Pozor schod

Hi everyone,

My training is continuing in a similar way as the 2 weeks before.
However, there are a few things I can share about:

About the IBIS Charleroi Airport hotel...
Last week I was staying in the centre of Charleroi, and working next to the airport, just outside the city. For this week I had a booking in the Charleroi Airport hotel. On Monday I took the bus service from Brussels to Charleroi Airport in order to get to the hotel.
When I arrived at Charleroi airport I saw a small sign that pointed to IBIS hotel. I started walking with my suitcase along the big road next to the airport.
20 minutes later, 2 kilometers down the road, I had finally passed all the airport buildings, take-off strips and parking lots, but still there was no hotel to be seen.
A few hundred meters further, also the sidewalk ended and turned into a small muddy strip next to the road. However, there was another small sign: IBIS hotel. I bravely continued.
After about 5 kilometers, I was getting a bit desperate and tired, but in the distance I saw 2 big apartment blocks. For the rest there were only small houses, fields and lots of cows, so this had to be the hotel.
After 6 kilometers I reached these blocks and noticed that they were not the long awaited hotel. Then I saw another dreaded sign to the IBIS hotel. Looking in that direction I finally saw the hotel. It was still 1 kilometer more but I was already glad to have found it.
Conclusion: IBIS Charleroi Airport is 7 kilometers north from the airport, while IBIS Charleroi Centre is 5 kilometers south from the airport. In the end, the receptionist of the hotel clarified the logic for me. The hotel is closer to the airport than to the centre, so their name makes sense...
A taxi to get back to the airport from there is 20 EUR. No decent bus connection that takes less than 1 hour is available. Probably this hotel is for people who take their car in their luggage.

About Sibelga...
After living in Brussels for 2 years, in August I properly filled out all the paperwork to end my electricity contract. Sibelga seems to need 4 pages of information to close an account, but I nicely put everything they wanted. I noted all the counter numbers and amounts, I wrote down my new address to send the final bill to, I photocopied my passport and I sent the whole thing to the company. Case closed... or so I thought.
This week I visited my old address in Brussels and guess what? There was a bill of 544 EUR, sent to the old address. These 544 EUR were my extra charges for the months of June and July, over the money I already paid earlier on. Interestingly enough this amount is higher than all bills of the past year put together. On the phone I first enjoyed classical music for half an hour, but then I quickly discovered that one of the counter amounts from my forms had been typed in incorrectly.
No problem according to my correspondent, I just needed to do all the paperwork again, and then they would see what they could do!!! I asked what happened to my original file, but these seem to be thrown away after typing them in the system.
When I insisted on a better solution, she proposed to send a technician to the apartment to check the counters, because probably I didn't read the numbers right! I asked if she was kidding and if she couldn't just contact someone else in the company.
After listening to one more classical concert I got her back on the phone with 'good news'. They will change the number and send me a new bill later next week. The amount on that one will be 8 EUR. I am curious to see if this will be the end of this story.

About home...
Right now I am spending the weekend in Antwerp with my family. This will probably be my last weekend at home in a long period. It is very nice to be in Brecht and enjoy my family, the garden, the house, the food,...
During most of my trips, I didn't miss home a lot, but now I can see a lot of things which I will have to miss for a long time. Let's see how I think about that in a few months.

About AIESEC involvement...
On Thursday I visited Brussels to go to the weekly AIESEC drink. First I met Habib from Cameroon, but now from AIESEC International who was staying in my old apartment.

Then I had a very nice chat with Paulo from Portugal, the newest AIESEC intern in Belgium. Paulo will spend 1 year in DHL in Brussels. He was asking me how I feel about being at the end of my AIESEC career. My conclusion is that I am not exactly at the end yet. I spent last weekend at September National Conference, on 13th of October I'll go to the local conference of AIESEC Praha and after that I hope to be a trainer at the international conference FEEL in Slovakia in the beginning of November.