Belgium - 2

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…

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.

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.

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!

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.

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!»

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 127^th Foire du Midi officially opened last night.

More importantly though, pity us poor IT sods who still have to take a bunch of manual steps to prepare systems for the coming new financial year. Woe unto us.

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.

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.

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.

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 25^th 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…

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.

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.

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.