The morning light in my borrowed flat in Ixelles is a pale, watery thing, filtered through the leaves of a plane tree that hasn't stopped rustling since I arrived. Day two in Brussels, and the city is still half-asleep, or maybe half-awake. The August quiet is real. It's a strange feeling, being in a capital city of over a million people and hearing more birdsong than traffic. My to-do list for today is simple on paper but labyrinthine in practice: sign up for the mutualité, the health insurance fund, and try to get a local SIM card. Two errands. That should be manageable.
First, coffee. I need a base of operations. I walk past the Ixelles Ponds, which are as calm as glass this morning. A few joggers, a mother with a pram. The air is already warm, promising the 31 degrees the forecast mentioned. I find a spot that looks busy even in August, which is always a good sign. My Little Cup on Rue du Page has a queue out the door, so I settle for a place called Damn Good Café, which is a bold claim I decide to test. I order a filter coffee, and it is, in fact, damn good. That'll be around €3.00, which is the going rate for a decent caffeine hit at the counter.
Right. The mutualité. The paperwork here is a beast of a different colour. Your commune registration gives you a foothold, but the mutualiteit, as the Dutch-speaking side calls it, is a separate, crucial step. It's your ticket to the healthcare system. Without it, a simple doctor's visit is a matter of paying the full whack upfront and hoping for reimbursement later. The process isn't complicated; it's just… layered. I'm told you can do it online with your eID card reader, but of course, my eID is still being processed by the commune, so I have to do the in-person dance.
My landlord, a retired schoolteacher with an encyclopaedic knowledge of Brussels' 19 communes, had advised me to go to the main office in Saint-Gilles. 'They're efficient,' she said, 'and they speak English, French, and Dutch, sometimes all in the same sentence.' So I hop on the tram. A single STIB ticket is about €2.30 now, after the fare hike last February. I tap my contactless bank card on the reader — it works seamlessly, which feels like a minor miracle given the mountain of bureaucracy I'm about to climb.
The tram rattles down the Avenue Louise, past the high-end boutiques and Art Nouveau facades slowly giving way to the more functional, working-class architecture of Saint-Gilles. I get off at the Parvis and walk to the address. The office is a no-nonsense, brutalist building that looks like it was designed to process forms, not people. There's a queue, but it's manageable. I take a number, sit on a plastic chair, and listen to the multilingual hum of the room. The woman at the window is brisk and helpful. She stamps my form, asks for a bank account number, and I'm nearly out the door in fifteen minutes. It was simpler than I feared. I make a mental note to tell the landlord she was right.
Now for the SIM card. The anti-fraud law means you must show ID, and practically speaking, you need a residence certificate. I have my provisional one, so I head to a mobile shop I know is in the De Brouckère area. The metro is a maze of tunnels and bright lights, but I'm getting the hang of it. It's a different beast down here compared to the quiet streets above. The air smells of stale air conditioning and electricity. I find the shop, get a prepaid SIM from a provider that seems reasonable, and it costs less than I expected. The whole transaction takes ten minutes. Another step ticked off the list. I feel a surge of confidence.
Lunchtime. The adrenaline from my admin victories has worn off, leaving a hunger the size of the Grand-Place. I remember a recommendation from a friend back home who used to live here: Fin de Siècle, a serious restaurant known for generous portions. It's a bit of a walk from the metro, but the streets of the old town are worth wandering. The stone buildings bake in the midday sun. I find it on a side street near the Bourse. The interior is all dark wood and brown leather, old-school and comfortable. I order the stoemp with sausage, a proper Brussels working-class dish. With a local beer, the bill comes to about €25. Worth every cent.
Feeling heavyweight after lunch, I decide to walk it off. I drift south from the centre, past the Palais de Justice, that enormous, looming neo-classical monolith that seems to crush everything beneath it. Just below it, spilling down the hill, is the Marolles. My bank branch is here, so I need to go in and set up my online banking profile with the Bancontact app. The bank is a small branch, not one of the big names on the boulevards, but the manager is helpful and the whole process takes time. It's all very secure, very Belgian. I'm done by four, and the day is slipping away.
But I'm in the Marolles, and the Marolles is a place to linger. This is the old working-class quarter, the beating heart of a Brussels that predates the EU. The main drag is bustling with the last of the daily flea market at the Place du Jeu de Balle. It's a chaotic, dusty scrapbook of the city. Mismatched silver forks, old postcards, LPs with scratched covers. An old man is trying to sell a set of dentures, which I hope is a joke. The air is thick with the smell of old wood, dust, and fried food.
I stop at a friterie and order a cone of frites. Just a cone, about €3.50, and I get a proper dollop of Andalusian sauce on top. This is the real street food of Brussels, and standing there on the cobblestones, eating them with a little wooden fork, is a perfect moment. The sun is starting its slow descent, turning the facades of the houses gold. This is why I came here, not for the EU bureaucrats or the corporate headquarters, but for this. The rhythm of a city that knows how to live. The day that started with the anxiety of paperwork is ending with fried potatoes and a view of a giant golden statue.
As I wander back up towards the centre, I can hear it before I see it. The tinny, cheerful chaos of a fairground. I've walked right into the edge of the Foire du Midi, the huge summer funfair that takes over the Boulevard du Midi for weeks. I'd read about it, and here it is, sprawling over probably a kilometre of street. It's the great annual carnival of Brussels, and even on a quiet August Sunday, it's packed with families. The air is filled with the smell of waffles, frying dough, and the mechanical clatter of rides. I try some croustillons, little bits of fried dough dusted with sugar, because when in Rome.
The Foire is a perfect symbol of this city. On the surface, it's all grand institutions, European bureaucracy, and medieval guildhalls. But dig a little deeper, find the right place on the right day, and it's a city of loud, colourful, ephemeral pleasures. I'm learning that the practicalities of life here — the mutualité, the bank account, the endless forms — are just the ticket you need to access the real show, the one that starts when the admin is done. I think about the flat hunting I still have to do, the visit to the Brasserie Cantillon to taste their spontaneously fermented lambic, and the thought of heading south to the Ardennes when the summer fades.
The evening is settling in, the sky a deep blue above the rooftops. I take a slow tram back towards Ixelles, the city lights starting to flicker on. I stop for one last coffee at the bar at The Usual, my hotel for now, and chat briefly with the bartender about the day. I buy a bag of frites from a nearby stand for about €3.50 and eat them on a bench in Parc de Bruxelles, watching the city go by as the day comes to a close. The world is full of people, and I am finally one of them. It's been a long, exhausting, and strangely satisfying day. Tomorrow, I'll start looking for a flat.
The day's lesson, I think, is that in Belgium, the path to freedom is paved with paperwork. It's tedious, it's slow, and it's frustratingly analog, but each stamp and signature is a small step closer to making this city, with its beer and its frites and its quiet August streets, feel like home. The mutualité is done, the SIM is in my phone, and I can now buy things with a tap of my card. I've survived the first real hurdle of the newcomer's trail. And I did it all in time to catch the sunset. The city is quiet again, but it's a different kind of quiet now. It feels less like absence, and more like peace. Good night, Brussels
I've got one more thing to do before I turn in. The Foire du Midi runs until the 23rd, and I want to go back for the proper experience, maybe on a weeknight when it's less crowded. And I'm told there's an open-air theatre festival in Molenbeek that might still be going. But that's for the days ahead. Right now, the only thing left is to walk back to my temporary room, climb the steep stairs, and collapse. A bed in a city hotel will set you back around €130 a night at this time of year, if you're watching the budget. The flat I'm renting is costing me about €1,200 a month, which is average for a one-bedroom in this city now. It's not cheap, but neither is anywhere decent. Still, for the privilege of eating frites in the shadow of the Palais de Justice, I'd say it's a bargain.
The room is quiet. The sounds of the city are muffled to a gentle hum. I open the window a crack to let in the cool night air. Tomorrow is a new day, with new forms to fill and new corners of this gorgeous, complicated, bilingual patchwork of a city to explore. But for now, I'm done. And I sleep.