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.