In the shadow of Mount Fuji

A new class of coffee

A journey of sorts as one waits for the train which gives just about 90 minutes to while away the time but not enough to do anything substantial.

Starbucks Coffee with a carrot cake and a blueberry muffin perhaps but the ever-friendly and helpful porter suggested the Café Royale on the 1^st floor, high ceilings, gilded gargoyles and 1830 just to tell you that it has been around for quite a while.

For location, Starbucks is a dreary, conventional template of dark colours and trendiness pretending to class, here, I get real bone china for a teacup and saucer with a silver spoon, not a mug and a wooden spatula – even the traditional does matter.

To Nippon with names

So, I collected my luggage and made for the platform, my name is sometimes mistaken for Japanese and there we were, a troop of Japanese tourists with their trunks, portmanteaus and suitcases, whatever happened to those humongous large Japanese-brand cameras, not one in sight – very strange.

The train was running late, they found out it would be 5 minutes late just 2 minutes before it arrived and then the train formation was reversed – I could not understand why an international train platform and announcement stuck to French and Flemish only – stubborn Belgian pride sometimes comes across as parochial – though I very well understood what was being said from the sound system that drowned out its original output with reverberating echoes. New station, rotten audio.

As we made for our coaches, the Japanese began genuflecting to each other, the guide as obsequious as could be sick-making, all that bowing and deference – we need to get on the train, for crying out loud.

Times have changed

You could see the hierarchies, the seniority, the juniors remaining standing until the seniors were settled, it all looked so colonial, the power-distance index showing a gulf as wide as to be unhealthy for genuine mentoring or leadership in the 21^st Century. That kind of society thrives within its own indigenous setting but one wonders about it when teleported to multicultural settings well away from home.

Then my reserved seat – a mess, just like the last time – whilst the stewardess might have been a bit miffed, it was only right for me to ask that the rubbish be cleared away just as one would expect of a table in a restaurant that was brimming with patrons.

I would suppose the Japanese are getting off at the airport having stripped Antwerp of its diamonds, well, the times of that kind of excess – the Japanese acquiring masters and valuable antiques of note – have probably gone but then this blog would be online before I find out.

Should be home in an hour, I think, as I glimpse the lives of those in whose backyard looms Mount Fuji.

Local situations in global straits

Global rates

The effects of globalisation have come to my little corner of the world. 6 years ago when I bought my place, I accepted the going fixed rate of interest on my mortgage because I felt rates would go down for the foreseeable future and they did for at least 5 years.

This November is the time for a rate reset and suddenly I wish I knew back then in 2005 that there was a possibility for a rate hike that would see one shelling out a lot more than one ever has done before – that is the credit crunch and rotten sub-prime loans in America filching my disposables. Arghhh!

Local arts

At the same time, I have attended the meeting of our house-owners association which in itself is a bureaucracy that churns out rules that makes one think it is a hostel block.

Beyond that, the entrance atrium had the Y-semaphore indicating the name of our block, but some of the residents felt it did not match up to their aspirational goals of having escaped a working-class label.

So the uppity ones banded together into an arts committee to remodel the atrium which has ended up with a dark green marble wall and plants that cannot stand the atmosphere, any wonder? – it could as well be the well-appointed entrance to a funeral home – how depressing.

Global talk

In the early times, all notices were sent out in Dutch, after a few years, we had them in English too, but imagine my surprise when the notice that ended in my mailbox also had a Japanese translation.

Translation is an inappropriate word because the English version leaves out information found in the Dutch version which states that someone on the fourteenth floor had been pouring deep-frying fat down the drains which were are all clogged up again, just over a month ago. Again? Miscreants!

All versions advise us that it is forbidden to throw fat down the drain as the native version states that translations are offered in English and Japanese to which many a nationalist might remonstrate that we all have to learn Dutch if we live in the Netherlands.

Strangely, the English version goes on the offer the tip to pour warm (not hot!) fat – in their words – in a milk carton and throw that in our communal refuse bin, nothing that the Dutch or Japanese would find useful it seems.

Local meets

A Japanese colleague at work did laugh when he read out the Japanese bit, though I thought there were a good too many pictures (kanji) for little information, I must commend the writer for bringing the Far East to the West.

I do wonder if English would now be allowed at the annual general meeting because the I last attended, my Dutch comments were applauded for their comical value than the seriousness of what I had to say – I have not be that participatory in apartment block politics just for the fact that they end up like Dutch meetings – the desire to congregate and be heard but never reach workable decisions as one stands out antagonising everything regardless of substance.