Dewi Sant

It's Welsh week here in Brussels, with a series of events taking place to tie-in with (patron saint) St. David's Day yesterday. On Sunday, I attended the Welsh Society's annual St. David's Day dinner at Drifter's restaurant on Rue Archimede. I thoroughly enjoyed the leek soup, loin of lamb with laverbread in puff pastry croute, and traditional Welsh honeycake combo I selected. Guest of honour at the event was Rhodri Morgan AM, First Minister of the National Assembly for Wales (the closest thing to a Welsh Prime Minister). I was fortunate enough to be seated opposite him and found him a thoroughly personable man who seemed well-informed on a wide range of topics. Being a politician he also knew how to work the audience's buttons: his well-received speech drew on the lessons of Wales' current success on the rugby field for the nation as a whole, a guaranteed winner with a Welsh crowd.
Yesterday, I ventured down to La Tentacion, Brussels' Galician cultural centre (well it is the capital of Europe!), venue for 'Fresh from Wales', an evening of modern Welsh music and culture, including a DJ set from Acid Casuals, a speech from Stuart Cable, the ex-Stereophonics drummer, now a BBC Wales presenter, and a walkthrough of the 'Colin and Cumberland' website (built to accompany an animated series of the same name encouraging people to learn Welsh and Scots and Irish Gaelic). This latter was about as exciting as an Estonian computer systems engineer talking about Profibus. Never mind, the evening as a whole was good fun and gave a pretty accurate flavour of the diversity of Welsh culture today.