One Year of Observations in Belgium

I didn’t remember the exact date, but my wife tells me that today marks one year of living in Belgium. We had some friends from the church over for dinner tonight and they happened to bring a bottle of champagne. So we celebrated one year of living in Belgium with a small glass of bubbly. Below you will find one year of observations of life in Belgium, along with some photos from the last months.

Some Things We Are Enjoying

• There is a wonderful and inexpensive variety of breads in the bakeries and grocery stores. You put it through the slicer yourself.
• There is a wonderful and inexpensive variety of cheeses to go with that bread. The standard cheese is gouda, which actually represents a family of cheeses. You can get a buttery young gouda all the way up to an old gouda that’s beginning to crystallized. Our kids love the old stuff.
• There is a wonderful and inexpensive variety of beers in Belgium. Wine too. Alcohol is a normal part of life in Belgium and rarely seems to be a problem. Beer is available at concerts, festivals, sports events, rummage sales, back-to-school nights… Yep, back to school night. But I have hardly ever heard of drunkenness. And when people go out for a couple drinks, they take the designated driver thing seriously. Or they ride a bike.
• Biking to everywhere. Our kids have ridden with us to places up to five miles away.
• There are numerous large parks, sometimes with a castle (more like a mansion), or an old fort with a star shaped moat around it. We have found some of the most fantastic playgrounds in Belgium, with slides so tall that in America people would file lawsuits as soon as they saw them.
• It’s very green here. Because of this strange stuff that falls from the sky all year long.
• Home-cooked Belgian food is delicious.
• The Belgian health insurance system has been great. We pay 25 euros to visit the doctor then get reimbursed about 20. The cost of insurance that includes such great coverage? It costs our family less for a year of coverage here than it did for a month of coverage in the Unites States. How is that possible? Taxes. But for a moderate income family of five it’s not bad at all.
• Serving such a diverse church has allowed us to enjoy many other ethnic foods. My new favorite is the spicy West African joloff rice.
• We are enjoying the church. People have been welcoming, friendly, and hospitable. And we are seeing the church grow in more ways than one.

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Some Things We Are Missing

• People. Of course.
• Mexican food. Even when we make it at home it’s not the same. The tortillas are different, the beans are different, you can’t find dried chiles or tomatillos.
• Bagels, which used to be a breakfast staple, are just about impossible to find here.
• Mountains. Central California and northern Belgium are equally flat, but in California we could always see the mountains. And we could drive to the mountains in an hour and a half. Here an hour and a half gets us to hills, but mountains are a long ways off. (But I am about to go there).
• Ultimate frisbee. We have found a group to play with, but for Isaac it doesn’t feel the same as his coach and team from Turlock.
• During an unusual heat wave through the month of July we missed air conditioning. No homes have it. Most restaurants and stores don’t either. Not even the hospital has a/c. So 90 degrees here feels hotter than 105 in California because there is no way to escape it.
• The road system of the United States, where streets are wide, well-marked, and easy to use. In Belgium, as in the other parts of Europe I have seen so far, roads are narrow and navigating is not so simple.

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Some Things We Notice

• We happened to be here during the world cup, in which the Belgian team performed very well. It seemed that in a rare display of patriotism people hung Belgian flags and decorated in red, yellow, and black. Still, it was nothing like the fanaticism of my hometown Seattle for their Seahawks.
• Was this just a World Cup thing, or is soccer baloney always available?
• Our younger kids say school is different. During their 90 minute lunch break, kids full on wrestle in the play yard, throwing each other to the ground and getting thoroughly dirty.
• What do kids take to school for lunch? Sandwiches. Always and only. And many times those sandwiches consist of butter with chocolate sprinkles, which has become a favorite of our younger ones.
• Belgium is very stable. Many families have lived here for hundreds of years. People have tight circles of friends. People tend to stay close to where they grow up. Business owners seem content to keep things small, rather than questing for world domination like American companies.
• Those small companies close on random days. A restaurant could be closed every Thursday, for instance. It is not unusual to go somewhere and find a handwritten note on the door that the place is closed a holiday, due to sickness, or something else.
• People in Europe in general seem to take their vacations very seriously. Just a few days ago friends referred to a trip to an island as “only a week.”
• People speak many languages. Dutch (or Flemish, to be precise), English, French, sometimes some German. I met a guy recently who spoke those languages and more and was learning Swedish as well, just for fun.
• There are a huge number and variety of bicycles on the roads here (though it is nothing compared to the Netherlands). Our family for a time had a different type of bicycle for each family member (city bike, mountain bike, street bike, hybrid, and BMX). A large number of bikes people ride here squeak like crazy. A little chain lube would do wonders. There are a lot of electric bikes. I don’t mind an older person cruising past me on an e-bike (well, actually I do a little), but every time a 30 year old man flies past on his electric mountain bike I think, “Cheater.”
• Butter is somehow different here. Chocolate chip cookies just melt into flatness. Rebecca has discovered some workaround involving cream cheese.
• Milk either comes straight from the cows at the family farm up the road, or so pasteurized it doesn’t require refrigeration.
• Bacon is not the same. It’s either a different cut or a different pig, because it hardly has any fat at all and doesn’t have the same taste as that salty, hickory-smoked American stuff.
• Paper here is not 8 1/2 x 11. It’s A4, which is just different enough to be annoying (8.27 x 11.69 inches). But of course instead of inches we use the much more sensible metric system here. It’s more sensible, but my brain still translates everything to feet, Fahernheit, and pounds.
• Belgium is more moderate than America. A partial list of things that are more moderate in size here: cars, roads, houses, refrigerators, ovens, salaries, soft drinks, people. Yes, even with all the bread, cheese, and beer, Europeans are thinner than Americans.
• The weather so far has never been “normal.” It’s not normally this dark in December. It doesn’t normally snow this much. It’s not normally this hot in the summer.
• Belgium, like much of Europe, is highly secular. Most people think of God as irrelevant. At the same time, it’s highly spiritual. I hear story after story (mostly from people in the church, which includes a fair number of Europeans) of healings, visions, dreams, and miraculous answers to prayers.

How are we doing after a year in Belgium? Our younger kids love it. Rebecca thanks God every time she rides her bike. Our older son has excelled in school. This past year has seen a lot of my energy go to grieving, but I am enjoying it here. There have been some dark times, but for the most part life is good.