Another reason to love Brussels: it is teeming with subcultures. And each time you gain entry to a new one, a whole new world opens up in front of your eyes.
Last night my new Polish friend Rafał invited me to go with him to a slavic stagiare party (which was, in fact, mostly Polish).
Stagiare parties are generally highly energetic knees-ups organised by this year's crop of EU interns, who are only here for six months or so and determined to make their mark.
Given that it was a stagiare party and not one organised by the indigenous Polish community in Brussels (I still have to discover where *they* hang out), you could well argue that it was just another variation of the Eurocrat scene, but it was, well... extremely different from the Eurocrat scene I know. It felt like we'd got on a plane to Warsaw and headed for the nearest student disco. Fascinating!
And there I was, using my schoolroom Polish to order drinks from the bar - greeting Rafał's friends and saying the well-rehearsed phrases that I know and hoping they wouldn't stray too far from the script. It was *just* like being abroad!
Anyway - I'm sure you get the attraction. And tonight I'm heading to a Flemish interpreter's birthday party - yet another subgroup... and then there's Martin and his Swedish friends. Switch, switch, switch...
I know it's the same in London, but London's *big*. What's remarkable about Brussels is that you have all of this in such a compact space.
Some of the Belgians don't seem so keen on this state of affairs, though. I was walking home the other day, still full of Liebeskummer after my own very personal story of Belgian rejection, when a drunk shouted across the pavement at me:
- Vous êtes Belge?
- Non
- Vous auriez dû rester dans votre propre pays!
Charming! Sometimes you really wonder if it's worth bothering to integrate at all.
Posted by Eurodan at June 11, 2005 12:52 PM