Congratulations!!

M&J: We would like to extend our sincerest congratulations to our Korean friends Ivan (aka Shockomir) and Elena (aka Lenny) on the purchase of their new uber home in downtown Ottawa.

Alsace and Lorraine

M&J: Exploiting the supremely generous European public holiday schedule, we took a nice four day long weekend to Alsace and Lorraine. Despite the rather (to understate it) inclement weather, we embraced the trip unabandoned relish.

Strasbourg (Alsace) headed the agenda, and it did not disappoint. Having swapped French and German hands over the centuries, the place had a unique feel: a little bit of the best of both countries (French food, German portions, French finesse, German functionality -- how is that for stereotyping!).

With our incredibly powerful Chevrolet Lacetti (what the h*ll is Chevy doing in Europe please?!!) we also toured the Alsace "route du vin", popping in to several wineries to sample the Bacchian delights and admire the stunningly preserved Alsatian villages.

Just so that Alsace's provincial neighbours in Lorraine would not get too jealous, we concluded our trip in Nancy, a very attractive -- and this time decidedly French -- town. The art nouveau goodies in that city kept us particularly stimulated and satisfied. The UNESCO World Heritage Place Stanislas is a sight to behold.

To see some selected photos on Flickr, click on this link.

A Legend Comes to Town!!

MJSK: It was great to have M.C.R (for security reasons, we cannot use his full name) visit us in Brussels for one night. It was such a short trip that we felt obliged to deprive the man of sleep for the full 24 hours he was here! Upon his arrival, he was greeted by JK - a legend in his own right - and was immediately handed a seductive Belgian beer made by none other than those booze-loving trappist monks!

We then proceeded to The Grapevine - a Place Luxembourg hot spot for "those in the know"! We met up for a drink with other former LSE legends before heading off to a Belgian institution: Le fin de Siecle, for nurishment. Petros introduced M.C.R to the wonders of Belgian cuisine by voraciously devouring a jambonneau.
Despite the inclement weather, and several bouts of banditry (Frederic and Sandra both had items stolen that night), M.C.R's mission was deemed a great success. He has agreed to renew his friendship with JK for another term.

Helsinki is kinky?

JK: I paid hommage to Europe's Great White North by attending a conference in Helsinki (16 and 17 May).

The conference was good, but alas my time in this very interesting and unique city was short.

To save my not-for-profit employers some money -- a real feat in a rather expensive city -- I stayed in a "discount" hotel. It was an interesting introduction to Finnish traveller behaviour. The drunken fifty year old Finn stumbling through the hotel hall at 4pm should have tipped me off. The veritable sea of hungover fifty-somethings (well, OK, about six people) in the breakfast room the next morning was a beautiful sight to behold. Very surreal, very quiet. It was as if I was not there.

But booze aside, the city was different, eclectic and stylish (lots of ambitious new architecture that I am a sucker for). Click here for some pics.

No news!? Oh the humanity!

M&J: No blog updates from Melanie or John? Preposterous!! But alas, true. I am sure you have all been, err, suffering. We have been busy with little time to write (OK, perhaps we have been shockingly lazy). Melanie graduated and is now working at the European Peacebuilding Liaison Office (EPLO). John completed a bugger of a paper for work. So, our life seems to be what you might call normal ..... we shall see how long that lasts!! Draft blog updates have been written, including tales from the top secret visit of "MCR".

Memo to women: Relax!!

Relax!!

June 3, 2006

Men fish, play golf, watch football, play computer games. Women shop. But don't confuse that with having fun, argues Germaine Greer.

Women either don't do leisure, or they do free leisure, or at best cheap leisure, or they fail to perceive any difference between work and leisure. Ask what a woman's leisure activity is and you're apt to be told, "Shopping".

Shopping is grinding toil that women mistake for play. Men stand bemused as women trudge from shop to shop looking for something better or cheaper than another thing that is virtually identical, wondering why they didn't buy what they wanted at the first shop that had it in stock. Men don't understand that if you haven't come close to dropping, then you haven't shopped. Men buy; women shop.

Most women would say that they have very little time to themselves. The time they don't spend working for the employer and the taxman they spend doing something called "housework", to which, for most women between the ages of 25 and 50, may be added "child care". There is also the onerous task of body maintenance, keeping the otherwise disgusting female body clean, tidy, deodorised, made up, not to mention toned and becomingly clad, plus the exhausting, sometimes painful and expensive business of hair and hairiness management. Work, all of it.

There are powerful historical reasons for women's imperviousness to the demands of leisure. The typical world citizen - who is still female, illiterate and an unpaid family worker - knows only too well that if she is ever to be seen with her hands in her lap, a job will be found for her. In traditional societies, the high days and holidays on which menfolk are permitted to straighten their backs and put on clean clothes are the days on which the women have to work the hardest, smartening up the house and putting together giant meals. It is not so long ago that on Sundays, while the rest of the family frolicked, the woman of the house had to cook and serve a three-course Sunday lunch and clean up after it.

Many women these days would like nothing better than the chance to serve soup, roast and pudding to the assembled family once a week. If they don't do it any more, it is less because they rebelled against such hard labour on everybody else's day of rest than because nowadays there isn't anybody around to eat the food they cook. Everybody else is out doing leisure. Has the woman of the house grabbed a kitbag and followed their example? Apparently not. Women don't go fishing. Women do play golf, but not many and not much. Women don't buy sports equipment or season tickets. Women don't buy sports cars, boats, power skis, trailbikes, guns, crossbows ... Women don't collect stamps, spot trains, buy music products. Women do use gyms, but not for fun.

If leisure is what you do when you are not working for a livelihood, then the women who were excluded from the paid workforce never had anything but leisure, but their leisure, as Thorstein Veblen explained, was vicarious leisure, its purpose to display for all to see the status of the man who owned them and could afford to let them sit about all day every day. Ladies of leisure were not permitted to enjoy their leisure. They couldn't go rambling about or fishing or playing cricket on the green or burying themselves in books. Instead, they had to fill their hours with useless, pointless, unproductive, repetitive work: beadwork, shellwork, tatting, making cut-paper patterns and silhouettes, japanning, plus what George Eliot called "a little ladylike tinkling and smearing". For the affluent, housework used to be done by servants. Boiling up shirts and sheets, ironing, polishing floors and furniture, blacking grates and shining silver used to be heavy work. The lady of the middle-class house wasn't expected to break into a sweat. It was only when machines replaced maids that vicarious leisure could take the form of housework.

Occasionally some foolhardy academic tries to suggest that housework is a leisure pursuit, the paradigmatic "leisure industry", which is one way of saying "keeping very busy doing nothing". Women will not accept this version of their reality; they want us to believe that they hate and resent housework, but that "someone has to do it". The people who make money out of this kind of leisure industry are multinationals such as Unilever and Procter & Gamble, and by manipulating women's insecurities they make unimaginably huge amounts of it. Currently, women are fighting a war on bacteria, nasty, deformed aliens who hide under toilet seats and on work surfaces. Where lazy boys play murderous video games, diligent housewives deal out death and destruction to an equally fictitious enemy. The boys know they are playing; the women think they are working.

The men's leisure industry covets the trillions of dollars' profit made by Unilever and Procter & Gamble. If it has seriously tried to entice women away from the housework and win back the money they splurge on home-care, there is no sign of its succeeding. Half of the population remains inaccessible to the leisure industry because of the fantasy war against filth, which requires the cleaning of a house already too clean. I have yet to see any ad appearing in a women's magazine saying, "Your house is clean enough. Come out and play!" In a current women's magazine, one advertisement shows a bare-chested hunk on a sunset beach holding what appears at first glance to be a boogie board. In fact it is an ironing board, and the advertisement challenges its readers, "Still finding excuses to keep your old ironing board?" The same magazine carries two advertisements for cars, one of which begins, "Slip behind the wheel of a new Ford Territory and you can relax in the knowledge that you're surrounded by a legion of safety features" - and proceeds to list them all. No suggestion that driving a car might be fun, in fact, nothing about the car's performance at all.

Women are not listening to the siren call of leisure. But it is also true that the leisure industry does not address itself to women. This may be simply because no female market exists, but an elderly market certainly exists and the leisure industry ignores that, too, even though older people have more disposable income than younger people. The goods and services older people use are never characterised as such. The explanation is not simply that advertisers are ageist, but that senior citizens themselves are ageist. The greyest of nomads would not buy an RV (recreational vehicle) that was advertised as ideal for grey nomads.

Older women, whether they play bingo or break out the camp stove, are heavily involved in leisure, but theirs is cut-price leisure. They are not in the market for recreational vehicles, or powerboats, or even motel accommodation. They are the people who make possible literary festivals and antique fairs, who support local art galleries and museums, who volunteer for every community chore, and happily raise money for what they believe to be good causes, giving, giving, giving of their time free. If we had a way of quantifying the output of the leisure industry of older women, we would probably see that it contributes vastly more to the GDP than the corporate leisure industry.

This article follows from Germaine Greer's speech at Permira Leisureland, a panel debate on the future of the leisure industry in the UK.

The hills are alive with the sounds of Austria!!

Highlights included: tour to all the sites used for the filming of "The Sound of Music", blood pudding dumplings and schnitzel, driving through the Alps and seeing breathtaking, awe-inspiring sites (e.g. photo seen here), and a Best of Mozart 2006 concert for Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's 250th birthday anniversary year. To see our photos, click here.

Easter 2006 in Greece

Highlights of our trip to Greece in April included: a beautiful sunny day spent in Lefkada with John's parents, spending time with John's Aunt Maria and cousin Aggeliki and her boyfriend Evrikos, celebrating Greek Easter in three different churches, and of course, incredible food. To see some selected photos of the trip, click here.

Geneva...more than just watches and banks

M: Seventy-two corn-fed European Law Students Association (ELSA) members wedged themselves on to a double decker bus in Leuven on Sunday night for a 12-hour drive to Geneva. We arrived early on Monday morning where we quickly shuffled into an intimate room for eight at the Youth Hostel, equipped with communal showers (3 for all of the girls) and 2 toilets. Ah, life as a 30-something "youth". I think I will soon retire from the youth circuit, particularly the bit that entails hanging out in hostels...

We visited a veritable cornucopia of acronym-blessed institutions like the UNHCR, UNCTAD, WHO, ICRC, WTO, ILO, WIPO. We also "hit" a reception hosted by the Belgian Representation to the UN, which took place on the top floor of the UN Palais de Nations building with a panoramic view of Geneva, including the imposing Mont Blanc in the distance (which can be seen on my right in the photo above). Very, very, nice indeed. But one stereotype does hold true of the place: the shoreline of Lake Geneva is cluttered with buildings housed with either international banks or watch companies.

We also had time to enjoy an authentic Swiss fondue. Cheese and bread for dinner...YUM! Veggies were not an option - no wonder the Swiss are particularly susceptible to scurvy (OK, bad joke). On Wednesday (5 April), I joined Erica and a bunch of the other students at Cirque du Soleil's Dralion. What great entertainment! I stopped breathing each time the performers were doing something remarkable (like a petite contortionist girl balancing on only one hand).

The last day (Friday), I had planned on starting my tour of the city at that famous Swiss institution, err, Starbucks, then walk around the city to take photos (for John, the blog, and Flickr, of course!) and eventually reunite with Erica and Paaaat. Well, my day started out as planned. But soon into my sightseeing, our digital camera broke. Oh the humanity! I lost my sense of time and space trying to figure out what went wrong and soon realised I had developed a nasty appetite. Hunger-induced panic struck me and I ducked into the first restaurant I saw. It looked like a steak house, without the red velour and mafia types in the back. Little did I know that is was the most expensive, most famous steak house called "Relais de L'Entrecôte"!! I must say, the Belgians do make a better steak frites and for one-fifth the price! I left there feeling like someone had ripped out my pride. Luckily, Erica couldn't have called at a better time!

Our afternoon tour included the beautiful campus of the University of Geneva (and Le Mur des Reformateurs), Place Neuve (and the General Dufour equestrian statue), the Temple de la Fusterie (first building designated for Calvinistic worship), and the Schtrumpfs Building in "Les Grottes" (a fantastical architectural icon that defies description - check out Flickr for pics to be posted soon). I also made sure to purchase some Swiss chocolate delectables to see how they hold up to the Belgians. Having experimented with my palate, I conclude that, although of high quality, Belgian chocolates are indeed superior.

The trip ended with a 12 hour over night bus ride back to Leuven in which I then had to take the train to Brussels and walk the 15 minutes with my suitcase and bags back to our apartment but in time to surprise my husband before he left for work! Fortunately John had no one else in our bed and our marriage remains a happy one...(ha ha, I'm just checking to see if you're still reading this monster missive).

Check out our Geneva photos at this link.

Mechelen - surprise!

J&M: You may or may not be interested to know that we took advantage of a sunny April Fool's Day and went to Mechelen, a quick 20 minute train ride from Brussels. (I am sure older Belgians, used to a life perpetually under cloud cover, are having real difficulties handling the consistent -- i.e. twice a week -- sun we have been getting over the last two months) .

Aside from the usual Flemish architectural glory we were impressed by the Dyle river and the way the city takes advantage of it (cafes, housing, etc).

This photo shows part of the Grote Markt (Grand Place) and the unfinished Saint Rumbold's Cathedral tower which is almost 100m high and contains two carillons (yes, I have no clue what those are either), each with 49 bells. The tower is listed as a UNESCO World heritage site. To see the rest of our photos from Mechelen, click here.