Who the hell goes to Belgium?

I'm going for tapas later (bear with me I'll get back to the title in a bit). Now there's something about tapas I can't quite put my finger on. I mean on the face of it there is nothing bad about tapas, it's tasty, I don't mind eating with my hands and no matter what any other European country might say Spain has the best sausages and hams in the world (chorizo is the way of the future). However I kind of feel bad for going out for tapas because it seems sort of... posh. Tapas is what people in London eat. Someone asked me why I was eating tapas tonight and my only excuse was that it was half price. Well that and that I have no food to cook and there's no point buying any if I'm going to Belgium tomorrow (see I said I'd get back to that).

Yes tomorrow I am off on way to Belgium, by way of Leeds and Wild Beasts, for my Brother's stag weekend. I am missing quite a lot of stuff for this so I have had to explain to a lot of people where I was going. "I'm off to Belgium for a few days" I say. "Who the hell goes to Belgium?" they incredulously reply. I sort of link that back to my first thing about tapas. There is nothing all that wrong with Belgium, you could object to it being an artificial construct of 19th century diplomacy I suppose, but lets be honest that's a fairly abstract point to make and I think most of the 10,666,866 Belgians are fairly happy with Belgium so why shouldn't I be?

But much like tapas I can't just say: well why not go to Belgium? I come up with excuses. "Well it's my Brother's stag do" I say, "I have to go to Belgium". Or I say "Belgium is famous for it's beer and well you know how much I like beer!" I honestly have no idea why I do this. Why is there a stigma attached to Belgium? Well no more! I'm going to prove you all wrong, I am going to go to Belgium and I am going to enjoy it and I will tell you all how great it is. I will restore Belgium's position as a place that it is alright to go to, and maybe I will eat some tapas while I am there.

P.S. My Grandad lived in Belgium when he was a kid and he turned out alright.

Blog is an entirely uncalled for word

So here I am "blogging". I'm under the vague impression that already "blogged" once before but forgot my password and the address of my "blog" before I was able to subject anyone to my inane ramblings. Right that’s the last time I'm using that word, the b one. It's horrid. I know English is a fluid language and all and it probably benefits from that but honestly there was no call for the b word and I intend to never use it again.

So why am I hear again typing out my thoughts to the world? Hard to say really I just feel I should, maybe it's a human need to have people give a damn about you, maybe it's because I realised considering the amount of facebook status changes I was doing suggested I had a fair amount to write. Also it's partially because Thuy told me I should (check out her blog, it's pretty funny and is probably worthwhile reading if you ever need to get into the mindset of Vietnamese girl: http://thuydeepie.blogspot.com/).

So what about me then? Well to be honest if you are reading this I imagine you already know me so probably don't need to know much more but here we go anyway. I'm Geraint, yes that name is a bit weird, it's Welsh. You might not guess I'm Welsh unless I tell you because I really don't sound it, the reason for that is that I didn't live in Wales for a fair bit of my childhood and also my family don't really sound all that Welsh either (exactly why that is I'm not sure). To be honest I'm also a good mix of everything with a bit of Irish, English and Scottish thrown into the mix for good measure, so I guess I'm really British more than anything. Why didn't I live in Wales as a kid? I'm from a family which likes to wonder basically, I'll probably leave that for now because I figure I can stretch all that out over a few posts.

Well I think leave it at that for now and come up with something better later. Oh and by the way "I'm a man with a fork in a world of soup" is a really good line from a song by a really good Swedish band called Caesars (or Caesars Palace or Twelve Caesars depending on who you ask) who are sadly overlooked but at least give me an obscure favourite band.

p.s. I edited this slightly after greg pointed out it made my family sound like they were gypsies.