bleungberg.com

Greetings from Brussels. My 14th visit to this place so I’ll just do something totally banal, called 10 things I’ve learnt about Paris and Brussels during these past six days:

1) English people are the worst Europeans. I was on the tram home late last Friday here in Brussels when I saw three English men and one woman, drunk and hurling random abuse at the passengers, including an innocent black man who, without any kind of provocation, got the effing ‘n’ word treatment from one of these twats. I so nearly shouted the ‘c’ word at them but for fear of getting beaten up, or even stabbed or shot given the current trends, I bit my lip and let it go. Come to think of it, as I wasn’t in England, I should’ve shouted at them.

2) Chinese tourists – middle-aged men especially – always pick their noses in public, particularly when they’re sitting down outside a famous monument in their smart clothes. Plus you never see their wives with them.

3) Gypsies kill swans in parks and fish out koi carps in lakes here in Belgium for food during the night.

4) You can go from one end of Paris to another on the metro for 90 pence. It costs £3.50 to do that in London.

5) Every Belgian town, city, village look the same: square, market square, big church, canal/river/port, Chinese take-way, kebab shop, Accessorize, H&M.

6) European transport chiefs have no grasp of reality. Brussels’s metro system got some new trams and underground trains recently, but the ventilation in each carriage still come courtesy of a couple of small windows on the side. With temperatures on the rise, why not use bigger windows or even air-conditioning? Don’t know what I’m talking about – look at London’s buses and see how small their windows are – those buses cost a quarter of a million pounds each and you would’ve thought they’d at least be good! Paris, Amsterdam, Berlin are all the same.

7) Paris is full of rats.

French people are less smelly and rude now than before.

9) The price for a Belgian waffle has gone up by 30 pence in ten months.

10) Weathermen are wrong whichever country you’re in.

With the US Open now less than a fortnight away, it can only mean one thing - the hurricane season in full swing (no pun intended).

I’m actually rather pleased that Hurricane Dean - currently giving the Yucatan peninsular a severe beating - is being given so much coverage by all the news channels around the world. France 2 led its bulletins with the destruction caused in Martinique on Saturday, whilst everyone else is now watching the Category 4 storm surge towards Mexico and possibly into America later this week.

I say I’m pleased with the broad coverage is that too many hurricanes had been ignored in the past if they didn’t go anywhere near America. Far too often, destructive hurricanes which caused widespread flooding and deaths in the Caribbean and Mexico went unreported in Europe due to the fact that America was spared.

That was typical of the world’s media that if something bad happens in America, then we must report on it - from hurricanes to bridge collapse or worst of all, mining disasters. How many people know of the 181 trapped (and most probably already killed) in a mine in Shangdong? Yet we all know about the few trapped in Utah. Quite why we should care about these sorts of things in America but not in other parts of the world is beyond belief.

Greetings from Malta.

It’s strange to be writing this in Malta – or just being in Malta full-stop. I’m here for work, but otherwise I would never have considered visiting this little island. Having spoken to a few of you who’d been here before, I arrived last weekend fully expecting it to be beautiful, historic, full of churches and fairly boring - and it’s true. But because I work during the day, I only have limited free-time to visit sites and since everything is quit close, it’s been a fulfilling visit in every respects.

Aesthetically, Malta’s beautiful. People are genuinely friendly, they all speak English, things are cheaper than the UK, the weather is faultless (though there were a drop of rain or two a few hours ago) and it’s just great to see so many locals sitting around at night by the seafront, chatting amongst themselves late into the night, whilst children continue to play out on the streets unsupervised till 10pm. It’s this kind of relaxing, low-crime and almost carefree environment which make this a great place to spend a few days in.

Of course, nothing’s perfect. My three-decade long battle with the cockroaches continue. Economically, Malta’s not doing well, as tourism – its main source of income – is falling as people go to nearby Spain, Italy, Greece and North Africa instead, whilst tourists resorts are popping up all over the place, driving up house-prices and forcing out the locals, destroying the local heritage. My flight over was half empty, and I managed to find a decent hotel room for a whole week with relative ease - and this is the high season! Lack of income mean a lot of things are neglected, namely old buildings and pedestrian pavements which are very, very slippery. Also, drivers are very bad – and you hear a lot of tyre-screechings as they brake at the last possible second at pedestrian-crossing – that’s if they bother. But the food is great, and portions are always generous to the point that I almost struggled to finish my meals on a number of occasions. I even had goat’s cheese for the first time in my life the other day – albeit accidentally - in a Maltese omelette. I’m pleased to say that my first taste of any-sheep based product for years was very helpful – in a sense that it reaffirms my severe dislike for the stuff – the smell, the taste, yuk. Definitely no lamb, goat’s milk or sheep’s intestines for at least another ten years, I guess. The thing that I like the most here are the buses – all vintage, American, creaky, diesel-run yellow single-decker buses. Going to the bus station and seeing hundreds of them together is for me, the equivalent of a live-sex show. I love buses, and this, for me, is ‘bus-porn’.

Back to London tomorrow but hoping to be back one day. ‘Ten points for Malta’, I say.

Having a laptop is one thing, but finding a wi-fi hotspot for free is quite another. In short, it’s been next to impossible but, nothing’s beyond me and hence this latest dispatch.I’m mildly enjoying Malta, having now switched hotel to a more comfortable one. Not that I hated the first one – it had a great view of the Mediterranean - but it was just rather too basic to my liking. Plus I didn’t feel particular safe in it – not for my possessions anyway. Now, I’m staying right by the sea and with a harbour view of Valetta which is pretty nice. It also has a tv which was lacking in the first one. I never thought a TV would be so important to me in a hotel room – not for watching but a bit of background noise to keep me company.

Malta’s a strange place. People speak Malti, but I don’t really see it anywhere – on buses or in shops. Everyone seems to speak English pretty darn well which certainly helps. And that makes me wonder why not more tourists from England come here – they speak the language, the weather is superb, beaches (or at least ones with rocks) and resorts are plentiful. Plus, due to colonial legacy, they use three-headed plugs and drive on the left, like the UK and Cyprus. So, how did I manage to find an empty room in a seaside hotel for the whole week so easily, or why check-in with Air Malta at Heathrow took 5 minutes, with the plane only 60% full? (Its food was superb, by the way).

Well, apparently the answer lies in North Africa and the ever-increasing number of resorts served by cheap flights all over other parts of the Mediterranean, with just Ryanair servicing this tiny little island and with only one flight a day. I can’t say that the Brits are missing out on much here but it is an interesting enough place to keep the easily-bored occupied for at least 4-5 days, to of which can be spent by the pool. There are enough quirky stuff to amuse people and the food is very much to the taste of the easily-homesick Brits. They’re missing out.

Then again, I am here to work so I guess I have enough to keep me going. But by taking a long walk around the harbour to the capital Valetta and a bus-ride to the ancient city of Mdina suggest that one can easily spend four days living well here. In addition, one can now boast to have visited Europe’s second-smallest capital city (after Vaduz) and the spookiness of Mdina. The latter had virtually no tourists and was like a 9th century ghost town – which it was.

That will do for now. Time for food. Had a terrific Egyptian meal last night which should’ve cost about a tenner, but whether or not the maitre d’ couldn’t count or gave me a super discount I’ll never know. I think I quietly impressed him by chomping down all the food he put in front me (and even I have to say I juts about managed to finish the soup and the seafood). I’ll either have Serbian food or Maltese food tonight. My Maltese omelette today was a let-down: the waitress promised me there was no goat’s cheese in it s what did I find in the second bite – goat’s cheese? Glad to say I hate the stuff more than ever after this nasty experience.

Off to Malta in a few hours’ time - and read something vaguely reassuring and that the excellent record of Air Malta in handling baggage. In fact, they are the best, closely followed by Turkish Airlines. Hope it goes well - nothing gives me more stress than standing at the baggage carousel not seeing any of my possessions. Fingers acrossed.