The French supermarket chain Carrefour announced Tuesday it was closing 21 stores and laying off some 1600 people in Belgium. The grocery store GB is part of the Carrefour family. And our GB on SHAPE is one of 5 stores in Wallonia slated to close by June. This is pretty disturbing news to those of us who shop there regularly - and to those of you who benefit regularly from the benefits of our shopping there. No more tax-free beer, chocolate, or speculoos.

I suspect there is some kind of agreement between SHAPE and the Belgian government to provide us with tax-free shopping but have little hope that if that is the case, a contract can be arranged with a new grocery store and the new tenant take possession of the space in anything less than 6 months, if even that quickly. Change happens at glacial speed on SHAPE. Correction: good change happens at glacial speed; bad change seems to move much more quickly.

We don't know when the GB will close definitively but it may be sooner than June. Rumors are flying that it will close as of 1 March. The employees have been on strike for 2 days. We heard the store would open back up tomorrow, but Carrefour employees have called for a general strike Saturday, with some stores closed starting tomorrow. So we may have shopped our last in our favorite place to shop.

Curling

As we've mentioned before, we get most of our US TV fix from AFN, which has to take what the networks give it, because it doesn't pay for it. As a result, there's absolutely no Olympics coverage but curling on during European prime time, since those of you with honest jobs in the US are at work then and not watching TV. So we watch French TV on our Belgian cable. It's as francocentric as US coverage is US centered, but since France has some good athletes in some interesting sports, we see stuff. We saw Bode Miller win gold, for example. Live. Oh, I'm sorry. Maybe you didn't know that because NBC was saving it to show next Friday.

Doing it wrong - first impressions

We just got back from 4 days in England, which was our first experience with driving on the left. My first experience, I should say. Rita declined to have anything to do with it. It wasn't as bad as I expected, maybe because what I expected was death in a giant fireball. Low expectations triumph again. As others had assured me, it wasn't too bad on divided highways. Rita had to remind me a couple of times that the right lane was the fast lane, not the slow lane, but other than that it went okay. The traffic circles were a little weird because you go through them clockwise instead of "anticlockwise," as you do in the driving-on-the-right world. What really took some getting used to, though, was meeting oncoming traffic on two-lane roads. It was okay as long as you were behind another car and felt protected, but the first few times you meet someone all by yourself, it's just…wrong.

In case you're in the area

Just saw a commercial on AFN for the annual best sapper competition to be held at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, in late April. Who knew?

Problem solved

Rita wrote recently about all the potholes that have formed as a result of the snow and the cold. Well, on the autoroute they have now "fixed" the problem by lowering the speed limit from 120 to 90 (75 to 55 mph) and putting up signs warning that there are potholes. No need to spend money on silly repairs when you've got this kind of brilliance at work.

Snow envy

We hear the mid-Atlantic is expecting another big snowfall today/tomorrow. This makes what - 50 inches or so for the year? I am so, so jealous. Or as a colleague put it, snow jealous. Yes, we've had our little snowfalls in Belgium this year, but nothing on the scale of one of those great big ole storms coming up from the south, full of moisture, that dump about 20 inches. No one here rushes to the grocery store to stock up on milk and toilet paper. Funny the things you miss.