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…
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