Via Brussels

The gems of this city can be pretty elusive. Of course, that’s part of their charm, but in the hope that my friends arriving after me don’t miss out on the best bits, here are – in no particular order – my personal recommendations for:

Sunny days
Celebrating a hangover with champagne and oysters at the Flagey market on a Sunday morning… browsing the fleamarket at Place du Jeu de Balle, every morning from 7am… more seafood snacks and white wine on a Sunday afternoon from the bustling and wonderful Nordzee / Mer du Nord (Place St Catherine)… lunch/coffee on the rooftop terrace of the Old England restaurant, above the Musical Instruments Museum (near Place Royale)…. Lying with a book in the Parc Tenbosch (Ixelles) or in the Parc d’Egmont, tucked just behind the Ave de la Toison d’Or… Read more…

Today it’s farewell to you, city of Brussels, and so to this blog.

It’s hard to say goodbye, and not just because you’re the city I’ve stayed in longest since I left home.  You have a capacity to evoke not a passionate love – this is no Berlin – but, for those who stick around long enough, a grudging respect and affection. You’re that person whose annoying habits drive one mad, yet is simply unique. You make daily life far more complicated than it should be, but you offer a crashing of languages, professions, mindsets, colours, in one big messy heap. You create the sparks that propel us into adventures, in different directions: for me, in Turkey, in Libya, in Cape Verde, and now to Tanzania. You raise the bar on our possibilities, make us question our limitations. If Berlin is, as one friend described it, like a too comfortable sofa that makes you lazy, you dear Brussels, are a driving seat…

It’s the people though that make the experience. Apart from the friends I’ll keep and those I’ll gradually lose touch with, others, I suspect, will stay with me in some way, for better or worse. The dear neighbour, the contented artist, the matter-of-fact boss, the unstoppable youth leader; the non-committal non-boyfriend, the severely troubled flatmate.

Thanks for those three years. The next chapter awaits.

I’ve never worked in recruitment. I have applied for a lot of jobs, though, and over the past year have been sitting on the other side – publishing job ads and sifting through applications. What follows is by no means comprehensive, but reflects what I’ve learned about the Brussels job market. I hope it’s helpful to some of you.

1.    Ask questions first
Small organisations may not have the resources to deal with your phone calls or e-mails, and some may not want to. But you need to find out as much as possible – not least to make sure you’d actually want the job if you’re offered it.  It’s also worth checking the ad is still current: it may not have been updated, or the company may be considering recruiting internally or may have changed their minds about the exact job description. Try to speak directly to the person you’d be working under and/or the one who’s doing the recruiting. Without being too demanding – and perhaps without asking the questions directly, try to find out: Are the job description and criteria fixed; if not, how flexible are they? Is it a new post or would you be replacing someone? What is the single most important skill needed? Read more…

People who think four kids makes a large family should meet my Burundian friend: I learned yesterday that she’s one of 39 siblings. Her father, from Mali, had 22 wives, and my friend only met all her brothers and sisters at her father’s funeral recently. Not surprisingly, there’s some tension surrounding his inheritance.

This particular patriarch may be something of an exception – generally, Islam allows up to 4 wives. But polygamy is a reality in many African countries. A Malian friend currently living in Brussels will return to his country to get married next year, and he says that though for now he doesn’t think he’ll have another wife, “I’m not married yet… so who knows!” He reckons staying faithful to one woman is impossible anyway; when you promise fidelity to someone, you promise it for a certain time. My Burundian friend agrees; women who are devestated by their husbands cheating on them shouldn’t make such a big deal out of it: “it’s normal”, she says. Read more…

The presidential election campaigns in France and the US may be rather more important for the rest of the world, but the run-up to Ireland’s elections later this month is provoking its own fair share of dramas and tantrums. Unlike the French and American counterparts, Ireland’s president is a mere figurehead, with no political power as such. That hasn’t stopped the whole country talking about the line-up of seven candidates.

And what a line-up that is: the former eurovision winner of dubious Irish roots; the gay, eccentric intellectual guilty of seeking to defend his partner’s rape crime; and the former IRA terrorist who as recently as five months ago refused to meet the Queen. Read more…

Today my eye was caught by a teenage girl’s schoolbooks, across the front of which was scrawled in HUGE capital letters: YOU CAN SLEEP WHEN YOU’RE DEAD!

It must be a sign of my ageing, but I thought to myself: only a teenager could so be so flippantly defiant; only for the very young is death still something that happens to other people. I felt a little bit envious (when did I stop saying things like that, I wonder?) but mostly it made me shudder, and it reminded me of my best friend at school, when we were 14, declaring that she would kill herself before her 30th birthday because getting old sounded so horrific. Read more…

It’s not the advice you expect from your future employers. I thought the briefing given by the Belgian Development Agency (BTC) – for the 34 of us about to head off to a developing country for a year – would be more about professionalism, the agency’s procedures, safety issues, etc. And a lot of it was. But a much greater proportion was more personal: dealing with isolation, cultural shock, stress, conflict and confrontation, danger.

“Get your fridge, fill it with your favourite things, decorate your room”, advised one former aid worker, meaning: get your personal situation sorted as a priority. Once happy there you will also be in a much better position to contribute effectively at work. “And bring chocolates for your Belgian colleagues there”. Read more…

For the first time in two years I’m away from the office for more than ten days at a time. While rediscovering the world outside EU procurement and quality management systems, I’m also realising how important change is. Being surrounded by different people, changing your routine, worrying about something different – it feels like gloriously stretching some long-forgotten muscles in my mind.

Of course, after a little while I’ll become immersed in this world : the one of international development (or development cooperation, as they particularly like calling it in French) with all its infuriating acronyms and theories. And inevitably, working inside what is essentially a government body will, I accept, settle into my mind until I start thinking a little like they do. When I started working in a pub a few years back a friend warned me it would change my perspective on things. I laughed. But he wasn’t far wrong. In the end, I wasn’t there long enough for the cynicism of my co-workers (customer service = customers are losers) to become ingrained in me. Read more…

There’s a nice series of features in this month’s Courrier International on today’s nomads, that looks at the diverse lifestyles of Canadian hippies, North African Touaregs, the mere thousands of remaining Nenet people in Siberia, and more. The less exotic variant of the nomad, for most of us, is the “hyperconnected globetrotter”, basically the ipad-toting, dual-home-owning 30 to 50-something whose daily routine changes depending on whether he’s in Hong Kong or New York that day. Even this red-eyed way of life – travelling all the time yet constantly remaining “at work” – is apparently sought-after by one in five workers.

I was reading this on my return from a trip to Barcelona – one that suggested my border-crossing nomadic generation would slip happily into the life of our older counterpart, the careerist globetrotter. Read more…

I’ve always known – like a lot of people living here – that Brussels would be a stop-off on the way to somewhere else (hence this blog’s name).  But the leaving date has just become quite fixed, and it’s odd how that’s changed my perspective of the place.

When you’re here “permanently” – or at least, with no fixed leaving date – you avoid getting to know the blow-ins, the interns, anyone who’ll be gone again before next season comes around. But now I’m one of those people: the ones not worth investing in, the temporary folk. Similarly, every time I meet someone new – as you do every week here – I find myself wondering if it’s worth spending my time getting to know them, when I barely have time to see all the people I do know – and know that I like. Read more…