barely fatal

Dragon Age so far has failed to fully immerse me in its story. Maybe it’s too traditional for my liking, maybe it’s too talkative, I don’t know. A colleague says he had no trouble with the fights and has finished the main story in two days. Well, I find the fights very challenging and it feels as if I have hardly scratched the surface after 3-4 days of play, but then again I tend to do every single side quest I stumble upon and have two weakly rogues in my party. I’ll give it another chance.

That being said, I haven’t played anything at all in the last two weeks, problems with my eyes when sitting in front of a screen for too long.

That includes Modern Warfare 2. The over-the-top single player feels a tad bit ridiculous, but the multiplayer is fun. Well, since I cannot select the maps I want to play, the matchmaking constantly forces me to play against groups of people 40 ranks above me, and I fear for the worst come the – probably costly – map packs, I can’t see me playing this for very long.

Christmas is approaching at an alarming rate. Already bought the train ticket home, but still had trouble getting one of the cheaper tickets. The pricing policy of Deutsch Bahn is as annoying and illogical as always. Amazon wish lists get sent back and forth, self-made cookie rations are announced, holiday plans finalized. The worst of all? Christmas markets. If it wasn’t for the Glühwein, I’d never set a foot on one. And this year not even that is gonna help it much, it having 17 degrees outside, and mostly rain. Climate crises or not, it just feels wrong somehow.

In other news I am thinking about launching a new, separate web site. Not a private one, but one covering my profession: Software Testing. It can’t hurt having some profile on the intarwebs, and there’s really not that many sites out there, the testing community is a small one. The big sites all talk about the theoretical stuff which is nice and all, but simply just that: theoretical. Since my company is trying new stuff, I have a few things I could talk about. Obviously I have to consider very carefully what I can write about without compromising any internal stuff, so I’m not sure yet if I’ll really try this.

So, my sister is going to come visit in a couple hours. First Christmas market of the year. I’d say last, too, but you know the old Klingon saying: Never say it’s the last as long as there’s still blood wine in the keg and a human alive.

Brussels was hectic, full and loud and parking cost a fortune.

Bruges was very … historic. No, honestly, Bruges is great: Okay, so you have seen old churches, old houses and old places before – haha, we’d just come from Brussels. But you haven’t seen a town which is so consistently old – err, historically valuable – until you’ve seen Bruges. Every single stone on every single corner and in every single wall is so picturesque, it feels like, laden with culture and history – it’s pretty incredible. Many tourists (like us) for November, but never too many to make it unbearable.

It took us forever to find the hotel – hint of the day: Bring a map. Tiny one-way galore, and my GPS didn’t show any streets in the Old Town – the map just stopped at the outer city limits. Hotel was alright, the people were very nice and helpful. Gave us a map. Lifesavers. And gave us a coupon thing which would have granted us cheaper entrance fees. If we hadn’t immediately forgotten about it because we were so tired.

Alright, the weather sucked at first, it but got better in the end (compare below).

We actually managed to get along with English and some German – phew for me, no need trying to resurrect my long-dead French. Though I was surprised to see again how much I remembered when reading signs etc.

We took the obligatory boat trip and on the way I tried to find the sights from the movie (In Bruges, duh). Bruges at night is quite a sight, too. We ended up in an Irish pub where I spent my last bucks on single malt and we listened to live music and watched the surprisingly large local Irish community.

On the way back home we stopped in Gent. Also a very nice town, but unfortunately, undergoing extensive repairs right now. Hence the large density of construction sites all across town. We enjoyed ourselves nonetheless.

A fortress, right in the middle of the city – those guys really meant business back in the day.

In case you are wondering: We brought sweets. Belgian chocolate, y’know. Every third shop in Bruges was an exquisite chocolate shop…every second sold waffles. It’s kinda unfair, when you walk through town and it smells delicious everywhere. We also tried Belgian beer, and Belgian fries, of course – couple hundred variants yet to go, though.