Thursday Bullets

• Halloween will probably go largely unnoticed here today except that I will try to make pumpkin soup for dinner. I had plans to buy a pumpkin and carve it together with Isolde but we never got around to it. She doesn't care yet though so it doesn't matter and besides, she already celebrated Halloween at school last week. This weekend we will probably visit a pumpkin patch (with the usual Halloween activities) though when we see friends in the UK. 
• Isolde has autumn holiday this week and has been home with Peter and Harald (and keeping her dad busy). They had planned to go to the Swedish church to check out their play groups but turns out it is also closed this week. So instead they've been frequenting playgrounds and met up with P & kid(s) a couple of times. 
• Early tomorrow morning we're heading to the UK by car. Hopefully the kids will sleep part of the 6-hour journey. I'm really grateful that we hadn't planned to go last weekend with the storm that we felt parts of also here in Belgium even though we were just on the periphery of it.
• We will be coming back from our weekend trip very late Sunday night so I've taken Monday off (tomorrow Friday is a Belgian and also Commission holiday, All Saints Day).  I'm looking forward to sleeping in a little and hanging with Peter and the kids. We may take the opportunity to go to Ikea for some supplies (candles for the approaching dark season) and we also really need to buy some plants for both indoors and the balconies. It gets very humid in the flat due to tight windows so I hope the plants will help a little. 
• Peter has bought tickets to go home to see friends in December when my mum visits. I'm happy that he decided to go, as he doesn't have as many opportunities to meet people as me at work and I don't want him to get bored. That weekend is also his office's Christmas party so a good time to go home. And of course it's also good timing, as my mum will be here anyway to keep me and the kids company. 
• Last weekend we had a really nice time when P, O & kids came over for dinner. We managed to eat a three-course dinner even though it took us a few hours :) We clearly need to have more friends with kids over so Isolde learns how to share her toys. At the moment she's in a very non-sharing mood also with her brother. But I guess it's a phase and probably also due to the fact that she isn't used to having friends over anymore since we moved here. 
• We have registered the family with a doctor (thanks P for the recommendation). It's a one-minute walk from  home so very convenient.  To continue on the medical theme, I took this year's flu shot (offered at work) yesterday. I have never had the flu but I don't want to risk anything so since a few years back I usually take it every year. 
• I finally put Harald on the waiting list for the Commission's crèche (childcare) and also started contacting a few alternatives where we live (the Commission one is near work but it would be more convenient to have one near Isolde's school). He won't start until next autumn (September 2014) but there are queues almost everywhere so it cannot wait. 

Friday Gallery: Doors/Portals

I decided to tackle today's theme - doors or portals (portar in Swedish) - by taking some photos on my way home from the metro station after work today.

Every day I pass this beautiful entrance to someone's home just outside Isolde's school. 

And further down almost the same street there's a little chapel in disguise. Or a electricity station in disguise depending on what direction you are coming from. I wonder if it was a chapel (or altar, as you can't actually go into it) first or an electricity station first. 

And after that I'm almost home. I like the entrance to our building and especially the name of our building. Why don't Swedish buildings have names? 

Brussels Points on a Thursday

Just a few things I have discovered about Brussels/Belgium since I moved here.

• There is no hot water in public toilets (or in the lavatories at my workplace either for that matter).  A bit of a contrast to e.g. the UK where there's usually only hot water and often too hot water (e.g. Heathrow).
• Similarly, there is only cold water in the guest loo in people's home usually as well, including in our flat (luckily we have hot water coming out of the taps in the bathroom ha ha).
• What's up with all the dog poo in the street??  Have you heard of those little bags?  Or show your dog to a bush at least where it can be hidden.
• The police often close of streets for no apparent reason??  I think they just need something to do and/or assert their power.
• At work, the men (who are from a range of European, and mostly continental, countries, so this is not particularly or only Belgian) are all very gentlemanny and want to open doors and let you lead the way, but that's all wasted on a Swede of course.  I don't see the point of having to squeeze by someone from the back of the lift or through a door, just because the man should hold the door to the woman.  It makes more sense for whoever is closest to the exit of the lift to go first and that whoever is closest to the door, man or woman, opens it and holds it for the other.
• Belgian houses are made of brick, brick and brick.  In different shapes and colours.  I like it!  Very little maintenance for house owners and it's easy to vary the design of the houses.
• Speaking of house design, almost every house is different from the next one, even if they are townhouses in a row and share a wall.  Well, except that they are all made of brick.
• Very few parents (seen a handful since we got here) use (or even buy) a carrycot for their pram and instead only use the carseat.  It can't be that "dangerous" as some Swedish parents seem to think (not me, though I do think babies sleep better in a carrycot), as then the majority of European children would have crooked backs.
• Why do some metro stations play such loud music?  I don't mind some background music but in some stations it's like small concert.  Aren't commuters already stressed enough (not even lous classical music is relaxing in my view)?
• I'm often surprised at how many young, well-educated people (e.g. doctors and teachers) don't speak English.  Okay, I know the Belgian complexities with language, the French v. the Dutch speaking, etc., but still.
• More people seem to smoke here, and also many young people.
• Our neighbours are friendly and polite and not only says hi/bye (which our neighbours in Sweden also do, yes, I promise), but also wish you a good day.  This is also the case at work.  There is a lot of bonne journée, bonne soirée and bon appétit (at lunch time they assume you're going out for lunch).  I will start wishing my neighbours god kväll when we've moved back to Sweden, even if it's not a neighbour I see that often.
• Belgian (and many other European) supermarkets have not "discovered" the brilliant idea of dividing the checkout band, which means the next customer have to wait until the other person has paid and packed their stuff, before the cashier can start scanning the products.  And sometimes the band is so short so they the cashier has to take pauses in the scanning to allow the customer to pack.  We shouldn't stress, I know, but I rather spend 10 minutes less in the supermarket and 10 minutes more with my children on a given evening.  (I'll deal with customer service and efficiency some other time...).

Friday Gallery: Lock(s)

This was a difficult theme.  I couldn't really find any photos of locks (lås) in my albums and I didn't have time to take any new photos. But in the end I found one that fit the theme.  It's taken by Isolde at last weekend's visit to the automobile museum Auto World.  Isolde has just recently become interested in taking photos herself - before it was just looking at the photos afterwards - and you can see that she needs some practice :)

Birgitta is our hostess for the month of October. If you want to participate in Friday Gallery, let us know through the widget on Annika's blog.

Thursday Again

This post is dedicated to Mette! ;)

• This week has been busy work-wise (not too many extra hours but hectic while at work) and I can't wait for the weekend to come! I'm looking forward to getting some sleep (as much as you can get with two small children - luckily they don't wake up as early as they used to) and hanging out with my family.
• This weekend I'm also looking forward to having our lovely neighbours over for dinner. Peter has seen them (or at least three out of four family members) several times but I haven't seen them for over a month (since E was one week old and now she's six weeks!). 
• Today and tomorrow I'm attending a conference on youth unemployment. I discovered that the venue also has a spa - must check if it would be a nice place to spend a day or even spend the night. It's located outside of town in the - currently very autumn beautiful and colourful - forest. 
• Harald turned 8 months last weekend (12th) and it reminded me that I haven't posted his 6-7 month-old report yet. On the to do-list for this weekend!
• Last weekend we had a lovely visit by my parents. The weather wasn't cooperating for most of the visit except for on Saturday when we were even able to have lunch outside. But more about visits in a separate post!
• We have finally booked tickets to go and visit friends in the UK at the turn of the month! We'll be driving and on the way there we'll cross the English Channel by ferry and on the way home we'll take Le Shuttle, i.e. the train for cars. 
• Isolde will have a week off pre-school at the end of the month (just before our England trip) and when she returns she'll start attending full days (08:30-15:30), which means she will also eat and nap there. We just filled out her food order for November. The food sounds really good - it's always three-course lunches - and sounds much better than Swedish preschool and especially school lunches, but I heard at the parent teacher conference that there's a new provider and people aren't that happy, so we'll see. But you have to agree with me that this sounds delicious! 

5 November: turnip soup - salmon, macaroni and spinach cream - gruyère - biscuit
6 November: split pea soup - diced chicken, haricots provencale, bulgur - fruit yoghurt
7 November: parsnip soup - beef stew, garden vegetables, parsley puré - dried fruits

8 Months Today!

I almost forgot that Harald turns 8 months old today!

Friday Gallery: Windows

My plan was to show my windows and our new (or recycled from our previous homes really) curtains but I didn't get around to take any pictures yet so I had to think of something else. A quick look through my iPhone, which I recently emptied, didn't come up with much but I did find two pictures of the kids (of course) who fit this week's theme.

Harald was looking through the window at Isolde playing with her friend Daniel in the garden last weekend. He was really interested in what they were doing and would have crawled outside if the glass hadn't stopped him. It made me reflect over how amazing the world is to him all the time. He's experiencing new things every day and his big eyes are following his sister wherever she goes and whatever she does. He's almost always happy and hardly ever bored. And even she's picking a fight he's smiling :) 

Thursday Points

• My parents have just arrived to spend the weekend with us. My mum came with the kids and me when we moved here at the end of August and also visited me when I lived here back in 2002/2003, but my dad has never been to Belgium. So we'll do some touristy stuff at the weekend, probably a repeat of when Maria and Daniel were here a couple of weeks ago. Tomorrow I am working but my parents, Peter and the kids will explore our neighbourhood and/or go to Tervuren (forest/park). 
• This week I've attended a three day training course on working for the EU covering everything from basic EU knowledge (mainly on institutions and the links between them) to working in an extremely multicultural environment (I'm still amazed every day just how many nationalities there are - I knew it already of course, but now I'm really realising it) to problem-solving skills to procedures. It was a really interesting and good course that really concentrated on our work situation and personal skills and competences. It was extremely interactive (sometimes a bit too much for my taste, such as making short plays to illustrate situations; acting is not my thing) and almost everything was done in pair or groups. The majority of the participants were newcomers like me who have arrived within the last six months. Really good crowd, and I hope to see some of them again. 
• Tomorrow it's back to (real) work again and I have several urgent tasks waiting and next week looks to be a busy one too. The honeymoon is definitely over! But it's fun so I'm not complaining, just stating fact! 
• We're planning to drive to the UK to visit friends for a long weekend at beginning of November. We just need to book the train or the ferry to cross the channel. Can't believe we can actually drive from here to see our friends! It's supposed to take 5,5 hours non-stop but travelling with two young children means we'll take our time. 

Friday Gallery: Walls

I had missed that Friday Gallery started up again in September due to our move to a new country (I think I'm excused for missing it!), but now with life having returned to some sort of normalcy, I should be able to blog on a more regular basis.  So here's the first post for October.  Birgitta is our hostess (as in picking the themes) this month and for today she has picked "walls".

Today I can only think of one thing when I think of "walls", and that is the grim pictures from the latest accident involving people wanting to get to Europe from across the Mediterranean.  Over 100 are dead and even though many have been rescued from the burning and sinking boat, about 200 are still unaccounted for.  I know the issue is very complex (or, you could actually argue it is not), but in principle I think we should really welcome everybody.  I don't like so-called Fortress Europe.  If we had more normal routes for migration, whether it is political, economic or human reasons, we wouldn't thousands of people arriving dead (or never arriving at all) on the shores of Europe.

Image borrowed

Thursday Points

An update is long overdue.  What has happened since last?

I like the "Thursday in bullet points" that Annika started so will try to post a list every Thursday at least, even if there's no time to write much else (and I'll try to join the Friday Gallery crowd too).

• To pick up where I left off last, Isolde is still enjoying maternelle.  She did have a dip after that first week and after the weekend, where she was really miserable on the following Monday and Tuesday, and didn't want to go and was very upset when we left her.  But Wednesday it was a little bit better and Thursday and Friday she was back to her happy self, and skipping into the classroom.  The week after went well, not a single tear, and this week has been the same.  She has a new teacher - unfortunately the first one was only substituting while the ordinary teacher was recovering from appendicitis - but the ordinary one seems good too, even if she isn't as sweet as the old one (and the new one doesn't speak English, which the old one did*).
• Last week I attended a two-hour parent-teacher conference in French and even though I didn't understand more than a third of the words spoken, I think I got the gist of it.  I was pretty tired afterwards after all that concentrating!  We first gathered in the refectory for the first 45 minutes or so and then continued in the classroom for class specific information with the teacher.  It was interesting to find out a little bit more about a day at preschool, or half-a-day in Isolde's case.  For example, in the morning they assemble and sing a welcome song and go through who's there and what day it is.  They have a painting of the school building where they put cutout dolls made of photos of the children and the school mascot to show who's at school that day.  And they learn the names of the days of the week through putting a different stuffed animal in the basket for that day.  Isolde's favourite activity at preschool is painting and gymnastics. 
• We've had our first "dinner party", to which we invited our friends Chris and Jacqui whom we know from Stockholm (C. and I used to be colleagues) and who have been living here now for three years but will sadly move to the UK in April.  We took the opportunity to eat some crayfish for our starter dish, since we had discovered that Ikea sold crayfish packets.  They were actually pretty good, considering they came from Ikea!  C. also invited us to join them for "champagne tea" at the British Embassy, which sounds fancy but was a low-key affair, although the surroundings were very nice as the Residence of the Ambassador (or Ambassadors, as the ambassadors to Belgium, EU and Nato share the building for entertainment purposes) is an old château-like house, which has recently been refurbished to its original glory. It was the first time since we moved here that we had available babysitters - Peter's parents - so it was nice to get away just the two of us for a few hours. 
• We've had our first sets of visitors (not counting my mother who accompanied us when we arrived and stay over that first weekend).  Our friends Maria and Daniel were here this past weekend and Peter's parents the weekend before.  Now we have a "free" weekend before my parents arrive next Thursday.  When Peter's parents were here we mostly hung out in the neighbourhood, as they lived in Brussels for three years in the mid-2000s and know the city very well already, but as M & D had never been here we spent Saturday exploring the usual tourist sites including Grand Place and Manneken Pis.  We took both sets of visitors to a brasserie in Parc Woluwe , as they serve great food but also have a playground, and we'll probably take my parents there too.  Otherwise we had almost all meals at home, and took the opportunity to have three-course dinners and drink plenty of nice wine.  When Peter's parents visited Sunday was a car-free day as part of mobility week, so it was a perfect day for a long walk, and we took M & D on a similar walk to show them our beautiful neighbourhood.  We were very lucky with the weather both weekends, especially this past weekend (and today it was 20 degrees and I had lunch outside with some work colleagues).
• We celebrated our dear neighbours' son V's second birthday, and of course the arrival of his baby sister E a few days before. I visited P and E in the hospital and it was interesting to see the insides of a Belgian maternity ward and hear about giving birth in Belgium. Not that dissimilar from Sweden but at the same time some differences in practices and methods. 
• The "honeymoon" at work is over and I've started being quite busy, which is fun but also a bit "scary" since there's still so much to learn.  Today I had to give a presentation to a group of Swedish visitors.  It was on quite basic stuff but since I only found out about it yesterday - my colleague who was supposed to present has back problems and couldn't come to work - it resulted in a little bit of nervousness.  It went well, but they had a few tricky questions that I had to admit I couldn't answer right now.  Anyway, good to have that first presentation out of the day!  I have also been to my first conference and also attended several training courses.  Next week I'm doing a three-day course that is mandatory when you're new, Working for the EU, which I'm really looking forward to.
• Peter has taken Harald to the child health centre (called ONE here; BVC in Sweden), once just for a weigh-in a couple of weeks ago, and for a check-up, vaccination and weigh-in this week.  He's now 9 kg and 67 cm tall (or short, as he hasn't grown much length-wise in the last month).  He's starting to crawl now and he also wants to stand up - holding our hands or standing against a piece of furniture - all the time.  But more about Harald in a separate post!
• We now have a dishwasher since a couple of weeks back - having to live without one our first few weeks here was horrible haha! 
• I've tried to start going to bed earlier now that I'm a working girl, but usually I'm failing, and so too tonight as the time is already 23:30.  But it's Thursday and only one more working day, so I don't care!  But Sunday night onwards it's bedtime at 10pm!  Wish me luck, I need it :)

* I'm astonished over how few speak English here, especially (or mainly) among the Francophone (the Flemish are better), even young(ish) people, and even among those with higher education, e.g. teacher and doctors.