You might think that after living in Japan, moving to Brussels would be like coming home. You’d be wrong. I don’t have any friends or family here, and no one says “g’day” for a start. And the differences go deeper than that. How could they not, here on the other side of the world?
I arrived in mid November following a panic of visa applications. My company in Japan had taken me off the payroll, but the company in Belgium couldn’t put me on unless I’d worked more than half the month there, which meant that I had to be in the office from the 16th. Of course I landed on the 15th, and then let out the breath that I’d been holding for six weeks. Speaking of salary, that’s something that’s not at all like home. Here, they pay on a 13.92 month year which I find even more bizarre than the 18.1 month year of Japan. Someone should show these countries a calendar. Then again, someone should get their hands on the Japanese calendar and show it to the Aussie employers.
Holidays are pretty cool here too. We get 25 days of standard leave. Five full weeks! But that’s not all. They work us a bit extra each day, then add all the extra minutes up for a total of 6 days. The company chooses when to use three of those – they’re pretty nice about it, choosing days that turn a public holiday on Tuesday into a 4-day weekend when they can – and the other three are left to our discretion. Even better than that, due to a paradox in the leave laws in the two countries, I got a year of holidays from Japan (paid in arrears) at the same time that I got a year of holidays from Belgium (paid in advance) and found myself with more than 70 days! So many places to see, so much time.
That brings me to another advantage of living in Belgium. Travel. It’s easy. We’ve all heard the story of people going to another country for the weekend, but I always thought they were exaggerated. In fact, they’re understated. I asked a colleague what he was going to do on the weekend and he replied, ‘Oh, we thought we might go to Paris for lunch on Saturday.’ It’s possible. I arrived on a Wednesday evening, worked for two days and then went to Paris for the weekend. There’s a high speed train that takes just over an hour from Brussels centre to Paris centre. You can get to Amsterdam in 3 hours. This weekend I’ll go to Pisa. It will be a 1.5 hour flight and cost me under 100 Euro return. I’ve also been to Grenoble, Orleans, Cannes (to the film festival) and Nice in France, Santa Christina (snowboarding) in the Italian Dolomiti, and London. Add to that a trip around the world again to Cincinnati, Sydney and Kobe, and you can understand why I haven’t written much.
But I have had some time at home. I moved into a very nice apartment in mid December, but I’ve only just finished furnishing it in the last few weeks. It feels twice as big as my Japanese apartment, and where that one was more extreme in climate than the air outside, this one is more temperate. I only used the central heating for about 4 weeks despite the snow outside, and now it’s summer, I have a nice breeze to keep it cool. Not that the temperature is too hot. It’s apparently dangerous to talk about the weather in Belgium because it’s notoriously bad. I think everyone exaggerates. Sure, it rained every day for the first month I was here, but then Kobe has a rainy season a month long, and even Sydney can be pretty wet for long periods of time. Then it snowed for Christmas (well, not on Christmas day, of course) which can only be a good thing. Since then, it’s been beautiful weather, never wet more than two days in a row and sunny for weeks at a time. They try to tell me it rained the whole month I was travelling around the world, and then the whole week I was in Grenoble, but I’m not sure I believe them.
So, back to my apartment. It’s almost what I would have designed for myself – a large living room with enough space for my home theatre, which points at the kitchen, so I can watch movies while I cook, and a long wall of windows; a creative / writing room on the other side of the wall to the stereo so I can connect my PC to the stereo; a bathroom with two basins; and a bedroom full of Japanese furniture that my friends call a girl trap. Two of the floor to ceiling windows in my living room open right up so I can sit ‘outside’ without leaving home. Each room has these floor to ceiling windows and they all have a special feature unique to Belgium as far as I know. You can open them inwards at the top so that you get the fresh air, but no rain or burglars can get in. Necessity is the mother of invention – except that it doesn’t really rain that much, I tell you.
I brought most of my furniture with me, but had to buy a few things. It makes me laugh when people say that my apartment looks Japanese. The bedroom, yes. But they say it about the living room too. And they pick on the coffee table. As if every Belgian house I’ve been into doesn’t have a coffee table too, and there’s a dining table with chairs right beside it! The last piece that I bought recently is the lounge. It’s a gorgeous 19th century Charles Xth wooden lounge and it’s the perfect place to sit, or lie, and read while listening to music. That’s the luxury that I truly missed in Japan.
There’s plenty more to write – I’ve been everywhere! – but I’ll stop here and leave more for next time. I miss you all.