My Tajik cleaning lady

My cleaning lady Tatjana comes from Tajikistan. (see map) I got to know her via a colleague where she also works. In fact she's a doctor but she decided to leave her country. Via Germany she ended up in Belgium. I'm happy with the work she does for me: cleaning, ironing, sometimes cooking, and now and then she massages my back and muscles. She has been living here for 4 years as an illegal, but last month she decided to make herself legal and start the procedure for asylum as political refugee. That's why she now lives in an old casern (Klein Kasteltje - Petit Chateau) near the canal, where she sleeps in a room together with other candidate-refugees. She says that she has been stolen there many times: gsm, wallet, coat. Poor woman. She looks very warm and sweet, but still a bit mysterious to me. She speaks a little French, and so do I, so we can conversate a bit.

Belgium's workers are top performers

(Expatica)
What I already felt since I work here is now also stated in the 'Global Labor Force Evaluation Report' if the American research institute BERI: Belgium workers are top!
Yes, I also see it around me on my workfloor. Belgians are hard workers, but most of all they are critical in their work and not superficial at all. On top of it, they have this no-nonsense attitude, they don't nag with useless words and get to the point. They're also very good team players. That's how I like it, and that's why it's great to work here!

I'm in the Belgian "press" !!!!

Via a good wind (thanks so much to the sender) this article from "Pallieterke" came to me, and, believe it or not, it's about me!!!
Can you imagine, just weeks after my arrival in Belgium I'm already in the local press for my weblog! I guess my family would be very excited to hear this, if Pallieterke would not be an extreme right newspaper. This paper finds me a brave girl because of what I wrote (see post) about the Arab gangster and my scare when walking in Brussels.

Dear Pallieterke, please don't use me to justify your racist opinions!
And dear progressive Belgians who find it absolutely politically incorrect to mention complete facts in a story when certain ethnic groups are involved and who immediately think of racism, I just call a cat a cat. If I would tell a story about parrots on the street who constantly call me "pute" (french for "whore"), I will also use the word "parrot".

Gymnastics judging goes broke

(See Reuters)

The judging of important gymnastics tournaments has lost for me the last crumb of credibility. Yesterday at the Olympics when the jury gave the Russian gymnast Alexi Nemov a low score, the public startet to jeer and chant (some Russians were also jabbing fingers and making the cut-the-throat sign at the judges), whereupon the obliging judges corrected the marks with scores a tad higher. Can you believe this?? What made the jury do this? Realisation of a mistake, scared of the public, or shame?
I also had some doubts before when the Russian Svetlana Khorkina had such an unrealistically low score, which costed her the gold medal. The American Carly Patterson won instead.
Here's an idea for Dr. Jacques Rogge, who says he is committed to reducing the size and scale of the Olympic Games: get rid of these judged sports. All of them. Toss them.

Back from Spa-Francorchamps

My employer is involved in the Formula 1 racing, and I went to Francorchamps to prepare stuff for the upcoming race. It was a fun trip, but we stayed in a horrible hotel. It's called Pip-Margraf and it's located in St. Vith. Our secretary found it on the Internet (http://www.pip.be), and there it looked okay. When she called for reservations she asked if we could have quiet non-smoking rooms. The owner said that all rooms were non-smoking and the location of the hotel is super quiet, near the forest. Sounded great!!!! On arrival it stroke us that the hotel in reality did not correspond to the picture on the website. It's located near a busy roundabout, and no forest in sight.

Inside the hotel it was the same disappointment. Very shabby, not as the photos on the website. Our rooms were smelly and smoky. I barely didn't sleep at night. The cigarette smoke made me sick. And the street was too noisy to open the window. Even late at night there was constantly traffic, and next to the hotel there is a "friterie" which is frequented by many "Johnnies" with boom-boom- cars who eat their greasy frites in their car on the parking lot near my room with their stereo on full volume. Nightmare!!! And the food in the hotel itself was disgusting. All ingredients were soaked in butter, cream and other unidentified grease. If this is what they call (I quote the website) "high gastronomy and culinary art", well, it made me puke. Dear readers, avoid this hotel.

Myskina nude on a horse

I was back from a business trip just on time to see the two last sets of Henin vs. Myskina, for the semi-finals tennis of the Olympics. It was breathtaking, though I'm neither belgian neither Russian. Henin did a spectacular comeback in the last set, from an almost fatal 1-5 score.
Myskina was recently in the news. She filed an $8 million federal lawsuit against GQ magazine, claiming it allowed topless photographs of her to appear in a Russian magazine without her permission. The Russian tennis star said she never intended for two shots of her appearing shirtless to be published anywhere.
Two of the pictures in question:

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Click on the thumbnail to see the full sized pictures.

New colleague at work: a jerk

We have a new colleague at work. He's an external contractor, that means he's not on the payroll but has a temporary contract. Most of the contractors we have are great. They don't care about company politics, promotions and career, etc. So they don't lick asses of their superiors, and are just focussed on doing their work well. Most of them have a great sense of humour and they're really cool. They know they're in constant risk of having no income, but they have confidence in themselves that they will have sufficiently work. Me I'm an internal employee... but NOT an asslicker ;-). One day I will make the step to doing contracting work myself, but now I'm too young and I have to gain experience first.
Anyhow, this new contractor does NOT have a sense of humour, and if he has one, it's certainly wrong. On his first day he already tried to impress me by boasting about his big Mercedes with which he does 180 km/hour, about all the business schools he visited, and the prestigious companies he worked for. Poor guy. I bet that 90% of what he says is just lied. I will test him! And he doesn't only act like a dork, he also looks like a dork! Yuk!

Another evening out

You can say I had a pretty lame evening out last night. After work I went with 2 girls from work, Tessa and Maud, to The Wild Geese. This is a popular after-work drinking spot for Eurocrats, and also a meat market/pick-up place, mostly for ugly English and German women. We only had a few drinks there because we were bothered by a couple of alcohol saturated Brits, who said that they were top executives of Computer Futures (a headhunting company) and they would make us a fabulous working contract at a fabulous company. We said no thanks we already have a fabulous job, but they kept on sticking to us and staring at our tits.
So we left.

Then Tessa wanted to go to a private party of a Dutch friend of hers, so we went there. Again it was full of Euro-employees, but the dullest ones you can imagine. And they danced on stupid music. Now Tessa had her camera with her and started shooting a few, and the people got a bit more excited and went posing for the camera. Here's a photo you may like.

Bonjour Paresse - Hello Laziness

Corinne Maier wrote a very remarkable book about management and career that is now a bestseller in France. (article FT) (article New York Times)
It's called 'Bonjour Paresse' or 'Hello Laziness', and it's about people who make career by doing anything at all, but just pretending to be important and avoiding any risk. Ms Maier describes how middle managers who have no strings to pull fail to win promotion because all the senior positions in big French companies are monopolised by well-connected alumni of the elite grandes écoles, notably the énarques from the Ecole Nationale d'Administration.

Here are her 10 commandments of how to act in a company and make career:

No.1: You are a modern day slave. There is no scope for personal fulfilment. You work for your pay-check at the end of the month, full stop.

No. 2. It's pointless to try to change the system. Opposing it simply makes it stronger.

No. 3: What you do is pointless. You can be replaced from one day to the next by any cretin sitting next to you. So work as little as possible and spend time (not too much, if you can help it) cultivating your personal network so that you're untouchable when the next restructuring comes around.

No. 4: You're not judged on merit, but on whether you look and sound the part. Speak lots of leaden jargon: people will suspect you have an inside track

No. 5: Never accept a position of responsibility for any reason. You'll only have to work harder for what amounts to peanuts.

No. 6: Make a beeline for the most useless positions, (research, strategy and business development), where it is impossible to assess your 'contribution to the wealth of the firm'. Avoid 'on the ground' operational roles like the plague.

No. 7: Once you've found one of these plum jobs, never move. It is only the most exposed who get fired.

No. 8: Learn to identify kindred spirits who, like you, believe the system is absurd through discreet signs (quirks in clothing, peculiar jokes, warm smiles).

No. 9: Be nice to people on short-term contracts. They are the only people who do any real work.

No. 10: Tell yourself that the absurd ideology underpinning this corporate bullshit cannot last for ever. It will go the same way as the dialectical materialism of the communist system. The problem is knowing when...

Bush: always a fake

My God, this Bush is such a creep. Look how he's pretending to help the victims from hurricane Charley, and how he feels with them. It's all fake... he just cares about the headlines and his photo in the newspapers. Remember that his dad made himself very unpopular in Florida when hurricane Andrew struck Homestead in August 1992, in the middle of his presidential campaign against Clinton. Bush pumped most of the aid funds in the re-building of the Airforce Base, even though some military officials had been questioning its usefulness before Andrew hit. In the meantime, thousands of people whose houses were devastated, mostly poor minorities, stayed homeless for years.
Later on in that year, Bush lost in Florida, and also lost the presidency. Son George W. does not want to make the same mistake!

Damn, I missed Lou Reed......

Shit, I just learned that Lou Reed played in Leuven at Marktrock last night. How much would I have liked to see him. How come I didn't meet anybody who could inform me of this??? I think I spend my time at the wrong parties where I only meet assholes who rave about their Porsches and Ferraris, and their musical knowledge is limited to stupid dance music and Mariah Carey.
Pleazzze contact me if you know some cool places in and around Brussels!

Arab gangster caught again

To be honest: I'm scared when I walk alone in Brussels. Something I did not expect when I came here is that the city is full of arabs and africans, and the majority of them is not really nice. Arabs look at me like I'm an easy girl that they can just fuck. Africans look like they want to steal my jewelry. Freaky. I see also lots of drugdealing in metro stations, and these guys are always arabs and africans.
Now I just heard on the news that they arrested again this Nordin Ben Allal, an arab gangster that already escaped 3 times. He did several bloody holdups, and shot a couple of policemen. Good that they took him and put him back in jail, but how long will they been able to keep him? Guys like this will always escape and strike back bloodily. Maybe society would have been better off if police had shot him dead by accident....

Hello

Hello, I am Lena and I just came to live in Brussels. I used to live in Stockholm, but decided to travel a bit, stay here and there. I don't know how long I will live here. Brussels is kind of weird, I will see.