:: @ Choepie’s ::

Actually, today it’s the 9th day of the 10 days of party in Ghent, and most of my friends are knocked out and will skip this one. Not for Bob, who was more than happy to show us a bit around the partyzone… his conscience doesn’t allow him to leave the city while the party is ongoing, so he has to go. As there were only 3 of us, it was a lot easier to move around from bar to bar and to get the most out of it, unfortunately we kind of choosed the wrong route and arrived at places where the concert or performances where about to end as well… ofcourse there’s always Charlatan, the only place in Ghent center where the party hardly stops. If it wasn’t for the music that stopped, we could still be there, but 10 o’clock in the morning wasn’t a bad idea to call it a day… at the end, this was only the second day of our trip to Belgium and therefore we should take it a bit easy..

Today it’s the birthday of my sister and one of my best mates in Belgium. They will celebrate this at the Duvel tent in Ghent where 10 days of party are going on, all my friends will be there, but only a few of them know that I’m on my way.
It toke some trouble to move the party from fridaynight to saturday, but I knew that only Lieve has the means to arrange this, so she was into it. Ana and me toke the afternoonflight to Belgium, where pickup by my parents (even my mother didn’t knew it untill the last minute) and went from the airport straight to Bob’s place in Ghent, where we could stay for the first 2 nights.
Big tears rolled of my sisters cheecks when Ana showed up to whish here a happy birthday and after Ana I turned over. It was 2 years ago that they all saw Ana so the surprice was complete…
The Duvel tent at the ‘Gentse Feesten’ is a dangerous place to go… you might know Duvel, it is the flemish word for ‘devil’ and is one of the strongest and famous Belgian Beers around : checkout : The Duvel Site , it has a 8,5% of alcohol and a very nice taste which makes it very dangerous to go out on… practice a lot and handle with care.
Anyway, most of us survived a couple of hours at the Duvel tent and we managed to almost finish the party for that day before going to bed around 7 o’clock in the morning, not after having some more beers, some Havana clubs and some Irish coffees at Charlatan , one of the best bars for music in Gent.

Yesterday I came home and the ‘concierge’ had a packed for me, he told. I should come to his ‘counter’ later that day because he was sweeping the floor at that time. F Communications send me my vinyl, nobody had to sign for it, and the covers of the vinyl were bend… not too good a service, but for part of the music is ‘The Cloud Making Machine’ another nice album. Big contrast with the music on the party we had later that night… For a reason whatsoever, the company I worked for organised a small party and about half of the people actually showed up. But it was OK… had way to much drinks and I’m sweating it out at this very moment… it’s going to be a tough day…

Got a good night out yesterday… went to a Japanese restaurant, Naomie in Madrid and I must say that this is about one of the first restaurants over here with foreign ‘cuisine’ without too much of a Spanish influence. Normally you go to a Indo-restaurant for example and you can drive with your bike for 3 days in your plate before meeting anything spicy. Not over here. The food was pretty authentic… well how should I know, I’ve never been in Japan… but I guess it was.
Anyway good food, crowded place and not too expensive.
Afterwards we had some Belgian beers in a bar near estrecho… not too bad a place, they had a wide range of Belgian beers although Duvel was missing.. I matched up with a Grimbergen Optimo and that was OK. Feels good to have a beer like that once in a while.

Tonight we have a ‘party’ of the office. I’m not sure to go. Mostly it’s boring and my daily work is enough work related stuff for the moment. As there are no ‘carreer moves’ possible where I work, there’s no need to chat with managers eigther. My mates at the office aren’t tempted to go eighter, and on top of it, they organised it 20km out of Madrid.. I guess it’s to avoid people drinking too much and raise the expenses… well, they flew over some managers from UK, germany and Sweden.. It’s a selective way of saving money I suppose. That’s why I’m probably not suitable to be a manager yet.

Boring day at the office…. I’m actualy not finished with my project but unfortunately no more time is given, so I parked it aside. Have to deal with customers issues again and it’s not that I hate that, but I like the freedom of developing and I hate unfinished monkey business.
So, tonight we’ll celebrate the fact that Andy starts his Rally to Mongolia within a few days, but I won’t see him anymore since he’s leaving to London on friday or so. Actually a great adventure is waiting for him, with an x-year old ‘real’ Mini, from London to Mongolia in 3 to 5 weeks time. You can read everything about this on Mongol Mini. I’ll try to help him updating his progress while he’s on the road. Although I’m not sure how he will reach me… we’ll see, if stuff comes in, I’ll post it. So, because he’s leaving, we’ll go to check out a japanese restaurant that apperantly is worth checking out seeing the reviews it has. It’s 3 streets away from my place and I hope it doesn’t end up like the Mexican and Thai restaurant we recently discovered… after 2 visits they closed both places down.. If this one closes it’s doors as well shortly, I’ll have to consider my behaevour in public.

Ha, lazy as I am, I install successfully the lazyboy plugin for my photogallery…
now there’s only one way forward… : -)
Actually, it is a very basic and therefore great plugin for Wordpress : Lazy Gallery . get it here… if it’s good, it’s good !

Finally… got choepie on a external server…
It was about time I created some silence in my house, previously www.choepie.net was hosted at a SunBlade 100 in my room… it is actually a desktopsystem, and with Solaris 10 on it, I cannot complain about the service it delivered, but unfortunately I needed to switch it off, everytime I had some guests over, I needed to reboot everytime I installed some patches, get the server out of the air everytime I launched a vpn connection to the office etc… now I’m pretty happy letting choepie be hosted at bleuhost.com… price is OK, and if you’re looking for some hosting you should check out their side… (no I’m not making money with this pub but I’m a possitive person and if it’s good, it might be said as well) I was actually surprised by the response time of their support once I launched a question.
Bah, enough now. At least I got choepie more stable and that’s what it is all about.
I have about 2000pics of my last 3 years living in Madrid, where I need to post a decent selection of over here as well.