So here we are thinking about a new EU treaty

Well! Sarkozy is on TV, live from a crammed concert hall in Toulon, giving some hot presidential speech. Blah blah blah, he was saying, right at the end (3 minutes before credits) that he had had to deal with a very horrible financial and economic catastrophe at Eurozone level with Merkel, using the framework of a rusty 1992 Maastricht treaty which turned the EEC in to the EU and invented the economic and monetary union.

Fair point. As he mentioned, the treaty provided clauses for preventive measures against financial meltdown, but no body to make sure they were properly applied. Penalties were devised in case of ridiculous deficits and debt levels, but nobody put them in place or used them. There were no institutions that could take over when things flew out of control. Which is why France and Germany have had to pile the steaming ruins of EU economies into a shit heap and sellotape it together.

Sarkozy explained the eurozone countries economies must converge or the euro will be either too weak for some and too strong for others. To do this, wait for it, it was necessary to draw up a new treaty which implements... economic governance at an EU level. France and Germany would strive for this.

BUT WHAT DOES IT MEAN?

Well, what it probably doesn't mean is that the new institution/level of power would be independent like the ECB, which stays firmly out of politics and lives to keep inflation down, cos that's part of the whole fucking problem, that monetary policy (printing the money) cannot be used in crisis situations, and that is why all the governments are focusing on fiscal policy (more money in taxes, less spending). But the Germans would never agree to that. Independent monetary policy is their condition. So what? A new branch of the commission that decides on centralised economic plans for each sovereign country? sounds unlikely. So maybe they're just going to start applying what's been written all along since the bloody Maastricht treaty, followed by Nice, Lisbon and so on.

So is this the scoop? It takes European rules 19 years to apply? or are we going a step further ijn EU integration with an incredible new political system, where a supranational economic governance (nment?) which is independent from the supranational central bank, has to face the specificities of each (sovereign?) eurozone member?

Can't wait to find out!

So here we are being a francophobe cretin

This article appeared on the Guardian's comment is free page. I have no idea who James Bennet is, but I would certainly piss in his drink at a party.

Below is his incredible article, as found on http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/aug/23/french-holiday-lazy-work; below that is my response, found on page 4 of the comments if you're interested. Happy reading.... cocksucker....

"Every day's a holiday, if you're French" by J Bennet.
"I love France. I'm half French and bilingual, have a French mother and dual nationality. Every summer we travelled across the channel on the ferry to France to see my relatives in a beautiful time-forgotten Burgundy village, where everyone knew each other and life tasted as a sweet as the freshly baked bread my grandmother sent me to collect every morning. It was the best childhood anyone could ever imagine. As I said, I love everything French.
Or rather I did. A week after coming back from my first holiday in Normandy with my wife, her two sisters and their four children, my affection for the country has been forever tarnished. Why? Because the French almost ruined it for us all, that's why.
Despite the country posting a slight recovery last quarter, France is still well and truly mired in recession. Its unemployment rate is currently running at 8.2%, one of the highest in western Europe, and is expected to go above 10% by the end of this year. And yet among all this financial misery and economic turmoil is a country in which people have rapidly descended into a state of supreme bone idleness but who equally demand second-to-none social welfare, lower taxes, benefits and a high standard of living.
Ever since the 35-hour working week was adopted in February 2000 under prime minister Lionel Jospin's socialist government, France has become a nation of languid retailers, invisible tourism employees and workshy shopkeepers. Try and find a cafe open in peak tourist season on a Monday, Wednesday or Sunday in Normandy and I'll break into the Louvre and deliver the Mona Lisa to you by hand. Even if you do manage to catch someone selling something in a shop or restaurant in France, they'll probably turn you away as they shirk off for a two-and-a-half hour lunch break.
Since the turn of the millennium, France has been on permanent vacances. So much for the 35-hour-week plan devised as a means to reduce unemployment and yield a better division of labour. It had more holes in it than a slab of Gruyere cheese. The then government had envisaged that a 10% reduction in the hours extracted from each worker would theoretically require businesses to hire more workers, and that as a result productivity would rise in line with more personal and family time for workers and an enhanced quality of life. In late March 2005, a glimmer of hope appeared when French MPs voted to relax the 35-hour limit, allowing private firms to increase working hours. But employers at the time all too quietly murmured that it had failed to create jobs and was uncompetitive and the new law failed to destroy what had now become a way of life.
But this was before world markets collapsed, previously resilient global currencies plunged and many thousands across the continent faced mass redundancies. Instead recruitment has fallen faster than the Maginot Line, per-hour production quotas have risen and many firms have in general avoided hiring new workers because French workforce regulations make it difficult to lay off workers during a poor economic period.
Only one man and a handful of his party faithful appear to have tried to shake the French from their slumber. Ever since becoming president, Nicholas Sarkozy's slogan of "work more to earn more" has earned him more enemies than admirers. The Catholic church is forever calling for the preservation of the balance between weekdays, devoted to work, and Sundays, devoted to family life, sport or "cultural activities", while members of his own party, despite assurances that it would improve the economy, have fiercely resisted reform, filing thousands of amendments to the president's original version of the law.
But the battle appears to have been worth it. Following more than 100 years of somnolence, last Sunday (August 14) marked the day finally France woke up. Well, partially. Sarkozy's law narrowly squeezed through the national assembly by a vote of 282 to 238 and now permits shops, department stores and shopping malls to open on the Sabbath in 20 zones of what are called "exceptional commercial" centres in and around three of the country's largest cities, Paris, Marseilles, and Lille. Additionally, 29 areas involving about 500 cities and towns will be added to the list of tourist areas, which already allow some economic activity on Sundays.
In less than a decade France has undone more than half a century's worth of work and gone from being one of the most popular tourist destinations in Europe to a nation of comfortable and lazy individuals. Thanks to a bizarre twisted socialist-era government law coupled with a backward-looking Catholic church and a weak-willed public and private sector, a mindset of "work less but gain more" was created and influenced almost every worker in a population of more than 61 million.
If France really does want to recover it has a much longer and more painful journey ahead than the rest of us, and it only has itself to blame.

Enchanting, and highly researched. My comment:

I don't usually but today I feel compelled to answer; what a strange.... rant. You say the French are lazy but that sounds a bit rich when you condemn French society and culture just because you had a bad holiday in Normandy. Have you ever worked in France? Or lived here apart from happy summers in Burgundy? Où est votre argumentation? The plural of anecdote is not data!!
First things first: are you criticising the 35 hour week or shops not opening on Sundays? and how do either make us lazy? Concerning the former, you might be surprised to learn that the 35 hour week is not the norm, any cadre (equivalent of a managerial position) or for that matter artisan boulanger could tell you that. Equally, for those it does concern what exactly do you have against having an extra afternoon/morning off a week, or a couple of extra days off a month? There are some things money can't buy, and spending time with your kids on a wednesday afternoon or taking a long weekend to visit the family are obvious examples. It might even be because of a certain equilibrium between work and leisure that French workers have the highest hourly productivity rate in Europe, something you forgot to mention when qualifying us of lazy. It's not all about length I guess, quality does count.
As for the catholics being behind the plot against Sunday shopping I find that very strange, the main argument against it being, as far as I can tell, that it is the most vulnerable workers (women working part time, pour ne pas les nommer) who would be working that day (for no extra pay I might add), when they would normally spend it with the family.
Again, it all boils down to the question of whether a strong(er) economy, fueled by more consumption and more working hours, is really what makes a society happy and healthy. We have good, free, schools, an excellent health service, and awesome transport. Who cares if the train driver works 35 hours a week when you can go from Paris to Marseille in under 4 hours?
France has its problems, no doubt. As you say, high unemployment, sluggish economy , massive debt, (hang on a sec, aren't you also British?) crappy universities, abominable prisons, social and racial inequality, etc. But there is also much to be proud of, not least the fact that we cling to the belief that we are not just labour, but human beings.
Last but not least: waiters will never refuse you for lunch to take a two and half hour lunch break. they geneally eat at about 11.30, before the first rush, or at 3 after the second. In fact the 2 and a half hour lunch beak is a myth today, and when it does last more than an hour, it's not so bad because we usually leave the office around 8, rather than head off to the pub at 5...

So here we are testing our Europhilia

Turns out I'm a left wing pro-European (yup). In French but a nice little test from www.touteleurope.fr!

So here we are in an electoral dilemma

So the campaign for the European elections has finally kicked off with, as usual, no fuss, no debate and little information. It's not easy being a conscientious European citizen and not only for the above reasons. The real challenge is to understand what exactly one is voting for and, in parallel, how the vote is perceived.

On paper, there is little doubt: on June 7th, France will be voting for the parliamentarians who will have a seat at the European parliament and technically the lucky ones will represent the European people and elaborate and vote for laws that concern all 492 million of us Europeans, according to their political beliefs. Easy peasy, let's vote left wing and get it over with. Unfortunately the reality of politics means that nothing is so straightforward. In fact, most national politicians would say that the election of the MEPs is just a bit of a strange side-effect of this election, which they consider a barometer of their popularity.

In 1980, Reif & Schmitt, two political scientists, coined the term "second order national elections". With this they explained that since the European vote has little bearing on national policy making and none on the current leadership, the voters will tend to vote with their hearts (or with their boots), knowing that voting for the local communist geek won't mean having to suffer the risk of a communist government actually getting sworn in. Hence the relatively huge difference in the smaller parties' results in the EU elections compared to the presidential, national parliament, or local ones.

So on the one hand, politicians see the European election result as support or condemnation of the current leadership, while it should really be about who and what you want represented in front of the world's biggest supranational legislative institution. On the other, voters vote for improbable or unreputable candidates to show they are pissed off with the big parties usual faffing around. In my case, the guys I would vote for on a European level are idiots at a local level, and the guys I like on a national level I think would be crap at an EU level. An electoral dilemma.

In more detail: the European election 2009 candidates in my constituency (the region of Ile de France) are (so far) 10 different parties. Once we have eliminated the extremes and weirdos- the NPA (new anticapitalist party, run by charismatic trotskist hamster Olivier Besancenot who is one of France's most popular politicians), the FN (ultra nationalist anti European), MPF-CNPT (alliance of nationalists and hunt'em shoot'em fish'em) and Debout la République! ('Nuff said), we are left with:

UMP: right-wing, includes Sarkozy, his government and a lot of parliament. Main candidates are Michel Barnier (agriculture minister) and Rachida Dati (justice).
PS: currently ridiculous Socialist party. Main candidates, Harlem Désir (founder of uber-symbolic anti racism organisation who has long since entered politics), Pervenche Beres (respectable current MEP) and Benoit Hamon (current MEP, opportunistic little twat who probably isn't sure where Brussels is).
The Greens: good old Ecologists, led by charismatic Daniel Cohn Bendit, a huge symbol of '68 France and Eva Joly, who used to belong to the Modem.
The Modem: poor François Bayrou's party, somewhere between the left of right and the middle of nowhere, led by Marielle de Sarnez (FB's faithful companion and current MEP).
The Front de gauche : communists- never heard of them.
Lutte ouvrière: a party as old as the world, more communists.

I have de facto excluded the last two, because despite my minimum wage status and my current respect for all things equalitarian, I don't actually want them to represent me in the EU. Modem: like(d) Bayrou for a while and would like to support him at a national level but at a European level I'm not sure about Marielle de Sarnez
The Greens: love the DCB character, am OK with EJ, but am extremely wary of my local green municipal councillor, and refuse to validate him at a local level via the European vote.
The PS: Jesus, my obvious choice but they are so fucking pathetic at a national level and I loathe and detest Benoit Hamon. This last fact could be overlooked if they weren't so hopeless, but they are.
UMP: I like MB, who actually knows a bit about the EU, but hate the current government and despise Dati.

That leaves... nobody, or abstention. And abstention is the same as not giving a fuck, so... damn, it'll have to be the Greens. But, I don't like you Mr Guadi!

So here we are in London and an Egyptian tomb

Chook and I went off to London for a birthday weekend and it wa sabsolutely great. We saw the Rothko exhibition at Tate modern, ate pub lunches and English breakfasts, saw my family and met up with some old uni friends for a couple of drinks. We went to the Britsh museum and plodded around in the snow which fell in abundance in London and the South East on Sunday and Monday.


We had an amazing time and one of my highlights was visiting the new Egyptian gallery in the BM. I've always loved their Egyptian wing and when I was a child would spend ages with my poor suffering mother looking at the Rosetta stone and animal mummies, the dried out corpse of Ginger and other slightly gruesome displays. Later I also started to appreciate the statues and artefacts, pottery, jewellry and so on, and know a bit more about Ancient Egyptian history and archeology.

This new gallery is like nothing I have ever seen before. It is a actually an average sized room that is solely dedicated to the tomb of an temple accountant who lived three and a half thousand years ago. The famous Egyptian tombs are typically royal ones : from the valley of the Kings to Tutankhamon's, or the even more ancient pyramids. The lives and deaths of the everyday Egyptians are comparatively unknown. A few years ago the Louvre had an exhibition on the people who made the pyramids, not slaves as it turns out(contrary to popular belief) but highly skilled craftsmen, experts in stone cutting, woodwork, engraving, painting and so on. It looked in to the lives of the Egyptian working classes, neither pharoahs nor farmers nor slaves.

In a similar way, this tomb is the tomb chapel of Nebamun, a "scribe and counter of grain" who died in around 1400 BC. His tomb chapel was discovered in the 1820s by a Greek grave robber who later sold the incredible paintings that are on display. Though we know the tomb was located near the city/temple devoted to Amun, where he worked, in Thebes (today Luxor),the exact location is today lost. Though it is a tomb, the paintings are a celebration of Nebamun's life, with paintings glorifying his everyday activities, from fishing to family and his job. The eleven large fragments, which have been restored and preserved over the last decade, are beautiful in colour and the level of detail in each one is captivating; the artist is unknown but has been called an "ancient Egyptian Michaelangelo".

One painting shows a young Nebamun fishing on the marshes and surrounded by spieces of birds and reeds and fat fish. Amongst the reeds his cat is somersaulting and hunting. The different species symbolise life, rebirth and vitality which is what the painting inspires.



In another, we see Nebamun at work. His name literally means "he works in the service of Amun", to whom the temple which employed him was dedicated. Here he is counting and inspecting cattle, who have been painted in such a way that you can hear the clatter of their hooves and the shouts of the servants driving them.



In another, slave giirls entertain at a banquet: a display of luxury, sensuality and wealth.


The exhibition also has a terrific 3D video that explains the tomb chapel's probable location and layout, and has some nice artefacts such as toys, jewelry, games and preserved offerings. The explanations are great and fascinating (such as the fact that the word "Amun", present everywhere in the hieroglyphs, including in Nebamun's name, was smashed centuries later) and to top it all the whole gallery, like the rest of the museum, is free.

So here we are in a financial crisis

Aaah, Armageddon. It's a strange day when you think for the first time that you are witnessing a moment whose handling will determine the course of history. Stuff the great grandkids might have to revise for their exams. The financial crisis is turning out to be a lot more than that : an economic but also a moral one. Sarkozy said while he was presidential candidate that international capitalism needed to be moralised, and it seems that it is not only desirable but crucial if the system is not to implode. So what are the causes of and the reactions to this shit creek situation?

As usual, it seems easy to blame it on the Americans, but they do rather deserve it. That said, it is impossible to pinpoint a first day of the crisis. Do we refer to the day that world stock markets crashed in historic unison? Or do we creep up the calendar to the symbolic day that Lehmann brothers went bankrupt? Or should it be when subprimes became an everyday word? Do we go further back to the first tremble of butterfly wings a quarter of a century ago when world leaders, led by Thatcher and Raegan, laid the groundwork for the liberalisation of international finance?

I think 9/11 is a good place to start as it was less than a year after the beginning of GWB's first term and smacks of the "before and after". 9/11 was an obvious blow to Amerian morale, and in Economics, a good way to cheer people up is to send them shopping, which also boosts consumption and gives the economy an adrenaline rush, whereas low morale turns the economy sluggish. So when the biggest morale crusher in American history devastated Manhattan, the Fed, or its governor Alan Greenspan, decided to cut interest rates, just as it had after the dotcom crash or Y2K angst. With historically low interest rates it became easier for the average American to borrow money and, more importantly, spend it. In contrast, many European countries had been nagging the independent ECB to significantly cut rates for years, which it didn't. The ECB's main reason for keeping interest rates high was to fight inflation but ultimately its decision might prevent Europe from sinking too far in the quicksand of an economy running on credit.

With lower interest rates (IR) the Americans started spending money they didn't have and, crucially, couldn't afford, courtesy of a banking system that lent money regardless of whether it could ever be paid back. This attitude was tied to the belief that house prices, which had been soaring for years, would continue to do so. Thus, anybody owning or planning to own a house was considered 'safe' as the value of their capital/house would surely increase. With low and sometimes negligible IR, through the irresponsibility of the banks and the property bubble, Americans stocked up on houses and cars and other consumer goods, living off trillions of dollars of credit to finance the American dream.

There was of course a catch to all of this. The IR were not fixed and by 2006 they had soared up. Soon, people who had been paying close to 1% interest on their loans found they had to pay five times that. Monthly repayments exploded. In three years the Fed's IR went from 2% to 5,75%, and the variable interest rates fluctuated accordingly. When repayment was impossible, banks seized the houses and put them on the market. All over America, as "for sale" signs were nailed to porches, the sound of the property bubble popping could be heard. The banks, far from being richer thanks to the sales of the houses, found themselves with a load of properties in a flooded market and they had to sell them for a fraction of their estimated price. They lost huge amounts of money and started going bankrupt. This is the subprime crisis.

So how did this very American problem (because linked to American banks and American loans, culminating in an American property crash) become a world crisis? To understand this, it is crucial to remember how investment portfolios are constituted and the importance of confidence and expectations on the market.

Concerning investment portfolios, while the details may be hideously complicated the general idea is pretty basic. Imagine you are a bank called Rippoff and co. You have lent vast sums of money to people and to show for it you have a load of virtual receipts saying that people owe you money. Like all banks you do not keep these virtual scraps in a vault, rather you chop them up, repackage them and sell them to a bigger or different bank who now "own" the money that Rippoff is owed. The new bank, Fukkem inc, will then do the same. It will take a bit of this and a bit of that and a bit of Rippoff and muddle it all up and sell it on to another bank, Skruya International which is based in 30 different countries and on 5 continents. Do this enough times and by the end it is obvious that nobody has a clue what they are buying and a bank the other side of the world will have a bit of Fukkem, Rippoff and Scruya in it. All they know is that the package, constituted of a million molecules of different companies, is worth roughly this at this time and is expected to increase or decrease in value.These packages are also border-blind and are thus present all over the world.

So all of a sudden, with the property market crash, Fukkem, Rippoff and Skruya find themselves broke (Lehmann Brothers, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac in the States notably, though the US bailed out the last two.) When that happened, packages in banks droppped in value because of the drop in value of what made them up. This is not the most dire consequence, though. Worse to come was the drop in confidence that led onto the stockmarkets crash seen all around the world, especially in the last couple of weeks.

Banks do not have a pile of banknotes locked in the cellar, and when you take out a loan they do not go to a backroom and peel off a sheaf of them. Most of this money is virtual. For example, in France, if someone wants a hundred euro loan, the bank need only have nine euros of its own. So imagine a bank (Arssfuk ltd) has 27 euros in the kitty and has granted three 100 euro loans : it can't give anymore. The way around this is the interbank lending system. Arssfuk borrows money from Sookmidic Bank and in return Soomidic's guarantee is, yup, in those little packages which contain bits of Rippoff, Fukem and Skruya. Or not. That's the problem, paranoia takes over and the banks no longer want to lend. This is the liquidity crisis. If everybody were to panic and run to the banks with an empty suitcase asking for their savings, there would not be enough in any of them. This is why leaders are saying DO NOT PANIC!!!!! And why the Central banks are pouring money into the system and/or promising to guarantee the loans, ie, if a bank can't pay back its loans the State will step in.

So banks no longer want to lend to each other, each thinking that the next is going to land them with a worthless package contaminated with bankrupt bank components. As a result, banks must be more careful with the loans they give (not necessarily a bad thing). This has however gone to extremes, where even small profitable companies now have difficulty borrowing money for investment, which is ultimately disasterous for the economy, giving lower growth and higher unemployment among others.

The most spectacular aspect of the crisis for most people has been the drop on the world's stockmarkets, sometimes double figure drops or close to them. This is due to the lack of confidence on the stock market which translates as people either selling wildly or reluctant to buy or a combination of both. Thus shares in France for example in some companies such as Renault or St Gobain fell by over 70%. This is the stockmarket crash which shows that despite money pouring in to the system from the Central banks investors are wary and specualtors less enthusiastic.

So what responses have there been on an international level?

There have been two interesting reactions (many more, but not in this post), one from the Amricans, the other rom the Europeans, and most notably the British. Sarkozy, much as I hate to admit, deserves a medal.

In America the Paulson plan aimed to simply buy back, for a trifling 800 billion dollars, the dodgy loans. This is intervention on an incredible scale and for the socialists among us, a certain amount of glee is felt, these people having aid for yars that the market "regulates itself" and does not need any kind of State intervention (which is true, if you don't mind a few million Americans becoming homeless). Any presidential candidate who promises even consiudering a tax cut in the future is either mad or lying.

In Europe, Gordon Brown made jaws drop. After the Thatcher/Major years where pretty much everything except the State was privatised, and after the Blair/Brown years where England produced an economic miracle based on the deregulated financial sector, first Northern Rock was nationalised, and in the last few days the State has become the main shareholder in eight major banks. Sarkozy, currently head of the EU, organised a meeting with all European leaders (no small feat) and has suggested the same on a continent wide basis. Despite (notably) Ireland and Germany's reluctance to participate in EU-wide measures, Sarkozy is somehow holding it all together. All European countries are now buying shares in the biggest banks and are thus guaranteeing any dodgy loans by pledging to bailout any lenders that default.

In France specifically, Sarkozy is producing 360billion euros to save the situation, including €320 billion in guarantees for new bank debt and a €40 billion fund for recapitalizing lenders. In exchange the State wants to have its say on how the banks are run and how bankers are paid, which is not unreasonable given the circumstances. Moreover, this will not be free for th banks who will have to pay interest. The blurb from the government is that this will not cost the taxpayer anything as a) the banks have to pay interest and b) the banks will be privatised again ASAP. Of course this is only true if the situation gets better. If not, the State will bail out and citizens get the bill.

In the next few days, Sarkozy and others are meeting Bush (god!!! why him?!) for the second "Bretton woods" this century. What lust come out of it is a complete upheaval and, yes, even if th word has been overused, moralisation of the international financial system. In the meantime I suggest you invest in gold.

So here we are holidaying in Bulgaria

Chook and I went to Bulgaria for the last ten days of August for romantic European cultural, natural and beachy relaxation.



Started in Sofia, the capital










and moved down to Blagoevgrad, the district capital and university city surrounded by foresty hills.










From there we took a day trip to Rila Monastery, the biggest in the country, alone in the middle of a valley and up in the mountains.






We then went to Plovdiv, the "Paris of the Balkans" with cobbled streets, Roman ruins and numerous art galleries.







From there to Burgas, on the coast, from whence we went first to Nesebar (international touristy beachy and UNESCO world heritage site)





and then Kiten (Bulgarian touristy beach). here are assorted highlights and descriptions.

******

Sofia is a boring capital city of which we saw two parts : the center with its big roads, plazas, communist buildings, cranes and renovations and domed Orthodox churches; and a nicer, small streets and less trafficky part to the North.















One modern, luxurious department store near the former communist headquarters (roughly six times the size of the Parliament) was deserted; another, selling mainly food in a turn of the 20th iron and steel building, was packed.

*****

Blagoevgrad is a nice pedestrian student town dedicated to concrete and set amongst rolling forested hills. Our hotel was overrun with wedding and birthday parties. Place was vaguely shabby but had loads of restaurants and we checked out the jazz club.

*****

From there we took a bus to Rila Monastery (rebuilt in 19th)


which is stunning and set in a valley sided with mountains of forests and torrents. It comprises a church, loads of arched galleries and lurid murals.

























Best thing ever though was when we explored an old abandoned building nearby, which was a former restaurant/hotel from the Soviet times. It had just been locked up and left, and we stepped back in time into the restaurant, the kitchens and in the old wallpapered bedrooms (still partly furnished) before getting told off. Even found a crate of vodka bottles saying "Made in USSR"! Missed the last bus back to Rila village (22 km away down forest road) and hitched a ride with a tourbus of Bulgarian pilgrims.

*****

Plovdiv, a couple of hours away by bus is in the center of the country.


It's a strange mix : roman ruins, loads of art galleries, long pedestrian shopping roads, squares with cafés, winding cobbled streets that climb around the hill, brightly painted museum/houses from the 19th. Lovely, except for huge motorway that zooms under the hill (we had a romantic dinner overlooking it). We visited a house/art museum full of beautiful antique furniture and Bulgarian paintings from the 19th onwards, saw Roman amphitheater













and a small roman stadium which is now surrounded partially built over with concrete blocks and is semi-submerged under a shopping street.

It was also in Plovdiv that we were confronted with the worst, most disgusting cocktail ever, which I ordered because I couldn't figure how it could be drinkable; it wasn't.

Sweet sin: whisky, peach liqueur, Bailey's, pineapple juice.

*****

Time to hit the beach. Bus to Burgas on the black sea coast and then to Nesebar, UNESCO world heriage site. It is a kilometer or so away from Slanchev Bryag, or Sunny Beach, which is overrun by the mafia, fluorescent British tourists reading the Sun, touts and shops selling beach equipment. We spent less than ten minutes there (time to walk through it) and headed
























for Nesebar which is exactly the same only has monuments instead of the beach (actually it does have one, which we tested : rocks and algae but good waves). Lots of old churches filled with icons and little streets lined with traditional wooden houses.Very touristy but does have a few interesting old buildings scattered about and a very lovely coastline though, must be nice out of season.

*****

And finally in Kiten we did absolutely bugger all except lie on the beach, surf the waves, get sunburnt, eat (including excellent calamari) and laze by the pool. This latter we had access to, having the choice between the nicest and most expensive hotel in town and the Hotel Balkanika, which could have been the setting for a movie on abandoned mental asylums in the 1930s. It was cracked, peeling, overgrown and had a view over the municipal rubbish dump. So we went to the other.

On the way back to Sofia, we stopped for the day in Burgas from where we were going to take the nighttrain. It's a coastal city but not touristy, so we checked out the beach, the ethnographical museum and the archeological museum. The beach had its share of rather dingy looking parasols but also a concrete jetty, an abandoned water slide, and Burgas international shipping port. By the beach were more abandoned buildings from Soviet times, including a large boat/restaurant which, according to a guy we got chatting to, was once a fashionable spot for Communist officials from all over the eastern block. Impossible to get close too unfortunately.

*****

And other :
*Food: two kinds of cheese : white (Sirene - feta) and yellow (Kashkaval- bland cheddar). Menus also proudly boast "processed cheese".
*Bulgarian girls, despite diet of pizza, hot dogs and cheese, are all incredible slim and stunning. The preferred uniform is micro-shorts, micro top, huge 80s haircut, long painted nails and high heeled sandals. Gulp. the men are plump, non descript and apparently hairless (study undertaken at Kiten beach).
*Bulgarian wine is drinkable : Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon from Melnik region is well known. We liked the Chateau Boyar and drank Chateau Karnobat. Zagorka beer is good too.
* Food : a traditional salad is Shopska : cucumbers, tomatoes, onions topped with grated sirene
*The best thing in Bulgaria is Vishna Sok- cherry juice- which is usually sugar and water and about 10% fruit juice. Massively addictive.
* Bulgarians are obsessed with ghastly singing+ dancing in traditional folk costumes amongst mountainous scenery. At any given time two TV channels are playing some.
* Food : usually some kind of grilled meat (chicken, lamb or pork), either on a stick or just a chunk or meatballs. Fried potatoes (topped with cheese), various salads, Tarator (yoghurt, cucumber, dill and walnut) soup. Stuffed vine leaves and cabbage leaves. Bluefish (size of sardines) and many others by the sea, trout in the mountains. Endless supplies of junk food, from McDonalds to pizza, to homegrown burgers (revolting - plastic pig eyeball ham in panini bread and containing Russian salad and cabbage) and hot dogs and various sweet and savoury pastries. HOW do the girls do it? Most food comes in two possible portion sizes.
* Everything is written in the cyrillic, which is fun to learn and even better when you decode words that mean something to you (office, McDonalds, garage and a lot of words are linked to French too).
*Bulgarian night trains are cold, uncomfortable, overbooked and loud Soviet pieces of shit that threaten to derail every second. Not recommended.
*To say "yes", the Bulgarians shake their head, not a side to side wobble like the Indians but an actual (to us) "no". Impossibly confusing.
*Beware, upon checking into a hotel, the plastic keyring : it means they are giving you the worst room ever. Twice we changed rooms after plastic keyring and the rooms were infinitely nicer.
*Food: Sach: a hot plate full of meat,onions and pickles. Nice.
*When someone dies, A4 pages are stuck around town with their photo, dates and so on. Lots outside churches (see photo) but also in the street, on front doors, in the churches, etc.

So here we are celebrating the French presidency

From July 1st and for six months, France will be head of the rotating presidency of the EU, after Slovenia and just before the Czech Republic. There is a €180million budget for this (summits, cocktail parties, travel, conferences, logos, freebies etc) and Sarkozy is determined to make the French presidency count, concentrating on four main themes : energy and the environment, the reform of the common agricultural policy, migration and defense.

Of course poor Sarkozy's responsabilities could not come at a worse time : while hideously unpopular at home and just as the unspeakable Irish voted against the Lisbon treaty, thus guaranteeing that the EU will remain stuck in its usual ruts for the next few years (NB I cannot bring myself to describe my disappointment at the Lisbon treaty being rejected. The bloody Irish of all people!). Anyway Sarko is going to have a tough time as the mood is bleak amongst the Eurofficials and little can be done, at a significant level at least, until the institutions are reformed.

Anyway, at lunchtime I popped to the Gare du Nord to have a rant, parisienne style*, at the Thalys train people about €244 they owe us. Impossible to get near the station, thee cops descended on me, telling me to take a new route. To get to the station I had to go round police lines and crawl up a side street. "What is this for then?" I asked the hot and bothered looking policeman who was busy diverting two bus lanes and six taxis away from the official looking cars that lined the front of the station. "Le sommet euopéen" he said rolling his eyes and shooing away a group of tourists who had wandered across his zone, trying to get to their coach.

European stuff? Hurray! I naturally went behind the metal fence, a first row eurogroupie and got out my mobile phone to set it on 'apparreil photo'. Quite a few other people were there, about seventy I'd say, mainly bodyguards, photographers and passers by with nothing better to do.

There were three large coaches, each with European Commission posted in the window and a dozen or so sleek black cars, complete with little French and European flags flapping at the front. One couldn't help noticing that despite the encouraging noises made by the EU and France about the environment, that all the engines were running or the twenty or so minutes it took the Euro people to arrive (presumably for the air conditioning).

They finally emerged from the station, led by José Manuel Barroso, President of the Commission; a couple of cameramen danced around them. They got in to their relevant cars and coaches. Barroso's car was right in front of me so I waited to catch his eye and gave him a little wave. I am happy to say he smiled cheerfully and waved back! My eurofan soul swooned.

The best bit however was just a ew moments before, when a little couple of Japanese tourists fought to the front, cameras out and chirping happily. As Barroso walked past they cheered "Jean Reno! Jean Reno!!".

* Parisienne style (à la parisienne), a brief definition : see following post.

So here we are weekending in Brussels

Chook and I set off on the Thalys for few days in Brussels with my friend Lucyna (left)


who had kindly agreed to put us up (and put up with us) over the long weekend. May 9th being Europe Day it made sense to go to the capital of the EU to check out the scene and celebrate as a true Europeist (there is some doubt over whether this word exists...)

We got to Brussels Friday lunchtime and Lucy took us to her flat which is a stone throw's away from Madou metro station and the European Commission building she works in. After lunch we walked around central Brussels, a mix of the old, the new, a building site and hypermodern architecture. A bit of a mad urbanist's pet project it seems.

In no particular order, that day we visited the famous Grand' place and explored the little streets that run round it,



saw the Mannequin Pis - (legend : a small boy gets lost in Brussels in the 17th. Father goes mad with grief and pledges to donate to the city a statue of the boy in whichever position he is found. At least he wasn't taking a dump) - who was today sporting a red jacket


walked through parks, visited the European quarter, where the modern, futuristic even European Parliament and some Commission buildings are,


visited the amazing steel and glass shopping galeries,


went round the cathedral dedicated to Ste Gudule.


And of course drank copious amounts of beer: Kriek which is cherry flavoured, framboise which is raspberry flavoured, Jupiler which is lager. Water costs roughly three times as much as beer.

We went for fries at a famous Belgian outlet, la baraque à frites Chez Antoine on the place Jourdan next to the European quarter.

We met a couple of guys in the queue for cornet de frites sauce andalouse (spicy, vaguely cocktail sauce with a kick) , Vince and Nico , who live and work in the Brussels area. We met up with them and their friend later. They were chilling out in the vast, deserted expanse that surrounds the European Commission. We joined them



then went for beer and then had a few smokes near the European Parliament. Poland, England, France, Belgium and Spain having a laugh outside the EP on May 9th: the Europhile in me was weeping from so much symbolism!