We discussed a range of subjects and divided them between us. These are my thoughts:

Beverages

Two sups that are axiomatic to English life are tea and beer.

Whilst it isn’t impossible to find a box of Taylor’s Yorkshire Tea in the European quarter¹, Fortune has yet to smile on us with the decaf variety. Deepening our reputation for bizarre eccentricity among our European friends, we still prefer to have the grey stuff shipped in by relatives from Blighty.

Chez Moeder Lambic in Forest / Vorst

On the other hand, if you like your brown stuff strong and varied, there is no better country in the world in which to be. It would be grossly understating the case to say that Belgians are rather fond of their beer and they would never tolerate the buying up of pubs by hungry “leisure” corporates.

Accordingly, you’re unlikely to find your choices limited here to the usual four pumps of watery fizz. Indeed, you could easily find yourself having to select from a menu of over two thousand.²

(Still) choking from smoking

Of course, even if the dizzying variety of beer will have most English folks pleasantly dizzy within one or two glasses, the noxious fug of fag smoke still clouds most bars in Belgium.

As any Briton will tell you, a rare piece of political bravery in the last decade led Parliament to ban smoking in all public places. Thus, though British bars have yet to replace the residual aromas of accrid piss and stale ale, the characteristic complexity of the law in Belgium means passive smoking is still as ubiquitous as dog turds. For the time being at least, you’ll still be sharing your nights out with the risk of lung cancer from passive smoking.

Lost on the highway

Seeking any excuse to outdo one another, the two principal linguistic regions of Belgium maintain aesthetically different road signs. And whilst one can debate the merits of typography and layout until the mussels come home, in a metaphor for the wider political situation here, the real issue with signage is actually something totally different.

You’ll have no problem with the text on the signs. It’s where they put them that’ll baffle you. If you have to get off the Brussels Ring, you can put your Grand National stake on the sign being right on the sliproad. No forewarning is forthcoming. You’ll be halfway to Luxembourg before you realise that was your exit. Meantime, if you’re looking forward to a day-trip to Brugge, plan on spending most of it on the E40.

The tailback starts long before the warning of roadworks. The Belgians are honking their horns like they like to do, as if doing it would go any way to parting the River Jordan. They have a point, even if it’s a needlessly loud point.

You know it’s an outrage when the stolid Germans in the next lane start to get narked. Only the bus full of Brits up ahead is oblivious, as the back window starts to fill up with empty cans of Fosters.

And when, after four or five kilometres of creeping standstill, you finally espy the warning of roadworks up ahead, what form does it take? An unrepentant sign? No, it’s much worse. Only the most macabre sight known to man, a shopwindow mannequin wearing a hard hat, its traffic-facing arm waving slowly and arthiritically. Abandon all hope ye who pass this point, though in truth you lost all hope ages ago.

In a weirdly resonant, art-imitating-life sort of way, these dolorous dolls started their careers constantly in the public eye, modelling the very best of Prada, Moschino and Tommy Hilfiger. Now they have fallen so low to wash up here, wigs astray and straddling the central reservation in deeply unchic orange overalls.

It’s the same story on that other highway, the information superhighway, that is. It’s bottlenecks in virtual space, as the creaking infrastructure of Belgian broadband struggles to cope with increasingly massive downloads of porn and music being perpetrated by its citizens when they’re not busy doing something better than sitting in front of a computer.

Civic pride, civic administration

Belgian citizens, or the Flemish, Walloons and that other German bit, have much better things to do than sit in front of computers. Every week or two some bizarre and fascinating event is going on somewhere here.³

If the ongoing conditions of fervent regionalism can be harmful to political progress, they certainly help to maintain the strong attachment to custom that is everywhere in evidence in Belgium.

Where local events such as parades, galas and street parties have fallen foul of fickle fashion in Britain, or worse have descended into cynical commercialism, the noble spirit of self-identity is central to civic life here. Annual festivals, ritual consumption of local produce, the continued existence of guilds into the modern era and prideful cycle races such as the Liège-Bastogne-Liège and the Ronde van Vlaanderen are all celebrated and serious matters.

It is however relatively easy to live in a particular city, town or district in Britain. You pay your taxes, you choose whether or not to be on the electoral roll and you can get on with making a profit from your boring job, worrying about your enormous mortgage and trying to bring up your kids safe from the latest bogeyman.

In Belgium, you’re on an umbilical cord to the nearest gemeentehuis or maison communale, your local town hall. It’s not enough to pay your taxes – indeed you’ll be lucky to receive a bill in good time without prompting for one – you have to be registered and parking your car, maintaining a household and proving your existence all involve frequent and regular trips to the town hall to tell them when you last farted. And, to borrow from Harry Chapin, you’ll spend a week there one morning, in the labyrinthine halls that are one commune’s shrine to Franz Kafka.

Even if it costs you a lot of time to live here, it’s not as painful on your wallet. Even a respectable apartment in an upmarket area of Brussels will cost you less to rent than a corner cupboard in Britain.

And you’re often going to get to live in a pretty nice building to boot. Brussels, Antwerp, Brugge and Ghent are all justifiably famous for their numerous examples of excellent architecture.⁴

Outside the cities, good buildings are equally important in a different way. In common with their Dutch neighbours for example, the Flemish like to build their own properties. This typically results in a wider spread of housing instead of concentrating upon and therefore stressing urban areas.

Occasionally, these personal pioneers of their own plot grasp the opportunity to erect the very model of bad taste but more often than not, the product is very satisfying indeed.

Political correctness and liability paranoia

It’s only when you leave Britain that you come to realise how pervasive political correctness has become in British society.⁵

It can be quite shocking at first to listen to Belgians do something we Brits seem to have forgotten to do, namely speak our minds. How it is for people here, you can be ignorant and you can be wrong but you are always entitled to voice your opinion. The only eyebrows raised are yours.

In a similar way, there’s something strangely liberating about seeing Bruxellois/Brusseleir kids kicking a football around in the street when you’re on your way home. And you know as well as they how adults tear-arse around these same streets in their cars with little concern for other drivers or (crap) road signs, let alone defenceless people. The kids didn’t seem to mind even if I did and so over time, I find myself giving less and less airtime to these things. That doesn’t decrease the risk of an accident of course, but neither did being privately concerned about it.

The other week, I was conducting a meeting with a colleague. My office is on the sixth floor of a tall building surrounded on two sides by a respectable residential quartier. I happened to glance out of the window and below me, on the steep roof of a four-storey house, two kids were scrambling around like it was a playground climbing frame. It had been raining consistently all day and the tiles of the roof were shining wet.

Needless to say, with my colleague being a nervous sort of person, my meeting was curtailed right there in favour of staring incredulously out of the window. Within a few minutes, a small crowd had gathered around us. But no-one was calling the police or the pompiers. Indeed those now in attendance had more in common with a crowd at a sporting event than those who gather with horror, dread and anticipation below some fool intending to jump off a building.

Nothing happened. Eventually the monkey-kids climbed back inside their skylight, close enough for us to see the complex expression of late afternoon boredom on their faces. People melted away back to their desks, some muttering how they had seen better examples on YouTube.

Another of my colleagues, a Frenchman, expressed similar bewilderment to me and it felt comforting to know that I was not the only one who mistook such behaviour for a deathwish. I’ve seen the same thing happen with cats, whom as we all know, are much better handlers of heights and the roof environment in general.

Kids are also the subject of one of my other private horrors, the bread slicing machine. At the Delhaize supermarket, there is none of the prepackaged pap you get at Tesco, reassured in the emollient of a Lancashire accent that it is bread and it is good for you. Instead everything’s fresh, often still hot from the oven and usually unsliced.

In Britain, the country that invented caveat emptor, things are different. Provided that the buyer has shown her queue ticket together with proof that she is over sixteen and lawfully in charge of a shopping trolley, the bread slicing process would require the services of a vacant-looking trained operative holding a current health and safety certificate in possession of a brand new, rust-resistant and totally sterile knife obtained from a double-locked shatterproof vacuumed glass cupboard and who had previously shaved and disinfected his entire body in a blue antiseptic solution the colour of a toilet block. And that person would himself be supervised.⁶

But instead that’s exactly where, as an ordinary, educated, taxpaying Belgian, your ordinary in-the-process-of-being-educated kid comes in handy. While you select a week’s worth of wine – a difficult but entirely necessary task – you send your kid to get a couple of boules of bread. And you make sure they know it has to come back sliced.

I’ve watched jaw to the floor in amazement as these expert bread slicers, distant relatives of those little Dickensian chimneysweeping urchin types, go to work on a loaf or three. They’re all business. Meanwhile what I’m thinking of is the meat aisle and a deli packet of fingers au petit bruxellois.

Buy now, don’t pay later

I’ve made no secret of the fact that I despise The Great British High Street plc.⁷ Dull, uninspired homogeneity meets the corporate cynicism of odious little oiks like Philip Green and Friends.⁸

I wouldn’t lose any sleep if Green’s entire number of outlets burned down overnight. The noxious smoke from the all the smouldering of the cheap, nasty, wafer-thin synthetic materials would be worth it just to see some sort of liberation from that fashion-finance slavery the yoke of which most British kids seem to happy to bear ad nauseam. It’s nothing less than legalised human cloning.

Fast food dives would have to go next and along with it the strangely palliative stench that wafts around high streets every day. Brussels has its own problem in a similar vein: the authorities need to clean up Anspach and the streets around the Bourse. I simply cannot believe there exists the kind of demand that would be required to justify so many pseudomeat kebab joints as there are polluting the air around that greasy part of town. Perhaps at the same time, they could also tackle the unsavoury characters on the Bourse steps who mingle among those who are genuinely using the place as a meeting point.

• Fancy a bit more? Read Reflections on Relocation: Part 2

References

1. Gourmet Food & Gifts, Rue Archimède 59, 1000-Bruxelles
2. Delirium Café, Impasse de la Fidelité, 1000-Bruxelles
3. See, for example, the speeches and masquerades of the quasi-religious Carnival of Binche, Dinant’s International Bathtub Regatta, the gay European Big Men’s Convergence and the not-gay Waiter Race (who needs Slow Food) in Brussels and the three-yearly Cat Parade in Ypres to name but a very few
4. For an overview, a good place to start might be Prof. Jeffery Howe‘s pages on the Boston College website
5. There are plenty of arguments for and against political correctness out there, of course
6. For more information, see the Health & Safety Executive’s bread, cake and biscuit manufacture page
7. Others have written more on this matter that affects all British urban areas, not just the crap towns: the Telegraph, and more optimistically, the Daily Reckoning; furthermore the sarcasm of a lowly wit such as myself neglects to address what should be on the Great British High Street – in that area, we could do worse than look at the suggestions of Mark Rowe
8. Green, nominally a knight of the realm and possibly among the least deserving of that title, recently claimed that the British youth’s insatiable appetite for his cheap, crap clothing was keeping his business from losing sales during the current financial squeeze

• Missed the first instalment? Read Reflections on Relocation: Part 1

We miss…

Source: Jeremy Keith (Wikimedia)

Fish and Chips, say no more

J will be “forever nostalgic about the many nights I feasted on portions of hot vinegared and salted chips, swathed in newspaper, as I wandered aimlessly the bitter cold streets of a Yorkshire village. As a child of the 70′s with chapped lips and cheeks, I could still feel like a Nordic princess nibbling on my prize battered white fish and intoxicating myself with the delicious aromas.

“Even the queue at the local ‘chippy’ held joyful anticipation for the Yorkshire folks in it; the cheery heartening chatter of the inky-fingered ladies serving mushy peas in polystyrene cups and wrapping your prize with a smile, talking of local galas and the weather. Fish and chips was more than ‘fish and chips’; it was the heart and soul of the community.

“We have friteries here in Belgium so we are not without ‘chips’, and in some squares you can take them into bars to be offered serviettes by the bar staff and a hearty beer to wash it down. However, it is only a partial swap for the infamous Yorkshire fishcakes, battered fish, scraps and mushy peas. And these Belgian chips are really not as great as people make out.”

Veggie pleasures in the UK

“Without that much research into the evolution of the Western vegetarian,” J observes, “I can still say that the UK has contributed much to the concept. While the beginning of vegetarian convenience foods could offer no more than ‘spiced up’ veggie lasagne or ‘cheese and tomato pizza’, this soon changed into the 90′s.

Pink Giraffe, Oxford

“The explosion of multicultural foods meeting the British staple menu has created a fusion of very interesting morsels including: Vietnamese-style soya chicken with cashnew nuts, the ‘Caprese salad’ (tomatoes, mozzarella cheese, basil leaves), aubergine moussaka, chickpea dahl and a flurry of sun-dried tomatoes in everything ‘panini style’.

“The UK is no longer the laughing stock of European cuisine, especiallly for vegetarians – it goes beyond Europe with its cocktail stick and jabs into many cultures to have its fill; you can certainly now find veggie sushi and probably soya kangaroo!”

J also wanted it written down that she misses “Pink Giraffe in Oxford for their innovative use of soya and sauces, and the infamous Aagrah (Yorkshire) for the British curry – and yes, we have yet to find a curry worth eating in Brussels, let alone writing about :-/   May our adventures continue to seek one out…”

To cross or not to cross, that is the pedestrian question

“As children we learned the ‘green cross code’ in the UK,” says J, “which in short means once the ‘green man’ lights up you can cross the road safely; in the UK many a parent can be reassured that every driver knows they MUST have stopped, handbrake on, by the time the ‘green man’ appears.

Looks harmless enough, but…

“So, imagine what happens when you have patiently waited for the ‘green man’ and you start to cross in dreamy oblivion, when a car continues to tear across in front of you , or behind you, or screeches to a halt with the driver glowering. This is the Brussels concept of a ‘controlled’ pedestrian crossing – as terrifiying as the Krypton Factor’s assault course, against the clock with a potential loss of limbs and life, but supposedly friendly enough for public viewing.”

We won’t mention the zebra crossings, then…

What is that English that we speak?

Ask any non native English-speaking person in the heart of Brussels’ European Quarter how they rate their languages and most would point to a CV that claims “excellent” or “very good” English.

However, put one native English-speaking person amongst a flock of non native English-speaking people and see what happens when the meeting Minutes are produced!

Says J: “the interpretation of what was said between the non native English-speakers will be very different from the native Englisher-speaker’s undertsanding. Why? Because if your mother tongue is English, your standard of English here is considered ‘poor’ to ‘average’. There is only one solution to do well here, and that is learn a second language fluently and then translate it directly to English. That’s what makes for excellent English.”

Voilà.

We don’t miss…

Not being able to get from A to B in a jiffy for the cost of a Jiffy lemon

Buy a one-journey ticket and hop aboard a Metro train, then take a tram, then a bus to cross the width of the city. All of that can be achieved on the same ticket at a cost of less than €2 (and you can save more if you buy a STIB 10-journey ticket or an annual travel card). Note here that the ticket is described quite accurately as one-journey, not ‘single’ or ‘return’ as in the UK.

“You are also responsible for purchasing and ‘stamping’ your own ticket in the orange machines,” says J, “and if checked it should reflect your activities within the hour…that is, if you pop into Anspach to make a quick purchase of a book and return home to Schuman you can do it on the same ‘one journey’ ticket if completed within the hour.”

Cheap and convenient public transport

J smiles knowingly and continues: “compare this to a journey around Oxford, where your ‘single’ or ‘return’ Stagecoach bus ticket cannot be used on a Oxford Bus Company service, or used with the Arriva bus company… not to mention train services to the next villages/towns a few miles outside, which require different tickets again… We saw many tourists in Oxford looking perplexed as the bus driver explained their tickets were not valid on their bus.  Small tip – Oxford city is small so hire a bike or walk!

London, as you would expect, fleeces the unwitting tourist with the underground travelcard; the cost of which seems to fluctuate increasingly with the price of rising property!  Take a tip from us, use the red London buses – fixed cost (around £1 for single trip) and you see a lot more of London life!”

Fair to say, then, that we don’t miss public transport in the UK.

The very unnecessary 4x4s and SUVs

J never understood why the average family ‘next door’ bought a 4×4 and a SUV.

“The guy mounted his 4×4 to go to his Leeds city job every day, not a welly or mud splatter in sight on his return.  His partner, after packing their small children into giant entertainment consoles,  headed to her office job via the school gates.  At weekends they would all mount the 4×4 and power steer themselves to Sheffield Meadowhall to buy replacement iPods and eat tuna and mozarella paninis.  Besides the fuel consumption of these public JCBs, it doesn’t set a great example for a ‘greener’ planet or prepare their kids for the reality of life outside the DVD-embedded car seat.”

As J says, we don’t miss the attitude that goes, “we have a 4×4 and SUV because…. er, doesn’t everyone have one these days?”

Dress to kill a profit

I mentioned in Part 1 that I’m not a fan of Philip Green. J’s not either. She warns: “in one word, Phillip Green and his ‘entourage of clothes donkeys, are NOT welcome across the Channel!  This newly ‘knighted’ mountebank peddles the fashions of a tramp, a tramp who wears the contents of a charity bag, all in the name of making a profit (but that isn’t stated on the FCUK label of course). Britain has never ‘looked’ worse for it’s credit card debt, especially at summer when Brits are encouraged to ‘let it all hang out’.  J states that if we wanted to see your reproductive organs we would visit Body Worlds again…”

Fortunately, most boutiques over the channel serve all purses and styles without expecting people to remortgage their homes.  “The only requirement you need here,” says J, “is the imagination to build up your own wardrobe since most boutiques sell either collections, like ladies leatherwear or mens wool suits, or one specific genre such as perfume, bags, dress jewellry or hats, for example.

“Piecing it all together as you wander about the cobbled streets of Lille, the modern Scandanavian touch of Uccle or the alleyways of Brugge, for example, make dressing an ‘art’ again.

You can have a lot of fun wearing anything you want here, because it’s the fashion to be yourself however unconventional that may be. I may smile at a 50-something professional lady in a kilt mini-skirt with green tights and red wool jacket, but she arranged it herself with the liberty that she won’t be laughed off the streets! And I tell you, it is liberating to not have the British High Street rammed down your throat from ASDA to M&S, via FCUK and New Look.”

The British High Street has the same shareholders in every city and town. Accordingly to J, that monopoly must come to an end of the British want to look good again. Until then, we won’t miss it.

Knock, knock. Who’s there? Doctor? Doctor who?

J is comfortable sharing her experience of GPs in the UK to explain why we don’t miss British GPs.

“It happens that you need to see a GP one morning and you call your local surgery to explain.” says J. “The curt receptionist says the next appointment is on x day of y month at whatever time. You quickly count how many days away that is, and it’s always at least 10 days away. You say that’s not quick enough but it’s fruitless to argue with a medical receptionist…  So, your alternative is to head to A&E (Accident and Emergency), which we have done a few times in the last 6 years to seek medical attention.”

On the occasion where we have chosen to wait to see the GP, J has been asked about her use of contraception when she had an ear infection, had a GP diagnose her with something that was impossible to have, been prescribed medication that she is allergic to, and has had to pay for private consultation just to skip a 6-month waiting list to see the same consultant.

“Speak to any British person about medical care and there will be lots of interesting stories! By the time we left the UK we were paying our ‘National Insurance’ for the NHS, as well as paying for private BUPA care, private dental treatment, private eye care and private prescription for medication.”

Here in Belgium, you subscribe to a health organisation, of which there are many to suit all tastes, religions, and so on, for a family cover which amounts to much less than what we were paying before.

“Hospitalisation is covered through our work contract, but again covers services similar to BUPA without the high costs,” adds J, “you have the choice to put your money where you want, instead of the State imposing a mandatory national stamp, and you can shop around.”

One less hop

J is particularly pleased to be more ‘green’ by not flying, sailing or driving across the Channel everytime we begin our journey to a holiday destination :-)

Recruitment ‘bounty’ agencies

J doesn’t miss the recruitment agency culture that now controls the job market.

“Whether you’re an UNIX administrator, a plasterer, a nurse or a legal executive, it’s always the same thing,” she says, “and being at the mercy of another profit-driven organisation, like bounty hunters, they are interested in your head at the best price and don’t care too much what happens to you (or the client) once they have ‘bagged you’. I hope they have this covered on the curriculum so British school leavers know how to apply for a job these days…”

Supermarkets

As an Information Designer, I’m used to working with hierarchies. Hierarchies help information consumers to understand the relationships between distinct data.

I learned that, here in Brussels, you can make quick value judgements by applying a hierarchy to compare day-to-day options. All you need is a pencil, a sticky note and a native Belgian:

Coming from Britain, possibly one of the most class-conscious nations in the world, these comparisons are helpful!

Plugging in

As daily life in our new country now starts to take shape, we realise that it’s time to make another small break with Britain: electrical plugs.

There’s only so far you can go on a couple of converters bought in the airport lounges of the past!

Belgium uses CEE 7/7 plugs and given that J is a major fan of both electronics and toolbelt DIY, I let her rip on some of our “business critical” connections.

It was pretty much impossible to get information from the Internet about rewiring UK plugs to European formats.

Typically, Wikipedia boasted an overwhelming volume of information about the various international standards, but nothing whatsoever of practical value.

That’s why, if you dear Reader, should need to convert your British plugs to Belgian or French plugs, I have prepared this nice diagram.

It really is as simple as that – just apply the normal wiring to the plug as shown and you’re away.

You shouldn’t need to worry about fuses and that sort of thing, everything worked fine in our tests.

Temporary accommodation

By way of illustration, we decided to stay in temporary accommodation during our first weeks in Brussels. It might cost us rather more in the short term, but we could take our time when choosing a more permanent place to live.

In Brussels, temporary accommodation at a reasonable price on a monthly basis is surprisingly difficult to find.

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Relocation: the final haul

Now we had an apartment in Brussels, all we had to do was bring all of our furniture over from the UK...!

It wouldn’t take much of an investment to corner the market since there must be extraordinary demand here, but then the famously high taxation in Belgium must put off many entrepreneurs.

We used Brussels Business Flats‘ Eurosquare serviced apartments on Rue des Eburons. We wish we hadn’t.

In the event, an excellent location was somewhat outweighed by:

• Constant, stale cooking smells from the rooms of Indian IT personnel, the surprising numbers of whom fill these places like dormitories
• Optional, expensive, poor-quality Internet connection
• Waiting 10 days for a change of towels: of course it isn’t a hotel but who uses the same towel for 10 days straight?

If that wasn’t enough, we eventually decided to leave when the mould and the cockroaches got too much. Sadly, I’m not exaggerating, I have the photos to prove it! At the time of writing, the promised refund has yet to materialise (it appeared some weeks later – Mike).

Choosing a rental property

Apartments for rent are relatively abundant in Brussels – anyone who tells you otherwise is making excuses for their inflated rent – though quality and prices obviously vary wildly depending on the commune.

So while J spent her first few weeks at work, I hit the streets to get a feel for the city. What might have felt like unfocused wanderings at the time quickly matured into a body of local knowledge, on which we could properly base a decision.

As with any other location, it was essential to establish what factors were most important.

Many of the expat websites – which I won’t quote here – harp on about family requirements, for example, but that didn’t apply to us.

So the three key factors for us (a younger couple without children) were:

1. Public transport – coverage from the “faster” services is patchy in some areas of Brussels
2. Taxation – communal taxes vary widely, within Bruxelles-Capitale there are 19 communes and, as it turned out in our case, the choice of a particular street within a desired quartier can put you in a different commune to a neighbour three doors down
3. Somewhere sympa – in some quartiers there isn’t much entertainment, whilst in others you’ll be an unwilling spectator at the annual street riot

Up to 30% of Brussels’ residents are foreigners it is estimated. You can be certain that the number of rental agencies that speak your language will be significantly less than that, but the number is growing all the time.

English is generally spoken by almost all Flemish and most Walloons of the younger generations (these latter to varying degrees). Indeed many organisations are actively employing foreigners to address that growing multilingual marketshare.

At the time of writing, my written French was better than my spoken, so I conducted most of our dealings with agents in French by email. Often I would send my email and receive a reply in English (the quality of my French obviously gave me away!)

A culture of cutting out middlemen also thrives in Brussels, so it was worth looking out for the orange A LOUER/TE HUUR signs in windows, though in practice I was usually too chicken to follow up on the mobile phone numbers for adverts in French or Dutch.

Since writing this article, I’ve heard anecdotally that people of certain Eastern European nations can sometimes find themselves unwelcome when applying for rentals. Apparently some property owners tend to conflate the ordinary hardworking professional with the sort of lawless itinerant stereotype evoked by popular newspapers.

So the Internet was the most efficient method of finding apartments in the initial stages. Immoweb was by far the best site in terms of usability and choice (good mix of private and agency properties).

We eventually found our apartment this way: selecting what looked good, testing the area against what we knew and could find out and then going to do viewings. A viewing can be disheartening experience when, like in any other big city, you arrive to find a big crowd all there for the same reason and/or the agent never turns up. Try, try, try again seems to be the motto here!

Official documents and language

I have already mentioned language issues above. Even if you, your employer, your landlord and your local government representative all speak English and your business is conducted as such, any official documents between you have to be agreed in one of Bruxelles-Capitale’s official languages. In other words, French or Dutch. Outside the Capital Region, it’s French for Wallonia and Dutch for Flanders of course.

This means that, if you’re not reasonably capable in your local official language, you’re going to need a lot of help. As previously mentioned, at the time of writing I handled written French pretty well even if my oral French was relatively poor. This reading ability turned out to be vital during the rental and registration processes which I’ll come to in a moment.

Types of lease

Research informed us that leases in Belgium are all longer term than the UK. In some areas, particularly in and around the so-called European Quarter, you might find 12-month tenancies aimed at Euroworkers but outside of the temporary lodging scene, these are rare. It follows that shorter tenancy periods – monthly or six monthly, for example – tend to cost more in monthly rent.

Three year and nine year leases sound frighteningly long but they’re the most common terms and they can always be terminated early (at a cost).

The nine year version sounds the worst but it can actually offer tenants slightly more lenient terms for early termination.

Typically, a nine year lease will demand three months’ rent from the tenant if he/she decides to leave in Year 1 of the lease; two months’ rent will be due to leave in Year 2; one month’s rent will be due in Year 3.

Thereafter, leaving before the natural end of the lease should not attract any penalty.

Keep in mind that, as mentioned above, all lease documents are provided in the official language.

In our case, we managed to find a three year lease with the same terms of early termination as those of a nine year lease. This was both fortuitous and illustrative of the capricious nature of rentals. It is important to check very carefully, even if you’ve had a coup de coeur on the property!

Rental guarantee

To rent an apartment in Brussels, as in the rest of Belgium, you’ll also need to have a rental guarantee.

The rental guarantee secures the lease in the form of an often hefty sum of money (in our case the equivalent of three months’ rent). The money goes into a blocked account at the bank in the name of the tenant, then a further legal document is provided by the bank and signed by both parties. Because this process is pretty much unique to Belgium, only Belgian banks are likely to be able to arrange it.

Since the rental guarantee secures the lease and both parties must sign, it usually has to be established contemporaneously with the signing of the lease. The prospective tenant therefore needs to arrange the appointment with his/her selected bank in advance as soon as he/she knows when the lease signing will happen.

Subject to the satisfactory ending of the lease according to its terms, the sum of the rental guarantee will be released to the tenant by the bank and any interest earned will also be due!

Registering at the Commune

Brussels isn’t so much a city as it is a region, in character as well as administrative structure. The actual city of Brussels (postcode 1000) is a small, heart-shaped enclave surrounded by a tight inner ring road. The region consists of nineteen communes, former villages long since sucked into the metropolitan vortex. The village mentality persists however: locals of one commune often know surprisingly little about the neighbouring communes.

If you’re moving to Brussels, chances are you’ll find yourself choosing to live in one of these nineteen communes. And in doing so, you’ll get to know your local maison communale (NL: gemeentehuis), a sort of town hall with a dizzyingly broad remit. Like everything in this multi-faceted country, they vary wildly and each one can be a source of linguistic friction.

A typical maison communale consists of one part Alice In Wonderland and two parts Kafka’s worst nightmare. In physical terms, it might be a squat architectural cast-off full of surprisingly docile administrators or (like ours) it could be a hulky neo-Gothic pile designed to aggrandise even the pettiest of public powermongers and to terrify everyone else.

The scare stories are numerous, but there’s probably an equal number of peaceful, queue-free idylls, particularly in communes whose population tends to be static.

The first time you visit, it’ll be to register as a new resident in the commune. Every time you move to another commune within Belgium, you must re-register, but the first time is the worst since you’re simultaneously registering your residency in the country as well as the commune.

Perhaps three visits and a home visit from the local police later (they need to check you really do live where you say you do) a little green card arrives, announcing the temporary end of your hassles. And you can breathe a sigh of relief.

For now at least. Because in the Transylvanian charnelhouse that passes for your maison communale, behind every creaking door lurks a beady-eyed official waiting to suck your lifeforce from you, even if all you want is a temporary parking permit.

Parking permits for residents and for moving house

Traffic is horrendous in Brussels. And parking on your own street could be described as an opportunistic slalom, even if you have a parking permit for residents (carte riverain). To obtain one means a trip to the dreaded maison communale where a frosty reception consisting of misanthropy and creeping suspicion awaits you.

This agony can be assuaged by combining this with communal registration. Proof that you own the car is required. For company cars, you’ll need a letter from your employer.

And what happens if you need to replace your company car every few months? A new number plate equals a new permit, and a new permit means another trip to the maison communale…

If you’re moving house (déménagement) to a busy street, you’ll need a temporary parking permit, available somewhere in the labyrinth of the aforementioned maison communale for a variable cost depending on the particular commune in which you find yourself.

The always reassuring no-parking signs can be placed in the relevant position on the pavement or the street which will notify drivers to keep the area clear during the time of your move.

Two things will happen as a result of this commonsense act: one, you’ll avoid beeping horns and angry expressions and two, you’ll have the rare privilege of seeing what the kerb looks like for the first (and probably last) time because the cars have cleared off!

Services and utilities

When we first arrived, we didn’t think to record those all-important meter numbers and their values. In the UK the landlord or his/her agent always provided that information while here in Brussels doing so got lost in a hundred other tasks.

A week or so after moving in – and therefore a week or so later than was strictly appropriate – I called a supplier (gas and electricity are now privatised while water is supplied by the Region) and struggled through with spoken French until the values for the meters were requested, which I didn’t have of course.

As I stuttered with the scant details I had, the very image of pleasant customer service was painted over with the increasingly rough strokes of cranky Belgian impatience. If you use Electrabel, more often than not your bored, francophone customer service rep will actually be in France.

Woe betide that young fellow if he should ever move his scrawny, parochial, backwater backside abroad himself. Then, when the wellington boot’s on the other foot, he’ll see how difficult it is to be a foreigner.

Take my advice: if you’re worried about making this kind of call – and this applies to any utility or subscription-type service – always select Dutch as your language of choice when prompted. The Dutch speaking reps can switch flawlessly to English right from the hello!

For general information, when you try to find online any vaguely important information from your local government, utility company or employer and you’ll probably be advised that the page was not found or that your account has expired, even if you have no account!

Some guesswork allowed me to paper over the cracks of another failed online enquiry, this time at the Bruxelles Propreté website, where I was trying to complete the simple task of finding out which days my household rubbish would be collected. The website does occasionally work, but if not send an email and amazingly they will actually reply personally.

Rubbish is collected twice a week by the Region. One of these collections will take your white bags (household, non-recyclable) and the other will take white, yellow (cardboard, paper) and blue (plastic bottles, containers and cartons).

However, use the wrong bags and nothing at all will be collected. Sometimes you get the angry “stickers of shame” that they plant on your bags and then leave them right there.

Worse still, put your bags out too early the night before collection and you can expect a fine. Having said that, if you live in an apartment within a bigger building, it’s difficult to imagine how they would figure out your own individual responsibility unless they know what you consume!

The correct bags (carrying the Capitale logo and blurb) are available from most supermarkets and larger general stores in Brussels.

Health matters and English-speaking doctors / dentists in Brussels

We’ve got all the insurance and we’ve since racked up visits to both the dentist and doctor. I’ll probably write more about these matters in due course.

Doctors Roger Verheul and Rachel Stockley are located in the European Quarter (Boulevard Charlemagne, 37 / 02 73 56 694) and are a GP double-act that previously practised in England.

Dentists in Brussels are both common and commonly expensive, as evidenced by the original artworks one often finds in their waiting rooms. My dentist is a quiet, efficient young lady called Eline Schol and you can find her at Ann Ritmeester’s dental clinic on Avenue de Tervuren – Tervurenlaan 94 on 02 734 01 43.

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If you have any questions, leave me a comment below and I’ll get back to you!

Buying soap in Brussels on a Sunday is difficult.

I hadn’t even brought my wallet but J had Visa. All we needed was an open shop or a cash machine:

Almost every store big enough to take plastic is closed Sunday but almost every other, smaller store accepts cash only.

This all started because – who’d have thought it – we’d run the soap down to the size of a paracetamol without thinking to replace it at the Delhaize.

That morning, I’d had to shower with half a fistful of shampoo and I only half saw the funny side. Then the same afternoon, still ignorant of the urgency of the situation, we instead found ourselves urgently needing refreshment at Chez Moeder Lambic, one of Brussels’ greater bars.

Right then, whilst licking our lips at the prospect of a juicy brew, we realised we were out of cash. It was a torrid early summer afternoon – perfect for sitting down for a jar, not trudging the streets of an unfamiliar neighbourhood looking for a cashpoint.

Well now, we may as well buy soap, I thought. The particular brand that J likes ought to be common enough, though I’m no expert on soap, I’ll confess. I could wash my face with a bar of Vanish and not notice (I once did).

Needless to say, after 20 minutes or so on the cobbles, no cashpoint could be found. Unlike the English, Belgians are not married to their money. No beer, no soap and I’m quietly getting into a lather about it.

We headed back to the car all dry. Through Charleroi, the bottom of Avenue Louise, Waterloo, Regent, Montoyer, Luxembourg, Trèves, Belliard … not a single cashpoint in front of or near which we could stop the car. Banks aplenty: Dexia, KBC, ING. No cashpoints attached to any of them. The sun was beginning to set and any shops that had been open were surely closed now anyway.

Belgian shops are there for their own convenience, not that of their customers. This is a refreshingly unconsumerist take on consumerism.

So now, almost home, we made the safest bet: the Fortis at Schuman. A cashpoint with the “wood effect” user interface. And a single, comfortably-sized parking spot was free just in front of it.

We parked and J rummaged in her bag.

She had forgotten to bring her wallet in the first place.

During my early wanderings around the city, I’ve been taking photos of maisons de maître, trying to capture the definitive style of these rather lovely houses.

Many of the most distinctive examples can be found in the district of Schaerbeek, to the north west of Brussels city centre. Schaerbeek’s townhouses exhibit the classic Flemish style, whilst some boast very individual Art Nouveau fascias.

I’ll be adding to this as and when I take new photos.

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Maisons de Maître

Townhouses and other buildings from around Schaerbeek in the Flemish and Art Nouveau styles.

Brussels is now our new home. It’s also home to just over a million other folks and the capital of two unions, one of which is barely holding together as a nation these days.

The old town is heart-shaped, girded by a ring road that roughly follows the line of the old city walls.

Architecture inside the ring broadly consists of the beautiful homes, guildhouses and markets of medieval burghers, together with much later maisons de maître.

Elsewhere Brussels is dominated by a conspicuous streak of bland neoclassicism initiated by the unpopular monarch King Leopold II.

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Brussels Old Town

The capital of Belgium and of Europe, rebuilt from the siege of 1695 and further developed on the proceeds of Leopold II's activities in the 19th century.

The things you own end up owning you – Tyler Durden, Fight Club

Competition: where did we relocate to? Win a box of chocs

When you’re upping sticks, there’s something unsettling about selling off your furniture on eBay. On the one hand, your imperative is to travel light whilst on the other you still catch yourself hoping that agglomeration of wood, screws and glue goes to a good home. As if you can equate a cat with a gatefold table.

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Relocation

Pictures of our relocation, starting at our flat in Sandal, then a farewell sojourn in London. Thereafter the Eurostar beckoned!

The four walls you call home are your bulwark against the big, bad world out there. And you can’t see it, but the fungal moulds of sentimentality are quietly propagating in the dark recesses of your cupboards, creeping onto your pristine marble-effect surfaces. In this way, spring cleaning at the end of a tenancy can be considered an exchange. The deposit returns to the tenants and the apartment returns to the block. Everything’s neat and tidy.

Nevertheless, if like Shirley Valentine you dream of living the dream of living abroad, the redefining of home can still be difficult, since such stories rarely unfold at leisure.

First the hazy prospect becomes sudden reality when one of a handful of job applications turns into a job offer.

Then piece by piece you dismantle your old life in readiness for the new. The concept of home transforms from comfort zone to millstone with the hauling of boxes and (unsold) furniture. And like the occasional bout of heavy drinking, you’re doing it again this time despite saying never again the last time.

Finally you physically move. You displace yourself from one point to another and at your destination you check if everything’s intact: your chairs, your computers, your relationship.

(S)he knows best

Relocation can be tough on relationships. If you know the drill, if you’ve done it all before, you should have learned that your relocation has the best chances of success if you play to your respective strengths.

In our case, I continued to go to work as normal. I handed in my notice at the last possible moment. This, I reasoned with some satisfaction, meant we would have enough income to tide us over the interim period. It was a brilliant excuse with which to excuse myself from the ugly early stages of the process.

In these stages she shows characteristic brilliance, whilst I flounder around with an embarassing lack of focus. In short, on this occasion as on others, I avoided any and every situation of planning, organising and packing. Avoidance is a male prerogative.

Instead I impressed her with an array of manly capabilities. If she could sort, organise and collate hundreds of individual objects and pack them carefully into labelled and sealed boxes, I could lift the boxes.

Later, like a young Freder unaccustomed to and exhausted by, the factory repetition of lift-haul-drop, I experienced feverish, eccentric visions of mad contraptions and devices that could do the brunt of the work in a fraction of the time, using vacuums, casters and belts. For even if I had the strength of a chihuahua, I could still lay claim to the imagination of Heath Robinson.

The whole storage

Not having frequented such a place before, I found myself fascinated by the storage warehouse in which we stashed our remaining goods and effects.

My expectations were somewhat skewed. I had envisioned vast boulevards humming with the traffic of a hundred forklifts and lined by towering skyscraper shelving stacks. A metropolis populated by tea chests, archive boxes and airtight bags all hopefully awaiting daylight in a much bigger world.

The reality was somewhat more prosaic, yet still intriguing. A tour de force in maximising profit per square metre, the ceiling was impressively low and the corridors superbly narrow. Take a haphazard sort of business and formalise it with processes, calculations and up-sell, the sort of thing the Americans are good at.

Every number corresponds to a unit and every unit is at least big enough to hold a car. Maybe some do.

Radio is piped in to lift the oppressive atmosphere. Everywhere the sound doesn’t reach is a quiet little corner occupied by a ferrety little Greek unloading mysterious items, taking care to avoid being watched too closely.

Blending in with the natives

I take an ugly satisfaction out of listening to the old buffer opposite. He’s a tourist: it’s in his outfit (for that generation still dresses for travel) and it’s in the neat pile of guidebooks on which he rests his shaky hands.

There are eight of us here, cramped together in an unusually overheated part of the Eurostar. It’s the last carriage on an endless St Pancras platform, but it’s the first carriage out of Britain.

Across the narrow aisle, the old Brit is tenacious in his engagement of the bemused, harrassed but always polite young man opposite, who is a native of our destination today and who, despite looking like a teenager complete with jeans sagging over his backside, speaks in the clipped, neat English of a Eurocrat.

Despite being able to see his pants, I sympathise with the youth who copes well with the persistent questioning. This is because I have something in common with him. We are not tourists in our intended destination.

I work hard to mould my impression of the irritating old bugger into someone who travels alone – for he is alone -to honour a tradition he shared with his beloved spouse, the great companion of his life, now passed. And he wants to travel without being a burden to his daughter, who has enough trouble squeezing three kids into a people carrier for the annual summer ordeal to Devon.

While this charming reinterpretation was being introduced, his questions have stopped. Now a series of statements has started in which, with a touch of the sycophantic, free conversation is being encouraged instead of closed questions.

Handpicked from a shelf full of stereotypes, the senior citizen’s statements include “they make good cheese there”, “I like the cafés in such and such a city”, and “the beer is excellent in your country”, each punctuated by a pause during which the young European citizen is expected to respond in the affirmative or the negative. He does respond, but the economy of his words does not suggest he wishes to be drawn into any particular subject. Except that the beer in his country is the best in the world, after which flat assertion there was only a prolonged silence.

I now felt that their difficult exchange had run its course. In the absolute certainty of his response about the quality of his nation’s beer, of which he didn’t look old enough to legally partake, the youth had drawn a line under this method of interaction. The old man was spent. There was simply nothing more to say.

“There are in fact over 600 beers brewed in that country,” came a quiet voice from the far side of the cabin. An Indian man had spoken and the Iranian fellow opposite him smiled widely enough to show a full set of gleaming white teeth. Everyone else present checked their internal encyclopaedia for whether these two could actually drink alcohol, heedless of the possibility that one might be knowledgeable about a subject without being directly involved in it.

“Is that so?” cried the old gent, his eyebrows lifting off like a pair of hairy jetplanes, for he knew, as we all did, that he had been rescued. The cavalry, it now seemed, had not just arrived, it had been there all along.

Thereafter, until the destination had been reached and the train drew to a halt, the flag was raised whenever the conversation flagged and the old man would chuckle again, “600 beers indeed”.

Tourists (or, eager to be legal)

Giving in to silly vanity, I found myself half hoping a tourist would stop us and ask for directions. There would be a moment, I gleefully imagined, when they recognised we could help them and that we spoke English with a familiar accent. Then I would get the opportunity to slip in that I live here and leave them with a nice hint of jealousy that they would have to head home in a day or two, while we could stay and enjoy as many coffees in these very chairs, at this very café, as the man upstairs would allow.

Indeed tourists have approached us in these early days. On each occasion, however, we’ve usually had about as much idea of where their destination was as they, for we ourselves are relatively unfamiliar with the town. We’re still getting to grips with our new home.

The important difference between being a tourist and being a resident, however, is that the former experience is generally quite superficial whereas in the latter one expects to be inculcated into the deep mysteries of the city, the nation and what it is to be from here.

And if “deep mysteries” seems like a rather highfalutin phrase, just wait until I start to discuss registration, national insurance and renting an apartment. There the mysteries shall begin.

Competition: where did we relocate to? Win a box of chocs