being me, Luxembourg

7 weeks’ later

20170105_174337

I have been in Luxembourg just shy of two months now, and if you were to ask me what was the thing which caught my attention, I would have to say it was the number of people who smoke. It is quite remarkable.

The photo above was taken some evening I was getting a bus to the shopping centre, rather than doing what any sane person would, which is go home and curl up next to the radiator. It has been cold here in Luxembourg – we had an orange weather alert warning us that temperatures were due to slip down to -10 last night. We have not had much snow since the beginning of January though and what remnants that are left lying around have just never quite got around to melting. You see them in the parks and on the the banks on the approach to the city from Remich. I was in Remich the other day.

On Friday afternoon, I got the bus to art heaven superstore, Boesner. It is just over the border from Luxembourg but not exactly straightforward to reach by public transport. It is, however, one of the best art stores I have been in. It is almost close to Schleiper. I bought a load of stuff I didn’t need but really really wanted which is typical really. It’s like going to IKEA.

From there, I got the bus to Nennig which is the border town on the German side of the Moselle river. It was pretty much flattened during the war, apparently. Nennig is on one side of the river and literally on the otherside, is Remich. I walked across the border several times, and thought malevolent thoughts about Brexit and the saps who want to destroy the European Union. I got my bus back to Luxembourg city from the customs checkpoint that looked like well it was hardly opened from one end of the year to the other. Along the Moselle, under the bridge, was the biggest conflab of swans I have ever seen. It was a stunning afternoon, with a beautiful warm looking sunset. And it was warm. It was 2 whole degrees above city. In the context of a week where the temperatures never got above 0 and where my trip to work was in -7 degrees, 2 degrees was tropical.

Yesterday then was more retail therapy. I needed new trainers, unusually, two new pairs, one for mucking around in, and one for actually running in. I also wanted some basic swimming gear. Having failed to find anything remotely resembling a decent sports shop (I don’t count Footlocker as such) and being vaguely aware that there was a Decathlon or some such out in one of the retail parks (the one that otherwise has a million car dealerships) I wanted to go out. It transpired that it was an Intersport and more to the point, there didn’t seem to be any swimming gear on its website. Knowing Intersport from elsewhere, I found this hard to believe so I wandered out on a bus and had a bit of a look around.

We don’t have ANY sports shops in Ireland like this. This had pretty much everything, and at the moment, it had loads and loads and loads of ski gear with 30% off. I went and found the watersports section and was overwhelmed by the range of swim wear available. My swimming gear is still in Ireland so I have capitulated and decided to start over again. There was a spectacular array of goggles to be chosen from. Somewhat less overwhelming on the noseclip front (Ireland is definitely better on that front for some reason) (do we prefer to make our style statements with nose clips than with swimwear). It’s just occurred to me that I somehow got distracted from buying a pull buoy. That will be changing.

As it happens, I work about a 10 minute walk from the Coque sports centre which has 2 fifty metre polls and a 25 metre pool. Next weekend it has a major swimming meet where apparently I will be able to see Ian Thorpe swim. I don’t really have any excuse facilities wise; it’s just getting my act together to get organised to start swimming again.

In addition to the swimming gear, and the ski gear, and the mountain climbing gear, and the hiking gear, and the many types of shoes and the football section and racket sports section, it had a ballet section which sells Repetto dance shoes (although I did not see any pointe shoes there, sadly). This place was a palace of supplies to enable you to be active. I got a beautiful pair of Asics trail running shoes, despite currently not doing any running plus a pair of Nike tennis shoes to knock about it. Oh and it sold many sleds.

I’ve been in a few sports superstores in my life and always been stunned by how much better they were than Irish sports stores, but this took my breath way. Witness the wall of shoes where shoes were labelled according to what sport you used them for or whether they were fashion accessories. I was mesmerised.

In the meantime, I need to check out the pools sometime soon and get a membership card so I can perhaps go before work if I am up early enough.

In other news, having suffered so far 2 weeks on only having a kitchen and a bed in terms of furniture, the rest of my furniture is due to turn up next week. I am looking forward to that. This week also I plan to join a painting club. I need to check out the knitting club as well. I like Luxembourg so far.

being me, Europe, Luxembourg, photography, The Move, things of beauty, travel, weather

Walking around a winter wonderland

It snowed in Luxembourg this morning.

20170102_124308

It was a rather lovely, peaceful snowy scene in the park near my apartment this morning so I took a walk around it before going in search of furniture. I wandered over to the lift down to Pfaffenthal but that was closed for some reason. I don’t know why.

This is what you could see from the Ville Haute near the lift anyway so you got the view even if you couldn’t get into the viewing platform.

20170102_111739

The bridge is called the Charlotte or the Red Bridge. I think they like the colour idea because the new bridge in the city centre is called the Blue Bridge. It was built because the main bridge, called the Adolphe Bridge, is in need of serious repair so it had to be closed. Imagine, if you will, closing O’Connell Bridge and building a temporary replacement almost right next to it. That’s what the Luxembourgers appeared to do.

20170102_111426

The glassy thing on the left is the elevator.

Anyway, flickr is not cooperating with me right now so I might add other photographs later.

annoyances, being me, living in ireland

Impossible to commute by car in Dublin

This doesn’t really affect me all that much any more since I left Dublin a month ago but the Independent had some words from Dublin City Manager Owen Keegan, on the subject of life after Luas Cross City goes into operation. Effectively, it will become impossible to commute by car across the city. This, he says, will be an effective congestion charge. You can read the piece here.

“Increasingly, the private car as a commuting option is going to be squeezed out.

The problem – as I see it – is that the replacement is hardly going to exist for a lot of people who commute by car. I commuted by car and looking at the plans for Dublin traffic post LCC, I’d still have to commute by car as LCC would not have helped me at all, but the planned re-routes would have made my life hell.

I’m aware that Owen Keegan is an advocate for cycling. I hate the activity. I’d prefer a functional public transport system and with all due respect, LCC isn’t going to turn the mess that is Dublin public transport into something usable any time soon. I recognise his hands are slightly tied given that central government gets to decide whether money would be spent on Metro North or not (well not any time soon anyway).

I hated driving in the city of Dublin for a few reasons. The drivers there are unfamiliar with how traffic lights and junction boxes operate. Cyclists have death wishes. People park in buslanes which causes some hassle to buses yes, and the knock on is chaos in the general traffic lanes. I think people like Owen Keegan need to realise that running a double buslane across College Green isn’t going to get the city moving any faster. Reroutiong the 16 bus down the keys is a material disimprovement to a major service. I spent sometime reviewing the College Green plans and came to the conclusion that there was an unspoken policy to favour bikes over absolutely everything else. You could see it in the documentation. Cyclists featured heavily as benefiting from the proposed changes.

When I see Owen Keegan suggest the private car will be squeezed out, I am disappointed. Buslane infrastructure in Dublin is awful. College Green and Dame Street changes, plus the changes knocking on elsewhere (Parliament Street for example), will not improve commuting for many people. Luas Cross City is not going to have a massive city wide impact. In a normal world, I’d prefer to see less sticking plaster, cosmetic things done. I’d prefer to see wider bus lanes and, if we’re not going to get serious rail based public transport in Dublin – which I doubt for the next 20 years t least, serious prioritisation given to bus operations in the city.

This requires cooperation between Dublin City Council, Transport for Ireland and the bus operators where the core objective is to put bus passengers front and centre of change. I can’t see it happening because mostly, these result in turf wars. You can see it already with ticketing. I live in Luxembourg city where 31 bus routes are operated by at least 4 different operators, there isn’t even a single brand identity for the bus service and individual routes can be operated by 2-3 different operators; there is a single ticketing system. A monthly city card costs 25E. A national transport card costs 50E per month. And as far as traffic planning is concerned, the buses are prioritised over everything else. Plus they are building a tram.

Owen Keegan can’t fix Dublin public transport on his own. I appreciate this. But he will have to stop pushing bikes and castigating cars and start dealing with public transport if he and anyone who holds the job in the future want to be doign anything other than applying sticking plasters to their mass transit issues. Owen Keegan is not in favour of an elected mayor for Dublin. You could argue that well he would say that, wouldn’t he. I’m not in favour either because I don’t think the non-urban parts of Dublin would be benefited by it.

But if Owen Keegan and his team don’t start dealing with the mass side of transit, all the bike lanes in the world won’t fix his problems.

annoyances, The Move

Youtube videos, making house moving easy

Youtube hasn’t yet learned that my favourite video at the moment is this one on how to assemble a Jattene box from IKEA. It has truly brought light to my life in the past few days in a way that nothing else has managed. The video is in German, but if you are ever severely under pressure, and urgently needing to assemble one of these boxes, he’s the only man.

I own twelve of these boxes and have a deep desire to have them full of stuff for Declan, the man with the van, to take away in two days’ time.  I’ll be glad when it is all done. I’ll be hugely relieved when it is all done.

Meanwhile, the car continues to challenge. It is an inanimate object, but the last month or so have pretty much been along the lines of “how most can I spite this owner of mine and make her life as full of hassle as possible.”

Don’t trust cars. They know when you are planning to break up with them.

annoyances, being me, The Move

The shredder is picking and choosing when it cares to work.

Impressively, I have a pile of dictionaries – which I love – in my living room, stacked and waiting for boxes. The pile is about a metre high and it includes several English dictionaries, a couple of thesaurii, a French dictionary, 2 German dictionaries, the dual Finnish English Finnish set, Slang and Untranslatables. I’m carting things downstairs at the moment because the shredder is being finicky and I’m getting through not very much shredding before it dances a fandango and demands a rest.

The car is sick. Expensively difficult to find the problem but can’t drive it sick. I’m very disappointed in it. I’ve had it 10 years and now it has neurological problems. I really only needed a week out of it and it could hardly have chosen a worst week to oh, spew a mad lot of steam out from under the bonnet. It’s scary, you know, when you are stuck in traffic watching your car behave like a kettle on which you forgot to put the top.

Next to the pile of dictionaries is what I think is my compete data viz and data presentation collection. At least, the hard copy version of it. The art stuff. TBH, I was surprised by how little of that. I know the How To Draw Dragons book is in Charleville, and, the four “How to Give Up Drawing Dragons Immediately because Elian Black Mor is so much better than me at Drawing Dragons” are there too. Surprisingly. I have not yet accumulated/unwisely spent as much money on How To Be A Better artist books as I did on “Look, I suck at being a photographer, Michael Freeman will make it better”.

I have beautiful photography books though, two classics in particular; a collection of Robert Doisneau and an Ansel Adams portfolio. Bearing in mind I spent most of my time photographing kitesurfers it might be surprising to know that they were my two favourite photographers.

At this point. the shredder has just visted another heart attack on me by springing into life. Most kind of it. Now I have to go and shred more of this pile of papers. It’s like it’s been snowing in the dining room. The hoover is just going to LOVE me.

Moving house is fun.

The Move

L-Day minus 8

What I remember most clearly about the last “big” international house move was just how stressful the run up was. I was 26 years old and man I lacked imagination.

Various things have conspired to make this one easier. Stuff is going into storage in Ireland (temporarily, I keep saying, as I look at my book collection that I am emotionally bound up in). I don’t have to do everything all at once.

Various other things have conspired to make it harder. The car is currently in the garage which isn’t exactly helpful.

This morning before breakfast I contacted a bunch of utility providers, spent ages on hold to one of them, found out they were going to charge me 40E for the privilege of no longer paying them for the service they provide, was told by another that there was a month’s notice (well I’m prepaid up to the end of that month so). I’m still waiting for another one to answer and two others are being remarkably helpful.

I foresee this week as being particularly stressful. But somehow because I am actually doing the stuff myself, I feel like I am making headway. What I do know is that when I am finally in my hotel next week, I will feel like I am on holiday. I can’t wait

 

annoyances, being me, life in general, living in ireland, personal projects

Movement motivation

In the way that you do, at 5.30 in the morning, I found myself looking at running pins on Pinterest this morning. I’m reasonably sure that I did not find what I was looking for but that’s life on the internet. What I did find were a lot of motivational quotes. They varied in quality. The one that sort of stood out this morning was this one:

No matter how slow you’re going, you’re still lapping people on the couch.

Or words to that effect. Anyway, it was nice and snappy and had an image, so I drew two people, one on a couch, and one running. I’m not very good at humans but we’ll leave that aside for the moment. The point is, while I was planning out the drawing, it occurred to me that this was a fierce judgmental way to go about things. And a lot of the motivational quotes were of a similar vein. If you go running, you will be better than other people. There were a few where they went with “the old you” being the other people you were better than but I’m not sure that’s any better.

I’m not getting anything near enough exercise at the moment. This I know to be true. But I do know from when I used to, that starting off is hard work, and then it gets enjoyable. I didn’t really see this anywhere in the motivational stuff for running.

And there’s lots of it. Run to beat yourself. Run to beat others. Run to be healthy. Run to reduce the risk of [some illness].

All good laudable things. But the most effective way to get yourself to do something is to enjoy it and very little around running involves the words “at some point it will get more enjoyable”. It must do but when the motivational quotes include “It won’t get easier; you’ll get stronger” well that’s really not motivating.

It’s the same with swimming. You see articles like “Why do we swim? It’s really hard. Why do we overcome this?”

Well personally, it’s because I enjoyed it. I actively like swimming and even though it’s rough going when you’re not fit and it’s been a couple of years, even the individual lengths are enjoyable despite not being fit enough to chain very many of them together. It’s that little spark that keeps you going.

I was browsing magazines in Easons a few weeks ago while waiting to get a train south, and picked up something that focused on trail running. I’m more interested in that than anything else. In it there was an article that pretty much hit the problem from how I could see it. No one talks about running because it’s fun. It’s not fun. If you haven’t run for years, it’s not fun. And if the big selling point is “you will a) get used to it and b) feel sanctimonious in some way”…

I can’t believe that this is all there is. If someone asked me, I’d say “look, swimming is hard to start off. No word of a lie. But, you know what, if you’re making it too hard for yourself, you’re not doing it right. What matters isn’t so much how far or how fast you swim, but how often you do. Just keep on going to the pool. Do one length, do 4, go up, go down. Just keep on going.” Three months later, I was doing 64 lengths.

Meanwhile, running motivations are “start thinking about the treat, like a massage, or a smoothie or a….whatever”. You need to be bribed to do this? Every single time?

And running gear. Art is a bit like this. “Oh you don’t need much. Just a pair of shoes and somewhere to run”. Sounds incredibly easy, doesn’t. Fantastic. Dead fecking easy.

And then there’s this kind of fabric top, shorter shorts, longer things, stuff to keep you warm, stuff to keep you cool. I read one piece on habit forming this morning that said “lay out your running gear the night before cos if you have to rummage for stuff, you will put it off.” Strictly speaking, this is true. I have two swimming bags so that there is always one ready to go and one drying if I am swimming daily. I need a new swimsuit but we’ll deal with that later. She then proceeded to list an amount of gear for running that was a bit kind of long to say the least.

It’s not very helpful in my opinion.

So, this long essay on motivation. What is it going to do for me? Well sometime ago I figured that I needed to start building time into my life to get more exercise. I’m going to be honest and say that while other people manage this, I struggle in Dublin. My efforts to find 2 hours a day to go swimming (time to get there, change, shower before and after and all that) have been seriously kiboshed by the fact that Dublin sucks as a city to try and move around in. Whether you’re driving or bussing, you’re losing a lot of time. I started walking early in the morning and while that has benefits in that there’s a marked lack of traffic and it’s reasonably quite and I did it on occasion even if it was raining, the truth is it was also concrete jungle.

But I want to trail run and to at least be able to run trails when I can find them, I need to be fitter than I am now. I need to walk more and I need to run more. And I have figured, having looked at what the running world has to offer me, that the best way to approach it is the same way as I approached swimming. Always do it. Never trash yourself for doing worse this time than you did the last time. You only ran 400m this time when you ran 600m the last time? Treat your body like it’s your partner, not your enemy. It’s a journey, not a war.

As an added bonus, I’m leaving Dublin and I expect the change of scenery; the novelty of nice European buildings will make it a more entertaining activity.

 

being me, life in general, personal projects, vaguely related to languages

Two headphones…

Alexander Gansmeier wrote a piece about The Interpreter, that movie staring Nicole Kidman some years ago, from the point of view of assessing whether she accurately portrayed being an interpreter or not. He points to it from the front page of his site but I don’t appear to be able to point to the exact space where he does so I’m pointing at the document as well as the index page. Anyway that’s all by way of an aside. One thing which Alexander noted, and which resonated big time for me this morning was this:

While interpreting, Kidman covers both her ears, which – while not a dealbreaker – is rather strange as most practising interpreters will confirm.

It casts me back years because I remember learning how to do that when I trained as an interpreter years ago and still have the habit. If you see me sitting at a desk with headphones on, no matter what I am doing, if I am in a work environment, I am most likely to have a headphone covering one ear but not the other. This allowed me over years to shut out most of the extraneous noise in various open offices while still retaining enough information about the outside world to catch when someone wanted my attention.

I miss interpreting. I occasionally practise at home and I did CPD interpreting in April at Heriot-Watt in Edinburgh. I work in the tech sector and you’ll find software engineers talking about the zone. I never once, while developing code, got into a zone the like of which you can get into while interpreting. But things which I did will learning to interpret still resonate in my life.

being me

It’s not the leaving…

I came back to Dublin in 1999 after five years away. I didn’t do the whole bar tending trick in exotic places; I just moved away and followed work around Europe, teaching in France for a year, then four years of administration and multilingual secretarial support. In 1999, I had a choice between job in Finland or coming back to Ireland. I gambled on Ireland, for family reasons. After 17 and a half years in Dublin, I am moving on again.

There are a bunch of reasons for this, some deeply personal, and some extremely practical. Someone asked me about 5 years ago if I were going through a midlife crisis when I was considering major league changes to my life and I said no; I was making the kind of decisions again that were second nature to me when I was 25 years old. I left a long term job in 2013 and linked to that decision, did a lot of thinking. I wasn’t really planning, in 1999, to be in Dublin even five years later.

The last 17 years were not wasted. I’ve been lucky enough to make a lot of friends, I’ve learned things, done things, achieved things. Two more university diplomas including a masters in computer science. Pictures of me in newspapers linked to the early days of blogging, pictures taken by me in newspapers linked to the early days of kitesurfing taking off in this country. Me on television for taking kitesurfing photographs. Learning (sort of) to surf, windsurf and kitesurf. Going to Portugal to photograph world champion kitesurfers. Going to Sheffield to watch world champion figure skaters. Going to Brazil, Australia, Western Sahara and Spain to kitesurf. In many respects, the last 15 plus years have been great for me, and there are lots of little stand out stories and quite a few bucket list items. It’s just I don’t and have never felt settled in Dublin and Dublin has not really facilitated me in feeling settled here. It’s hard to settle in a place where putting down roots is so incredibly expensive. This goes for rental and property purchase.

Sometimes you create the scope in your life for opportunities to arise and when I left work in 2013, I set in motion a series of events which now mean I am moving to Luxembourg. For a lot of people, that three year journey might seem awfully long; for me, quite a lot of stuff got concertinad into that period so it was very short in many other respects.

Moving house at this stage of my life, after 17 years in Dublin is daunting. I have accumulated such a lot of stuff, that I glance around and thinking, you know, I must be stark raving mad to be even considering this. But against that is a feeling deep down that sometimes, being loyal to yourself is accepting the challenges that you set yourself. Moving house is a small price to pay for not regretting never taking that opportunity. It doesn’t last forever. At least when I was moving house every 2-3 years I kept a check on my possessions and of course, there was a time when I didn’t have computery stuff to lug around. Being honest with myself, I would regret not making this choice within about 6 months and I owe it to myself to do it. Plus, 15 years ago, it would have been a no brainer of a decision.

In a way, though, it was completely predictable that this would happen. I had conversations with boys I cared for where they revealed they would never leave Ireland, and a small part of me hurt to know that if I hitched my stars to them, I, too, would spend the rest of my life in Ireland bar the odd holiday. It seemed awfully limiting. And I have always known that in a way, it didn’t matter where I lived, there would always be a yarning for somewhere else. A need for something I missed from before. Of course, Lidl and Aldi have dealt with quite a few of those somethings, and couscous is now really easy to get in Tesco. It was not so in 1999. But there will always be gaps, always things I can’t get everywhere.

One of the things I have most yarned for though, is a basic lifestyle thing. The ability to walk to work. The ability to depend on public transport. Rent to have some relationship with my salary.

There are people I will miss in Dublin, in just the same way as there are people I miss in Brussels. There will be new friends in Luxembourg. There will be time developing new habits, finding somewhere to live. There will be trains to other exciting places, new things to try. I intend to learn to skate properly this winter – another bucket list item. And life will turn and change as it always does.

 

 

being me, travel

Places you should consider visiting

Probably, if I were right and being right on and stuff, this would be illustrated with photographs (like I used to do) and drawings (oh wait, that we can manage) but…

Anyway, I was planning to go to Venice on my holidays to be all artistic and drink hot chocolate in this one café I hoped I’d be able to find having not seen it in ten years but I’m sure it’s near the university when events eventuated and I wound up not going to Venice on my holidays but going to a corner of Europe most people don’t usually holiday in, not from Ireland anyway. It’s best known for a few castles, and a lot of pan European administration. I started in Brussels and ended up in Frankfurt and went to Luxembourg on the way.

However, this allowed me to knock an item off my bucket list by visiting Trier and Heidelberg. Heidelberg has a Lamy flagship store which of course should be everyone’s number one reason for going there provided everyone has the taste to like their pens, but it also has one of the all time great castles in Europe. You should go.

Trier is, as far as I know, the northernmost Roman city on the European Mainland (I’m saying this because there’s almost certainly one further north in the UK somewhere, only that less of it remains that remains of Trier. It has quite a few Roman monuments still lying around, such as the Porta Nigra which:

 

I endeavoured to draw into my marker notebook. Later I shall try to put it in my travel notebook as well along with some words.

Trier is a lovely town. It is a university city and in addition to this, it also has a cathedral which is basically an epitome of what I feel cathedrals should look like. Worth visiting. ON the downside, I missed the Roman baths, and Considine’s Basilica although that was careless as I did pass right by it at some point, lost.

To get to Trier, you’ve a couple of options:

  1. fly into Brussels and get the train. This is likely to be your cheapest option courtesy of Ryanair.
  2. fly into Frankfurt Hahn and hire a care. This may be cheaper than (1) but I don’t know as I haven’t priced it.
  3. fly into Luxembourg and get the train. This has limited availability in that unlike Brussels, there are not six flights daily between Aer Lingus and RYanair, but one five or six times a week with Luxair.
  4. Fly into Frankfurt and get the train.

Once you’ve checked out Trier, it’s not that hard to get to Heidelberg. I recommend the castle in Heidelberg and the funicular (it’s only 12E and includes the top and the bottom and all stations in between and entry into the castle. I strongly recommend the castle in Heidelberg. I gather you can walk up (but get the funicular it’s easier).

I like holidays like this. You get to do stuff and no one is trying to ram cheap holiday cocktails down your throat.