I’m not really fond of mussles. So I haven’t had any. In fact, I haven’t even had a waffle, mainly because I’ve been sleeping ’til 3 p.m. every day. I have, however, enjoyed some super tasty beer. The Belgians make some of the best and there are some you can find easily here that are rather difficult to find in the U.S.
So yes, I’m at an internet cafe. I’ve had problems before at internet cafe’s and with other foreign computers (say, hotel business centers, etc.) with the language issue, but, believe it or not, I’ve never had a problem when it actually came time to type… until yesterday. The keyboards in Belgium are … not the same. They’re not just a little differnet (like many other countries), though, they actually have several letters in the wrong places. For example, A and Q, and Z and W, and M and : (colon) are switched. Just enough to irritate you.
So today I decided to try a differnet internet cafe. Same problem. But this one had a little blue icon in the task tray that said “FR”. I thought it would be prudent to click it. Sure enough, an “EN” showed up as the other option… Wheeeeee, now I can type. Fortunately I don’t look at the keys much at all, otherwise I’d *really* be confused. It really does make it an english keyboard. Even all the punctuation (like on the number keys) is different, so I can’t look at the keyboard at all… (good thing I know where everything is!)
So now that I can type, here I am, well, typing. And what do I really have to type about anyway, other than messed up keyboards? Maybe I’ll have more after tonight. There’s supposed to be a jam session at one of the bars here in town. The bartender last night wasn’t sure if it would happen tonight though. Apparantely it’s vacation time in Brussels so things are kinda slow. We’ll see…
And tomorrow we’re thinking about going to the go-cart track. That’s the kinda stuff you do on a long layover. We were talking about heading off to Amsterdam or Oostend or Bruge or someplace like that but I guess we’re too lazy to do that. But for 4 days, ya gotta figure out something, especially when there’s no internet access in the room.
Maybe I’ll write a book… Would anyone read it???
V- (live from Brussels)
My last keyboard was so worn out that many of the letters were just plain gone. The wear was so severe that the little “home” bumps on the J & F keys were non-existent. They were wore smooth. I moved the 5 key over to the J position so I could find “home” still. Just for funsies one day I randomized many of the keys. I am a touch typist so I don’t ever look at the keyboard unless I need to use keys that are not part of the alpha portion of the keyboard. I don’t know offhand which key is the ‘insert’ or ‘delete’ or ‘home’ or ‘end.’ Page up and page down are in my muscle memory and I can somewhat touch-type on the numeric keyboard but it is nice to watch them sometimes.
Using a keyboard set up like the Belgian would have me all messed up. I can’t even handle those new-fangled split keyboards because the key angle is all wrong and it slows me down to about 30WPM and causes a lot of errors. Crawling at that speed makes writing anything a chore.
Hey, good tip about the J and 5 switch 😉 Needless to say, I’m happy to be back to typing on my own keyboard again…