Category Archives: brussels

Sunday 23rd January 2011 – Today is Sunday of course

… and that is of course a day of rest. And in our case, a day of sightseeing, as Liz and Terry have never visited Brussels before.

And so after a leisurely morning which actually involved a shower for yours truly, and a light lunch, we hit the streets.

First stop was the Basilique de Sacre Coeur at Koekelberg, the huge church on the heights to the North-West of the city that you can see clearly from my apartment.

Mind you, you couldn’t see it very well today because of the muggy weather. The view from here down to the city, usually quite spectacular, was a bit miserable today.

It’s been a while since I came to the Basilique though. The last time that I was there it was for a religious service with Marianne, and I took the collection. Since then, they have been waiting for me to bring it back. I did however manage to avoid being struck by a thunderbolt or whatever and that was something.

Following on from there I took Terry and Liz on the tourist route that I used to follow when I did coach tours all around the sights. First stop has to be the Atomium, up at the top end of the Parc Roi Badouin.

From there, we even managed to go down the narrow street behind the railway station where all the railway workers’ wives wait in the window to spot their husbands finishing work, so that they can quickly put on the supper before they arrive home. But Liz and Terry were staggered by the cost of living here in Brussels, and so were not really surprised that the poor women could not afford to buy many clothes to wear and that what clothing they were wearing, they had grown out of a while back and couldn’t afford to replace with a larger size.

So tomorrow we are back at work. First job is to empty the rubbish and then clear out the third bedroom so that we can make a start on that. This will involve a trip to the shops (the first of a great many, I shouldn’t wonder) to buy one or two things that we forgot yesterday.

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Saturday 22nd January 2011 – My first day back in Brussels …

… and it’s really difficult to adapt to the new conditions. Running water, proper bathroom and kitchen, central heating, a comfortable bed. How can I possibly survive?

We have a proper bathroom and kitchen thanks to Liz who has performed heroics today in making this place fit for heroes. And I also have room to sleep properly, a dining table and chairs and a comfortable sofa thanks to some rather thorough sifting of a huge pile of old and manky paperwork from heaven alone knows when. Terry has been making plans and projects for the work that will be needed, and that resulted in a trip to the shops.

The traffic was difficult to adapt to as well – there isn’t traffic like this in the Auvergne. And there aren’t the queues in the carparks either. And neither are the ridiculous prices. No wonder I moved down there when my income dried up. I could never have survived here.

The tidying has come to something of a halt though – we have filled up all of the containers in the waste room. We shall have to wait for the concierge to start back to work on Monday before we can take any more rubbish downstairs. But not to worry. There’s plenty of other things to be going on with.

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Friday 21st January 2011 – I was right …

.. about blogging from another country. We are actually back in Belgium. In Brussels in fact, and in my apartment here. It’s been sitting doing nothing for a couple of years so we’ve decided that it’s high time we attacked it and got it done.

I say “we” because Liz and Terry are with me. We are going to have a work-in and not leave until the place is finished and up for sale. Liz has already attacked the fridge, and managed to avoid being grabbed by whatever it was that was living in the freezer compartment. She’s also been into the bathroom, which I told her was a silly thing to do just before going to bed. She’ll be having nightmares all night now.

I won’t say it’s warm in here but considering I haven’t been here since September and then for only a day I was expecting it to be much colder than it was. But tomorrow I’ll switch on the heating. That might help. And also tomorrow we’ll have a good look round and make a plan of attack and see where we go from here. I mean – regardless of whatever I could raise by selling it, it’s costing me €200 or so each month to keep it up with the communal charges, electricity and rates and so on and I have much better uses for that money.

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Saturday 25th September 2010 – Well, I’m back home.

And hasn’t this been an exciting few days?

The journey back was just as exciting though – it was raining when I left Brussels, (which was actually at about 21:00 in the evening Friday) and it gradually came down heavier and heavier.

At Troyes it was starting to become difficult to see with the rain and my eyelids were becoming heavier and heavier, so I parked up at St Florentin at 01:30 for a few hours for a sleep.

A torrential downpour woke me up at about 08:00 and that set the seal on the whole day. It rained non-stop after that and I brought the whole lot back home with me.

But the exciting events of the last couple of days have worn me out and I crashed out this afternoon. In fact I was hard-pushed to make it to the footy tonight.

And don’t ask me what happened there because I really can’t remember. I came back here and was out like a light.

I’ll be dead for a week, I reckon.

Friday 24th September 2010 – PHEW! I’M EXHAUSTED!

And it’s hardly surprising too after what I’ve been doing today!

In order of appearance –
1) I went in person to the Connections office and I’ve booked my flights and car hire. I leave Paris Charles de Gaulle at 11:00 on Wednesday and fly to Zurich where I pick up another flight to Toronto.

Then I have my car for 6 weeks, and then fly back. Total cost, all included, was €2100 which, all things considered, isn’t too bad at all.

Flying from Paris Charles de Gaulle means that I pay maybe €60 more, but I don’t have to go to Brussels, which would probably cost me that much on the train.

The downside is though that I have to hang around through the night on a railway station somewhere in provincial France.

At the moment, Nevers looks a good bet. I can get a train from Riom at 19:36 that gets me there at about 21:00 and there’s a train from there to Paris at 05:00.

Nevers is a draughty railway station but there are cafes and restaurants just over the road where I can loiter for a while and the train starts from there so it is usually backed into the station by the night shift at about 03:30 so I can curl up in a corner.

It arrives in Paris at about 07:30 so there’s plenty of time to get over to Charles de Gaulle.

I was tempted by flying to Charles de Gaulle from Clermont Ferrand on the 07:00 flight but the price €280 has put me off. I could travel there the night before and stay in the Hilton and still have change from that.

2) I visited the IKEA and had some luck too. As you know, with the composting toilet I’m using an aluminium plant pot but it really needs to be something in stainless steel.

And I found some superb waste-bin cum plant-pots there – 25 litre capacity and in stainless steel, for just €14.95. Exactly what I want and so I bought two of those.

3) But the most important thing concerned my property empire.

Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that when I first moved to Brussels in 1993 I bought a little studio apartment about 20 minutes walk from work.

A few years later I met Laurence and as she had a little daughter (Roxanne) my studio was too small for us so I rented it out and we rented a larger apartment. When Laurence and I split up and she moved away, I bought the big apartment at Jette.

The little studio remained rented out – the old couple who rented it moved out and they passed it on to their grandson. When he moved away he passed it on to a girl he knew.

And to cut a long story short … "hooray" – ed … a few months ago, she sent me a mail to say that she reckoned that she ought to move out and find a place of her own to buy instead of renting.

But as she was happy in my place, she wondered on the off-chance whether I had ever thought of selling it.

The property market isn’t as good as it used to be and finding willing buyers is not all that easy. You need estate agents, plenty of time and patience, a good deal of hassle.

And of course there are all these laws now that you need homeowners files, surveys, thermal inspections and everything else and so on.

So someone ready willing and able to proceed is something that should not be discarded lightly, especially as the price that was offered was – well – I could have got more for it, but then I would have had to pay estate agents, etc etc.

And so I am now 1 property lighter in my portfolio.

But what I have lost in rental income has been more than made up by the fact that I have now reimbursed the outstanding mortgage on the apartment at Jette and the difference between the two figures means that I have more than doubled my disposable income.

There’s also a lump sum left over of an amount not to be sniffed at, and Terry, Simon and I are going to be having a little chat about how this lump sum can be made to work.

I know that if I just leave it lying around it will slowly melt away into nothing.

Thursday 23rd September 2010 – THE JOURNEY …

… to Brussels on Thursday went fine until a few miles north of Moulins when the heavens opened.

And it’s been a long time since I’ve seen rain like that. After a couple of hours it calmed down a little but I still arrived back in Brussels resembling something rather like a drowned rat.

And I must have been in a dismal humour when I left there back last April.

The computer was still on, the door onto the balcony was open and generally speaking the place was in something of disarray. I didn’t really fancy that at 02:30 in the morning after having just driven 8.5 hours.

It took me a while to tidy up some space and it was not unti 04:00 that I finally went to bed.

Friday23rd April 2010 – I’ll be back …

… on the road in about 10 minutes. And I’ll be very late getting away tonight, much later than I wanted to be, but then again, a lot has happened.

Firstly we had yet another “end of an era”. Long-time followers of this organ will recall the white LDV that I bought in 2002 and which ran for ever once we put a new engine into it but which was defeated by rust and lack of spare parts. It’s been sitting outside the apartment at “Expo” for three years since Caliburn came along and everyone was moaning about it, so I had someone come along and take it away.

A vehicle dismantler in Brussels has an LDV and he can’t find spares for it either so he gave me €100 for it, which I reckoned was excellent value.

Cleaning it out discovered hordes of goodies that I had forgotten all about too as well as a full set of tools, so it was quite profitable all told.

After that I went for lunch with Mike, who is doing my old job as chair of the Open University Student Association’s North European Revolutionary Forces. And I had quite a laugh as on the way there I saw a billboard saying “You have won the lottery. Where will you be dining now?” Well, I had effectively won the lottery with disposing of the LDV and I was taking Mike to a fritkot. My generosity knows no bounds.

And so, after paying all of the bills and so forth, I cleaned up Expo just a little bit, loaded up Caliburn, and hit the road.

I also found some time to call in at the IKEA Anderlecht (where I was one of several persons involved in an argument on the car park) for one or two things that I need at home.

And so, all in all, it is going to be a very late departure and I’m not planning on making it all the way home in one go. After all, I’ve had quite a busy day.

Thursday 22nd April 2010 – I can’t be doing …

… with this tidying up nonsense

I’ve been at it for most of the day and don’t seem to have made any progress at all. But then again I’ve taken 6 full bin liners down to the dustbins, packed up another three ready to donate to the clothes collection, and I’ve also done four washing-machine loads.

But you can’t really notice any difference and anyone who comes here and recalls this posting will wonder what on earth the place looked like before I started to tidy it up.

Having said that though, it IS three years since I’ve lived here and so there’s bound to be piles of dust and the like, and with renovations going on simultaneously in two rooms (long-term readers of this blog in its previous guises will recall all about that) it’s hardly surprising that things got just a little out of control.

Tomorrow I have some bills to pay and then I need to load up Caliburn with stuff. That’ll empty the place somewhat and it will make moving around so much easier. I still haven’t worked out where I’m going to put everything when I finally empty out the place (I’m just bringing stuff that can be left outside) so it seems to me that my priorities need to be to finish the bedroom back at the farm when I return and get that emptied out of tools and slates and the like. That’ll give me somewhere dry to keep everything while I have a good ponder.

But there’s some kind of plan simmering around underneath the surface for this place too, but more of this anon.

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Wednesday 21st April 2010 – Friends Reunited

Strawberry Moose got to see his Auntie Tracy this evening. In fact it’s been quite some time since the two of them met – probably two years or so.

As predicted, cleaning this apartment is pretty hard work particularly when your heart isn’t in it. But at least I’ve cleared away the forest of dead plants inside the apartment, made a start on the ones on the terrace, and I began some desultory cleaning.

But then of course the rest is history.

It didn’t take me long to get discouraged so I rang up Tracy in Antwerpen to see if she fancied coming down for a coffee, but she wasn’t feeling too well and so, any excuse to stop cleaning and tidying, I went up there.

We had a good chat, mostly about what’s been happening to us since we both graduated from the Open University, and then went out for a meal. And if there’s one type of cooking that will run a good Indian close then it has to be Middle Eastern cooking and as luck would have it there is an Egyptian restaurant not too far from where she lives whose falafel and hummus is second to none. And of course there has to be a big plate of fritjes to go with it. After all, this is Belgium and they invented the French Fry. There is of course all of the old jokes about this –
“Why are there no Belgian astronauts?”
“Because there are no fritkots on the moon”
“What do you call a German living in Belgium?”
“Fritz”
“Why are there potatoes in Belgium and oil in the Middle East?”
“Because the Belgians had first choice”
Yes, we know them all.

But I like Antwerpen – it’s got much more going for it than Brussels. And had my work not have been so “irregular” I would have gladly bought a place here. In fact there is a suburb of Antwerpen specially named for me – it’s called Weerde. I would have been very happy there, almost as happy as living in that Belgian town between Enghein and Ath.

It’s called Silly.

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Tuesday 20th April 2010 – AND RIGHT NOW …

… I’m in Expo, my apartment in Brussels.

As I said yesterday (or to be more precise, first thing this morning) I’ve had to rush back here as a matter of urgency as there are a couple of things that need my urgent attention.

There are a few other things that I would like to do too. Not that these are important, but I can combine all of these things together and that’s a few more issues solved too.

But back in Brussels I was almost run down on a zebra crossing as soon as I got out of Caliburn, and then I was involved in the Great Brussels paperchase.

And that includes the fact that my Brussels id card is out of date and not accepted in the bank, but my driving licence, issued on the same day and with the same photograph, is accepted.

And then being stuck in the Brussels rush-hour traffic that I had forgotten all about for hours, watching a motorist deliberately ram her old and rusting Opel into someone’s big and spanking-new BMW.

To think that I used to work amongst this for 10 years.

And then finally getting back here (having done first everything that was important just in case I was overwhelmed by the excitement of it all) and walking right into the middle of a raging controversy.

I am not glad to be back and I can’t wait for Friday night when I can come home. I’ve only been here for a few hours and I’m fed up already.

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EPIC HALL

The Poisoned Pen (or Poisoned Chalice, more like) – or my relentless struggle against reality