Belgium \o/

Yay for taking a week to write up...

Thursday:
1400) Arrive at Kitty's house, find nobody there. After much wandering round looking, she comes cycling into the garden -- the T-Shirt printing company, who'd been told to get some done by that morning, had decided that they couldn't start until they had a signature; and they hadn't told her about this until she phoned up to check that they were done...
1600) T-Shirts finally printed, we run for the train, and get to the platform just as it leaves
1615) Next train, off to Ashford International~
1700) Having passed customs and such, the Eurostar leaves. Much training happens.
2000) We arrive at the hotel. They seem to have a thing about a pissing boy...
2100) We went to the LeRoy for supper. Being Belgium, who's languages are French and Dutch (not Belgian, as I had always thought...), wfk ordered in Dutch, Mike ordered in French, and the rest of us in English, though Kitty was in the habit of saying "Danke schon" a lot... I had the only things I recognised, meatballs in tomato sauce. These were, by far, the best meatballs I've ever had -- I ended up stopping after each bite to wait a few seconds just savouring the taste... For pudding we had Dame Noire; chocolate icecream with chocolate bits covered in cream covered in chocolate sauce; which was also nice. We then had much misc beer, and I can't remember what we talked about (Except gezpacho soup :P).

Friday:
1100) Go for tea in some random place, decide where to go. We found a guide full of much pisstaking, and followed it to...
1200) The Atomium. Belgium's equivalent of the Eifel tower, apparently; it's made out of several huge metal spheres making a model of an atom. It was in a state of being rebuilt while we were there though :| We saw a video of how it was built originally in the 60s, with the workers having absolutely no safety equipment. Those guys must have had balls of steel to build that place... It also had fridges and a nice view.
1530) Siesta
1730) Back to LeRoy for drinking. Here is where I first met Tolman(sp?), one of Kitty's belgian friends.
1800) We decide that seeing as there's nowhere to sit in LeRoy (this was "the FOSDEM beer event", and it was totally packed), we'll go elsewhere. We try and take several random people with us, but the only one who manages is Mike, who gets a cute girl~ We then go for pizza and more talking.
1900) Back to LeRoy, it's still full, so we go to another pub /o/ Tolman introduces me to a beer called Gueuze, which is lovely. Unlike the english beers, it tastes nice *and* has alcohol :O People shuffle around, and I end up next to Bettina, a nice German girl who's living in Belgium, and is only here because her FOSDEM-attending friend needed a place to crash. Apparently I spoke more to her than to everyone else all weekend put together, but I didn't notice. Possibly drunk.
2200) Bettina suggests going elsewhere; we get outside and ponder home vs a bar with more music; most people go with the first, as I would have done, had Mike not pushed me towards the latter... I am most thankful for that, as that evening with Bettina was most entertaining ^_^
2500) I get Home. wfk and Kitty collaborate to tell me the history of unix as a bedtime story <3

Saturday:
1000) Wake, metro, bus. Trying to navigate the crowds at the uni was hard...
1100) Arrive mid way through the OLPC talk
1400) I go to an Xorg talk, which seemed interesting, but my student instincts of "I'm in a lecture theatre, must be bedtime" took over :(
1500) An AIGLX talk; the guy from Red Hat got a round of applause when his laptop managed to boot, after 15 minutes :P
1600) Linux Kernel talk with Andrew Morton
1800) Home
1900) Dinner at some random place with random people

Sunday:
1100) Debian internals
1300) CACert signing
1500) Secure jabber
1600) Debian auto-install
1700) A talk on the GPLv3 from some FSF guy; I found it terrifying. The speaker was young, had a german accent, with a crew cut, and was talking about how the enemy were weak and now is the time to crush them. Much spreading of blatantly biased propoganda was done...
1800) Dinner with just our group
1900) We go to the bar opposite the real-life mannequin-pis
2200) Be very drunk. Most of what was discussed in that pub will stay in that pub. Inspector Gadget was played on the radio, in French... There was much talking of war and geography too. Once we were quite drunk, 3 of the group started trying to work out how to get in bed with a girl at the bar who didn't speak english... Once we got out, Mike gave me a fireman's lift down the street~
2300) To bed, for misc drunken chatter.

Monday:
1000) Mike had a hangover, but everyone else was OK, which isn't what I would have predicted...
1100) Train back to England; much like thursday morning in reverse. I arrived home knackered, with an hour to go before an exam \o/