sneaked through a fence and ran around there. It's quite eerie, but very beautiful and calm. Some kids were swimming in it, presumably unaware of the fact that reservoirs have a big plughole-type-thing at the bottom that can suck you down and turn you into a beverage. I admire their adventurous spirits, and I hope I don't end up drinking one of them. Next time I'll take a picture and post it!

Until next time, folks!

Rob


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Update

I've sort of, kind of managed to keep up my 1 activity a month for a year, but I'm a bit behind..

After I did the 10k run in April, I let May run away until I was stuck for something to do..so I knitted a scarf! That's May sorted. Never will I have to pay for woolens again, that skill is in the bag - unless, of course, I want something that looks good and doesn't itch like a disease!

June: this was boxing, in theory. Just boxing training, a little bit of pad work. Well, I re-joined the gym, and it hurt, and one of the circuits I do involves hitting a punchbag, but it's not really boxing training. I've booked in to be trained twice, but something's come up both times. That's still ongoing.

My plan for July is to do some piece of creative writing, but I feel I'm drifting from the original objective, as this would not be something actually new to me..they're my rules, though, so I can change them, right?

Esperanto is still the best thing I started. I'm getting sucked deeper in all the time. I even started a version of this blog in Esperanto..

Heat

I'm suffering. I live in country with least predictable weather in the world. I find it grimly amusing that instead of preparing for everything, we're prepared for NOTHING. I'm dying slowly of sleep deprivation because of this fucking heat.

Uuuuurgh I can't be bothered with any long-winded set up. The point is, I'm building my own air conditioning. The ingredients: a fan, some rubber tubing, some copper tubing, two large plastic bottles and some very cold water. I'll let you know how it goes.

If anyone knows of a poorly-guarded walk-in fridge, let me know.

Papa's got a brand new shiny thing!

I went for a Blackberry 8900 over an iPhone. It feels good, especially as I have an iPod touch anyway..really damn shiny. It's been years since I had a camera phone!


Sent using BlackBerry® from Orange

Recently..

I didn't manage to think of anything specific to do in April for my year of new activities. To be more accurate, I didn't start anything in time to do it for a whole month! I did a 10k run in Frenchay (near Bristol) on the 19th, so I'm counting that as my activity. I'm cheating slightly, but I made some effort and sacrifice, and it's my thing anyway so I'll make up the rules as I go along!

My time was 52:49, which is four or five minutes faster than I've managed previously.

It's now May and I'm still not bloody sure what I'm doing for this month!