Lucky (move) number 13

So I worked out when preparing my "Decade in Review" that I've moved 13 times in the last ten years. Oof! In fairness, most of the early moves just involved me and as much stuff as I could carry (which, contrary to my father's nay-saying, was around 40 kilos). But on the other hand, all except two moves (in Tours and Brussels) have involved changing cities and/or countries. That is, how you say, a pain in the arse no matter how much stuff you have.

The most recent move was prompted by the boyfriend moving in last October. My old place was 45 sq metres (I think? Like my glasses prescription, this is something everyone else seems to know - for themselves - but I always forget), which was great for a single gal plus cat but not so much when Jules moved in and inconveniently insisted on bringing things like books and clothes with him.

So we gave notice just before our trip to NZ and once we got back the hunt was on to find a new place before the end of May. We actually only saw three places, ending up taking an apartment one street over from our old place. I would have liked having a direct transport link to work, but otherwise, we know and like the neighbourhood, so it made sense to stick with this area.

Plus the new place ticked pretty much all the other boxes. It's way bigger, a duplex (two floors) around 140 sq m (although a lot of space is lost to things like the stairs and the sloping roof on the top floor. Talking of which, a slopey roof was, unsurprisingly, not one of our requirements, but we are very pleased to be on the top two floors. As my sister can testify, in the old place a demon child lived above us who loved nothing more than to rampage up and down on our ceiling making as much noise as humanly possible. So now we get to be the ones annoying the downstairs neighbours, with no retribution. The third big problem with the old place was that it only had a small fridge with a freezer compartment. Even the motorhome we stayed in in New Zealand had a bigger fridge! It was a real pain having to shop basically every other day since we couldn't have much frozen food and anything big like a big bag of spinach basically took up 1/4 of the fridge space. Lastly, it met the terrace and bathtub requirements, so pretty much a home run.

New terrace. On, like, the only sunny weekend this summer, in which we spent 90% of the time indoors moving house

Finally, a move with a furniture lift! I'm so easily impressed

Bob surveying the empty (old) apartment. He has been a super trooper with the move! Even knew how to go up and down the stairs from day one!

 A bigger place meant more furniture, so we have spent the last couple of months busily shopping at IKEA and assembling our purchases. We had the idea to get a nice mid-century sideboard and found a few in antique shops that were gorgeous (and expensive!) but we didn't get our act together to buy one before the move, and then afterwards there would be the problem of how to get it into the apartment. It would basically mean hiring a lift, with all the hassle and the expense that involves. So, sadly, we stuck with our all-IKEA decor since that, at least, we can haul up the narrow stairs ourselves.

The light in the kitchen was the worst. Ugly as hell and hung down too low

We switched it out and added extra bench space - the right-hand side is all new, from IKEA (I'm sorry I didn't take a before picture of the kitchen, because this was where we made probably the biggest change)

Then the finishing touch (almost, there's a couple of bits and pieces we still haven't sorted out) was the long-awaited arrival of a few boxes of things from New Zealand. Mostly books and a few paintings, this was stuff I'd left behind 7 years ago when moving to Europe. I'm so excited to have all my old university books back, many with notes and highlights, all reminding me of my student days. I don't tend to over-sentimentalise books too much (it irritates me if you see some craft project using books online, like a découpage or something, and all the comments are HOW DARE YOU DESECRATE THIS BOOK? Yeah, this mass-market paperback of which a billion copies exist. It's not a sacred object. End rant) but yeah, my uni books are still special to me!

It was like Christmas when all my stuff arrived from NZ

The finished product

I still dream of a room with floor-to-celing built-in bookcases. But a wall of Billys (already full!) is a start

My (and Jules's) preciouses

The week of the move, we had just come back from Berlin (I swear, I can't move without sticking an international trip in the mix, just to stress myself out), and that weekend was also the Brussels Food Truck festival. The evening before M-Day, we snuck out after a full day of packing to get some fresh air and sunshine and conveniently have dinner without needing any of our packed-away utensils. Win win! This year, for security reasons, it was held in the Park Royale - which was actually great on a hot day, with plenty of shade and grass to lounge about on.

It was a popular event on a Friday evening

Jules tucks in

Peko peko was one of our favs from last year

Wine and some sort of fried cheese-chorizo lollipop makes a happy Gwan

This is actually a different park. But another nice day (rare)

So, as moves go, #13 was relatively stress-free. It's been fun decorating and fixing up the place and we're pretty happy so far. Signed a three-year lease, so long may that continue!

Brussels: it's not so bad

Obviously, the terror attacks were awful, and I don't want to minimise the pain and suffering of anyone who went through them, particularly those directly affected. They have certainly disrupted everyday life even for those of us lucky enough not to be personally involved - the metro and bus/tram network has only just opened fully up again this last week (other than Maelbeek station), and it has become not all that unusual to hear of roads blocked off and areas "locked down" due to police activity. One night a couple of weeks ago, there were three or four police cars parked outside our apartment, doing some sort of search of the houses opposite us. There seemed to be far too much chatting and eating of chips for it to be a terror raid, but it came just a few days after they shot a guy where I often take the tram (I've never heard what came of that?) so we were a bit on edge seeing so many cops right outside.

But life goes on, and as far as I can tell, other than for those whose lives were tragically cut short or forever changed by the attacks, it's back to normal for most people. It's really not possible to go on every day worrying about something which, in reality, is very unlikely to affect you anyway. No offence to anyone, but the sentiment that we've got to keep on as usual "or the terrorists win" makes me roll my eyes a little. I take a more pragmatic view of the situation: there's really not much of an alternative to carrying on as usual, because what else are you going to do?

It helps that spring is busy springing, the birds are singing in annoying fashion outside my window early in the morning, the sun has been shining most days, except today since it's a Saturday and that would be too convenient, and life in Brussels is really not as bad as sensationalist headlines would have you believe. Last weekend, we discovered a whole new (to us) area of Brussels, which I'm kicking myself at never having visited before. The Marolles district is surrounded by areas we have visited plenty of times, like Sablon, Louise, and the Mont des Arts, yet for some reason we had never strayed in to it before. But, googling good places in Brussels to go antiquing, we came across it. It was described as full of antique shops, in the process of gentrification, and less chichi (and expensive) than the neighbouring Sablon area. This pretty much nails it, and it turns out to be a really cool place to browse through antique and design shops, visit a huge flea market on the Place de Jeu de Balle, and visit a café or two.

The creatively named Chapel Church, on the edge of the Marolles

Inside one of the area's huge antiques shops

A beautiful shopfront 

One of the more interesting items for sale

Me and a sculpture of Brueghel, who apparently lived/worked around here in the Middle Ages

Sadly, our budget didn't stretch to any new acquisitions (half the time was spent going, *how* much?!?, half reflecting that you can actually pick up a lot of chunky old antique furniture for about the same price as something from IKEA, but that's because it's dated and impractical), other than a new handbag for me. But I think we will definitely be back. It's a fun part of town with a great vibe, and when the weather gets warmer there are plenty of nice cafés on the main square where you could sit quite happily and watch the world go by. We felt kind of dumb not having been there before, but that means we had the fun of discovery, so it evens out.

Our other "discovery" was actually somewhere we'd known about for a long time, but never been to. There's a Friday night food market in the neighbourhood that we've talked about going to for ages, but when Jules was living in Luxembourg, he wouldn't get here until around 9pm, and then he moved here right at the start of winter last year, so we were not so motivated to be out hitting the open-air market. But last night, we finally went, on a sunny spring evening, and found a place with a really nice atmosphere: a mix of young families using the playground facilities and young professionals unwinding after work. There's a great selection of food from around the world (we shared a Cornish pasty and dim sum), and you can grab a wine or beer and stand around drinking it, which would probably be banned back home. 

Other than that, I am in an organisado (organisation tornado) because we will be moving house next month. We gave our notice before going to New Zealand, which was a bit scary, but we were pretty confident of finding something new. In the end, we're moving only one street away, into a duplex apartment which is more than three times the size of the present place. Particularly looking forward to not having a freakishly clodhopping toddler running around on our ceiling (we will have the top two floors), having a full-sized refrigerator instead of the tiny one we have now, and having a south-facing terrace. Exciting! It's maybe not quite as elegant as my current place, but the rent is not so much more expensive (and less between two than I used to pay by myself, of course), that we can sacrifice a wee bit of style for much more space. Farewell, old flat!

One last (?) photo from here. A souvenir from NZ - vase with stylised pohutakawa flowers

Chocomania! A visit to the Neuhaus factory shop

I have been ghosting you again, dear readers. Not much has been going on here, just struggling through the gloom of a Brussels winter. It got cold for a little bit, snowed a tiny amount, and now has gone back to quite warm, but rainy gloom has replaced the frosty sunshine we had in January. And it's still so dark all the time!

But not for much longer... We are almost in the final countdown to the NZ trip, less than two weeks to go. On the one hand, I kind of regret that we will be enduring most of the winter here anyway, but on the other hand, I didn't want to use up such a big chunk of holidays so early in the year, and when we come back, hopefully spring will be here. Plus, NZ in February is much nicer than January. At least, I hope so. Every time I check the weather forecast, it seems to be sunny but with rain predicted for the coming days. Not sure whether that means it has actually been sunny all the time or not...

Couple of quick things before I probably go into hibernation again and then hit you with an unending stream of posts from New Zealand. (Eeeeee!)

Our joint Christmas present to ourselves was a shiny new Magimix food processor. Points to note: my god, it takes up space! I knew the size of the processor itself (we bought online, but had seen it in a shop). What I didn't know was how much room all the blades and other accessories take up! It's true, by the time you fit the blade and clean the machine afterwards, half the time you could have just chopped the carrot yourself, but it's a lot of fun. And we've made some things like pommes de terre dauphinoise or sliced leeks or julienned carrots where I definitely wouldn't get the things as thin or uniform. And it does come into its own when you're making a big batch of whatever. We made soup yesterday with 2 cups each of diced carrot, celery and onion, and that saved a lot of grief. If you have any recipes that require a lot of chopping/slicing, send them my way!

Plus it's so shiny and red, and looking at it gives me a smug middle-class sense of self-satisfaction

About the only other noteworthy thing I've done this year is also food-related (surprise, surprise). I wanted to take some Belgian chocolates back home to friends and family, but the good ones (not cheap and nasty bulk-buy seashells) cost an absolute fortune. Like at least 25€ per box that you see in the photo below. Times it by maybe 10 people and you're looking at a cool 250€. (Geez, thanks for the maths help, Einstein.)

Luckily, I was talking to a colleague who let me in on a little Brussels secret - the Neuhaus factory shop! Neuhaus is already one of my favourites, so I was super excited to visit, especially when I heard you can eat as many free samples as you like. Basically, the boxed chocolates are not so much cheaper than what you get in the retail stores, but the real bargains come in plain, single-variety cardboard cartons. I picked up three kilos of chocolate for 40€.

You can eat as much as you want from the open boxes

And then splash the cash on the plain packaging

As far as I'm aware, the plain boxes aren't "seconds' in the sense of being defective or whatever. We were looking for later expiry dates on the boxes we bought, and they all expired by like the end of April, so I'm guessing that's more the reason why they are in the factory shop. Apart from that (I'll just assume my family will eat their chocolates quickly!) the only downside is that there's only three different varieties of chocolate in the three kilos and I'll have to fiddle around in NZ packing them into individual portions. On the plus side, it will be a lot easier to transport them than the equivalent in 10 different boxes. 

I suppose I've lifted the veil of mystery for anyone who may be reading the blog and also getting chocolates from me, but oh well. I figure most people would rather more chocolates in a less fancy package (and also that I don't bankrupt myself).

We went by car, but apparently you can take the metro to the last stop and walk a short way, so definitely an option if you're ever visiting Brussels. Beware though, we didn't have breakfast, and I would have thought I could eat basically endless quantities of chocolate, but I got sick pretty quickly! If you're coming on a mission, e.g. for the bulk-buy chocolates, make sure you taste those first, because by the end I horrified myself by having to take a bite of different chocolates and then throw the rest away. (A dark day for humanity.)

A few loose ends

My first day off work! Next year, I go straight into my new job for six weeks or so, and then a long break in New Zealand - seems just about perfect! First, a few words on stuff I haven't blogged about/follow-ups. Yesterday I actually looked at the stats page of my blog and the post with the most hits over the last week was the last day of my trip to Ukraine in 2011. I ended up looking back through my whole trip and really enjoyed the walk down memory lane. So it's a reminder to keep blogging even if it feels like I'm the only one reading it...

• Edinburgh: One thing I forgot to say last time was how marked the differences were in security between Edinburgh and Brussels. How quickly one gets used to seeing armed police and soldiers everywhere you go! It seemed really strange to me to see the Christmas market, for example, without armed (wo)men standing guard outside. I don't know how I feel about that. As we saw in Paris, it doesn't have to be a big, well-publicised event for it to be targeted. The Sydney siege was in a Lindt chocolate shop of all places. But I suppose it's more about reassuring people they can still go places like the Christmas market and the Grand Place than anything else.

I got a few more photos from other people's cameras - my birthday brownie

I had to take a photo of a photo since I don't have a scanner, so this is not the best quality. I feel I was tricked here because Caro said "let's really go for it with the photo, none of this namby-pamby stuff" and then those two do incredibly photogenic cute little scared faces, and I'm the marauding hell demon next to them

That wasn't my only cake of the weekend. I'm so excited!

Pre-dinner silliness

C&C and our indian feast

• In "look how fancy I am" news, the other week I was invited to a party at an Ambassador's residence! I didn't exactly cover myself in glory while I was there. It was pretty crowded, so while trying to skirt around some people I managed to walk into a massive lampshade and then while trying to fix the shade I had knocked askew, I tipped my (first and undrunk) drink on the floor. That wasn't too bad, I think only the girl right behind me saw. But then the Ambassador came up to us, introduced himself by his first name and asked when the choir was going to perform. I totally didn't recognise him and (politely) said I didn't know, maybe he should ask that guy over there. Then he (nicely) said he was the Ambassador and wandered off. Oops. So this is more "why I shouldn't be invited fancy places". It was fun seeing everyone's party frocks though, and I talked to the Ambassador's wife later, who was very nice.

In Grand Place after the Ambassador's party

A fondue sandwich. What an age we live in!

Jules at the Christmas market

Light show in the Grand Place

Panorama at the Grand Place

• See how I'm not wearing a coat there? I do tend to run hot, but it's definitely unseasonably warm here. The coat has only come out on a couple of occasions, with most days getting into the low teens or at least double digits. It's like winter in Auckland! Way back in October, we even had a day in the beach at Ambleteuse in France. It was sunny and about 16 degrees, we couldn't believe it. I don't know if it's going to suddenly get cold next year, but so far it has been incredibly mild. I still can't believe the photos below are from October in northern France though!

The beach at Ambleteuse

People on the rocks looking for mussels

A feast of wine and local cheese

Catching shrimp and playing with the timelapse function on the iphone

That's about it, just counting down to a few days in Luxembourg for Christmas and then a quiet new year to recharge the batteries. Merry Christmas all!

Movin' on in

So while we were roadtripping around South-West France, wheels of a different kind were in motion. Jules and I have been together for over a year and a half now, which is a year and a half of what I term "medium-distance dating". Long-distance is a bit dramatic, since we spent every weekend together, and we've only been two to three hours' apart the whole time (traffic and so on depending). But still, it's obviously not quite the same when you have to say goodbye every Sunday evening and go back to your weekly routine on your own.

There have been high-level negotiations going on over when we could move in together, and the general consensus reached was to look into it some time after we got back from Albania. I think we both quite wanted to have at least one summer in Jules's apartment, which is sunny and has balconies on both sides, and it made sense to get summer holidays out of the way before he started a new job. Talk accelerated after Albania as well because it was the first time we'd spent longer than a week together and then it makes it harder to settle back into daily life without them.

Enough soppiness. Anyway, Jules started looking pretty much in the late August or the beginning of September, and within a week of sending his application to this one place, he had a phone interview, came up to Brussels to meet with them the following Saturday morning, and by mid-September, when we were due to go away on our trip, he was debating whether to hand in his notice before or after our holiday.

He decided to do it beforehand, and with the week's holiday, a weekend in London and another in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais, the month flew by and in mid-October, before I knew it, he was on my doorstep with all his portable possessions in the back of his car (his furniture thankfully stayed behind in his flat which is now rented out - and I never got to say goodbye to it!)

It's now two weeks in (more by the time this gets published, since for once I have stored up a number of posts in advance and am doling them out at a measured pace instead of dumping them over a few days and then radio silence for a month) and I don't think it has really dawned on me that he lives here yet. It doesn't help that we were back in London again the day after he moved in, or that this week he's gone away with his new work.

One major challenge is trying to fit two people's stuff into an apartment that has heretofore been set up for one person. Even just sorting through the duplicates of herbs and spices needed some strategic thinking (yeah, yeah, first world problems). So there's been a bit of an IKEA-fest, getting a second wardrobe, a little thing with drawers instead of the small coffee table, and replacing one of the bookshelves with a vitrine, which has the dual function of freeing up space in the kitchen and giving me somewhere to put my pretty things.

Room for more wine too :)

I fell in love with the Fables of La Fontaine series of Gien faience when I first moved to Brussels and have been collecting it since. They had a sale on a couple of months ago, and I rashly bought some of the Four Seasons plates too (on the left). I need to start having dinner parties so we can use them!

Coffee table replacement, aka storage for all the crap hanging about the lounge

I don't know how things will change from here. It's fair to say that living apart extends the "honeymoon period" somewhat, since it's always a special occasion when you see each other. But I'm pretty excited to do normal couple things like go to pub quiz on Mondays and occasionally meet up in town after work (Christmas markets!) or go to our favourite local restaurant which is only open for dinner on Thursdays and Fridays, so we could never normally go. And maybe I'll feel a bit more like my life is actually here in Brussels, and we might even make some friends (gosh, dreaming big here). It should be fun to find out :)

Update/ Time to publish this post and it's now been a month of living together. Still very early days of course, and to be honest, I still don't feel settled into the routine. It's more just like the weekends together have blended in to one another or something. The house is tidier, which is a bonus! I do clean, but I'm kind of a "big clean once a week" girl, whereas Jules is "little and often", which is a pain at the time but does result in a more continually clean dwelling. I miss having leftovers for lunch though! Hasn't quite filtered through to my brain to buy more food and cook larger quantities since the number of people eating has doubled. Boxes are mostly unpacked and stored, but will still be good to move somewhere bigger eventually, if only for the chance to get a larger fridge! (Also hampering that "cook bigger meals" thing.)

Keep on truckin'

If there's one thing that will motivate me to get blogging, it's knowing that I have a backlog of posts to get through before a long-anticipated, VERY FUN THING happens. It's that time of year again, and I'm counting down to my annual trip back to Tours (well, not counting the time I went in March which I didn't blog about because I just hung out with my friends) for the big Vitiloire wine festival. But more on that coming up, first I need to tell you what other fun things I've been up to. And what better time to do it than an overcast Monday morning, when thanks to Pentecost, I don't have to get out of bed? The fun of Vitiloire is still to come, but that makes it already a very good week in my book.

So, a few weeks ago, Brussels had its annual Food Truck Festival - food? festival? Yep, I'm gonna want to check that out. Luckily, Shannon from Almost Bilingue, along with her husband, a friend and her ex-flatmate of the sadly defunct I Fly a Starship blog also wanted to discover the delights of the food truck festival. Shannon and I have been talking about meeting up since I moved to Brussels nearly a year ago (gasp), thus bringing me pretty close to Lille, where she lives, but there's never been a good time until now.

Blog relationships are a funny thing - it's strange to know so much about someone you've never met, and vice versa, and at the same time you're conscious of all the gaps in the story - some people don't blog about relationships, many about work, or their friends, or the mundane, everyday parts of life. So it can definitely be weird meeting someone you've known for years - nearly six years in this case - and seen through major life events - moving, marrying, changing jobs - all without ever meeting.

Shannon is in fact one of my oldest blog friends, since I think she first got on my radar via the old Assistants in France website, sometime in 2009 before I moved back here. That was during the year-and-a-half or so that I wasn't blogging, since the blog was, at first, mostly a way to let people back home know about my exciting adventures in Europe (most of whom no longer read this as far as I know), so there wasn't much point keeping it up when I was having less exciting adventures as a student and worker back in New Zealand.

So, six years ago I had not long moved back to Auckland from Wellington, and I was working full-time as a librarian (the first and only time in my life I've done that, despite that supposedly being my profession) while finishing up my second Masters degree at night. I was beginning to develop horrible RSI in my arm from spending all day and all night typing away on the computer, and contemplating whether or not to chuck in the 9 to 5 and move back to France to work as a language assistant after I'd finished my degree.

The other option would have been to move back to Wellington, to cover a former colleague's year-long maternity leave. It would have been a big pay rise, working with a nice team of people I already knew, and probably a good opportunity for career development. Plus I like Wellington, and at the time still had friends there from university, although most have moved away now. It was hard to know whether to pick that option - I pictured myself in a nice flat in central Wellington, sipping lattes in one of the many cafés (not really though, since I don't drink coffee) and barhopping through chic cocktail joints at night. Versus moving to France and trying to survive on the Côte d'Azur on 780€ a month while going back to teaching English, which I hated the first time round...

It was a tough choice, but in the end, I decided that if I didn't give it a go and see what happened heading back to Europe, I might fall into a settled-down life in New Zealand and it would never happen. I had to try and see where I ended up. The plan was always to try and parlay the seven months as a teaching assistant into a more permanent job in my chosen field, but even if I just ended up having a seven-month break in the South of France, that was worth experiencing, right?

The Assistants boards were a big part of ironing out the anxieties and uncertainties of taking this leap, and I remember in particular getting a lot of advice and reassurance from people who had already been there and done that, like Shannon, Ksam, Eyeleen and Jennie. I suppose these days new assistants just join groups on Facebook or follow people on Twitter, but I hope there's some resources out there for them, because even though I'd lived and travelled in Europe before, it was scary trying to figure out how to turn up halfway across the world, find somewhere to live in an expensive city on a tiny income, with zero help or communication from the new school I was meant to be starting work at within a few days of arriving.

Anyway, all this to say that Shannon and I go way back, a lot has changed in the last 6 years, and it was cool to finally meet her! I think there were no big surprises on my end at least, we hung out, ate good food, had some tasty cocktails, and had a good time! Since we were hanging out as a group and eating lots of yummy stuff, I probably didn't get the inside scoop on all the behind-the-blog gossip, so I have a good excuse to schedule a return visit to Lille some time :)

The Food Truck Festival was fun too. Lots of people and a fun atmosphere. My only complaint was that pretty much everywhere was serving full-meal sized portions, i.e. whole burgers or whatever, so it was hard to sample stuff from many places. Luckily Jules and I ended up going back the next day (since I went with Shannon on the Friday night before he got to Brussels) and spent really quite a long time there, plus we shared one of everything we got, so we ended up being able to try quite a few things.

The super-cute Chang Noi food truck (love the elephant) along with one of my favourite bites of the festival - that delicious spicy shrimp.

Jules enjoys a mid-day mojito, as you do

Time for some classy street cider-chugging. Strongbow FTW!

Hmm, not so sure about this?

Nope, it's all good!

Our other favourite snack, delicious Japanese fried chicken strips from the equally cute Peko Peko van.

Walking back from drinks with Shannon and crew on the Friday night, we came across an illuminated Grand Place - I've never seen it lit up like this at night before, really pretty!