General Observations

It’s the little things, and some big things, that are so different here in Belgium.

Commuting & Driving

Many of the roads are very narrow here in Belgium so driving is an activity that requires extreme concentration and is generally a very cautious and calm affair. The road signs are plentiful and everywhere as are the markings on the road. Whilst driving you need to be very alert for road signs and the interpretation thereof. If there are no road signs or markings to the contrary, traffic (including bicycles) have right of way when turning into the road from the right. This sounds crazy but it works because it slows traffic down and makes drivers pay attention.

Bicycles tend to have complete right of way and if pedestrians are in the way they ring those bells! Pedestrians are supposed to, and do, get out of the way.

Busses have absolute right of way over cars. If a bus wants to pull out into traffic, cars are obliged to allow them in. Even though they have right of way, they still pull in carefully. It all works very calmly.

Trams have right of way above everything on the roads. This makes sense because 5 tons of metal (empty) isn’t easy to stop even at slow speeds.

The trains work well here and for getting from one city to another are ideal. They’re direct, don’t have to deal with traffic lights and such. On weekends all train tickets for Belgium internal are half price. A very good arrangement for weekend exploring!

Getting around by bicycle is great. A lot of distance can be covered and there are all kinds of accessories and attachments, big and small, for bicycles from lights to trailers.

Petrol attendants are non-existent in Belgium. It’s all help-your-self when it comes to pouring petrol and such things here.

Something that I’m still not used to here is crossing the road. Its going to take a long time to stop looking for oncoming cars in lanes I think they should be in. In South Africa I’d always start by looking right for the closer oncoming cars, then left and right again. I keep looking right first and think ‘its clear’ when I should be looking left first because then I’d see the oncoming cars.

Stopping for Coffee

The etiquette for having a coffee or even eating in a Belgian restaurant is completely different. The waiter or waitress won’t clear the table of used crockery or cutlery unless asked to do so and won’t offer to refill empty glasses. It’s considered rude to do so because you’d be hurrying the customer along. Here they only give re-fills if you ask for something more and forget having them offer you the bill! You have to ask for it or they’ll leave you there all day, again because it’d be rude for them to rush you out of the restaurant.

There’s a cute little custom they have here too which becomes a whole little sing & dance routine all of it’s own. When you give something to someone here its polite to say Alsjeblieft as in “please”. Its considered rude to simply shove something at a person and expect them to take it. You’re effectively asking them to take it so even if you’re paying for an item at a till point (a kasa) you’d give them the item with an Alsjeblieft and they’d give it back to you with an Alsjeblieft and you’d give them the money with an Alsjeblieft and, well, its all quite Alsjeblieft cute. During all this Alsjeblieft business there’s also the Dank u well as in “thank you” which is said almost as much as the Alsjeblieft!

Standard items that come with coffee here are the little container of concentrated milk, sugar and a biscuit.

If you need something to fill the gap, a little meal, don’t look for a McDonalds! Belgians have more self-respect than to eat that stuff! I’ve only seen a few and only in the bigger cities. Here in Belgium most of the coffee shops and some of the bars will serve a “Soup of the day” which is perfectly safe to eat unlike South Africa. The soup of the day usually comes with a few slices of bread and is an inexpensive, filling, warm meal dependent on the type of soup. They sometimes serve cold soups like cucumber soup.

Wee-wee Holes

Need a toilet? The average price is 0.50 Euro at a public toilet. If you stop for coffee, go there. The one thing that I like about bathrooms here is that more of them have paper towels than those hand dryer things! I prefer paper towels far more. It astounds me at how open the urinals are in most of the public use bathrooms especially at restaurants. In South Africa we tend to really hide the urinals away from lady passers-by. Here they’re not really hidden away! It’s not that you could see anything though its simply that I’m not accustomed to being seen while I wee.

Sometimes I really feel like a white African when I can’t figure out how to turn the tap on to wash my hands afterwards.

In the Kitchen

As can be expected, the products are different. There are certain things that Belgians just don’t eat like chilli sauce. I’ve seen a sweet chilli sauce but nothing as powerful as a Banditos chilli sauce or even Tabasco. China town has chilli sauces and dried chillies available so that’s an option if I really want to go for some sauce.

The tap water’s much harder here. Every product like washing machines, dishwashers and even the coffee maker has descaling products and they need to be used often.

I’ve not had tap water to drink since I’ve been here because the normal thing here is to buy your drinking water. For making coffee and tea the Belgians use the tap water though.

Coffee granules are available in some shops but its not the most preferred method of making coffee here. The most popular way to make coffee here is with a coffee machine, either a filter coffee machine or a ‘Senso’ machine. The Senso machine has coffee pods that you load into it and the variety of the pods is quite amazing.

TV and Radio

The choice of channels is great! If you have cable or satellite the choice is very much like South Africa but all the programs (although they’re in English) all have dutch subtitles. I haven’t had to watch African Edutainment at all! What we get here is either News or entertainment. The radio’s strange to listen to. I listen to Classic 93.20 where the announcers are French but they play stuff like Creadence Clearwater Revival, Rolling Stones, Blues and they’re currently obsessed with Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here which is very fitting. I hear Wish You Were Here at least once a day on that channel. Again, no kwaito krap and raving about this that’s wrong or that that’s wrong just good music and the odd bit of French chitter chat.

The People

Belgians are indeed very reserved and keep to themselves even on public transport right up until someone needs help like when the doors of the bus start closing and there’s some old biddy still hobbling off. They all start shouting “Wooah!” and so on and then as soon as the incident’s finished they all go quiet again.

Yesterday a couple of passengers helped an elder lady get her daughter who was wheelchair-bound onto the bus. They all just pitch in and do it and end off with at “Was niks” when the older lady thanks them. It’s all just so strange but I think I get it. The bus is the regular passenger’s only way of getting around and if someone who battles also needs to use the bus it’s pretty given that it’s their only way to get about too so everyone helps when they need to embark or disembark and that’s just how it works.

 Nothing new in elevators though. Everyone stares at the door and keeps quiet.

Escalators are a different story. Pick a side and leave gaps so that people can overtake especially at train stations and airports or you get the highly annoyed “Excuseerd!” behind you but those people are usually in a rush and are trying to catch a connecting mode of transport and if they’re late it could cost them an hour of waiting.

There’s nothing more pleasant than the smell of waffles or chips in the air on a cold, rainy day. It’s an amazing, warm smell and the perfect advertising.

The amount of beer I see being consumed in public (on the trains and on the street) is amazing. I’m just not used to it! The most common beer consumed on the run here is Jupiler. It doesn’t sound particularly fabulous and I haven’t tried any yet because it comes across to me as a rather common beer. I prefer beer that doesn’t come in a can and is sold at the till point (kasa) like coke-a-cola.

Belgians are like the Japanese in one aspect - its polite to take your shoes off indoors here too. I think it was originally the mud issue. You didn’t want to go traipsing mud through your host’s house.

The children, even the teenagers are really polite and well-rounded and have respect for other people in general.

 

These are just some of the things I’ve noticed.

Ciao for now.

Things That Don't Work Out

It’s the most amazing thing! I’ve seen these items for sale on the internet at massive prices, but here they are all banging into each other and doing good things. They’re automatic vacuum cleaners and I’m going to need one…or three depending on how many floors the apartment has. I’ve also seen the version of this that mows the lawn in someone’s lawn doing the deed. I may need one of those too!

 

Incidentally the standard plug is a round connection that looks like a two prong but can have a spoke for earth sticking out of it. The two prong plugs like the one on our electric toothbrush fits just fine!

 

I arrived at the employment agency in good time and had a coffee outside at a place called "Infinity Cafe".

 

 Things work completely differently here. The agent will go with you, even drive you, to your first interview and sit in on the interview to answer any questions pertaining to the technicalities and legalities of the employment and contract. The agent would also give you a rundown of how he felt it had gone and what points to brush up on. A second interview would be done alone.

Well I didn’t get the job or the one after it. They were both looking for something very specific skill-wise which I didn’t have.

Oh, well. I did get the third one though and without an agent holding my hand!

There’s something in Belgium that freaked me out to begin with - their varied and creepy spiders.

This one in particular is everywhere because people here don’t have walls, they have hedges. These spiders have this very pretty web on the hedge surface with a little web tunnel leading inside the hedge.

 

They also have spiders that do the traditional spiral spun web that floats at eye level between two branches, fence posts, well you get the idea.

To Ela’s horror, she found out that beauty spa’s here require you to be stark naked. Everyone, men included, mill around with nothing on! It’s like an indoor nudist colony! There is no separating the males and females at all but the staff will throw anyone out who starts staring.

 

The Belgians don’t seem to have that male and female separation that the South African culture has. Men and woman will all change in a common area with no embarrassment at all.

After Ela’s booking of the beauty therapy session, we came home and my letter from the mayor was waiting for me! Everything was in order and I was required to go in and arrange to have my ID card made.

 

The Weekend

On the weekend Ela took me to Heist-op-den-berg where she applied to do more art classes. It’s a very, very quite yet funky little village. The street at the foot of the ‘berg’ was really busy but up at the town square it was dead quite.

Just off the square is a primary school. There are 13 school years here before you ‘matriculate’ and if you don’t have a diploma or degree of sorts, you’re not considered to have passed your matric equivalent here since our school career is generally only 12 years.

It was a warm day in Belgium and the town square reminded me of a Karoo dorpie, eerily quiet but you know there are things happening behind closed doors.

Sunday was soon upon me and I made it my mission to go to mass to ask God, Mary and Jesus to help me put everything in place to help get my family to Belgium. I prayed very hard in this little (big) church in Tremelo and plan to do so every Sunday!

Maybe it was the praying, but the week ahead turned out to be very busy and somewhat of a turning point for me with the early interview on Monday morning and later that week the interview where I got the job!

The seasons are changing. There’s the first yellow leaf on the tree outside my window. It won’t be long and the tree will be all yellow or bare, I’m not sure how quickly this particular tree loses it’s leaves.

Monday – Interview Day

Monday morning was cold, wet and dark. It’s definitely gotten darker in the mornings here in Belgium in the short few weeks that I’ve been here. When I left the house at 5:30 it was very dark still and it took my eyes a while to adjust so I could see the driveway that I had to walk down to the road but I got there. Being a skeptical South African I was wondering if the bus would actually arrive at the bus stop on time but this is Belgium, not Africa. The bus was perfectly on time even at some early dark hour in the morning. Not only was it on time but it was pleasantly warm.

The train station was buzzing and I was soon on my way to Antwerp – Berchem Station which I arrived at good and early. To fill the tedium of the wait I stopped and had a Speculoos muffin and coffee.

 

Again the interview didn’t go as well as anticipated because the company wanted some skills that were quite specific and I hadn’t slept very well and made silly mistakes because I was nervous. After the interview when Christophe was driving us back to the office someone rear-ended us.

All in all really not a good morning.

After the rear-ending incident, Christophe dropped me off (at my request) near the canal of Antwerp.

I walked back to Antwerp Central Station knowing that the day was a right-off.

Later that day though, whilst out at Delhaize with Ela I got the phone call that restored my confidence again – the phone call for the interview for the company I will now work for!

Ciao for now.

On my bicycle with Ela.

This time I went with Ela on a bike ride.

After a few minutes ride we arrived at the lake. It was very peaceful and the ducks were quite friendly. We were both quite sure they’re used to being fed or they’d never be as friendly as they were, bloody beggars.

 

The lake isn’t natural, it’s an old World War II air field that was built up and filled in with water.

I see many things in the Belgian way of doing things that was ingrained in the culture here because of World War II. That event had a massive impact and still rattles through the generations, affecting the way things are done here. For instance Belgians are naturally savers and in good times they save quite a bit in the bank. When the recession hit Belgium they didn’t start dipping into their savings, somehow the rate of saving went UP. People cut back even further than ever and began saving harder! I believe that has a lot to do with the impact that World War II had on Belgium.

Soon we were on our way from the lake and heading to Keerbergen central. On the way we passed this old windmill. Very Don Quixote. We stopped past it when we were on holiday here and, well, its still the same. There’s a mill festival that happens here every so often. I’m looking out for it but I have a feeling it’s a spring thing.

Ela stopped at a clothing store called “Spyker” to get some T-shirts so I went in too to have a look at clothing prices and, well, I was shocked! Okay, the quality’s better but so is the price! It was 300 Euros for this jacket! I suppose if I were to wear it for years like I do to my jackets it doesn’t work out to that expensive.

We took quite a long bike ride to just outside Haaght, the neighboring town and Ela showed me her “Wine Stop” restaurant. They were unfortunately (or is that fortunately) closed. I’m still not sure I can drink and ride … a bicycle.

The Wine Stop is right at a bridge and entry to the canal wall gravel road. The no entry signs here are a red circle around the thing that may not enter. Here horses cannot enter onto the canal wall because the sign says so. Here in Belgium the no entry sign as we know it means no entry to ANYTHING. Even that can get complicated because they’ll have an absolutely no entry sign and below it it’ll sometimes indicate that bicycles or other modes of transport are exempt an may well enter?!

We rode past quite a few fields with crops on. This was one of them with a crop of mielies.

Just beyond this we exited from the canal wall and rode into suburbia again. There we came across “Kinderwereld”. It’s an entertainment center for children with both outdoor and indoor activities and play areas. In summer they use the outdoor petting zoo that has goats, deer (the spotted kind that Santa would use), potbellied pigs and of course rabbits.

In winter they entertain the children inside. I’m not sure what that entails, but the place looks pretty amazing from the outside passing by.

 

One of the pervy piglets that play with children. From our little adventure and round trip we decided to go home. I'm sure I no longer have butt cheeks, I have two huge callouses. Also I have the strange desire to zig-zag accross the road and sing "The hills are alive, with the sound of music..."

Fin.

First Mechelen Visit

Ela wanted to go into Mechelen to get T-shirts for herself and a few extra goodies for Natalie’s birthday present. She and Natalie are going to Tuscany, Italy in a few weeks time.

Belgian’s drive on the right-hand side of the road. I thought it’d really mess with me, but I’ve become quite used to it. I think the bicycling helps since you ride in the same direction as cars do and have to follow the road signs that the cars do too. When I come back for that short stop-over to pick you up in SA, you’re going to have to drive because I don’t think I’d be able to!

Most of the larger towns and cities like Mechelen have a “ring road”. It’s a main road, not a freeway, that circumvents the town and from which all other roads into town lead off of.

 

 

 

As odd as this may sound, the rule of yielding to traffic turning into the road from the right works. It doesn’t apply to all roads, and junctions exempt from this rule are clearly marked.

This is a typical church tower here in Belgium with the “onion” type of top. To me it looks very Turkish, but it seems to be a Belgian thing.

 

We visited here when we came on holiday and drove past the last bit of the city wall that was still standing, the gate. Ela parked close to it and I got to see how the parking meters worked. In the cities there’s a limited amount of time you can buy. We managed to get 2.5 hours. What you do is pay the fare at the paypoint and it issues you with a slip of paper that you leave on your dashboard for the “politie” to see.

 

 

The entrance must have been very grand in the day and I’m assuming the richer towns or cities had the more elaborate gates and walls.

 

This is a small snapshot of the apartments near the gate.

We walked past the gate and into some back alleys that Ela’s so good at doing. Mechelen is very pretty and has this reoccurring theme of these flowerpots brimming over with flowers in summer. They’re everywhere, on the sidewalks, the bridges and in the alleys and squares.

 

The Mechelen Tower sounds like another failed attempt at the Tower of Babel. It either is or was going to be the highest church tower in Europe but it was never finished. Its a fantastic landmark when I’m travelling by train. As soon as I spot it in the window I know to watch for my stop in Mechelen.

 

What would Belgium be without cafes? I’m not too sure but I can’t separate the two anymore. Cafés are everywhere and in summer everyone’s sitting outside. They’re completely empty of customers and dark inside. You can still sit inside but they really wonder what you’re about if you do.

 

I have no idea what Beethoven would have to do with Belgium but here’s a statue of him as a child in the middle of this square of cafes.

 

There’s a canal that runs through Mechelen and there are many of these bridges throughout the city to cross over it.

 

This was the fish market district in Mechelen now home to seafood restaurants. From what I can gather, every town had a fish market district or at least the bigger towns. It brings to mind Unhygenix from Asterix and Obelix.

 

Ela suggested we take a break for some coffee. When this happens I know we’ve come to a place she considers worthy to stop at for coffee. I’ve wanted to offer a coffee a couple of times but I usually hold my tongue because I know the places I’d like to have a coffee at are ordinary and run of the mill. When Ela suggests coffee, it’ll be a special stop.

 

Here’s where we stopped in Mechelen. It’s an organic café where they make superb breads and have other organic products for sale. Like most cafes it’s a little bit of a deli too where you can buy some of the stuff they use in their food they serve.The coffee cup was like a small soup bowl in that it didn’t have a handle. Ela suggested the cheesecake and for a baked cheesecake it was very, very good.

I’ve noted that the portion sizes are far smaller than I’m used to from South Africa. I believe the thing here in Belgium is quality and taste experience over quantity. It’s something I’m beginning to get used to but in the beginning it was a little difficult but if you chew your food properly and savor the flavors it goes a long way.

 

All along the canal are these beautiful apartments. It’s all so pretty and peaceful.

Ela then showed me a great place to purchase oils and vinegars. The shop was called Mezze. The principle is that you buy your glass bottle for the purchase of your choice and bring it back to be refilled by decanting from their big jars of stuff.

 

The Mechelen Tower again. I learnt you can pay to climb the stairs inside to the top and that its quite a view from up there.

 

 

The main church is also off the square. It boggles me why they would need the church attached to the tower AND another church for good measure.

 

Opposite the Mechelen Tower over the town square is the Town Hall which I understand to also house the gemeente huis.

In the shopping alley we saw this piece of urban art (that means graffiti) but to me it was definitely worthy of being called art. It was a damn good rat in my humble opinion.

 

Ela then led me to a wooden alley that floats on the canal. It’s a quick and convenient way to get to the next bridge or square without the interference of shoppers, bicycles, scooters or cars.

 

 

The wooden canal walks are accessible from next to most bridges.

 

More of those flowers on a canal bridge.

Finally on our way home I spotted a very special petrol station, a Texaco!

And that’s the end of the Mechelen trip.

Oh, please note the summer sky! Crystal blue and the temperature is very pleasant - hot, but not so hot that you can't do anything.

Fin.