agreed, once I start, I can't stop without going on for a very long time

my wife is actually very pleased with that trait though

^^ lol @ jurg, well said.

and thanks for the "brief" overview. i read it all, and am now better informed.

the reason i asked about belgium was because a friend of mine went to visit some inlaws in paris. they took him to belgium, because he wanted to see some of the ww2 history up there, as well as drink great beer. they booked a place, but it was in northern belgium. on the way to the hotel, the inlaws told him, ummmm, hey, you have to be the one to talk to the hotel when we sign in, and they will love you. if we talk when we sign in, they will hear us speaking french, and assume we are southern belgians, and then it could get ugly.

so he did the talking in american english, the hotel people loved him, the french inlaws never said a word, and everything worked out just fine.

made me wonder wtf was going on in the country for that story to be true.

well I would say that the hostilities are not that general (yet). We are far from a civil war, don't worry :P. You will find most hostility around Brussels because that's where the 2 regions border and that's where the Dutch speaking people are fed up with the French arrogance of refusing to speak dutch.

I don't know where you stayed but maybe you went to the very north of the country where not everyone is bi/trilingual (most Dutch speaking people speak also French and English, ze French people...well..speak French). There they can also look funny at you when you only speak French.

So I tried to be neutral in presenting the Belgian situation but I know it was a bit biased because of where I live (I live near Brussels so I am faced with these problems everyday).

It's not my place to say maybe but if I look at it from the French speaking perspective: they are a bit afraid of the changes. They think we want to split the country because we want to regionalize a lot of stuff. But that's mainly because there simply are two opinions on how to handle immigration, justice, unemployment policies etc. If one person wants to go left and one badly wants to go right, going straight ahead gets you nowhere. There is no reason to split Belgium unless both sides refuse to give in like they are doing now.


So the south thinks we want to abandon all solidarity with them because we want all those cutbacks and government reforms. Their politicians make them scared about all this but actually in the long run both regions would benefit from a healthy and efficient government. It's not that the northern money is infinite so we want to keep solidarity and continue money transfers but there needs to be an improvement in efficiency for it to be sustainable.

Oh god, I did it again

I badly need a topic switch

you have yet to answer the questions as to whether the north or south makes better waffles, beer, or chocolate.

northern belgium people speak flemish. which is dutch but sometimes hardly understandable.
same goes for the southern wallonian people. they don't speaking 'normal' french.

Is it that hard to have 2 languages in the same country huh ?

Your perspective is kina Northern oriented Jurgen ;-)

Brussel waffles are the best (Bilingual region so 50 50)

Best chocolate is made and sold in Bruges (North). Brussels has some good chocolatiers too.

Most importantly: Belgian Beer is mainly brewed in the North . Imho, best Belgian Beers are from the north (Deus, Stouterik, Duvel, Taras Bulba, Westvleteren, Achel, etc) but I am going to be honest and say the south has some great beers (Chimay, Orval) too

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InBev

Interbrew Ambev is the largest beer producer in the world. Interbrew (the Belgian part of this multinational) is located mainly in the Northern region with some breweries in the south too.

I know I am biased olk, it's almost inevitable to be when you live in Belgium.

2 languages in one country is not a problem by definition. We have lived together for almost 2 centuries now without too many problems (well the French minority has always oppressed the Northern majority, especially until 1970 or so, simply because the noble class/bourgeosie in Belgium was pure French speaking and "ruled" the country with an iron fist)

The 2 languages in one country was not a problem as long as there was enough money to be spilled and every compromise was bought with money from the North. Now things will have to be reformed for the better and there is no money left to polish up the agreement. The French speaking people are used to get their way or get some extra money if they say no long enough. Now, this is over and they can't sell it to their voters (yet).

Historically Belgium has been created artificially to keep the entire Western European region stable in a way. It was a very rich , economically important region. Many wars have been fought here and most medieval/ancient superpowers have conquered it or tried to (spanish, french,dutch etc).

So in the 19th century every western nation in the region had their eyes on us but also , no country wanted another country to control our regions. So the best solution seemed to be to form a seperate state (we had our indepence war and all but read wiki I guess if you want to know all the details). In a way, we served as a meat shield between germany, france, holland and UK.

So they created an unstable country on purpose (or at least they allowed it). They knew we would always be busy with our internal discussions. Also we are only 11 million people so we would never become a big player. But again, we served as buffer in the region (I think we were officially a neutral country like Switzerland until WW I or WW II)

* presses post and hopes that there aren't 7 new posts where I can't help myself from replying to*

PHEW!

Anheuser-Busch is part of InBev.