If It's Tuesday, This Must be Belgium - 3/4/08

Well, I'm here in Brussels.  I've spent the last two days exploring and looking for an apartment.  The experience has been both encouraging...and discouraging.  Today I went to see 12 apartments.  Most were spacious enough (some too much)...some were in good locations...some had good views...and some were decent values (in a relative sense).  Unfortunately none were all of the above.

In several of the places there were good sized living rooms:

Kitchens were hit or miss:

And then there was this:

Then there were a couple of oddities.  In this one, there was a staircase that went down a level to built-in bookcases.  Nothing else around the corner, just the bookcases.  I kept picturing my Abraham Lincoln book collection on these shelves.

This same place (above) also had an odd step of steps that went upstairs to an attic room.  The only light was from skylights, one in each of the rooms, and the view was of one of the few tall glass buildings in this part of Brussels (The Blue Tower).

Another oddity was a master bedroom in one of the places.  After walking through a bathroom to the bedroom we quickly noticed the low ceiling.  See the wood beam in the photo below?  Well, it runs about 5 feet from the floor.  This was emphasized when the relocation expert that was showing me around walked straight into it.  I could hear the thud as he got knocked back onto the floor...and after lying there for a while got up to walk in a crouch the entire rest of the time (and had a big red bruise on his forehead the rest of the day).  Ouch.

Finally, I took the following photo at the last place I visited Monday.  The place was just okay and overpriced, but I loved the decor this couple had.  This was actually the only room I dare show as the rest of the apartment was a bit of a nightmare.  The couple, who had once lived in northern Virginia not far from me, were packing up for another move from Brussels to Japan for another assignment.   Here's the room I liked:

That's it for now.  Tomorrow I look at even more apartments.  I think I've narrowed down the areas to look - some were nice and cheaper but further out of the mainstream (I want to have some social life).  Others are convenient to the tram, which ends right in front of my office.

Oh, and my new office is very cool also!

More next week.