Dirty Word: 7 Letters and it Ends With ---hole

You guessed it (if you live in Belgium): it's pothole!
Never have I seen a country allow its major highways fall into such a state of disrepair. One or two potholes; OK, it can happen. But several miles worth? And these aren't the kind you drive over and say, "What was that; a pothole?" These are the kind you drive over and say, "The realignment will be 300 Euros!" This, followed by a choice string of curses in your favorite language. Driving to work last week, traffic slowed to a near crawl - at 6:40 AM, mind you - on the only major freeway headed north from Waterloo to Brussels. The cause? A "field" of potholes so bad that not even crazy Belgian drivers wanted to chance dropping into these car-eating bad boys at anything faster than about 20 MPH. The only good news is that when you cross the invisible border from Wallonia (the southern, French speaking part of Belgium) into Flanders (the Dutch part to the north), conditions improve noticeably. But then that's the case with just about everything in this country...