It’s January in western Europe, when the daylight hours are short, and the daylight hours are usually short on daylight, come to think of it. It’s cold and dark this morning, and inertia kicks in when the alarm jars us from our mini-hibernation…
Can it be possible that we’ve completed a full year living in Belgium? It seems like only last week that we arrived, all giddy and starry-eyed, on the honeymoon of our overseas assignment. I had carried Cheryl over the threshold of our new apartment. Okay, I made that up. (Darn, why didn’t I think to actually do that?)
But here we are at the end of Year One. Rather than giving you a general and abstract report, I thought it would be fun to describe a typical day in the life of an ex-pat. (Remember, it could be worse – I could be sitting in your den right now with a slide projector…)
I’m up and out the door at 8:00 am, already shifting into second gear, but the world around me is just deciding to start the engine. This morning person is out of sync with a culture where the office workday starts at 9:00 and most cafes aren’t open early. It’s a challenge to find a convenient place to indulge my decades-long habit of beginning the day with an early morning coffee in a cafe before heading to the office.
As I close the front door behind me, I return Marc’s wave as he opens his locksmith/shoe repair shop across the street. (This is a common combination in Belgium.) The sign says “Serrurerie”, a sadistic French word with an “r” to pronounce in every syllable.) Marc is in his forties and seems to be a neighborhood unofficial official who knows everybody and, at least in warm weather, spends as much time in sidewalk conversations as in his shop. He is a friend of our landlord, who advised us to get to know him because he “keeps an eye on the place.” (I wouldn’t be surprised if he has a key to our building.)
I look to the right when I hear the clatter of the metal doors being rolled up at The Shoppy. (Yes, “spell check”, that’s correct: The Shoppy.) Jean greets me with a hearty “Bon jour!” and one of his irrepressible smiles. The Shoppy is a typical Belgian convenience store that doesn’t feel like one because of its fresh produce, cheeses, meats and wines. Jean is from India (I suspect that “Jean” is his nom de l’ èpicier.) He is owner, buyer, stocker, cashier, and everything else. He is open thirteen hours a day, not counting buying and stocking and inventory, and he is the sole person there. And he is always smiling! It seems like there are never many patrons there, so I’ll often stop by after work to buy a tomato or two, just for the cause. (He probably wonders what the American guy does with all those tomatoes!)
Our apartment is almost perfect. We occupy the middle floor of a three-story building on a corner. We have a garage and an elevator, rarely used. Our two bedrooms face a shady wooded lot on the side. We look out our front windows in two directions onto this lively neighborhood, with residential streets behind us and commercial in front. We can walk to numerous cafes, restaurants, bars, and shops. Public transport is a three-minute walk, a nice park is nearby, and work is 3 kilometers away. The apartment is cosy and light. Double the toilets to two and it’s perfect.
I walk around the corner to our patisserie, passing Dominoes and Pizza Hut on the way. Thankfully, my table is free. I take my seat in the Non-Smoking section, which consists of one table with a “non-fumeur” sign taped to the wall above it. I get a café, which costs around 1.75USD, which at 44 cents per sip, is worth every penny.
I arrive at the office and greet my co-workers. Talk about an international staff: Surnames such as Sarzedas, Virilis, Benozzi, Plettinx, Pham, Eilers, Mallon, and Bruno, along with the Foxes and Kosslers and Olmsteads, reveal the rich diversity of this team who must work closely together across cultural and linguistic barriers. We work through the morning, sending e-mails to our US colleagues, some of whom have just arrived at REM sleep.
At lunch I stop by the bank to pay our utility bill, which like most bills here, is paid electronically from the bank. Personal checks do not exist here – Your bill has the payee’s bank account number on it, and your bank transfers money directly into their account. Of course, we have just made the transition to the Euro now, and things are still a little confused around the continent. It’s a welcome switch to us U.S. Americans, since the Euro is close in value to the US dollar, making mental conversion simple. But imagine the stress and grief for people who have grown up with a national currency and now have had to give it up and recalibrate their lives. I notice an older woman as she leaves the bank line, pauses, and stares blankly at the strange new coins in her hand. In every store, clerks are slowly and cautiously handing back change, counting out loud as they examine each unfamiliar coin. (It doesn’t help that there are 8 different coins.)
We have received a notice from La Poste that a package is waiting for us to be picked up, not at our post office around the corner but one in a distant inner city locale. I am making the hour roundtrip there for the second time. I tried yesterday, but as I approached the area, I encountered roadblocks, police in riot gear, armoured personnel carriers and water cannons. No, it had nothing to do with our package but rather with the protests surrounding the European Union Summit taking place several miles away. I turned back and drove home, realizing how many things I’ve often taken for granted, such as running to the post office to pick up a package.
So here I go again, searching in an unfamiliar area with only a street name to go by. The street appears on the map to be only 4 blocks long, so I figure it can’t be too hard to spot a post office. I park my car and start walking. I walk from one end to the other and see nothing resembling a post office. I retrace my steps but still find nothing. By my map, I’ve walked the entire street. I am one of the lightest skinned people on this predominately Middle Eastern bustling street. I am not nervous but rather self-conscious. I decide to ask the first person I pass for directions. As I approach a middle age man, I ask if he knows where the post office is. He thinks for a minute, brightens, and tries to tell me where it is. Finally, he pantomimes “Walk with me.” We walk in silence the three blocks to the end of the street. He points around the corner and down a hidden extension of the street to the familiar red post office sign. I thank him profusely; he smiles a faint smile, shrugs, and walks on. I feel the familiar feeling of warmth and gratitude that I have experienced so often in the past year as strangers have gone out of their ways to be helpful and kind.
I finally retrieve my package and start the drive back to the office. By the time I am finished, I will have spent two hours on this errand. The quality of life here is wonderful, but sometimes the logistics are a real pain.
I arrive home around six. Cheryl and I decide to go out for a drink and hop on the tram to ride to a bar called L’Atelier (The Workshop”). It is near the university and serves over 200 different beers. Cheryl, not historically a beer drinker, has discovered one she likes, and L’Atelier has it on tap. It is a cherry beer, which seems like an oxymoron to most beer drinkers, but not to the Belgians. I am not a fan – It tastes like a mixture of Robitussin and cherry Kool-Aid, but I’m glad Cheryl has found her beer. We feel a little self-conscious at this place, because we stand out. Being near the university, the average age of the patrons is around 19. We feel the stares as we walk in, imagining what some of them are thinking: “Whose parents are here checking up on them?”
We return home and prepare a simple dinner. Afterwards we turn on the TV to check out the evening’s offerings. After the reflexive check of CNN, we surf the channels looking for English programming, but as usual, the pickin’s are slim. There are two Dutch language stations that sporadically offer English shows, but they are usually not current ones. Tonight it may be “The Rockford Files” or “Quincy”. And they are heavy on U.S. made-for-TV movies, all of which seem to star Patti Duke or Farah Fawcett and have titles like “They Stole My Baby!” Luckily, we also get BBC.
So that’s about it. We feel that we are at the appropriate level of adjustment for the one-year mark. Milton J. Bennett has a cultural adjustment model that moves through stages from “Ethnocentrism” to “Ethnorelativism”, the latter ending with complete integration into the new culture. We are obviously not there, if for no other reason than our lack of language facility, but we are moving in the right direction.
As I read back through this account, I may have given the false picture that life here is more idyllic and carefree than in reality. There are headaches and hassles every day. The weather gets depressing when there are weeks of overcast skies. I’ve shared some of the good, so here’s an example of the bad and the ugly. I have just gotten into a verbal dispute with an elderly neighbor, when I happen to step out onto our small front balcony to see her small dog squat and poop in the middle of our driveway 20 feet away. I wait to see how she will respond. I can reasonably predict her reaction, having spent the last year hopscotching down innumerable sidewalks, dodging hazardous wastes every few feet, as is typical in Brussels. True to form, she and poochie shuffle on down the sidewalk.
I feel compelled to speak out, but the language fails me. Although I can confidently order my Vol au Vent in French, I am ill-equipped to create the impact necessary to convince this woman to see the error of her ways. So I revert to my mother tongue and shout, “Madame, please clean up your dog’s poop!” This unleashes a torrent of indignation, accompanied by dramatic facial expressions and shoulder shrugs. This is not the first time I’ve encountered this indignation/resignation defense. I once nicely but firmly confronted a woman who had blocked our driveway while she ran errands in the neighborhood. “But Monsieur”, she whined emotionally as she shrugged her shoulders, “there was no other place!” (Case closed.)
So my neighbor and I reach an impasse, with her walking away muttering and shaking her head in disbelief at this strange, rude foreigner. And me, well, I watch her until she turns off the sidewalk, carefully noting which apartment is hers, plotting, just in case there is a next time…
January, 2002
