From Belgium with love....
We've been in Brussels a few weeks now but it only feels like a couple of days. We had a week to find somewhere to live while being put up in temporary (posh and expensive) accommodation which was pretty stressful and we made the mistake of viewing the cheap/scary/isolated places first which almost led to us packing our bags and coming home....lets just say first impressions are important but they aren't always right, especially when your basing a city's merit on what turns out to be the ghetto (Also wasn't a great start when the coach station we were dropped off at turned out to be smack bang in the middle of the red light district!)Belgium is well.....Belgium is different. When i said it was the deep end of the pool I'm not entirely sure i realised how deep it would be or that someone had turned the wave machine on to boot!
It's amazing how much the little differences matter and how many of them there are, things like the fact that the symbols on the oven are weird so we've had a mixture of burnt to a crisp and soggy in the middle food or that when a light bulb blows its a full scale stress because you know you have to firstly find somewhere that sells light bulbs in a country you know nothing about and then you have to read the packaging, take it to a cashier and pray they don't make small talk or ask you anything because you really don't want to stand there looking like a dork completely oblivious to the fact that they re only asking you if you know there's a two for one offer or if you are paying by card or cash.
It was all very obvious that there was going to be a language barrier and that until I can take lessons that will be a problem but I don't think i really realised how much of a barrier that was going to be, how much it affects you not being able to understand the people around you. For one it instantly makes people a whole hell of a lot scarier. In the UK I've never been the sort of person to be afraid of groups of lads because at the end of the day they re usually just cheeky, looking to impress each other by shouting something dumb at the girls who walk past and are on the whole harmless (in the daylight at least) but when you don't know whats been said and you don't recognise the social uniform then it becomes a whole new scarier ballgame. For instance i wear converse shoes, if I saw someone in the UK wearing converse shoes then I'd be pretty safe in assuming they had at least mildly alternative music tastes and were probably a student/ex student. Here however converse are sold in every kind of clothing store to every kind of person....the social uniforms are different, perhaps even less pronounced over here, which is both wonderful (I can get cheap converse :P) and frustrating as it makes finding those with similar interests rather difficult!
I was also rather wrong about the ability to meet expats here, i was under the false impression that it would be the fact that you were all in the same boat, all English speakers, all thrown into a foreign country that would unite people easily but the thing i forgot was that this isn't any foreign country, this is the head of European Union. The expats here are high powered, euro-crats who may be very nice but on the whole they are the kind of guys and gals who have known what they've wanted to do since they were five and this is it, pushing very important, European pieces of paper in embassies, law offices, Parliament, the chamber of commerce and what am I? Well at best I'm going to be a temp but at the moment I'm a unfocused, hippy-chick who has no ambition or drive, at five thought she wanted to be an archaeologist (and now can't even remember how to spell it!) and now believes that people who live to work need their heads seeing to. So not only do i have the opposite outlook on life to most of my fellow Belgian expats but i then have the added bonus of really no being in the same boat as them, they are all here because they already have a job, if they had a partner in the UK well then that poor sod came in a sorry second place after the job and either stayed behind for the long distance thing or never stood a chance. Even if you do overcome the gaping social divide and think you might find something in common then there is the confidence factor to get over. The confidence factor being I have none and they were all on their school debate teams. Now you might think well great that means they'll do the talking and i wont have to....that would just be too easy now wouldn't it. Turns out that all that confidence comes with a big dollop of not needing to talk to newbies (even if you are one) because you have a ton of ready made work friends and an air of this is all so easy what's the big fuss...you see they've all done this before, or they intend to do it again so they aren't quite as desperate for human interaction as those of us who's best friend has become the french dude who came to read the water meter for 2 minutes and didn't speak English (and never calls hmmpf!) so when you re deliberately speaking English a little louder or smiling like a Cheshire cat at complete strangers because you heard an American accent they just think you're a loon rather than jumping at the chance to speak to you just because you speak the same language.
I realise this post makes it sound like i hate Belgium and that perhaps i shouldn't have come but its not all negative, everyday i find little things that delight me about life on the continent and I'm sure the more confidence i gain and more interaction i get the more things I'll find and who knows maybe in a couple of posts time I'll be forced to post a retraction of my first impressions of the EU crowd!
posted by Nelly @ 6:08 AM
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