Arrival

My new living arrangements are quite different from JC.  The main difference is instead of renting an apartment, I've rented a room and bathroom.  My comfort with the metric system clearly did not prepare me for the size of an 11 square meter room.  Had I known it was this small I would have brought one less piece of luggage (2 instead of 3).  Oh, I also didn't realize that B3D (my room number) was going to be on the 5th floor of a walk up.  This also made me wish I'd brought less luggage. On to the good: one thing I really like about the room is the window /skylight, it brings a ton of light into such a tiny room.  It also has a pretty open view to my area of the city.  I also have about 8 roommates that I share the building with.

"Dude, Brussels sucks."  I meet one of my new room mates.  Everyone shares a living room and kitchen, and the common space is nice: high ceilings, well lit, efficient.  My first afternoon/night in the building I have a short discussion with one or two of my building-mates.  "Brussels sucks," sounds like a general consensus in the building, with the amendment that Brussels is also great.  We are within a hour or two train ride from 3 major cities in 3 different countries, so it is a very convenient city for travel.  Brussels is also the home of the EU congress.  This makes it a sort of commuter community: busy during the week... empty on the weekend.  Even non-EU employees seem to travel quite a bit, apparently even the native Belgians in my building are gone one week a month.

I will spend my first few days finding things I need for my room and randomly roaming the city.  I start my new job on Monday but I'd like to get a few tourist things out of the way first, like cheep wonderful Beer (for the sake of comparison, a beer with dinner was 1.50 Euro).