(b)logophile

Municipal elections are coming up. I’m not paying much attention, but an amusing piece of self-assured advertising pushed itself under my nose this evening. There’s a smart initiative here, issuing stickers for on your mailbox that say “No unaddressed advertising, no house-to-house newsletters” (or no to one but yes to the other). They’re nationwide and [...]

Growing up in this tiny little country must be weird. Flatmate Ella was shocked this morning to discover that Olga didn’t know Winnie the Pooh. “You know,” she said, “Winne the Pooh from the Seven-Acre Woods!”

I learnt my conversational Dutch mostly in the pub. It’s a method I recommend, for loosening up and just spontaneously sayin’ stuff, as well as for getting used to coping with background noise and non sequiturs and topic changes and all the things that make live conversation different from the examples you learn from in [...]

I had a close encounter with rockstardom last night. A bloke from De Dijk (keyboardist, according to Nikos) was at Dionysos where I went for an after-dinner dinner, and it turns out he plays baglama and bouzouki also. Hellenophiles get everywhere, it seems…