The train from Zaventem airport is twenty minutes, and it smells faintly of rain and warm upholstery. I watched the outskirts of Brussels slide past the window, all red brick and graffiti and laundry lines, and I thought, okay, this is it. It’s the first of August. The city is half-empty, the light is soft through the overcast sky, and I have exactly one mission for the next few days: to become a resident, not a tourist. The first step is a stamp in my passport and a long conversation with a civil servant about my address.
I’m Lucas Peeters. I’ve just moved here from the other side of the Atlantic, and I’ll be making this podcast from the ground up, starting with the unglamorous, essential, and surprisingly absorbing work of sorting out a life. Today, it’s the commune registration. I’m staying in a small hotel near the Grand-Place, the Vintage Hotel Brussels, which is a good base for the newcomer trail, mainly because you can stumble out of the door and into the cobblestone heart of the city in about ninety seconds. The room is modest, but it costs around a hundred and thirty euros a night, which feels about right for a mid-range place in the centre.
The communal house, the maison communale, is a different kind of building. I headed to Ixelles, the expat and student heartland, because that’s where I’d found a temporary sublet. The paperwork is the same process across all nineteen communes of the Brussels-Capital Region, but each one has its own rhythm. Ixelles is a good choice for a newcomer, it’s got the ponds at Flagey, the Matongé quarter, the Art Nouveau streets, and a vibe that’s both chichi and comfortable. The building itself is a grand nineteenth-century affair, all stone columns and echoing hallways, and I spent a good hour in a queue clutching my passport, my lease, and a birth certificate that had been officially translated and apostilled. It’s a lot of paper, but it’s the key that unlocks everything else.
You have to register within eight days if you’re from outside the EU, or three months if you are. I’m in the first camp. The process is simple in theory, but the waiting room is a microcosm of the city itself. A woman in a hijab was arguing gently with a clerk about her address certificate, a young man in a suit was checking his phone, and an older gentleman with a grey beard was reading a newspaper in Dutch. It’s a genuinely bilingual city, and all the forms are in both French and Dutch. I fumbled through my French with the clerk, who was patient, and I got my address certificate. This small piece of paper, the attestation d’inscription, is the foundation document. You need it for everything: for the bank, for the health insurance, for the library card, for the gym, for your life.
I stepped back out into the Ixelles sunshine, or what passes for it in early August. The air was warm, around twenty-five degrees, and the streets had that quiet, anticipatory feeling of a city on holiday. This is when Brussels is at its best, I think. The businesspeople are away, the traffic is lighter, and the terraces are filled with people who actually live here, enjoying the long summer evenings. I walked down towards Place Flagey, past the ponds where ducks were swimming under the weeping willows. It feels less like a capital city and more like a well-tended village that happens to have a metro and a film festival.
But the paperwork isn’t done with one stamp. Next on the list is the bank account. Back in the day, this used to be a nightmare of patience and a strong tolerance for administrative delay. Now, you need an appointment, your ID, and proof of residence. I went to a BNP Paribas Fortis branch, which is one of the big players here alongside KBC and Belfius. The advisor was efficient and friendly, and within forty minutes I had an account number. The most important thing about a Belgian bank account is not the IBAN number, which you will recite from memory for the rest of your life, but the Bancontact system. Every Belgian bank card runs on it, and it’s how you pay for things, how you get cash out, and how you transfer money instantly to friends using an app called Payconiq. It’s not like the American system of credit cards and Venmo; it’s quietly built into the national infrastructure. It all costs me nothing to set up, but it’s the engine of the economy.
With the account came the next crucial piece of admin: the eID and Itsme. The eID is your national identity card, and it has a chip you can use to log into government websites. Itsme is the app that turns your phone into the same key, so you can authenticate yourself online without a card reader. The bank advisor set me up with it right there. In the autumn, this will feel like magic, I’ll be able to sign contracts and file taxes from my sofa. Right now, it’s just another piece of bureaucracy, but it’s impressively slick for a country that still loves its paper forms.
To celebrate my new citizen status, I did what any sensible person does on the first of August in Brussels: I went to the banks of the canal. The Brussels Canal is the less glamorous, harder-working sibling of the city’s grand squares. It cuts through Molenbeek and Anderlecht, carrying cargo barges slowly under low bridges. It’s not a postcard, but it’s honest, and in the summer, the quayside bars and pop-up terraces make it feel like a proper urban beach. The sun was slowly burning off the clouds as I walked along the towpath, smelling the water and the diesel and the frites oil from a nearby stand. I ended up at a spot near the old breweries, sitting with a cold glass of abbey beer. It cost about four euros for a local pils, and it tasted of toasted grain and minerals. That first sip, after a morning of paperwork, was one of the best feelings of the month.
After the afternoon’s admin, I needed a proper meal. Not a fancy one, just something solid and real. I headed to a place called Fin de Siècle, which is a bare-brick, candle-lit sort of bistro, always packed, and very Brusselish. You go in, squeeze onto a long communal table, and eat. I ordered a version of moules-frites, the national dish of the summer. The mussels come in a big black pot, steamed in white wine and celery, and the frites are a generous heap on a side plate. A meal here costs around twenty euros, maybe a little more with a drink. It’s not fine dining, but it is exactly what you want after a long day of forms and queues. The room is wall-to-wall brown wood and the noise level is substantial. It feels like a good, honest trade with the universe: I registered with the state, and the state gave me a bowl of mussels and these perfect, salty fries. I can’t think of a better exchange.
The frites themselves are a whole subject. They’re not a side dish here; they’re a snack, a meal, a way of life. You buy them from a friterie, a little shack often painted in bright colours, and you get a cone of them with a squirt of mayonnaise, not ketchup. The best ones are crisp on the outside, fluffy inside, and double-fried. A portion of these golden sticks costs about three euros and fifty cents, and they are perfect for eating while walking back through the city, past the closed shops and the shuttered offices. The centre feels different on a Saturday evening in August. It’s full of tourists, yes, but it’s also full of locals who’ve come in for the evening, and the Foire du Midi, the huge summer funfair down at the Boulevard du Midi, adds a layer of chaos and carnival music.
Speaking of funfairs, the Foire du Midi is apparently in full swing, it runs from mid-July to late August. I’m told it’s a big deal, with over a hundred rides and stalls, and it brings a frantic, cheap energy to the boulevards. I listened to the distant squeals and the pop music from where I stood, and I knew that would be a fine plan for Sunday afternoon. There’s also a street party tonight, something called 2Much, a sixteen-hour trance and Eurodance thing in the Circle Park in Anderlecht. That sounds both amazing and terrifying, and I think I’m too old and too tired from paperwork to attend. But I like that it’s happening. It means the city isn’t just asleep and waiting for September.
My new bank card works with the metro, which feels wonderfully modern. I tapped it on the reader at the Arts-Loi station and took the underground a few stops north to the Marolles. This is the old working-class quarter, tucked under the massive shadow of the Palace of Justice, and it feels very different from the polished centre. It’s scruffy, lived-in, and full of character. On Place du Jeu de Balle, there’s a daily flea market. It’s open from early morning, but the best time is around late morning, when the serious dealers have come and gone and the day-trippers are poking through the boxes of old coins, military badges, and slightly broken lamps. I picked up an old map of the city, on yellowing paper, for five euros. It’s a nice thing to have if you want to trace how the city grew from its medieval core to the sprawling region it is today.
The Marolles is also home to the comic-strip murals, which are scattered all over the city. Brussels is the world’s comic-strip capital, home to Tintin, the Smurfs, and Lucky Luke, and the city celebrates this by painting giant murals of its heroes on the sides of buildings. There’s a fantastic one on a gable end near the Rue des Capucins, and a few more in the alleys around the Grote Markt, which is the local name for the Grand-Place. These murals are not tacky; they’re a genuine form of public art, and they give you a reason to look up from your phone and find a new corner of the city. They are, along with the little art-nouveau details in the facades, like a treasure hunt across the whole Brussels-Capital Region, every part of it, from Schaerbeek to Saint-Gilles.
I ended my day close to home, in the Sablon district. That’s the chic one, full of antiques shops and chocolate houses. I did not buy any antiques; they are mostly far beyond my pay grade. I did, however, buy a coffee at a tiny specialty place called My Little Cup, which is around the corner from the Burgundian gothic church of Our Blessed Lady. The coffee cost three euros, which is a fair price for a shot of quiet before heading back to the hotel. The church bells started ringing as I walked across the square, a deep, sonorous clang that echoed off the old stone. It’s a sound that feels like history, and it made me think that all this paperwork, the bank accounts, the transit passes, they are all just the way you earn the right to stand in a square and listen to the bells.
So, that’s the first day, and the first episode. It’s not about the Atomium or the EU quarter. That will come. This is about the foundation, the quiet, unglamorous work of arriving. Tomorrow, I’ll tackle the mutualité, the health insurance fund, and I’ll get a monthly pass for the STIB, which costs about 55 euros, and is worth every cent for the freedom it gives you. The rent for a decent one-bedroom flat here is about twelve hundred euros a month, and a single metro ticket is two-thirty. Knowing these numbers is the beginning of knowing the city. For now, I’m going to sit on the roof terrace of my hotel, listen to the sounds of a city settling into the evening, and plan the next move. The Ardennes are waiting, and the summer is long. Bonjour, Brussels. Or perhaps I should say, Goedenavond. I’ll be here all autumn.