Is Belgium Harder to Leave Than Other Countries?

It’s the last day before the end of my internship here and I have to ask myself the inevitable question: Is Belgium harder to leave than other countries?

I have to assume it’s a yes, simply because so far I have not managed to leave Belgium conclusively, although Belgium has a wide range of transportation modes to choose from if you do want to leave it (though I don’t recommend the E40 on an ochtendspits).

So why exactly is it that I have not yet managed to leave, or that I always end up coming back?

Donald Trump, everybody’s favourite conversation topic at the moment, recently (ish) called Brussels a hellhole, but called Belgium ‘a beautiful city’. I disrespectfully disagree. Belgium is a beautiful village, or, more to the point, as we say in my hometown, Belgien ist ein Kaff. Surely for me, coming from Germany where I study a grand ‘five hours by train’ away from my family, Belgium is paradise and hell – you can cross the entire country in what feels like little more than an hour for a festival, but you’ll also never have an excuse not to visit your parents on the weekend. It’s just all so damn close to each other, and also everybody knows someone somewhere, which makes couchsurfing really easy. Or so I’ve heard. I mean, I only leave the coast if I have to.

I’d like to tell you a bit about my favourite Belgian things though. Strap in and put on the Mountain Goats, because you’re going to get a little bit more than waffles, fries, and chocolate.

The List

10) Three languages under one roof.

The viability of a bi-lingual, let alone a tri-lingual country is often discussed, and mostly in terms of success or failure. What is often overlooked, however, is that there can be no one point in which multilingualism either fails or succeeds. People just keep on learning languages, or they don’t, and even then they have to somehow communicate.

At my job, I often have to answer telephones – mostly in Dutch, but sometimes in French, and even more rarely in English. When I pick up the phone and a tentative voice asks ‘parlez-vous français?’ my stomach drops a little bit, because I feel like I’m a disappointment to the multilingual Belgian identity. We always manage somehow, but by the end of those calls I feel like the other person calling has made greater concessions towards me, language-wise. And Dutch isn’t even my native language.

Belgian Dutch, certainly where I live, is riddled with French words. Sometimes it’s frustrating, trying to figure out the ‘Dutch’ spelling of a word and then finding out it’s originally French and that’s why it’s spelled weird, but it can also be funny. Like that time I talked to a friend of mine who had lived in Paris – ‘allez’, to him, was an expression similar to ‘let’s go’. To me, it was an expression of incredulousness or frustration (and also the most useful filler word I ever learnt; I’ve even caught myself using it in German once or twice). It’s true, there’s a lot of bitter history, too, but it should be just that: history. There’s no use in asking for reparations over past grievances, that smells of stale nationalism and is untimely in today’s society.

So languages are always a little weird, and communication can be difficult. What else is new. For Belgium, it just works somehow.

9) Beer pipeline.

Basically this ZEIT article says everything worth reporting about Belgium in international media, in my opinion. Long story short: to prevent traffic damage to historical downtown Bruges, a brewery decided to build a pipeline to transport their beer between the two locations. It sounds like something out of a near-future sci fi novel: A country in which the ancient art of beer brewing and future technologies combine for the best of the human future. Every house is connected to a beer tap now. Nobody ever gets kinks in their back from carrying home too many bottles. World peace is achieved. Belgium reigns supreme. (It’s still some way to that, though.)

8) Interior decoration.

Now, this might be a phenomenon of an older, house-owning generation, but I cannot emphasise how deeply thrilled and unsettled I am by the way Belgians decorate their houses. Nearly every family I’ve visited during my stays here seems to have taken their approach to design from a Harry Potter novel. Specifically, book five, and especially one character from book five. Specifically, Dolores Umbridge. I don’t know where the Belgian fascination with everything lace comes from. Maybe it’s because lace is this big thing in Bruges, but that doesn’t explain the proclivity of Belgians to decorate everything they own with lace. Okay, maybe not everything. But a fair amount, still. A friend of mine told me that homes are important to Belgians. I don’t know if that’s a generational thing, the belief in a private home as the be-all end-all of adulthood, but the way older generations decorate their living spaces certainly speaks of some pride in their homes. It gives Belgian houses a certain vibe that you’d be hard-pressed to create elsewhere – I’m sure if you dumped me in a Belgian living room without telling me, I’d be able to tell which country I’m in.

7) Rommelmarkten.

Belgians love a good flea market. It’s a unique sight to see, when you step out of your apartment one morning, to find the street packed with people with blankets spread out before them, selling junk you’d never in your life consider buying (until you do). Flea markets are a bit more common here than were I’m from, and there are also quite some famous flea markets, for example in Brussels. But the most fun flea markets are always the ones you weren’t expecting, the ones that you just kind of run into, because that’s when you make the truly awesome discoveries.

6) Brussels.

I can’t help it, I love Brussels, even though it’s loud and kind of ugly, and not even my favourite European capital.

Nowhere else will you find as many bilingual baristas selling you coffee in your language of choice. And Brussels is home to a lot of immigration, a lot of different kinds of immigration too: there are highly isolated groups of people who tend to stay in their own area of the city, only converse among each other without learning at least one of the languages, and don’t even make an effort towards immigration – otherwise known as the European elite – and then there are the immigrants, children of immigrants, and families who’ve lived here for decades from Morocco, Turkey, or Syria, that often get the bad press. Rich and poor are flocking towards Brussels, and so sometimes it seems Brussels might crack under the pressure of being both a town with a lot of poverty and home to a high-income population. But it also always pulls through somehow.

I might be romanticising the idea of Brussels when I say it’s a city where the international and multicultural spirit of the European Union and the world beyond its borders is most visible, but it does make you more aware of it. It’s a city that makes you expect everything – from having trouble to communicate your lunch order to the French shop owner, to suddenly being talked to in your native language, to stammering your way through asking for directions in Dutch from another non-native speaker, hearing Turkish or Arabic thrown in with French sentences, or people randomly switching the language while talking to you.

It’s a city that seems to accommodate its EU residents while trying to forget about those that don’t come as employees of an EU institution. Brussels isn’t a bubble, it’s just a world of its own, with so many things to discover.

5) Cinemas.

I am German, okay. Cinemas that don’t dub are a big deal for me, especially since I discovered that I’m a person who is much more into written comprehension (yay for subtitles!) than listening comprehension. German dubbed movies without subtitles have become the bane of my existence every time I move back to Germany. Here in Belgium, however, cinemas offer you beautiful Dutch and French subtitles to go with the English original audio, and only dub children’s movies (and there’s always an English original offered for adults or older children).

I still remember the first time I went to a cinema in Belgium – it was in my second week of living in Belgium, and only when I was sitting comfortably in my seat did I think about the fact that the movie might be dubbed. I hadn’t bothered to check. Until the movie started, I couldn’t sit still, I was so nervous. I didn’t want to have spent 10€ for a movie that I couldn’t understand anything of. Then the movie started. And I smiled happily.

4) Belgian beers, fries, waffels, chocolate.

I promised you more than beer and fries, I didn’t say there weren’t going to get mentioned at all. A lot of my friends have wondered, with these being the most salient Belgium-identifiers out there, how Belgians are not chronically overweight from eating unhealthy food and drinking a lot of alcohol. Frankly, I don’t know. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that they also bike a lot. But as far as unhealthy foods go, the entirety of Belgium is one big enabler. So I, a German beer purist, never thought I’d enjoy Belgian beers just as much as I did.

To me, it’s the sheer variety that is so stunning, and Belgium likes to boast with some staggering numbers – highest number of beers commercially available (2,004 at Delirium Café in Brussels), 12 Belgian beers listed in the world’s 100 best beers, the majority of Trappist breweries worldwide, around a 150 active breweries in the entire country, the list goes on. In Germany, Belgian beers are only now beginning to become more widely appreciated (they recently made an appearance in my small town home supermarket, with classics like Leffe and Duvel present). Belgians like to experiment with the taste of their beer. Whereas Germans feel offended by the idea that beer could still be improved in any way (the Reinheitsgebot dates back to 1516, after all), Belgians seem to approach the act of brewing beer with a little more curiosity. All’s fair in love and war, and also apparently in beer brewing.

The aesthetic inherent to going down to the next frituur for a quick dinner instead of cooking is probably well-known to Germans, who, after all, love their Döner takeaway after a long working day. Still, there’s something inherently pleasing about going down a street and suddenly smelling fries – it’s just food that’s always good, and the food on offer rarely ever varies from frituur to frituur. There are croquets, meatballs, bicky burgers, and countless sauces to choose from, Belgian specialties, and those specialties that were allegedly invented by the Dutch, dishes that sound delicious, and dishes that sound a little bit disgusting. And over all, the lingering smell of frituurolie that sticks to your clothes for a little while after you walk out.

Pretty much the same goes for waffles – they’re either Luiks (glazed with sugar) or Brussels (plain and a bit bigger), you can take them with whipped cream or speculoos sauce, with ice cream or fruit. And despite what everyone says, they don’t taste the same everywhere. You might try out a few waffle places, but you’ll know the right one when you find it – the waffles will be a bit warmer, a bit more cross, the whipped cream will taste a little sweeter than elsewhere.

Also Belgian chocolate is better than Swiss chocolate. Everybody who says otherwise is trying to sell you something. Probably Swiss chocolate. Of course, the Belgian pride in their chocolate means you can go to a supermarket and find genuinely good and affordable chocolate there, but it also means that if you look past the chain stores selling you chocolate, you can find adorable small chocolatiers selling you the most amazing chocolate you’ve ever tasted (this is not to say that the big-name chocolate stores aren’t good, just that you should support your local businesses). I think the Belgian motto is that if you don’t like chocolate, you just haven’t found the right one yet.

Also, it makes you everybody’s favourite relative on a trip home – just bring all of them chocolate.

3) Speculoos.

Yes, speculoos in all its variants gets its own bullet point, because whoever had the genius idea to take these delicious cookies and put them into a spread deserves a medal. Now you cannot only eat speculoos with your coffee or tea, you can also put it on your bread during breakfast. If that isn’t amazing, I don’t know what is.

When I was little, my grandpa used to take me and my brother to a café where they served the original Lotus speculoos cookies with the coffee. My brother and me used to fight over who got to eat it. The first time I learnt that in Belgium, you buy the fifty pack for little over two euros, I died a little bit inside. So many fights with my brother had been for nothing. There was a land of plenty, and it was right next door, basically. I hope Belgian children know how blessed they are, never having to fight over a single speculoos cookie in an overcrowded café.

2) The sea.

I’ve written more eloquent love letters to the North Sea elsewhere (and even drew little hearts around it… not kidding), but it deserves a mention here as well, because it often goes underappreciated. Sure, the concrete boxes that pass for coastal apartments are ugly as hell, and you wonder who with good sense allowed these to come into existence, but if you’re even looking at them, you’re looking in the wrong direction. Sitting on a towel facing out at sea, you shouldn’t be able to see them.

Summer at the coast is just about the most frustrating experience ever, because you expect it to be long evenings with Belgian beers and ice tea at the beach, but then it starts raining and keeps raining all through June. There are maybe two weeks per summer that can genuinely be considered good weather, but those are really amazing then: thanks to the wind and the proximity to water, it never gets too hot, just the right side of toasty warm. And summer at the coast is full of concerts and festivals, too – many of which are free to attend. Even if there’s no festival, the beach is wide enough to find space somewhere, to sit down and play some music. Just bring a sweater, and a raincoat (you never know).

Granted, you have to love the sea a bit more to put up with the coastal weather, the way it can turn from rain to sunshine in a matter of minutes and the fact that it mostly rains all through the winter, but in my opinion, it’s worth it for looking out at sea on a starry night and see the fishing boats in the distance. It turns even the most hardened heart sappy.

1) Belgium as I got to know it.

Now, after all this you might say ‘But Belgium has real problems! There’s the Flemish-Wallonian divide, rising nationalism, the threat of terrorism, poverty, and rising sea levels! It must be a terrible country!’. And I say to you ‘Yes, but isn’t every country?’.

Belgium as I got to know it is my favourite thing because while the politics may be chaotic, while there may be people who are hostile towards foreigners such as me (and even more hostile towards foreigners who aren’t white), the Belgium I got to know is an open, at times chaotic, but ultimately welcoming country. So just for today, I’m not going to partake in sweeping generalisations, and just say that I loved it here, and that I’d like to come back (I always do), despite its flaws, and definitely because of the things I listed above.

Belgium isn’t a perfect country, but it’s a country with a lot of nice things to discover.

The Conclusion

So is Belgium harder to leave than other countries? Apparently, for me, yes. I’ve tried to answer why that is the case in the above list, but I suppose that a part of the answer will always lie in the people I met here and the friends I made.

Anyway, maybe you’re just starting out on your exchange year, maybe you’re going for a visit. Whatever the case, when somebody asks you 'why Belgium?', you can show them this list, to show them how truly awesome Belgium is.