Not even cross related

So scanning through the papers online today and this story pops up on AFP. Seems that the homeland has a bigger issues than Bart Wellens building his own bikes, Klaus Vantournot moving to SunWeb or how much the winner of the BK's are going to get.

Poor Alizee Poulicek. The new Miss Belgium speaks French, Czech and English, but she doesn't understand Dutch. And that shortcoming has upset some of her countrymen.

AFP says the 20-year-old language student was booed Saturday when she failed to answer a question that was posed in Dutch during the beauty pageant finals in Antwerp. She was then roundly criticized in the Flemish press, with one paper saying her linguistic shortcoming shows that the country's "community crisis ... has insinuated itself into even the lightest sector."

Poulicek, who hails from the French-speaking part of the country, pledges to learn the language spoken by a majority of Belgians.

"I have to try, learn more," she tells VRT television in halting Dutch, according to the Associated Press. "I spoke almost no Dutch when I started this adventure," she continued in French.

Germany's DPA news agency had the best headline: "Blonde, Belgian and beautiful - but not bilingual."