Brussels Bacteria

By guest blogger LaFritte.

Brussels. NO. NEVER. NEVER ever in a Million …

That’s what I was thinking as a ten year old on my first visit to Belgium. It was raining cats and dogs during the whole bloody week I stayed at my uncle’s place in Namur, my shoes, trousers, just everything got soaked wet and not enough I got sick from the crème fraîche in the Leonidas pralines that my uncle and aunt had offered me. I swore would never lay my feet again on this country that made me vomit and freeze in the middle of August.

 

No. NOT again. …Remember the weather, no…

That was when I was 21 and saw an advertisement at my local university to go studying in Belgium.

I went.

No, Belgium AGAIN???!!!! Really?

Well… why not?

That’s when I came again 8 years later and …STAYED.

A strange destiny seems to have me linked up with this country or putting it less romantic, a simple necessity to escape my home city I had grown fed up with. Change is always good and the truth is Brussels is changing all the time.

Many are oscillating between Love and Hate for Brussels, never sure if they are waiting in a corridor for something better to come or slowly becoming a fabric of the city itself.

But beware it’s a trick. The longer you stay the more you’re likely to be stuck here, unable to leave, not WANTING to leave. Brussels gives home for the homeless, for those species of Europeans who are not easily to be integrated anywhere else anymore, those Italians, German, Spanish, Swedish, who feel alien when going back to their home country but who don’t feel Belgians either.

“We are like bacteria” a friend of mine said lately. “Only the strongest come here and survive, the ones with the most of determination. “Ah?”. “Yeah, think of all the crazy, confused, enormously independent people escaping their national countries for whatever reason to find their luck in Brussels. Living a life of a nomad. It takes willpower to do that”.

Bacteria…I smiled and thought about my own journey and the good and surreal things that I have encountered  here…

TO BE CONTINUED

LaFritte is a blogger for Bruxpat. Conceived somewhere in the East-south, born somewhere in Eastern Europe, raised in the middle of Central Europe, she stranded on the Western shore of this continent a couple of years ago. She loves Belgian imperfections, the fact that everybody seem to be permanently stuck in an identity crisis, creative chaos and the rare sunny spells that occasionally fall on this country.  When this happens Brussels transforms itself completely turning into one of the most vibrant places - which reminds her why she is still living here.