     | When I first got to Belgium, I joined a French conversation class led by a woman who had been born and raised in Brussels. During our meetings, I listened quietly to her dish about the bad drivers, the ugly architecture, the cold people, the constant rain, and the rising prices. I nodded as she rolled up her nose as she berated customer service, and puffed her lips at the slightest inconvenience that befell her.
As Americans, we are used to up and moving for the smallest of reasons: school, job, spouse, bum boyfriends, greener pastures, and even for bad weather. After all, we can go 3,000 miles East, West, or diagonal, and still be within the borders of our country. I sympathized with my professor’s plight, assuming she was ‘stuck’ here, and thought to myself, ‘she must really be unhappy’ so during one of our classes, I suggested she move. Her response was bug-eyed and visibly defensive. With her shocked hand over her heart she hissed, “Why would I leave? This is my home and I am Belgian.” The funny thing was that over the course of the class, if any of the students, all foreign, dared complain about the same things, she would scold them for being closed minded and unwilling to adapt. This was one of many valuable lessons I would learn as an expat. First and foremost: only the people that live in the glass house can throw the stones. After all, she had lived here her whole life so she earned the right to complain.
I vowed never to say a negative word about my new home (at least not openly or to a Belgian), but rather look at the experience as a chance to see a place from a completely unique position: through the eyes of an expat, a perspective you can’t comprehend until you have stared from it for a significant amount of time.
Expats live 24/7 in a state of suspension. We are visitors that don’t get to go ‘home’ after a month. We set up a life, a house, open bank accounts, enroll in schools, and establish residency just like the locals, yet we must adjust to customs, rules, and protocol we don’t understand. We must juggle a language, a history, and customs that are different from our own, yet we still have the basic human desire to fit in and make friends, invite the neighbors, set up roots and throw birthday parties for our kids. It’s a balance and a struggle, and not a sport for the weak and weepy. From the outside one might ask, why would you do that to yourself? Well, because it’s fun!
When I was getting ready to leave the United States, a friend asked me why I was going, and was bewildered at our decision to uproot our family and move across an ocean to a place we had never been. Much like my professor, this friend couldn’t imagine leaving her homeland either. Like many wives following their executive husband around the increasingly condensing planet, I was just doing what was best for him. However, I confess this to be a lie. The fact is, from the time I can remember, I have wanted to live somewhere else, far away from my youth in Los Angeles, and experience life as a foreigner. Call me crazy. I never dreamed it would be Belgium, but then again, I had never heard of it either. So when my husband had the chance to move to Europe, I couldn’t pack my bags faster.
As far as foreign cities go, Brussels is an easy place to land. Having the advantage of hindsight, I can see why people come, and I can see why people never leave. But Brussels is also an acquired taste, not unlike their adoration for mayonnaise on French fries, and a place you can’t understand until you spend some time. I remember when I was young I wanted to set my brother up with a friend of mine. Like any teenage guy, his first question was, “Is she cute?” And like a diplomatic friend, I responded, “She’s really smart and funny, and yeah, kind of cute.” Brussels is that blind date. She won’t be love at first site, but she has a great personality. She won’t knock your socks of initially with her beauty, but get to know her and you’ll be planning a life together.
Brussels brims with all that other cities offer: a tumultuous history, a vibrant art scene, museums, a royal family, Michelin star restaurants, and top notch food, architecture, student life, and ethnic diversity. Sure, walking the streets of Brussels is not the same as walking the streets of Paris. Can anything really compare, anwhere? In fact, Brussels has its areas that are so lackluster and uninspired, I scratch my head in wonder who could have conceived such banal and drab architecture, and been paid for it to boot! But one need only dig, and not very far, to find the green parks, hidden galleries, and local markets. Brussels is a city of neighborhoods where expats and locals live and work side by side. Once you polish off the soot, it’s easy to see why its called capital of Europe, and not just because the headquarters of the European Union is based here. The city is a perfect blend of foreign flair and feels-like-home. Perhaps it’s because 50 percent of the city’s current residents come from somewhere else. That’s right…half the population are expats just like me and I believe both contingents feel as if the city is one of Europe’s best-kept secrets.
Being an expat has given me the chance to live in a multicultural setting and explore Belgium from two sets of glasses: the foreigner’s and the local’s. That’s the beauty of being an Expat. While at first I felt like an outsider, I now feel like I am part of the fiber that makes this city so different from any other I have ever lived in. I have come to appreciate the differences in our backgrounds, while recognizing that half of us are in the same boat. It’s in observing and experiencing these ebbs and flows from the eyes of an expat that has made the difference between residing in a place and living in a place.
After six years, I may even have earned the right to complain a little too, but don’t tell my French teacher. |
