Fuckin' Belgium

So. It's happened. And in fairness to Belgium, it's taken a long time for it to happen. When I moved to Florence I was a furious wreck within hours; Paris took a couple of months at most, and it's taken more than half a year here for the rage to set in, that is, for me to say to myself "fuckin' Belgium."

As always in these cases, it feels like there was a series of triggers setting off big annoyance shots at the same time, like going to Germany and realizing I liked the food and beer better there or realizing what a pain in the ass it's going to be for me to get a residency card despite my European citizenship or the successive ineptitude of TWO Belgian banks in terms of setting up a simple current account. But the one that got to me worst was being told about the Dutroux case, because its implications of deep and dangerous legal and political corruption made me feel like I was living in Calabria, but instead of having parasitic murdering thugs at the top of the socio-political pile there're parasitic murdering thugs who're also the sort of perverts you feel an instinct to kill for the protection of the human race. Also the weather here is exponentially shittier than in Calabria.

Then of course there's the issue that democracy has ceased to function here, following on issues of nationalism, unfair tax distribution, and deeply flawed bilingualism that makes the sometimes acrimonious relationship between Québec and the other Canadian provinces look like the relationship between God and Her nicer angels. Belgium is not bilingual in the sense that much of Canada is bilingual. The French don't learn Dutch, and vice versa though less so. You cross a regional border in a fuckin' train and suddenly the train announcements are only in Dutch or only in French. So they can be that culturally separate from each other on an official level, but when enough people vote for a party promoting greater regional autonomy on the political and fiscal level suddenly the government grinds to a fuckin' halt and the king has to step in. The fuckin' king and the old prime minister who nobody fuckin' voted for.

Oh, their political shit pisses me off. People are still dying in the Congo and Rwanda because of this fuckin' country and they can't even sort out how to institutionalize how little they want to be a country. Fuckin' Belgians.

I could go on about fiscal issues, particularly how it seems here as though the taxation system has been set up to keep poor people in their place or about how publicly funded civil projects can take years and years to complete whilst paralyzing the local economy because the contracts are all crooked or about how when you drive into the country from Luxembourg or the Netherlands you don't have to look at the signs to tell when you've crossed the border - suddenly your ass is being jounced off you by the potholes - but there's another thing that's pissing me off right now: these stupid fucks don't know how to drive. I can't count the times I've nearly been hit by some moron whilst walking across a zebra crossing or intersection where he or she is running a red light. It's just like Italy except, once more, the weather is a lot shittier. And they don't look as good while they do it.

Speaking of stupid fucks: for the last few days it's been below freezing here, which isn't so bad - I like it because it keeps the weather clear and the sun out; no precipitation, which is a fucking mercy in this goddamn puddle of a country. So you'd think, no precipitation, no icy pavements; right? Fuckin' wrong. Shopkeepers - not just a few, a lot - are in the habit of washing off the pavements in front of their shops because Belgians are incapable of cleaning up their dogs' shit. Okay, fine, I'm used to that; Europeans in general don't appreciate that it's fuckin' grosser to leave their dogs' shit all over the place than to bring some plastic bags when you take them for a walk, and pick it up. Whatever. I don't want to pick up shit in a bag either, which is why I don't have a fuckin' dog.

So anyways; shopkeepers are in the habit of washing off the pavement in front of their shops, and just because the temperature has dropped below zero doesn't mean they're going to stop, right? So despite not a drop a precipitation falling since the temperature fell, about a tenth of the pavements in the commercial districts are covered with a fine patina of slippery, unsalted ice during the mania of the Christmas shopping season. The fuckin' morons.