Sunday, December 30, 2007

Telecom Hell Belgian-style

There are many good things about Belgium: apart from the obvious chocolate and beer, there are the bakeries with the best patisserie I've ever tasted with more variations on the nut/chocolate/pastry/sponge combo than I've ever seen anywhere else; small hills - important on a bicycle - although I've never actually been on a bicycle in Belgium; comfortable cinemas that show movies in three languages; yummy boutiques with gorgeous clothes and jewellery and accessories; delicious restaurants of every foodie persuasion; teenagers whose idea of assault is trying to sell you marzipan in the street as opposed to mugging you for your mobile. But no-one, not even a Belgian, could say that their newly competitive formerly public sector utilities are anything but supremely incompetent.

I will not go into the tedious details of my Kafkaesque experiences with phone and internet connections over the past three weeks, but for anyone bothering to surf their holidays away in this direction, this is a quick heads up that blogging in this vicinity is severely limited by lack of access, but normal service should resume come Feb...and in the meantime can anyone explain to me why it is acceptable to 2 telecoms operators that our phone answers to a phone number that officially belongs to a Swiss insurance company? No? I thought not.

In the meantime, The Lives of Others was definitely the best movie of 2008. Definitely.

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