Belgian tourism sues Belgian weather service for bad weather

From this week... It's gloomy!

This is definitely the funniest bit of news I've read for a while. It appears the Belgian tourism bureau is going to take the Belgian weather service to court for forecasting really rotten weather for July and August. The weather forecast currently shows just five days above 25°C in July while the first half of August will just be terrible.


Let's be frank here... Does anyone really expect Mediterranean type summers in Belgium? I sure don't. That's why, I try to run away to Sardinia around this time of the year. Every Belgian knows and accepts this, and no tourism guide book ever professes otherwise. I'd just love to see the Belgian tourism bureau get kicked out of the courts with this one.

What they're really saying in this case is that there's absolutely nothing worth seeing in Belgium. If the weather is bad, people just won't bother coming along. (To the tourism officials: I'm not slagging Belgium off, this is exactly what you've claimed yourself)

A quick look at Wikipedia and you can see that the month with the highest temperature is July, but is at 18°C while the month also suffers from the highest precipitation of the year with 78 mm of rain. In the past century, rainfall has increased by 10 mm.

The weather in Belgium is generally quite terrible. It's not much different to other Central European countries and cities around this region. The southern part of the UK suffers from a similar problem and they seem to deal with it OK.

I arrived at Goodwood Festival of Speed in Chichester (far down south in the UK) and saw local wearing a wide range of different types of clothing from rubber boots to short-shorts. You just make the most of the situation, and trust me, it did rain during the weekend. Still, the motoring summer party went ahead and quite successfully so.

Let's just get on with it!

News source: Reuters  (via Twitter)