Articles
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A day in the life…
At the risk of seeming a bit like Seven Up!, I thought I'd have another crack at this day in the life stuff. After last year's effort, I was curious to see what had changed.
Apparently, not much!
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Christmas lights in Brussels
I couldn't possibly have a Christmas without my Mother asking for pictures of Christmas lights in Brussels. Not much has changed since last year, although this year's lights on the Grand Place are even more tacky…
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Agorafolly
One week ago I was awoken earlier than usual by the sound of what I initially thought was a chainsaw. This being somewhat odd and inexplicable, I made the effort to get out of bed and take a peek. It seemed workers had arrived to shut down the fountain and, from what I could tell at the time, they were starting to encase it in wood.
Being a little too weird and therefore difficult to comprehend at the extremely unsociable hour of 7:30am, I went to vegetate under the shower and wake up. Once outside, I still failed to comprehend what exactly was going on here.
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Benespection
☥Another busy month has passed by, and it's not long before the year has passed by completely. It does seem that 2007 is flying past and it's starting to really irritate me as I cannot find any major personal accomplishment this year. There are accomplishments there, but nothing spectacular.
Lately I've watched everyone around me fall ill as we move into Autumn and finally succumbed to a particularly nasty cold about a week and a half ago that's done a fantastic job of drowning my brain-cells in snot. I still managed to take photos of a few things however, and I thought that I should once again wrap up the month using my invented word.
Life rolls on…
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Benespection
☯Lately I realise my life is amazingly out of balance. I'm now forced to play catch-up with everything going on around me, not only at work but in my personal life; Everything's out of kilter, and this is why I haven't had time to return phone calls, answer emails, scratch that bloody mozzie bite on the side of my arm, or write blog entries.
I've started to write about several things, but they've never really gotten anywhere beyond simple statements. As most of these are inspired by something I've seen, I thought that the best way to deal with them was to sporadically compile a little post that was somewhat closer to a photo-blog. In a moment of weakness, I unfortunately invented a little word for this; Apologies in advance.
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Festival weekend
Over the weekend just passed, the Brussels Summer Festival (formerly known as Euritmix) wound up the last big batch of their 280 free concerts being performed through-out the city. Me being me, I missed out on most of it, but I couldn't possibly miss the action when it arrived on my doorstep!The weekend was probably the busiest weekend I've had in a long time, with many errands to run and much out-of-pattern spending to be done, and yet I still managed to spend a lot of time watching bands from my window ledge. For my own future reference, I thought I should jot down some notes about these unknown bands, which is represented by this post.
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Summer in the city
As I try to refrain from The Lovin' Spoonful references, I have to say that lately I've been feeling more and more at home living in the city. I love summer in Brussels, because all the plebs that live outside the pentagon bugger off on their holidays and the city centre turns into one amazingly friendly village (so long as you ignore the tourists).Brussels also comes alive in a certain indefinable magic way, not only because it has it's own beach on the canal, or the arrival of the carnies at the medieval city gate in the south, but because of a fantastic summer festival.
This year, the festival has come to my doorstep!
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The last mile
Anybody else have problems with phones or Internet within the nineteen-communes today?Around 4am this morning, Belgacom suffered a major outage that impinged upon everything in the Brussels area including phones, Internet connections, business data circuits, EFT networks, and even Belgacom's own mobile phone network, Proximus.
By mid-morning, Proximus, most land lines and EFT networks were available again, but related problems continued between networks such as Mobistar and BASE. A significant number of business services are still unavailable across Brussels, and should only be restored over the weekend.
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Malignant society
My usual metro this morning from De Brouckère was late, which in itself isn't unusual. Despite being «La Grande Vacances», a late metro still converts the locals into pig-headed selfish morons, unable to understand that forcing themselves through a small doorway with twenty alighting passengers is not only impolite but incurs further delays for everyone.One particular woman and her son did just this, blissfully ignorant to the obvious fact that once everyone had left the carriage there was plenty of room to embark. They hogged the open doorway arrogantly, refusing to move to let other passengers pass easily. So far this could describe any morning's journey to work, and most days I'm simply amused (or bemused) by the sheer aberrations being played out before me.
Upon arrival at the next stop, Gare Centrale, this woman's son, who must have been no more than 8-years old and no less than 6, started screaming painfully; «Maman, maman, mon bras! Il blesse! Il blesse!»
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L'été et la Foire du Midi
According to the InBev marketing department, it's barbie-season. Fantastic news, but I'm still not going to drink their crappy Jupiler grog. Or Stella for that matter. Click on the ad for a look, since it's a some-what clever adaptation of the Jupiler logo.I was starting to believe we'd had summer in place of spring and it was now autumn, but sure enough though summer has finally arrived this weekend. Perfect timing, as the 127th Foire du Midi officially opened last night.
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Walibi's Vertigo
Walibi have spent a fortune on advertising over the past week, keenly promoting themselves by way of their new Walibi Heroes campaign. Essentially the idea is that you rock up to the park, buy lots of crappy merchandise, ride on a bunch of prescribed rides to collect little stamps in your “hero portfolio” in order to become hero of the day, month, or year. Ultimately, this all depends on how many of your friends you can convince to vote for you pretending to be a statue of yourself within the park.I did not return to Walibi for this reason, but rather to finally experience the first-of-its-kind Vertigo, which has suffered various set-backs for the past 18 months. The ride finally opened while I was in Greenville, so obviously I had to check this thing out.
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Home
Yesterday I completed my quick tour of duty in the USA. I must say, it's good to be back in the city of Belgium, here in Eastern Europe. Well, close enough anyway, right?Seriously though, I honestly have the feeling that I've been isolated from the world. Despite what they think over there, the concept of World News doesn't really exist in the USA, so I didn't know about the murders in the Marolles, nor the bikie violence in Melbourne. I've been under a rock, and yet the rest of the world heard about the firefighters who died in Charleston.
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Cyclocity
In May 2005, JCDecaux launched Vélo'v, an award winning automated bicycle rental system in Lyon. The concept was simple: One simply picks up a bike from one of the automated stations (or bike ranks), and then once they're done they return it to any station they wish.The project was a success, and now boasts over 2,000 bikes available in Lyon available at more than 175 bike ranks. Cyclocity is now available in Vienna, Córdoba, Gijón, and finally Brussels (Cyclocity) last year. There are plans for expansion into several other European countries (Paris comes on-line in mid-July), but also plans as far as Australia! Such a system would work perfectly in Melbourne.
Brussels is now being used to demonstrate this environmentally friendly transportation alternative to other cities, using it to supplement existing public transport with strategic locations for bike ranks initially within the pentagon (city centre).
John's marathon effort last week has made me feel guilty, so I thought I'd give it a try.
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20km of Brussels
Today was the Brussels 20km (half) marathon. I didn't participate because I was busy doing battle with an Emsen, wielding only a Fixa (bloody Swedes), but a mate of mine did run today.John: my congratulations on the achievement! I feel sufficiently like a fat-bastard now, possibly even enough to encourage me to get fit for next year's run on May 25th 2008. Maybe even the ING Brussels Marathon, since it's basically a choice between a 5km, 20km or 40km run back to my apartment. Hmm…
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Bruxelles-Propreté et la confusion aux verre
Meet Louis: Ordinarily he works for Bruxelles-Propreté, the garbos here in Brussels. Louis is an incredibly busy man since he started his second job with Nintendo as the half-brother of Mario. Unfortunately, this has left Louis little time to properly communicate with plebeians with regard to how garbage should be handled.Lately, Louis and his team of public relations boffins have decided to attempt rectification of their past communications that disappeared silently — They have attempted to convey to the great-unwashed how glass should be recycled. In order to tailor the message to the masses, they've decided it's a good idea to treat everyone like children.
Continue reading "Bruxelles-Propreté et la confusion aux verre"...
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Belgian Politics
Belgian politics is amusing for outsiders, which probably helps explain why most Belgians are not particularly open about their political views.Floating around lately is this, the NEE party («nee» is “no” in Dutch). NEE aims to provide voters in the up-coming general election a the choice to not vote for any of the candidates, as opposed to a blank vote which still essentially gives votes to all parties.
As a concept this really isn't too bad, since a vote for NEE would steal votes from parties you didn't really want to vote for but had no choice — overcoming the lesser evil principle. NEE's principal, Tania Deveaux, is offering 40,000 blow-jobs as a publicity stunt which has lately pushed the group into the international spot-light.
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Walibi's Follies
One month after Walibi started its 2007 season, and it seems the park continues to struggle. Rides are still failing, despite another busy day within the park during some stunning record breaking weather.
Thinking of visiting Walibi? Perhaps save yourself the disappointment and wait until July, presumably when all the problems are solved. My visit today left me feeling empty and has, as you can see, left a rather bitter taste in my mouth about this season.
Last time I wrote about Walibi, I detailed that the Vertigo was still unfinished, and the Turbine was still in disrepair. Unfortunately, not much has changed since then.
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Walibi woes continue
After being dragged back to Walibi after only one week, it's turned out the park still has many early-season problems. The park itself has been heavily criticised in the media over the past week, including a scathing report on the Belga news-wire, «Walibi a vu du monde, mais a connu quelques soucis».
The short of the article is this: While Walibi's opening patronage was higher than the previous season (10,500 people), many attractions were closed for “temporary” reasons. Some of the rides were particularly rough on the opening Saturday, and technical staff worked overnight to help fix the problems. This may go some way to explaining why some rides did not open until the afternoon of the second day of the season.
The article goes on to state that the park management have invested €4m with special attention paid to increasing capacity of the existing rides, which is indeed visible in many places, but it looks like some rides have been somewhat neglected.
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Walibi's back!
How could I write an article about my rollercoasterholicism without returning to Walibi on the first weekend of the 2007 season? Well, as it turns out, I couldn't possibly do such a thing, so I went today.The interesting thing about Walibi is that the start of the season is always quite dreadful. Last year I arrived on the very first day only to find a messy park full of jerky rides and incompetent staff. I'm happy to say many of these problems were solved during this opening weekend, but perhaps not quite in the way I would have preferred.
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Lunar eclipse
I love events such as lunar eclipses. They tend to remind me how small I am compared to the size of the universe. It's amazing how something so simple can be so impressive.This is the second lunar eclipse I've managed to witness, and the beautiful colour of the moon is something that will also still continue to impress me. Unfortunately the photo shown here isn't very good, but it's the best I could do with my little digital camera (along with some cropping and noise cleaning in GIMP, but otherwise no other alterations). This photo was taken around half-past midnight this morning.
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