A touristy weekend

This weekend Steve and I did what the tourists would do in Belgium. The two attractions here are the Grand Place and the Mannequin Pis. The Grand Place is the old historical city center of Brussels. What you see in the square now are the historical buildings and different shops and pubs/restaurants. From my understanding the buildings were part of indoor markets, and also different guilds such as the brewer's (which is now the brewer's museum).
























After the Grand Place we went and saw the Mannequin Pis. Essentially this is a small little statue of a boy peeing. Yep, a boy peeing. It sprays water and everything. I don't really get the whole excitement around the statue, but it's big here. The Belgians' dress it up for different holidays and events. If you Google it, you'll see all sorts of photos of the mannequin dressed up like Santa, Elvis, Cupid, etc. When we went to find it, the boy was dressed up for the paralympics. It had a little jersey on and was sitting in a wheelchair. I'm not sure who dresses it up each day, but they do get creative.

It's a big tourist attraction, walking around the shops you see t-shirts, water fountains and mugs with a peeing boy them. I can only imagine what my parents would say if I brought them t-shirts with the Mannequin Pis on them. 

A look into the working world...Steve's world

Hello all readers, this is Steve, the authoresses’ husband.  As Mary has so graciously allowed I wanted to submit a “contributing editor” piece to this wonderful blog.  As Mary has done such a wonderful job of blogging on life in Belgium I’ll focus on a few items from the workplace.  Here we go…

Free Coffee:  Coffee is automatic here, no standard coffee machines.  Not sure if you have seen the automatic machines or the ones where you pick a “pod” and then put it in the machine and Voila’ a hot cup of what you wanted comes out or the ones where you key in what you want and then BAM hot cup of deliciousness.  This seems to be the standard here.  In my now 5-6 weeks in total here I have yet to see one standard coffee pot.

Abbreviations = Am I am 16 again?  In Belgium people like to abbreviate  the word assessment or assistant with ass. on whiteboards, flipcharts and emails.  Now I recall one time when a substitute teacher of mine did this by accident in high school and we had a field day with it.  Thankfully I managed to keep my chuckles under wraps in the meeting where a sr. manager I work with did it in front of a group of 20.  At first I thought uh excuse me you just wrote ass on the board, but then when I saw no chuckles I though ahh cultural difference.

Office Attire:  For the most part is exactly the same, business casual.  What is odd though is that I will often see the big shots wearing suits both men and women and then some of the other people around my office the “common folk” just throw in some random jeans from time to time.  A 3 year employee traveled to Belgium for meetings last week an wore jeans the entire week.  He also wore a blazer with them so it looked OK but he still had jeans on,  not sure what the rules are there.

Office Hours:  to Beat the traffic out of Brussels and because I don’t really sleep in on the week days I get to work at 8am.  At 8am the office is a ghost town.  People usually roll in here around 8:30 or 9:00 and leave about 4:00, 5:00 or 6:00.

No Cubes:  There is no cubes in our office at all!  It’s strange coming from cube land and now being in an office.  Thankfully for my transition I share an office with another HR team member so it’s better but just odd not being able to stand up and shout questions down the row.  Might get some odd looks if I tried that here.

Dutch Speaking, Flipping the Switch:  For those of you that thought, what the heck is Steve doing he can’t speak either Dutch or French, rest easy…our office is an English speaking office.  It is odd because due to the divide in Belgium there is a clear language split.   We live in Brussels 20-30 minutes south of my office where the main language is French and then I work in Mechelen where the main language is “Flemish” which is a dialect of Dutch.  I guess the historical reason for the language divide I am not fully in tune to yet but from what understand Brussels is actually in the northern Flemish speaking region however over time it seems to have adopted French as the mainly spoken language.  I guess way back when the “fancy” people that migrated to the city they wanted to show their “class” and speaking French was one way to do that.  People in the office are relatively friendly but due to the fact that most people here are from the region near the office here they will greet each other in Flemish, have lunch conversation in Flemish and then look at me and then just switch right over to English.  Pretty fascinating really that they can within the course of 1 second just flip the switch and they are speaking another language fluently.  Makes me feel super inferior!!

Radio on the commute no censorship:  On my drive to and from work I listen to Q-Music a radio station that has to be based somewhere in the north of the country.  All of the commentary is in Dutch so really all I can understand somewhat is the traffic report in the evenings as the Dutch numbers like “the E19” or “the A40” I can understand as they sound a lot like English numbers, but then when they give the report about what is going on , on these said highways I get lost.  Anyway the radio station was playing an Alanis Morrisette song the other day which I am very used to listening to the edited version of from radio stations at home.  Then as I continue to listen awaiting a cut out or a badly dubbed in word, there it was, a clean crisp F-Bomb dropped right on the public radio at 6:00pm on a Wednesday.  At first somewhat surprised I then thought to myself… if they played a Dutch song in the US would the Dutch curse words be edited out?  Now of course it’s somewhat different with most of the people I meet speaking English here and of course the first words you learn when you speak a new language are hello, thank you, good bye and then all the nasty ones!  Anyway an interesting observation to leave you with.

Hope you are all enjoying Mary’s blog and thanks for letting me contribute… Steve

One of those moments

Today I had a "moment." One of those moments, when you think to yourself, what the $%# is going on? I had expected to have these types of moments when I got lost in a train station, or couldn't read a menu or a street sign. I didn't expect to have one of these moments doing typical household stuff like laundry or heating up leftovers in the microwave. The funny thing is that in general I've handled the "big" stuff alright, it was trying to figure out the washing machine that threw me over the edge a bit. Looking back its kind of funny that I couldn't figure it out, but at the time I just stood there thinking what is this?

I went to do a couple loads of laundry and I had figured I would find maybe some dials with chaud (hot) froid (cold) but instead I found three different temperatures. I had no idea what temperature to use, and then there were multiple temps under three different sections. I tried to figure out what the different sections were using my limited French skills, but I'm pretty sure I washed colors in hot water and whites in cold water. I also learned that opening the washing machine is a little different here. I've always had washing machines where there is a little handle for you to just pull the door open. Here there is a release button that springs the door open. I of course spent too much time looking for the handle and then tried to place my fingers into the grooves to pull the door open. That did not work.

I eventually sent Steve pictures of the machine at work and one of his co-workers helped write a detailed description of what all of the settings meant. She must think I'm an idiot.

The first weekend

Steve and I had a great first weekend together in Brussels. We wondered the city and checked out a couple of different neighborhoods. We also enjoyed some of the great food and drinks that Brussels is known for.  One of the neighborhoods that we went to is called Sablon. Like most of Brussels the buildings were tall and narrow and had a lot of character. The sidewalks are mostly cobblestone, which is why I invested in flats shoes before coming here. Between the cobblestone and the hills, heels were out of the question.

The train saga continues....

Of course Steve would not accept the blame for my night of wandering around random cities, so we went to the train station the next day to figure it out. To start out with, in Belgium many street/ city/store signs are both in French and Dutch. So the city of Leuven is Dutch and in French it is Louvain. The second thing to know is that there are Dutch parts of Belgium and French parts of Belgium, and when the Dutch  part has something like a university or a city, the other part wants it to. So when the Dutch part created a city named Louvain, the French part created a city called the new Louvain. I had gone to the French speaking region instead of the Dutch speaking because neither one of us knew about the two regions and there need to copy each other. Now here's a test for anybody reading, from the picture below to the right which train would you have taken to meet Steve for his meeting?

First try at the train..not my most successful day

Today  tried to navigate the train system by myself. I was pretty confident at the beginning but it turned out to be a disaster. I was going to meet Steve at an out of town meeting where he was staying overnight. He went by car in the morning and I decided to take the train later in the afternoon.  It was suppose to be 45 minute train ride and a 20 minute walk but the train ride alone was about an hour and a half.  When I got off the train it was like I had gotten dropped off in the middle of a big mall. There were no pedestrian walk ways and no cabs anywhere. I don't have a cell phone that works here so I found a free wifi and was emailing back and forth with Steve to pick me up. Unfortunatey neither one of us knew where the other person was. So after 2 frustrating hours of being lost I headed back on a train to the apartment. 

I think the problem was a case of the blind leading the blind. I was going to Leuven and Steve told me that I would also see it written as Louvain. So I got off the train at Louvain which is a completely different town. So lesson learned, neither of us know where we are going.

Day 2: how much is tinfoil?

I made another attempt at the grocery store today. We've been eating out mostly and wanted to try and make an actual meal(yes I am going to try and cook). First I tried to shop for tacos but couldn't find tortillas or tortilla chips so I moved to fish. I was going to buy tinfoil to put the fish on, but it was almost 8 euro, so almost 11 dollars. Am I crazy or is that ridiculous? I couldn't do it, so we'll see how dinner goes:)I suspect that I'll find an actual grocery store eventually...I'm just not sure when...

We're also starting to settle into the apartment. There is still stuff everywhere but it's coming together. Our apartment is quite a bit smaller than our house and finding places for everything will be a bit challenging. I'll post photos of the place when it is a little neater.

Settling In

First day in Brussels. It's raining which makes it harder to walk around but I found a nice little coffee shop called karsmakers. It's right down the street from our apartment so I have a feeling I'll be a regular. Our apartment is right down the street from parliament which makes it easier to get around the neighborhood as  people are must more accustomed to non French speakers. It also makes for great people watching. For my single friends there are very GQ looking men in suits everywhere. They look like young diplomats. (don't worry Steve, I'm only observing the surroundings) It's both exciting and a little lonely to sit here and listen to everybody speaking French. It sounds like a beautiful language, I just wish I had somebody to chat with too.

I also went to the grocery store today. I say grocery store lightly as it was more like a small market. I felt a little bit like I was in ikea. The place was like a big ring, you go in and only go in one direction. Turning around to go back for anything is like a fish going downstream. I spent a lot of time just looking at things trying to figure out what they were. What I still need to figure out is how to buy milk. I found a section that looked like milk containers but they weren't chilled. Then I found some containers that looked like chilled milk but I wasn't sure what kind they were. In the MN pink milk is usually skim, red is whole etc. Here I've got red or green...and from the little French that I think I can read, there is a good chance this is actually coffee creamer, so I'm going to have to look into that one.

Overall I'm still excited about all of this, it's just taking some time to get settled...