Thursday, January 22, 2009

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).

3 comments:

  1. That room already looks lived in.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Suckiness is relatively to your meanning of "it sucks", eh? Cool room. The world ourside is big though... We'll be like bloggers passing in the night.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Thats because theres too much stuff to fit... so its always a mess a.k.a. "lived in"

    ReplyDelete