Lá Fhéile Pádraig (St paddy's!)

Thursday is St Patrick's day, the national holiday of Ireland. Now that I work for the Irish Embassy, the day is more significant now. Having always been a big fan of the green isle, I usually tried to celebrate a bit by joining in the fun atmosphere in the Irish pub, but nobody celebrates st Paddy's like the Irish! This year I will get to experience just that. The Embassy is organising a big celebration in Leuven (big college city in Belgium) in an old building called 'The Irish college', and 600 people are likely to attend! That's a lot of people, and most of them will be Irish! I get to go too, at first mostly to show people where to be, but once everyone has arrived, I get to join in the festivities and have drinks and nibbles and mingle!
Everything will be in the spirit of Ireland, the drinks, the food and the musical performances. I'm very excited about it, I can't wait! Most of the people will probably be older, fancy goverment, EU and other high-up staff, but I hope there will be some people around my age to talk to!


Why am I so fond of Ireland you ask? Well to start with it's a beautiful country (been there 8 times now, first time when I was sixteen, on a holiday with the parents), there really are a hundred shades of green. When landing you already notice the beauty, you see all the little different patches of green that is the fields, mountains in the distance, rivers.. It really is something. Dublin is bustling just like any city, but it's great shopping and Temple Bar (the popular old outgoing part of the city) is great fun for a night out! Galway is calmer, a student city, and has the air of a seaside town, there's street musicians in the shopping street, the houses are colourful, it's my favourite Irish city. Had some great times there! Now the countryside is really something you must see when visiting Ireland. Especially the Connemara, one of my favourite places, it still has the air of calmness real country living about it, something that is hard to find nowadays. There's tiny little towns, with always at least one pub (of course :p) and a church. You need to beware of sheep, cows and even donkeys occasionally when driving on the road, because they roam all over the place. There's gorgeous mountains, and fields of heather, and sparkling lakes. I really do love it very much, and I will continue to go there.

The people are great (most of them anyway, you can find a grouch anywhere), they have a great sense of humour, they're fun-loving, easy-going and very social. Now, I may be biased, because I dated an Irish guy back in the day, but through him I met a lot of other Irish people, and all of them really fit the traits I just mentioned.

If you're a history buff, Ireland has a rich history, with lots of mythology from the days of the Celts, and a violent and interesting history from the days when the English decided to conquer Ireland and take over the land. I actually wrote my thesis about Ireland (mainly a comparative study of the view on Northern Ireland in the Flemish and Dutch press, but I also included a long historic background of Ireland). Therefor, I know a whole lot about the Irish history, and I found it very interesting, although sad at some point, Ireland has been through a lot.

As you can see in the title, the Irish have a second language, the old Irish language, gaelic. It's not spoken much, but they try to keep it alive by teaching children the language in school, and all the traffic signs etc. are both in English and Irish. I find it a very cool language, unfortunately you can only learn it in Ireland, as it's pretty pointless outside of it.

So hope I got you all a bit excited about Ireland, you should really go visit it! (good for the Irish economy :p.. hey I work for Ireland :P I need to promote :D)

Have a great St Paddy's day if you intend on celebrating!

Sláinte (cheers!)

Belgians -the 11th coolest people in the world

I was reading the online newspaper at work (indeed very busy here again) and I read an article about the Belgian nationality being picked as the 11th coolest to be according to CNN. Appearantly having perfected chocolate, waffles and beer is good enough to fall under America's cool radar. This all in spite of its tiny size, the crap weather and the shocking child molest cases (I quote CNN). Thanks to the huge amount of scandalous cases involving priests and even a few nuns, that last downside has now completely exploded again. The fact we haven't had a government for a year now because the Flemish (dialect of Dutch) and the Wallonian(southern part of Belgium, french-spoken) politicians are all a bunch of stubborn idiots who refuse to cooperate or make concessions in any way in order to reach an agreement and build up a government. But according to CNN, the Belgians are pretty easy-going about that and don't really give a f# for the most part, while in most countries anarchy would erupt, so we're pretty cool because of that. Yay us..

As for the other ten nationalities on the list? Here they are:

1 Brazil
2 Singapore
3 Jamaica
4 Mongolia
5 USA
6 Spain
7 Japan
8 Botswana
9 China
10 Nepal

Now, most of them deserve to be on the cool- list. Brazil has the half naked dancing girls, Singapore is all exotic, Jamaica has Bob Marley, the USA is the land of the free and the home of the brave, Spain has siestas;big hats and good food, Japan has technology and employees who work 12 hours a day and China is the land where everything is made. Now the three I don't get are Mongolia, Botswana and Nepal.
Not that I don't like the countries, but I can't seem to find a reason for them being cool. What does Mongolia have that's cool? Giant empty planes, horses, nomads living in yurts.. all pretty special, but cool? Maybe it's Ghengis Khan, he conquered Russia and half of Europe or something and went plundering and killing all over, I suppose that might be cool, but come on the guy lived hundreds of year ago, that doesn't count anymore CNN!
And Botswana, why Botswana? Not that I know anything about Botswana, I know it's in Africa, and that's it. Why is Botswana the 8th coolest? Someone please enlighten me about the coolness of Botswana! Is it the wild animals? That's pretty cool, but that would make other African countries equally cool.
And then Tibet, why is Tibet cool? Sure the landscape there is breathtaking and I'm all for freeing Tibet, but would that fall under 'cool'?
CNN is sure using some strange criteria.

And where is Ireland! Surely Ireland deserves to be cool! Maybe it's the chaos that is Ireland's economy. The lack of jobs, the loads of young graduates moving abroad and the rising taxes probably made Ireland rather uncool for the moment. Where o where are the fabulous days of the Celtic Tiger.

working hard or hardly working

Starting anew with the blog, as I totally forgot about the one I started months ago and I got no, yes NO, comments at all! so perhaps my stories were a bit boring :D So hopefully I'll be able to entertain at least one person if I start posting more regularly!

Alrighty, I suppose I should introduce myself. My name's Athena and I live in Belgium. You might know it for the waffles, the amazingly good chocolate and Jean-Claude Van Damme, a very lame actor to be honest, but he seems famous for some reason ! If that still doesn't ring a bell, it's somewhere in western Europe, tiny country squished between France, Germany and the Netherlands. I live by the coast, in a small city called Nieuwpoort. I added a map just below for the less wordly people among us. Its a tiny country really, but there are like ten million inhabitants which is pretty crazy to me, way too densely populated. I like me some peace and quiet.





I'm 23, got my master's degree this year as translator English and Russian and have finally found a job last month!
I work in the Embassy of Ireland in Brussels. Loving the job so far, but a huuuge downside is the insane commute, its two hours by train to get to Brussels, so four hours on the train every day. Yes, I know, that's a bit crazy, and it reaally tiring sometimes. I get up at 6.10 am and get home at 8.10 pm, which is a very long day. I do intend to move at some point, but to be honest, it's so expensive to live by yourself and I'd rather spend my money on more fun things :p and i like having company when I get home.

What else hmm well so I live at home with the parents, and a younger brother. Have two dogs too, love my doggies. The older one is called Annabelle, but we call her Belly, it's a scruffy mix of a Fox and a Snauzer and she's 12. And the other is a greyhound called Fiona and she's 8. In one of the next posts I'll tell you all about my beloved doggies naturally.

Currrently at work actually, ssssh, don't tell ;) Don't have much to do at the moment. I generally occupy myself with visas and the accounts, and general mail and phone answering. Everyone here is really friendly, mostly Irish, which I really like because I love all things Irish. You'll find that out in later posts too for sure. My thesis was on Ireland and I've been there many many times! Ah it's a great country really, so I was so excited to get to work somewhere Ireland-related!

Hmm guess I should find something useful to do here at work then! Promise to not forget to write this time, hopefully I'll eventually get a comment then! Cause I want one!