Brussels vacation (From The Northern Echo)

Brussels vacation

2:45pm Tuesday 30th September 2008 in Reader Blogs By Lynn Briggs

Why is it that a Beer Festival in Brussels attracts people from all over the world, much alcohol is consumed, and there is no "trouble"?

I'm very impressed with the multicultural group of people we stood next to and talked to a week ago in the Grand Place. I talked to a lot of Americans who live in the city and apparently work for NATO. Being the proverbial "hick from the sticks" in the USA, I didn't even know that NATO Headquarters was in Brussels. I've never claimed to be a brain surgeon and am a product of the failings of the Pennsylvania school system. We talked about that tonight at my birthday dinner at Spice Garden. Not the failings of the US school systems in particular, but about why school teaches people things they'll never need or use in life?

Why don't they teach practical things instead of making you memorize (American spelling), speeches from Macbeth? I must say that in my entire life, I have never once been asked to quote Shakespeare. I can honestly also state that I highly doubt anyone will ever ask me to do so.

The only class I credit with helping me in life, was Home Economics, which probably has gone the way of sentence diagramming. Sentence diagramming lasted about as long in our school as the metric system. For about a year back in the 60's, we were force fed the wonderful metric system and soon it would "take over" and feet and inches would be obsolete. Guess what? It never happened and that's why I have such a hard time here trying to figure out grams and centimeters and all that fun stuff in this country and I refuse to learn it at this stage in my life. John doesn't "do metric" either so he's no help.

We'll continue to stumble along blindly and ask for pounds and ounces instead of grams and whatsis.

Oh, and as for Brussels, I highly recommend the city but sadly the weather was a carbon copy of Darlington and we got very wet and chilly walking around.