Christmas shopping season begins

Oh, those horrible hordes of Christmas shoppers! I eluded the masses by taking my usual route down the side streets, but every time I go shopping it's inevitable that I must deal with bumping into people I know (at least one person), and having to deal with buskers on a repeated basis. At this time of year, it's also the season for heathens who feel that their malingering derived, tax-payer funded, minimum wage salary is so low that it's better to sit on the street with their five dogs begging for money abusively (I'm not bitter or anything, really). This weekend was no exception.

The acquaintance was the Merchandising Manager at work - he looks a lot like Robbie Coltrane, so he wasn't hard to miss.

The buskers were actually clones this time around. For some odd reason, I came across three simultaneous performances of guys dressed up as Indians, dancing and badly miming to some loud distorted music they were conveniently flogging off on CDs at the same time. To help share this moment with you, I grabbed a blurry camera phone photo as I walked past of the second group doing their thing in front of La Monnaie.

The heathens were the typical punks that hang around outside the front of Connections on Rue du Midi.

My initial target this weekend was, unfortunately, MediaMarkt, the evil German chain that are taking over the world slowly, combining cheap prices on name-brands with possibly the worst customer service in Belgium. My local MediaMarkt is one of these store-in-store things (sorry, "concepts" as the marketing popsies say), living inside Inno.

This store-in-store thing is getting ridiculous now, since Apple have a contract to have a store-in-store thing inside MediaMarkt.

For those that don't already know, MediaMarkt is particularly evil because of how they sell DVD's. Basically, MediaMarkt have a bunch of cheapo publishers that purchase rights to cut DVDs of common movies using low quality prints, most often with subtitles on the video frame (so you can't turn them off). They then print dirt cheap DVDs without menus, or at least with very shonky menus. I'm always very cautious when buying from them because of it.

So anyway, I was heading there to poke around for toys to give people and to finally buy a Siemens M34 USB, since they're on sale for dirt cheap at the moment. The ultimate goal is that I'll be able to use VoIP software rather than continue paying for a landline; More on that later.

The problem with places like MediaMarkt is that they have a giant wall with DVDs. This is a problem when you're a bit of a hobbyist collector of these things. I walked away from there with a pile of them, one of them being first season of Deadwood, which isn't too bad after-all.

I couldn't help myself but also buy Batman. The movie will forever remind me of my father's birthday in 1989. My mother bought tickets for our family to go and see the film as a part of my Dad's birthday present. A few days before we went, we had a new front door installed with one of those deadlocks that only allow a key to be inserted on one side of the lock at a time. Needless to say, one of the new keys to the lock was left in the back of the door. After we returned late that night from Village or Hoyts, we found ourselves locked out. Entirely inspired by the film, my father decided it was a great idea to climb up on the roof, remove some tiles, and break in through the ceiling manhole in the laundry. Lacking the finesse of Batman, this stunt took a very, very long time to perform.

Christmas is looming, and le shopping is further limited by Brussels' restrictive attitude to opening hours for retailers. Being unable to shop on Sundays, nor after 7pm makes it difficult for us non-heathens. Personally, I wish people would be satisfied with a delayed Christmas, so presents could be bought during the soldes d'hiver (winter sales) in January!