Arrival in Brussels

I am in Brussels this weekend, working as an interpreter and all-around personal assistant to a design artist from Kyoto. It's fascinating work - there is an entire universe here that I never suspected existed until my first design show. Any time you see a floral wallpaper or a paisley-strewn bed cover, someone had to actually sit down and create that image. A great many of these designs are not actually created for the company that produces the final consumer good by in-house artists, but are rather purchased from freelance designers, and fairs like this one are where the artists and the customers come together.

Here's a fascinating fact for you: To protect the carpeting during setup, the entire floor of the convention center is currently covered with huge cellophane sheets comprising sufficient surface area to keep a sandwich the size of the Empire State Building fresh.

I could eat a sandwich the size of the Empire State Building. I'm starving, and they want €10 (one billion US dollars) for a salad here.

I'll try to break away from time to time to blog my experiences here. Hopefully I'll have a less exciting trip than last year, when the hotel my boss was staying at misplaced €80,000 (one metric fuckton of dollars) worth of his prints and couldn't find them until the last day of the fair. Translating angry Japanese into polite English and angry English into polite Japanese for hours on end ranks way down at the bottom of my happiest lifetime experiences.

Edit: In response to criticism, I have made "billion" italic. Also, I've fixed a few spelling errors and added "fuckton" to my Firefox spell checker's dictionary.