Where I live

Thank you to all my friends who have signed up to my Yahoo 360 site...

Now I'll have to find something interesting to write about. The problem with blogs is that they can quickly become:

a) a year round Christmas Card letter with endless showing off

b) become a boring diary of trivia

c) a whinge list

I hope I can avoid all of the above now I've got an audience. I think though, if it is alright with you, that I will pretend you are not there at all.

I've been told unofficially by my boss that I will get the training contract, so I am in Brussels for another 6 months.

Now I will have to find somewhere to live, as my current apartment is up for sale along with the rest of the house it is in.

I am currently living in the ground floor of a large old 4-storey house (pictured above) that belongs to an English couple, Jim and Olga. Olga is a friend of Janet's sister, and that is how I found the place. The apartment is right in the centre of Brussels in a region called St. Gery. St. Gery is a little like a miniature version of Covent Garden in London there is an old covered market that is now an exhibition centre and bar and hundreds (and that is not an exaggeration) of bars and restaurants and is also the Chinatown of Brussels so there are quite a few Chinese, Thai and Vietnamese restaurants in the area too.

I guess I am right on the frontier between the trendy part of Brussels and the grotty part of Brussels Everything trendy is to the North and East, everything grotty is to the South and West.

The apartment has been broken into twice. They smashed the front window the first time but ran off before they nicked anything. The second time 2 weeks later the burglars climbed the scaffolding on the building next door and came in through a dormer window in the roof. They did over the whole building. Jim and Olga lost quite a lot. By the time they reached my apartment I think they must have been tired and worried. Tired by their climb and search and worried because they couldn't get out as the front door was deadlocked and the back garden is surrounded by a 12 foot high wall. Eventually they climbed out of the window that they smashed on the previous occasion. Fortunately they opened it this time as it had only just been repaired. I lost about €35 from a collection of Euro coins but that was all. I had hidden all my valuables after the last break in and they deemed my p.c. to be too old to be worth nicking.


(interior shot - my kitchen, dining room and garden)

I have some colourful neighbours – on one side I’ve got a house full of Polish builders who are living in the house as they rebuild it – they are very noisy with power drills starting at about 8am most week days, but it ensures I don’t oversleep – beyond them the neighbourhood gets posher. Some nuns occupy the next house and the rest of the street in that direction, towards St Gery is very well to do. On the other side of the apartment things run down hill rapidly. The house next door is subdivided into 8 apartments and beyond there things get more and more ragged with communal kitchens in basements, bunk beds visible from the street in tiny grotty apartments, loads of letterboxes in every front door, most of which have mail hanging out of them and then suddenly you are in Place du Jardin du Fleurs that has a nice fountain and a couple of restaurants, one of which is terribly terribly posh.

I really like it here, but all the same, I think my next apartment may be a little more upmarket than this one.

Oh by the way if you want to buy the house, then here are the details...
http://www.immoweb.be/EN/Global.Estate.cfm?IdBien=738736