"Phlegmalloony" what?...

You might wonder why this mess of a blog exists and who created it... Let me share a bit of my story!

As a postgraduate student in Wallonia, it felt that my life was incomplete. This place looks so much like a cocoon, an old rusty one, with the same old friends, the same funny accent you get easily used to. Wallonia is like that. Sincere friendly people, usually a bit old-fashioned and predictable... Old gray streets, which, during the rush hour, become full of youngsters dressed like in the last hiphop music video or simply beggars who desperately ask you for the first time while all you have is a bank card...

I sighed while walking through the RAVeL on the riverside, realising that not that many people actually use their bike but prefer TEC, the local bus company, which goes on strike at least five times a year for an indetermined duration of about one or two weeks. Strikes expresse two tendencies of Walloon labour: depression at work for being underpaid and for miserable work conditions and an obsessive need for party, leasure and cheap beer drinking, which usually go with an age-long love for a local football team, which doesn't actually win that much outside of the country. RIP Michel Daerden (passed out in August 2012), representative of the socialist party and cliché of a Walloon, speaking funny and slowly.

Five years of student life in Wallonia, my homeland, being told all the time about the importance of a Belgian unity, a compromise à la Belgian, without even having the least interest in what was going on across the border, imagining the Flemish as gibberish-speaking Walloon-haters. I remember our former Prime Minister Yves Leterme, who while talking about French speakers living in bilingual districts (2006), said "apparently French speakers are not in an intellectual state to learn Dutch", even though he has Walloon origins and a Walloon name... I decided to discover a region I didn't actually know that much. This blog is dedicated to my life as a student there and my discovery of our introverted marketable and polyglot cousin neighbour.

Yves Leterme, who also thought La Marseillaise was his national anthem...

Oh, the title of the blog? Just a pun I made with the words "Flemish" and "Walloon", because Flemish have the phlegm (the type of humour, not the liquid!) and Walloons are loony. Grappig eh?