Brussels, for the most part, is awesome. But I still can’t shake the feeling that we’re not quite on target. Just too many misadventures in this comedy of errors called relocation. For instance: we got rearended while househunting, which I guess is not that significant. But after pulling over two blocks later at a Renault dealership to have somebody who understands cars look at our rear bumper we realized how foolish we’d been. We only took the rear-enders business card and bid him farewell. This, we quickly understood through broken English, is NOT going to help anyones insurance claim in Belgium. Fortunately the man at the Renault dealership called a certan M. Dubois to get him to come back and fill out the proper form.
As it happens, that accident occured just blocks from where we’ve now settled.
Another incident is called Paint-on-Boots. While shopping for paint to do some home painting a Brico employee dropped a can of paint, that burst open, and managed to coat and ruin a pair of Chiara’s boots. Of course those boots were the nice warm suede ones her Mom bought her specifically for the cold Belgian weather.
That’s now insurance claim number two. The paint job looks good though.
Also the job hunt has been slow and shitty. However we did discover two days too late that Chiara had been selected for an interview to work for the Euro COOP Organization as an assistant/translator for the Italian rep.
That was the first positive feedback we’d received, and despite their expressed enthusiasm for Chiara’s candidature, by the time we got in touch with them, they’d of course already hired somebody.
Shit.
However, in the midst of writing this, or perhaps because I was writing this, I received an email reply from a Media Company saying they’d like a phone interview on Tuesday. Nice. I don’t know if theirs connections in all this, or whether magical thinking (mentally drawing connections between unrelated events) is really working, but I prefer to think that it does. Because maybe it does help.
