I’m staying at the Best Western Belfort Hotel in downtown Kortrijk, Belgium. It’s red-brick buildings on the right of the picture with the sidewalk cafe in front. The hotel has high-speed wireless, but until tonight it has been very sporadic and not very useful. Something seems to be a little different tonight. The connection is staying up and is reasonably responsive. The hotel is nearly full as well. For the first time I can hear people above me and to the right of me. Tomorrow is a holiday in Belgium — called National Day — celebrating the 175th year of Belgian independence. I’ll finish up some work in the morning and then will take a drive in the afternoon.

But, tonight I’ll take some advantage of the internet connection and make an entry in my weblog. The hotel is nice and the location is very nice. I’m right in the heart of the city. Kortrijk is about 20 miles due west of Oudenaarde where our plant is located. It takes about a half-hour to drive from Kortrijk to Oudenaarde. The drive is quite picturesque and goes by a couple of windmills and a nuclear power plant.

There is no hotel parking. When I arrived on Saturday, there was no parking anywhere around the hotel. So I drove to a municipal parking garage to find that this place was going to be closed from late Saturday night until early Monday morning. After some negotiations, the attendants told me there was a way to park. I had to pay in advance and they would give me a code I could use to go in and out of the underground garage. That worked quite well. The alternative was finding a street-level parking place somewhere and then feeding the parking meter every 2 hours. That also wasn’t what I wanted to do. The parking on the street is free, however, from 7:00 p.m. through 8:30 a.m. the next morning. Since Sunday I’ve been parking on the street.

That yielded one of the most expensive parking places I’ve ever used. I parked my car last night outside the hotel feeling pretty lucky at the parking space I was able to get. I went out this morning to find my car was missing. It had been towed! It hadn’t really been a parking spot because it was a driveway entrance! It doesn’t look much like a driveway and the sidewalk is all torn up, so I just didn’t see it. The markers are there, however, if one knows where to look. The result was a trip to the police station where I filled out a bunch of paperwork (they even wanted the name of my boss) and payed 50 euros fine (about $70). After all that was completed, a couple of policewomen in a van drove me to the impound place which was some significant distance south of Kortrijk. That place didn’t open until 9, so I had to wait about 20 minutes. The owner first brought coffee to the policewomen before he would pay any attention to me. I’m sure he knew who needed to have the attention! His fee for towing the car was 110 euros, making the whole escapade about $190. Mighty expensive parking! Tonight I was much more careful about were I parked my car. I’m not interested in doing this again tomorrow.

Before coming over to Belgium, I called Church Headquarters to get the address of the church in Kortrijk. They told me there was a branch here, gave me the address of the meeting house and the telephone number of the Branch President. After I arrived on Saturday, I called the Branch President’s house and spoke to a teenager in the house. The Branch President was not available, but the son told me that church started at 10 a.m. I didn’t verify the address which, of course, was a mistake.

I walked to the church building on Saturday morning, leaving plenty of time to get lost. There was no one there. I eventually walked back to the hotel room and called some other folks from work to see what they were up to. We met up in Oudenaarde and took the train into Gent. There is a huge festival going on this week in Gent, so the trains and streetcars were packed. We spent the afternoon going around to the various venues to see what was going on. It was quite a show. The festival is primarily about music, with about seven different stages set up in different places in downtown Gent. All of the performances are free — food and drink, however, has a charge associated with them. I took a lot of pictures and some of them will eventually be uploaded on the web.

So, that’s generally been the past couple of days. Hopefully this connection will last through the rest of the trip! We’ll see…..