How it was in Brussels

This is the fourth time I've accompanied Mr. M, a Japanese design artist, on his visits to European trade shows. Three of those have been in Brussels, and I've always slept at the Jacques Brel youth hostel, which is very well kept and has the advantage of being just around the corner from the Hotel Bloom, where Mr. M always stays. This year, though, I found that I just don't have what it takes to brave a night in a hostel any longer.

Those of you who've been following my adventures for a while will remember that my laptop was stolen from my room last year. And so this year, I simply couldn't relax enough to sleep. Every slightest sound was enough to haul me from the brink of slumber and send my eyes darting around the room in search of a sneaking thief. After two nights of this, I was operating in a sort of haze all through the day. I felt like I was coordinating the activities of my brain and body by remote control, and I started having trouble remembering which language I was supposed to be speaking to whom. Mr. M was surely impressed at my ability to translate English into German, but it didn't help him understand much.

The third night, I vowed to ignore anything going bump in the night and simply accept the loss of anything that walked off. After all, I'd brought nothing of value with me precisely because of my experience last year. My forced change in frame of mind and sheer exhaustion combined to let me actually relax, and by ten o'clock I was drifting off into a land of poetry and...

SNNNKSKSKKKKKNNNKSKKKKSKKKNSNKSKK!!!

Holy shit! Earthquake! Car wreck! Chainsaw massacre attack! My head shot from my pillow as from a launch pad and with adrenaline surging through my veins I sought the source of this ungodly vibration. It was, I soon established, neither a natural disaster nor a man-made catastrophe. It was a gangly teenager with a snore that could blast corn from the shuck. He had the worst case of sleep apnea I've ever observed - after nearly every exhalation, he'd begin SNNNKSKKKKSNSNKSNNKKKKing air into his lungs, then stop breathing altogether for several seconds before audibly waking with a gasp.

The way I was feeling, I didn't care whether the kid stayed awake all night or just stopped breathing for the same time span, but the apnea thing was not doing it for me. I tried to get a single room for the night, but the hostel was booked full, as were all the hostels in the area. I finally decided to pay for a hotel room, and headed out at about 12:30 to find my new residence. I finally got to sleep around 2:00, but slept so deeply that I actually felt a lot better the next day.

As I mentioned in yesterday's mini-update, I've finally returned from my moderately hellish trip to Brussels and am finally feeling rested enough to give a coherent account of my experiences there.

I couldn't afford to stay in a hotel the whole trip, but fortunately a friend a fellow interpreter offered a place on her floor for my last two nights. That really saved my trip (thanks again, Y-chan, if you're reading!), and resulted in a fairly excellent photograph when I found a very... interesting hat in a corner of Y's apartment. (Photograph removed after I realized it was the first thing showing up when you google image search me. Me with a rubber boob on my head isn't the first impression I want to give people.)

As if sleep deprivation weren't hellish enough, business was awful for the second year in a row, and Mr. M seemed to be bent on taking his frustrations out on me in the form of indirect criticism. Without getting into the whole "he said, I said" exchange here, let me just say that if you do not believe in the value of academic knowledge, you shouldn't hire an academic, pay him for using knowledge he gathered in study, and then criticize as useless the way he's invested his time.

Grr.

Finally, though, Friday came, and the fair ended. It turns out that one advantage of being a stupid, foreign academic instead of an entrepreneur who understands the true soul of Japan is that even when no one wants to buy the entrepreneur's art, the academic still gets paid. I now have about half the money I'll need to buy a new digital piano, and hopefully I'll be able to spare enough from my first paycheck to cover the rest. And so long after I've forgotten the frustrations of the last week, I'll be able to make beautiful music with the fruits of my labor.