One year on + a lovely weekend

I just looked up my Gcal for a year ago, because I knew it was coming up to my first anniversary here in Brussels, but I couldn't remember when exactly. Turns out it's not for a few days - moving day was Friday the 13th, which wasn't an omen of anything in particular, unless you count that the movers broke my "Bio t'y foule" wine glass that I never understood what it meant anyway.

Gcal is how I organise basically my entire life, from little reminders to put something in my handbag to take to work, to travel plans, to organising an international move, and looking at my calendar a year ago reminds me of how stressful it was, but also kinda makes me feel organised and adult, so that's nice. I had forgotten just how much was going on around the move as well - I was in Mallorca three weeks before the move, Tours two weeks before, Brussels for one night the week before and Luxembourg the week after, seems crazy (most of that was booked before I knew I was moving though).

The past year has definitely flown by. On the minus side, I don't really feel any more integrated into the city (i.e., no friends). I haven't been trying, and am mostly fine with it, since I spend all my weekends with Jules and after work I'm pretty much okay just vegging out, but there are obviously times when friends would be nice. I've never really been in the situation before of making *no* friends in a new city, so I'm trying to take that as a sign it's down to lack of effort rather than inherent lameness, but that thought's always floating about somewhere.

On the plus side, oh my god is it better living in a nice apartment, getting paid a decent wage and not having a hellish international commute. We had a barbecue at Jules's place this weekend and invited one of my old colleagues and I found myself going on to another guest about how awful that used to be and then kind of had to bite my tongue because my colleague still does the commute (although she does live closer than I used to).  It's been fun visiting a few places in Brussels and around the country too, although inevitably you always end up feeling that you don't do half the things you would do even spending a week here as a tourist. It's a pretty good hub for travelling further afield too - for once, I don't have to tack on a trip to a major airport like Paris in order to have a wide choice of destinations. The cat is way happier to have me around more as well :)

Further to the "not integrating" bit, I don't really have any great observations or insights into Belgian culture. There are probably people (Flemings?) who would hate me for saying so, but day-to-day, things are pretty much exactly the same for me as when I lived in France. Being a national and EU capital, you hear a lot more languages spoken on the street, but everybody speaks French in supermarkets and so forth. It's relatively rare that someone will just start speaking Dutch to me. Honestly, most of the time I feel I could be in any given French city instead of in Belgium.

Anyway, I should be blogging about my trip back to Tours the weekend before last, but I can't find my camera cable, so I'll have to fill you in on this weekend's visit to Bourscheid Castle in Luxembourg instead. The weather this weekend was fabulous, hence Saturday's barbecue on Jules's awesome terrace, and it was still great for our Sunday morning trip to Bourscheid. It's in a fantastic location, perched on a hill 150 metres above a valley where the Sauer/Sûre river loops by.

When we were setting out in the car, Jules promised to tell me the "story of Jules and the Sauer", but only when we got to the river. I was quite excited, expecting a tale of derring-do, or perhaps an embarrassing mishap. When we finally got to the Sauer, he told me that he used to go fishing there a lot with his granddad. "And...?" And that's the story. Not to toot my own blogging horn, but that's why only one of us has a blog enjoyed by fives of people.

Source - we didn't get this aerial view of it, unfortunately

There was a really detailed autoguide to the place, but I found it really confusing so I don't actually know anything about the castle, oops. The audioguide was in the form of a dialogue between two guys, and either I didn't listen properly at the beginning or it wasn't properly explained, because I had no idea who they were meant to be. According to Jules the premise was that one of them was from the nineteenth century or something and one from the present day and they were like comparing notes on the state of the château through time, but I just got really confused with their dialogue e.g. "Was that tower there the first time we visited?" "I don't really know, but someone told me it was reconstructed during the renovations in 1972". Okay, that doesn't sound too confusing, but they lost me with all the talk of "in my day" and "our first visit". Plus I found it hard to follow when they pointed out different parts of the castle, like "in the back left corner there is X". How are you meant to tell where the back left is?

So anyway, I'll just recap what it says on the tourist website, which is that the stone castle was started around the year 1000, it underwent various renovations and expansions over the years before falling into ruin as early as the 18th century. The government acquired it in 1972 and has carried out extensive renovations. I always feel a bit cheated by big renovation works, as though I'm seeing a fake - this is one reason I've never been to Warsaw, although it's allegedly quite nice - but I suppose the bones of the place were more or less always intact.

Rebuilt or not, it's a stunning place, and the views from the top are magnificent. Something for everyone who thinks there's nothing to see in Luxembourg -

Bourscheid Castle

Jules amongst the ruins

Jules took forever to take this photo, on purpose I think!

Some of the castle wall was carved right out of the rock

Views from the tower of the gatehouse and ruined castle interior

We climbed up to the top to take the photos of the view below

Looking down on the Sauer

View from the other side of the tower

Pale tower selfie

Of course, the only photo where I was smiling normally was the one adjusting my sunnies (I finally took them back to the shop to get them tightened up on Monday°

Tower panorama - we had lunch at the hotel in the valley immediately to the right of the tower

The reason we actually were at Bourscheid to begin with was because I happened to spot that it was restaurant week in Belgium and Luxembourg, and the only participating restaurant in the Grand Duchy was at the Cocoon Bel Air hotel in the valley nearby. It was pretty much the same as the Dining with the Stars thing we did last year, in that you pay a fixed price and get a surprise menu (except this place didn't have a Michelin star). It's in a beautiful location below the castle, and the food was pretty good and reasonably-priced, at least with the special deal - I didn't see the normal prices.

Looking back up at the castle from our lunch spot

Our salmon entrée was a bit bland, to be honest #wewantplates

But the sea bass main was tasty!

I don't like crème brûlée, so I was glad that the "revisted" strawberry CB was actually not very crème brûlee-y at all

Ahhh, so much easier to kick back and enjoy life when the sun is shining and the long summer days stretch on forever. I feel so much more motivated to get out of the house and go exploring, and we really reaped the rewards this weekend. It was great!

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!