Mons Belgium

Just after returning from Catania, I went to Mons in Belgium for the NIAS, the NATO Information Assurance Symposium.

I was supposed to fly to Brussels on the 16th, but Ophelia had a different opinion, so my flight from Dublin was canceled, and I spent a night in a hotel somewhere.
Fortunately, I got on another flight the following day.

Mons is approximately 70km south of Brussels, where I landed and took the train.

I forgot to charge my phone overnight, which usually wouldn’t matter, but this time it got me in trouble.

It was almost empty when I entered the train, like 2-3% left, so I turned it off as I needed it to get directions from the train station to the hotel. The train was so slow!
It felt like hours.

Anyway, in the late afternoon, I finally arrived and met my two colleagues from the US who had come two days earlier.
They were both from Sales with little to no technical expertise and had a difficult time during the first day of the conference. As you can imagine, they were delighted to see me!

By way of seeing, Mons is a lovely little city!
As we went out for dinner, I took a few pictures:

And, of course, my mission “get a burger wherever you are” was successful here, too:

In the dark, the cathedral looks even more impressive:

On the following day, the conference began for me, and they had something cool standing around:

It was one of the originals they used for the movie. In this pic, on the right side, a bit difficult to see, are the signatures of Fox, Lloyd, and Zemeckis.