Belgium, till when?

Today, as almost everyday, I had a café con hielo while reading my favourite newspaper, El País, in a café near my office before going to work.

Regarding the café con hielo, well it is one of my old vices of living abroad... In Spain it is very common to drink café con hielo in summer (not so much in winter as I do), but being it so difficult to get abroad since you need good coffee and somehow a minimum degree of intelligence on the part of the waiter (meaning that 30% of the times that I ever ordered a small coffee and a glass with ice cubes abroad the waiter put the ice into a glass with water, or even refused to serve it, and another 50% of the times the coffee was too watery) I never gave up in trying to get it. And thus I still drink café con hielo even in winter.

So much for the café con hielo. Let's go back to the situation, I am drinking my café and reading my newspaper, and a piece of news regarding Belgium catched my eye. It is funny that when I was in Belgium I always got the news about Spain with a certain delay of a day or two. Well it is not that now that I am in Spain I am looking to hear the news about Belgium but this one certainly deserved my attention. Only yesterday I was having some drinks with Jùlia, a colleague from the office and we were discussing that Belgium is really a country where almost nothing works, a country divided with a weird mix of organization-unorganization for everything which definitely doesn't work. All of you who know me from Bruges-Brussels have heard me complain so heavily about Brussels that know exactly what I am talking about.

Well, the news started this way:
"El 13 de diciembre, Bélgica tembló. La televisión pública francófona emitió un telediario que anunciaba la independencia de Flandes, la próspera región belga con aspiraciones independentistas. "Bélgica ha dejado de existir", dijo el presentador."
To be honest I read it and wondered: Belgium shivering because the end of Belgium has arrived? I thought it may be sad but I bet loads people were not surprised! Indeed, further down in the article the following sentence was underlined:
"El 89% de los telespectadores creyó la noticia"
In fact this was a fake news program in tv playing the "war of the worlds" with the audience.

How lovely, belgians with a sense of humour!!!! I only met a few of them in my life, and all of them college fellows (and Davy). I really would have liked to see this program, well faked, with conections to all the Parliaments in Belgium (he he) and announcing that King Alberto has resigned and moved to Africa... And I would have loved to see the debates afterwards when it was known that it was just a joke, and now the program has been acused of spreading false information. The program has defended itself saying that it is as much of a lie as the ones of the politicians in TV, ie.: US saying it would go to Irak to find the mass destruction weapons.

The ironic point is that we Spaniards, do not need to go so far... In the first quoted sentence just change Flandes by Catalonia, Belgium by Spain and belga by Spanish, and you get a piece of news we got tired to hear this year... Whether this is true (Spain no longer exists, etc) or a lie I will not enter on the matter, but nobody ran to the cash machines as it happened in Belgium...
Bisous e à +,
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