:: One People, Many Cultures ::



::Living Together in Respect and Friendship::

To me, trams represent an ancient world. I’d seen the photos of trams in Miranda near where I grew up, but the photos were black and white, which meant that they were taken about as far back as history went. Seeing them still running in Melbourne and in Sapporo didn’t change that, and when I arrived in Brussels, the trams just added to the feeling of antiquity that the buildings created.

It was a delight then, to find that I needed to catch a tram to work on my first morning in Brussels. I threw on my coat, slung my bag over my back and stepped out into the cold wet with a grin. The grin didn’t last long. It took me over an hour to catch a tram, and three passed by in that time.

The first didn’t stop because I didn’t wave it down. It seems that it’s not enough to stand up and start to get your wallet out – you actually need to put your arm in the way of the tram.

I got that right the second time, but the driver refused to open the doors for me. Bastard! He pulled out just as I started to knock on the door.

Sitting right behind the second tram, the third seemed to assume that I had just gotten off, and ignored the thumb I stuck out over the tracks. The driver didn’t even look at me.

The only reason I managed to catch the fourth, now shivering miserably, was that the driver opened the door for someone else, but still looked at me like I was an idiot standing next to the front door. I ran down to where the other guy was and followed him on.

Then I had to go through the process of buying a ticket. If you haven’t bought a ten-trip pass from the stations, then you have to buy a single trip ticket from the driver, and that costs almost twice as much per trip. Still, I had no other choice on this first morning, and didn’t know that the ten-trip pass existed anyway, so I distracted the driver from watching the tracks and was given a credit card sized magnetic ticket. By now, all the passengers were looking at me like I was an imbecile, making it even more humiliating to ask where I could validate the ticket. After giving me the most condescending look I’ve ever had to suffer, one woman moved out of the way of an orange box with flashing lights. I managed to stamp my ticket and headed for a corner to bury my face for the rest of the trip.

I handled the trip home more easily, thanks to the explanations of my colleagues. When the tram stopped, I looked closely and found the green strip running down between the folding doors and pressed it. I’d seen it that morning, but assumed it was just safety covering for bolts holding the narrow panel in place. Of course, it’s obvious to anyone who’s grown up in Belgium.

My story doesn’t end there. The following week I was trying to catch a bus in town and found myself in the same predicament. The driver didn’t open the door and there was no button or green strip in sight. I was just starting to panic, when a lady came up beside me, and with the same condescending look I’d hoped never to see again, pushed what I had thought was the blinker. For me, these tricks were like finding secret panels in a castle. I was truly in another world.

You might think that after living in Japan, moving to Brussels would be like coming home. You’d be wrong. I don’t have any friends or family here, and no one says “g’day” for a start. And the differences go deeper than that. How could they not, here on the other side of the world?

I arrived in mid November following a panic of visa applications. My company in Japan had taken me off the payroll, but the company in Belgium couldn’t put me on unless I’d worked more than half the month there, which meant that I had to be in the office from the 16th. Of course I landed on the 15th, and then let out the breath that I’d been holding for six weeks. Speaking of salary, that’s something that’s not at all like home. Here, they pay on a 13.92 month year which I find even more bizarre than the 18.1 month year of Japan. Someone should show these countries a calendar. Then again, someone should get their hands on the Japanese calendar and show it to the Aussie employers.

Holidays are pretty cool here too. We get 25 days of standard leave. Five full weeks! But that’s not all. They work us a bit extra each day, then add all the extra minutes up for a total of 6 days. The company chooses when to use three of those – they’re pretty nice about it, choosing days that turn a public holiday on Tuesday into a 4-day weekend when they can – and the other three are left to our discretion. Even better than that, due to a paradox in the leave laws in the two countries, I got a year of holidays from Japan (paid in arrears) at the same time that I got a year of holidays from Belgium (paid in advance) and found myself with more than 70 days! So many places to see, so much time.

That brings me to another advantage of living in Belgium. Travel. It’s easy. We’ve all heard the story of people going to another country for the weekend, but I always thought they were exaggerated. In fact, they’re understated. I asked a colleague what he was going to do on the weekend and he replied, ‘Oh, we thought we might go to Paris for lunch on Saturday.’ It’s possible. I arrived on a Wednesday evening, worked for two days and then went to Paris for the weekend. There’s a high speed train that takes just over an hour from Brussels centre to Paris centre. You can get to Amsterdam in 3 hours. This weekend I’ll go to Pisa. It will be a 1.5 hour flight and cost me under 100 Euro return. I’ve also been to Grenoble, Orleans, Cannes (to the film festival) and Nice in France, Santa Christina (snowboarding) in the Italian Dolomiti, and London. Add to that a trip around the world again to Cincinnati, Sydney and Kobe, and you can understand why I haven’t written much.

But I have had some time at home. I moved into a very nice apartment in mid December, but I’ve only just finished furnishing it in the last few weeks. It feels twice as big as my Japanese apartment, and where that one was more extreme in climate than the air outside, this one is more temperate. I only used the central heating for about 4 weeks despite the snow outside, and now it’s summer, I have a nice breeze to keep it cool. Not that the temperature is too hot. It’s apparently dangerous to talk about the weather in Belgium because it’s notoriously bad. I think everyone exaggerates. Sure, it rained every day for the first month I was here, but then Kobe has a rainy season a month long, and even Sydney can be pretty wet for long periods of time. Then it snowed for Christmas (well, not on Christmas day, of course) which can only be a good thing. Since then, it’s been beautiful weather, never wet more than two days in a row and sunny for weeks at a time. They try to tell me it rained the whole month I was travelling around the world, and then the whole week I was in Grenoble, but I’m not sure I believe them.

So, back to my apartment. It’s almost what I would have designed for myself – a large living room with enough space for my home theatre, which points at the kitchen, so I can watch movies while I cook, and a long wall of windows; a creative / writing room on the other side of the wall to the stereo so I can connect my PC to the stereo; a bathroom with two basins; and a bedroom full of Japanese furniture that my friends call a girl trap. Two of the floor to ceiling windows in my living room open right up so I can sit ‘outside’ without leaving home. Each room has these floor to ceiling windows and they all have a special feature unique to Belgium as far as I know. You can open them inwards at the top so that you get the fresh air, but no rain or burglars can get in. Necessity is the mother of invention – except that it doesn’t really rain that much, I tell you.

I brought most of my furniture with me, but had to buy a few things. It makes me laugh when people say that my apartment looks Japanese. The bedroom, yes. But they say it about the living room too. And they pick on the coffee table. As if every Belgian house I’ve been into doesn’t have a coffee table too, and there’s a dining table with chairs right beside it! The last piece that I bought recently is the lounge. It’s a gorgeous 19th century Charles Xth wooden lounge and it’s the perfect place to sit, or lie, and read while listening to music. That’s the luxury that I truly missed in Japan.

There’s plenty more to write – I’ve been everywhere! – but I’ll stop here and leave more for next time. I miss you all.