Excuse me??

Maybe I'm just being a snob, but it bothered me while we were shopping in Belgium during our trip. And it didn't just happen once, it happened 3 times.
Imagine that you try on some clothes in the dressing room of a clothes shop, but they don't fit or you don't like them. What do you do with the clothes when you leave the dressing room?
Well, in 3 different shops during our stay in Belgium we were asked by one of the girls who were working there: 'Could you please put it back where you took it?'.
My mouth fell open in disbelief.
Now tell me, am I being a snob and does this sound normal to you?


On another ocasion, I was about to make a picture in a shopping mall, when all of a sudden a security guard comes running to me, saying: 'sir, sir! You can't make pictures here!'
Can they forbid you to take pictures in the passage of a shopping mall?

We're home again!

Hello again.
We're back home, in Spain. We arrived on Tuesday evening after a very long and tiring trip: an hour and a half to get to the airport in Belgium, 2 hours on the plane, and 3 hours by car again to get home.
It was a good idea to take an extra day off yesterday to rest a little. But today I'm back at work.

Our trip to Belgium was great. The weather got better the day after we arrived, and we had sun and temperatures above 20ºC/68F almost every day.
Our family and friends were all fine, and it was great to see them again after 6 months.
My 2 year old niece Morgane was the star of the week. We had a blast with her. She's absolutely adorable.
My friends all came together for a nice dinner on Saturday night, and after dinner we went out like old times. The biggest news was that my friends Tom and Louisa are expecting a baby.
We visited Brussels together with my parents. But they don't have enough patience for these kind of trips. We saw all of Brussels in about 3 hours. After the trip it felt like we had seen nothing at all.
The communion party of my nephew was fine, but spending five hours eating gets a little boring. They should have organised it a little differently.
Of course we spent a day shopping as well and we even went to club Versuz on Thursday night.
So you can understand that those five days flew by extremely fast, and that we had to plan and calculate to be able to do everything we wanted to do.
But now it's back to reality. Even Mónica is having her first day at her new job today. I'm already curious to know how that worked out.

More pics here

Off to Belgium

Well, this is my last working day of the week. Tomorrow morning, Mónica and I will be traveling to Valladolid, where we will be taking a plane to Belgium in the afternoon. We are going to visit my family and friends in Belgium again, like we try to do every 6 months.
My parents and sisters will be glad to see me again, and we are very curious to see the nephews and niece again. The last time we went, our little niece Morgane couldn't talk yet. Now apparently she doesn't shut up. And she has been practicing with pictures of us to know and say our names. We will also be attending our little nephew's communion party.


I plan to make many pictures and videos, and maybe I will share some with you guys and girls.
So until next Wednesday it will be a little quiet around here. But I will be back with fresh courage and stories. Until then and have a nice week.

Pump it up!

Do you know the arcade machine in the picture? It's an Exceed or 'Pump it up' machine. According to the official website, they can only be found in Spain, Taiwan, Korea, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina and the USA.
Before a few weeks, I had never seen one in my life. Until it suddenly showed up in the arcade hall in the local mall. It was standing alone in a corner, flashing its lights and playing jingles to attract potential gamers.
Two weeks ago, when we entered the mall, we suddenly saw a huge crowd at the entrance of the arcade hall. As curiosity is my middle name, I persuaded Mónica to go with me and check out what was going on. We found out that they were all looking, staring in disbelief was more like it, at 2 youngsters on the machine.


Exceed is a dance simulation game, which consists of a projection screen and a dancefloor with 5 pressure sensitive panels. As the music starts, the symbols that are also on the panels of the dancefloor begin to move up the screen with the music. The player has to step on the corresponding panel on the dance floor as each symbol reaches the top of the screen. That way, the player is sort of dancing to the music.
Sounds easy, doesn't it? Well, it looks impossible, I can tell you. Especially when you see those kids, dancing and jumping to the music at a speed so fast that I couldn't even follow the symbols on the screen. People were looking with open mouths at the spectacle.

So I started wondering where these professionals suddenly came from, as I never had seen anybody dancing on the machine before. That's when I started investigating, and found out there is going to be an exceed tournament at the same mall on the first of may. So apparently, they were practicing for the tournament.
Further investigation led me to the official site of the Spanish 'pump it up' community. Apparently there has been already a tournament at our mall in february, and when I looked at the pictures of the event, there they were, the same youngsters.
If we don't forget about the event, we sure will go check it out. And I'm going to take my video camera, because you are not going to believe your eyes when you see what these kids are capable of.

Counting the days

Blogger has been acting strange again the last few days, so I wasn't able to post when I wanted to.
Anyway, we got some great news.
Mónica was supposed to start at her new job yesterday. We had been talking about the fact that she wouldn't be able to go to Belgium with me next week. I knew she could use a break as well, and that she would love to see the little rascals of the family again.
So she decided to be brave and mention to her boss the fact that we had planned a trip. He took it quite well, and said that there was no hurry. If she wanted to, she could start working the day we got back.
So she will be going with me after all. It's better this way.

Due to the bad weather we ended up in the shopping mall again this weekend, buying presents and clothing for those same little rascals. And then we decided to go out and celebrate the fact that Mónica found a job.
So we ended up dancing in our favourite bar 'Bulevar' in Gijon and in a beautiful bar we discovered some time ago, Buddha (see picture), until 4 in the morning.


It had been months since we went dancing. When it's that cold at night, we just don't feel like it.
On Sunday we went to have lunch with Mónica's parents, and cleaned the apartment afterwards.
I'm counting the days until next Wednesday. I really need a vacation.

Spain's worst shame

Spanish security and social experts have expressed great concern over the surge in incidents of domestic violence after 13 Spanish women lost their lives in the first quarter of 2005 in domestic violence incidents.

In 2004, 60.000 women lodged complaints against their husbands or partners.
Spanish authorities say the figure is much higher, given the number of women who suffered various forms of domestic mistreatment but never complained officially. Thousands reportedly stay in abusive relationships because, they say, there is nowhere else to go.

Further worse, 72 women were also killed, including 67 by their husbands or ex-husbands in 2004, according to the statistics released by the Spanish Observatory on violence against women.
They also revealed that 170 women were killed out of domestic violence during the last three years. Feminist groups, however, put the number of victims at 350.

Feminist groups blamed Spanish authorities for dealing with the complaints less seriously than they ought to. They regret the authorities hear from the mistreated women without writing down their complaints.

The government of Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero has pressed for a number of measures to deter domestic violence since coming to power in March last year.
The measures include allotting 200 policemen and 250 Civil Guard members to intervene immediately to save women facing threats by their husbands, ex-husbands or partners.
Abused women now get financial compensation, and could call a government-run hot line to deliver their complaints.
Zapatero recently described Spain's domestic violence record as the country’s "worst shame" and an "unacceptable evil".

Boredom

I'm a little bored on the job.
There is very little new work coming in lately, so I'm taking it easy on the work I still have assigned to me. A little trick everybody on my team is applying these days.
We don't want to get in the situation where we have no work at all and nothing new is coming in.

So what does a person do all day when he is bored? That's right, surf the web.
I see a lot of strange, great and funny things on the internet in a day. You should see the list of favorites I have gathered in a year.
To avoid this growing list of senseless links but still be able to recall some things I've seen, I decided to place some links here.
It may be just a temporary thing, because I created it out of boredom. But as long as it lasts, whenever YOU are bored, you could check out some strange things I've seen.

A special day

We had some great news today.
Mónica has been offered a job at last. She had done a job interview last week, and the recruiter had said that the people who would get selected for the job would receive a call on Friday. Last Friday. But on Friday nobody called, so Mónica was a little sad all weekend.
Today they finally called. I had told her they were still going to call, but she was convinced they weren't.
She has to go sign her contract and meet her colleagues tomorrow.
She will be selling and making radio advertisements for a national radio channel.

The bad side of the news is that this probably means that I will have to go alone to Belgium at the end of the month, when I will go visit my family. For one week it will be like old times again, me living in Belgium and her living in Spain. Calling, chatting, webcamming and missing each other. She would miss seeing my nephews, I'm sure. And I will be bored most of the time.

Just a thought

Won't it be strange when another pope will be elected?
I've only known one pope in my life.
Now 'the pope' is going to be another guy.
I wonder if this is going to change the Vatican's vision on some important worldly themes, like anti-conception.

Dad's sending pictures

My dad always tries to act as if he knows as much about computers as I do.
He even sends me links that he thinks I might find interesting.
So I giggle when he sends me a link, tells me he discovered a nice program I should try, and I find out he is talking about 'ad-aware'.

Recently he bought a digital camera. Today I finally got the mail I had been expecting since a few weeks.
Apparently he's trying to send me 900 KB pictures, and he's wondering why it is taking so long and why they are not getting through. He will try sending them one by one.
So how do you explain your old man he should resize those pictures before sending them.
I started Googling and I found the ideal program. I tried it out and it is the easiest thing I've ever seen, resizing images with just one click. Check it out: photogadget


Today at 18:00 European time, a new Belgian Groupblog will open its doors. Some 20 bloggers will try to make a difference in the Belgian blogworld. I've been asked by the creators to join in and be their reporter in Spain. Belgian newspapers and radio stations have already mentioned the blog, so if you understand any dutch, check it out, starting this afternoon: www.struikgewas.be