Back to the Grindstone

The pint of beer costume didn't work out. This was for several reasons - firstly I had to go straight from work to the shop to buy the materials, and secondly I had to meet ATS on the way. The first part of this plan was easy, the second was less so. ATS is as much of a great guy as he is a useless guy. He forgot to show up. We went dressed as plants instead, which was difficult but well worth the effort - delicate operations involving brown wallpaper, sticky tape and pieces of tree stolen during a night-time raid into the university gardens down the road armed with a pre-mixed bottle of vodka-lemonade and a pair of scissors. Being a pushover as I am, I was talked into going clubbing after the party, got to bed at 5am and felt pretty out of it at work the next day. Saturday I woke up feeling better, played football, went and got trashed once again at Momo's leaving party and felt out of it the next day. This morning, once again, I've woken up feeling better and I intend to keep myself feeling that way for a while at least.

Momo is going back to his home town of Marseille this weekend - that's how things go here. Friends come and friends go, but we're usually good at keeping in touch and I have no doubt that it's not the last I'll see of him.

As for me, I'm getting closer to the date - I'm leaving for Helsinki on April 1st with a typical poor student over-complicated route which serves the purpose of saving a little bit of money. I'll be leaving Brussels at 5.30am on the train and with stopovers in Luxembourg, Frankfurt-Hahn airport (which is nowhere near Frankfurt) and Tampere, I'll arrive knackered in Helsinki about 13 hours after leaving. I usually travel this way, even though the money I save on the cheaper air fare usually goes out the window again on overpriced airport sandwiches and bottles of coke and, quite honestly, I don't really know why I do it. For the fun I suppose.

Moving back to Helsinki will be accompanied with a shifting of focus from that side of things as well - whereas whenever I get into money in Brussels I'm looking at airlines flying for cheap out of here, my eyes in Helsinki are looking more at maps of Russia and Eastern Europe. I've wanted to go to Moldova and Belarus for quite a while and hopefully I'll make it this year before running away to Africa at some point in 2009. Either way, it's been on my mind a lot recently. Sitting in an office is probably more comfortable physically than burning yourself on oven dishes working in tapas bars but throughout this job (my first ever office job) I've been thinking to myself - surely there's another way to live than this ? Everyone seems to aspire to it, to get their feet on the ladder with the aim of going up. I aspire away from it, but I haven't really managed to work out how to get out of the rat race before I'm sucked in and it's too late to escape. All of the ideas have gone through my mind - take up freelance photography, journalism, travel writing, development projects around the world, opening a bar or a campsite somewhere, but it seems that everyone with my best intentions at heart is telling me to get something good on my CV, get a serious job and be happy with my 3 weeks of holiday a year so that I can get off to the Costa del Sol and get bored stupid on a beach. It's pushing me to try harder to prove them all wrong but I'm also setting myself up for a harder fall if it goes wrong.

At least here's one advantage of being next to the 6-lane road in a moderately sized European city - you haven't fallen yet, your life is in front of you and you're going to give it a damn good crack, and you're all invited to my bar in suburban Kinshasa for free beer on the opening night ! A good dream to take back to the office tomorrow.....