Friday, August 08, 2003
Brussels
Mo is great :) We had dinner last night at an Italian cafè near the hotel we're staying at where my Mom practiced her Italian a bit for our upcoming adventure down there about two weeks from now.
I'm still having some language processing problems and often find myself using Russian in simple situations, like "yes", "no", and "please" coming out as "dah", "nyet", and "pahzholista". Oddly enough, when I did this at this Italian cafè in Belgium the waiter replied, "Horosho. Ladna, ya govaryat pa-Rooskee tohsha" (Good. Okay, I'll speak Russian too.) Strange. As it's highly unlikely that the world is adapting to my language difficulties, I'm chlaking it up to the fact that our hotel, and this cafè, share the block with the enormous and amazing European Parliment building. Brussels, and this area more specifically, are VERY international indeed.
So, if you thought that Washington DC was a government town, Brussels is home to almost all goverment in Belgium, head-quarters of the EU, divisions of the world court, ground-zero of NATO, and hosts the foreign Embassies and diplomatic missions to Belgium, the EU, and NATO.
If I knew French, I might just stumble into a government job here. :)
Mo is great :) We had dinner last night at an Italian cafè near the hotel we're staying at where my Mom practiced her Italian a bit for our upcoming adventure down there about two weeks from now.
I'm still having some language processing problems and often find myself using Russian in simple situations, like "yes", "no", and "please" coming out as "dah", "nyet", and "pahzholista". Oddly enough, when I did this at this Italian cafè in Belgium the waiter replied, "Horosho. Ladna, ya govaryat pa-Rooskee tohsha" (Good. Okay, I'll speak Russian too.) Strange. As it's highly unlikely that the world is adapting to my language difficulties, I'm chlaking it up to the fact that our hotel, and this cafè, share the block with the enormous and amazing European Parliment building. Brussels, and this area more specifically, are VERY international indeed.
So, if you thought that Washington DC was a government town, Brussels is home to almost all goverment in Belgium, head-quarters of the EU, divisions of the world court, ground-zero of NATO, and hosts the foreign Embassies and diplomatic missions to Belgium, the EU, and NATO.
If I knew French, I might just stumble into a government job here. :)
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