Belgie (Belgium)

Here is another picture of the bakfiets for the fans...
I should tell you the funny story about how Monty thinks our house is called Belgie (Belgium). He always refers to it as Belgium. "Are we going to Belgium?" or "I don't want to go to Belgium..." I think it started when we were getting ready to move down here and we kept telling him that we were moving to Belgium. So when we finally got here he decided that the house was Belgium. So now it's name is Belgium.
Too funny!


We have a picture supply problem, because Leland didn't bring the connector cable from the camera to the computer. He says that I told him not to bring it, but I can't remember saying that. Maybe I did, I might have had a moment of insanity. In any case, i need to find a place where we can just plug in our memory card and it will put the pictures on a cd or something, but haven't gotten to that yet. The bakfiets pictures were taken by my mom and the picture of my mom with the boys was taken by her camera. My parents came to visit us a week or so ago. It is nice to have them so much closer.
Monty is obviously tired in this picture.

Comment about the background: There are electrical cords everywhere in our living room. The house is about 100 years old and my guess is they put in the electrical outlets later. But every electrical socket has only room for one plug-in, and with today's modern equipment... We need one for the computer, one for the modem, one for the cable box, one for the tv, one for the charge cord for the phone, etc. So we have several power strips in our living room.

Bakfiets

I have to tell you about this bike that we got. I hope I can get the picture to show up on the website. It is great.

This type of bike is called a “bakfiets” which means, box bike. They are fairly common in the Netherlands but still a novelty in Belgium. We get quite a few stares, especially the time when I accidentally rode into an underground parking garage! Luckily I don’t embarrass that easily.

We use it to transport the boys anywhere, but mainly to school. Their school is more then half an hours walk away, so we take the bike, that way it only takes ten minutes. It is also very convinient for shopping. I must say that its a little tricky at first finding your balance, and it gets ugly when the boys decide to hang out, but oh well. It can be quite cold in the mornings here, with little clouds of steam coming out of our mouth, so in the morning we bundle the boys up for school in mittens and hats, but by afternoon when school lets out it's usually close to seventy, so ten they can ride in their t-shirts. I am kinda afraid that this fancy bike gets stolen, so we have three locks on it. At home we always put it in our hall, because we don't have a shed (or a yard for that matter).

The mess of getting settled

Well, we are here now. All moved in at our house in Korbeek-Lo (which is just outside of Leuven). As always when you move, especially when you move to a different country, there is a lot of hassle. On Monday we went to Leuven with a long list of things to do, unfortunately, it was a local holiday, and all departments of the university were closed. The bank was closed to, so we didn’t get a ton of things accomplished that day.
Tuesday everything we needed to be open was open, and we went a ton of places: the international student office, the registration office, the social services department for international students, the housing department for international students… Then we went to the bank and opened an account, went to the mobile phone store only to find out that we can’t just put a new sim-card in Leland’s American phone, like you can do with European phones. Most American phones are sim-locked, apparently. Then we went to the place where students can rent bikes for just about nothing. Leland rented a bike for an entire year for only 60 euros!
Anyway, to explain why we had to go to all these offices at the university (by the way, like most European universities, it is spread out over the entire city, so we walked all over town getting this done) we had a little problem arise with the house that we rented.
Our landlady said we couldn’t use the house address to register us. Leland’s visa requires that he gets registered at the local town hall of the city were we live. The landlady said it would mess up the taxes if we used the houses address as our living address. So we talked to all these people at the university to get it straighten out. Nobody really knew what in the world the landlady was talking about and eventually the lady at the housing office said that as long as we are listed as ‘temporary residents’ it shouldn’t matter for the tax purposes of the landlady/landlord.
So on Wednesday we went on a wild goose chase to find the city hall. Don’t get me wrong, the city hall in Leuven itself is smack in the middle of town and you can’t overlook, but since we live just outside of Leuven, we fall under the city limits of Bierbeek. Bierbeek is just a bunch of small villages that are one “city” for administrative purposes. The bus that drives by our house also stops by a bus stop called “gemeentehuis” which means city hall. So we rode our bikes following the trail of the bus. Well, what do you know, the bus stop “city hall” is nowhere near any city hall. Luckily we did find a street map that indicated where the actual city hall is. It was in a completely different town. We rode our bikes for an hour and a half through the middle of nowhere. Very pretty landscape with pretty houses, but mostly accompanied with cow smell. =) Leland says that this was his tour-de-France. I figured that by the time we got to the city hall, it would be closed or something, that would be our luck, but it was open. It turned out though that there is a problem with us living in this house. The landlord lives in a house that is directly behind ours, and officially they are one residence. I am not sure what the rules are in America, but here you need to get permission to divide one residence in two, and the landlord had never gotten that… The city hall people said they will take care of it, but I am a little afraid we are majorly ticking off the landlord by this. I don’t want to get them in trouble, especially after they have been so nice and helpful to us. They had old stuffed animals from their kids and put them in the boys room before we got here, they brought us some little kids chairs and all kinds of other nice things that they are really not required to do. So I don’t want to upset them, but we had no choice of getting us registered here in the town. The students that lived in this house before us, were all from Belgium, and they just left their place of residence at their parents address, but we can’t do that, because we have to have an address in Belgium… Anyway we will see what happens…