Vive le bazaar

Well, it's been three days since I arrived in Brussels. I've just now had a chance to sit down, rest my blistered feet (Europe=walking, which I forgot), and update the blog. I'm currently in apartment stalking mode. This goes far beyond simple hunting; I am not just sitting on apartment websites quietly waiting to shoot emails at unsuspecting landlords. Oh, no. I am stalking the streets of Brussels, calling each and every number on every orange-and-black "A Louer" sign on every Art Deco door in this city. (This can be very amusing, as sometimes the room for rent isn't really specified. I've been offered a garage, a four-bedroom penthouse, and an entire floor of offices "perfect for bureaucrats.")

While apartment stalking is often frustrating and sometimes funny, it's also been a fabulous way to meet Belgians in Brussels. This is harder than it sounds; Brussels is a city of immigrants, a melting pot that rivals New York. It's a strange mix of suit-as-uniform European Union bureaucrats, kinte-clad Central African refugees, headscarf-and-kaftan-sporting north Africans, somberly stylish (and usually disdainful) Parisian expats, bike-riding Dutch, and a handful of hipster-esque exchange students, mostly Erasmus (I am fast learning how unusual it is to be an American who 1) speaks French passably and 2) is studying at ULB). As one of my potential landlords told me yesterday, "Bruxelles est un bazaar," a strange, barely-organized mix of newly-immigrated people and cultures loosely fenced in by a relatively new city who can agree on neither language nor cultural heritage nor political power (Belgium still lacks a functioning government, incredibly). This bazaar is becoming more and more international, to the point that many expats spend years in Brussels without ever meeting a real Belgian. To many Brussels-dwellers, whether in heels or a hijab, a real, native Belgian is like an endangered animal, once native to an area but now pushed into hiding by new predators and competitors.

I feel lucky, therefore, to have sighted, spoken with, and apartment-stalked several real Belgians in the past few days. I've met a retired public health worker who after years of working in Somalia now illustrates children's books, a schoolteacher who transports, advocates for, and teaches refugees from central and north Africa, an entrepreneur moving to Latin America to start a fast food pasta chain, a diplomat's wife (and an entrepreneur in her own right, as she owned an impressive number of apartments in a very desirable area), an amateur painter who idolizes Matisse and Magritte (so, vaguely tropical surrealism), and a professional violist who is also an expert cyclist. Most were warm, unassuming people; I would have never guessed that they were so passionate, and so quirky.

I have yet to make my final decision on an apartment, but I am already quite happy with the results of my stalking. I've learned quite a bit about Belgians in the bazaar within the past three days, and am eager to get to interact more with at least one of these people in the future. I'm also thrilled that Belgians, at least at this point, seem very forgiving of slipups and accents in French; while Parisian waiters and shopkeepers would as often as not sneer and start speaking in English as soon as they detected an accent, the Belgians either ignore my accent or ask politely, "Where are you from?" in French. This makes getting back into la Francophonie much, much easier. I am also pleased that people wear colors besides grey and black here, and that heels are decidedly optional. And while their bureaucracy does make me (and many others standing in line with me today) want to cry, their bureaucrats do know how to apologize and soothe their edgy clients.

All in all, three days into apartment stalking I'm happy and tired and still hotel-bound and thus technically homeless. Belgium is pleasantly surprising me.

Of course, this may be all due to the chocolate: Belgians serve all coffee with a bar of either milk or dark chocolate, and when I used my "Find Chocolate" app (yes, there's an app for that) to see how many chocolate stores were within walking distance of my hotel I found 15 within a five-minute-walking-distance radius. Vive le bazaar, indeed :)