The Monday traffic on Avenue Louise is a low, steady hum, and I am walking it with a printout from a real-estate agency that lists exactly one flat I can afford. It is a studio in Forest, about 45 square metres with a kitchen the size of a corridor, and the asking rent is 1,100 euros a month. That is the cheap end. That is what passes for a bargain in a city where a modest one-bedroom now averages around 1,200 euros and rents have climbed roughly 44 percent since 2020. I have been here three days and I am already beginning to think in monthly figures, which is the first sign that Brussels is becoming home.
This morning, though, is not about the flat. It is about the other piece of the arrival puzzle: understanding where I actually am. Brussels is not one city. It is 19 communes, 19 little town halls, each with its own rules, its own rhythm, and its own mayor who signs your papers. I registered in Ixelles, which the locals also call Elsene, on day one. That was the easy part. Now I need to know what the other 18 look like, so that when the studio in Forest falls through, which it will, I have some idea where to look next.
I buy a Brupass ticket at a STIB machine near Porte de Namur. The single ride costs about 2.30 euros, up roughly five percent since February, and the monthly pass is around 55. There is a contactless reader on the tram, but I buy the paper card anyway because holding it makes me feel less like a tourist. I tap it on the validator and it beeps once, a small green light, and I am in. The 81 tram rattles south through Ixelles and into Saint-Gilles, past the Parvis with its Saturday market stalls being dismantled, past the Horta houses with their iron vines curling up the facades, past a bakery with a queue out the door and a hand-painted sign saying it reopens on the 17th of August. The whole street has that half-shuttered feel of the second week of August, when half the city is at the coast and the other half is running the shops that stayed open.
I get off at Parvis de Saint-Gilles and walk. This is the part of the newcomer trail nobody prints on a leaflet: you have to feel a neighbourhood with your feet. Saint-Gilles is the creative one, the bohemian one, with cafes spilling onto the pavement and a food shop on every corner selling the same frites with the same five sauces, and it is also where Victor Horta built his own house, the Horta Museum, a townhouse that practically invented Art Nouveau and then spent a hundred years making every other building in Europe look behind the times. The museum is closed on Mondays, of course. August in Brussels runs on its own calendar. But I stand outside on Rue Américaine and look at the windows, the curving iron, the door that looks like a plant that learned to open, and I decide that this district goes on the shortlist.
From Saint-Gilles I walk east, towards the big iron silhouette of the Palais de Justice, which looms over the Marolles like a stone cliff that forgot it was a building. I came down here on Saturday for the flea market at the Place du Jeu de Balle, and it was exactly as chaotic as everyone says: tables piled with old postcards, bent forks, a man selling a single boot with a story attached. Today the square is quieter. The stallholders are packing down, and the cobbles are wet from a light shower that came and went in about an hour, leaving everything smelling of dust and rain. The weather forecast said 22 to 34 degrees today, which in practice means you dress in layers and carry a jacket you will not wear until five in the evening.
Behind the Palais, the streets drop steeply towards the canal. I follow Rue Blaes downhill, past vintage shops with windows full of lampshades and enamel signs, and there, wedged under a concrete bridge, I see the space where the XRDS festival will apparently set up next weekend, a techno event run by the people behind Fuse, with a line-up that I am told includes Mall Grab and Ben UFO. The venue is literally the void under the highway. It is a brutal, roaring space with traffic thundering over the top of it, and on a hot August night, with a sound system and a thousand people, it will either be the best place in Brussels or a terrible mistake. I plan to check it myself. That is what weeknights in August are for.
I cross the canal at the pedestrian bridge near the Bruxelles-Midi station, which is a whole other lesson in how this city works. The station itself is a transit hub and a place where you should keep your hand on your wallet, especially after dark, and it is also the gateway to the Foire du Midi, the summer funfair that has taken over Boulevard du Midi since the 18th of July and runs until the 23rd of August. I passed it on Saturday night, all 130 rides and food stalls glowing under their own lights, and I promised myself I would go back on a weeknight when the crowds are thinner and the queues for the waffle stand are shorter. Tonight might be that night. The fried dough smell carries half a kilometre downwind, so I will find it.
But first, lunch. A friend in Ixelles told me to try Fin de Siècle on Rue des Chartreux, a bistro that does the whole Brussels thing without any fuss: dark wood, chalkboard menu, a chalkboard beer list longer than the food menu. I get a table near the window and order the stoemp with sausage, which is essentially mashed potato with vegetables and a proper Belgian sausage, and it is the most comforting thing I have eaten since I landed. With a pequist beer, the bill comes to about 18 euros. That is on the high end of the inexpensive bracket, which the guidebooks say runs 15 to 18 for a bistro lunch, and it is worth every cent. The beer is cold, the bread is fresh, and the room has that hum of people taking their time.
After lunch I walk off the stoemp towards the Grand-Place, which is the city's front room and the only place where I still feel like a tourist. The guildhalls are gold in the afternoon sun, and the Town Hall spire is so tall you have to crane your neck to see it. There is a fence up around the square, and workers are laying out what will become the Flower Carpet, the biennial begonia-and-dahlia tapestry that fills the whole plaza in mid-August. This year it is the 13th to the 16th, and the city is already gearing up for it. A volunteer in a bright vest tells me the theme is Japan, and that they expect the carpet to be covered in over half a million flowers. I cannot verify that number. But standing there watching them lay out the first strip of petals, I believe it.
The square is a magnet for pickpockets, so I keep my bag zipped and my hand on it. That is not paranoia, that is just the local advice, and it applies anywhere the crowds gather. I take a lap, look up at the facades, and then I duck into the side streets towards the Bourse and the Belgian Comic Strip Center on Rue des Sables, a building that Horta designed and that now houses the world's largest collection of the art form that Belgium practically invented. Tintin, the Smurfs, Lucky Luke, all of them grew up in this country, and the museum is a love letter to the line between drawing and storytelling. I do not go in today. The ticket is around 13 euros, and I have already spent my day's budget on lunch and tram tickets. I just stand in front of the building and let the architecture do its thing.
Which brings me to the one place I was determined to visit before the week was out: Brasserie Cantillon, the working lambic brewery in Anderlecht. Lambic is not like other beers. It is spontaneously fermented, which means it is exposed to the wild yeast in the air of the Senne valley, and it comes out sour, funky, and completely unlike the pils you drink at a bar for four euros a pint. Cantillon is a museum and a working brewery at the same time, and the tasting room is upstairs, where you can try a flight of their beers. The gueuze is the classic, a blend of young and old lambic that does something to your mouth that I can only describe as a surprise. It is sharp, almost fizzy, with a finish that tastes like green apples and old wooden barrels. I am told that the brewery has been doing this since the turn of the last century, and that the process has not changed because it cannot change. The yeast is in the air. You just have to let it work.
The visit costs about 15 euros for the self-guided tour and a tasting, which is one of the best deals in the city. I sit in the courtyard with my glass of gueuze and watch a cat patrol the barrels, and I think about how this is the third day and the city is starting to make sense. The paperwork is done. The bank account works. The mutualité is set up, the SIM card is in my phone, and I have a transit pass that gets me anywhere. What remains is the slower work: learning which streets have the good bakeries, which trams run on time, which parks are best at dawn. The flat hunting is a project. The Ardennes is a plan for when the summer cools into golden autumn. But right now, on a Monday afternoon, sitting in a brewery in Anderlecht with a sour beer and a cat for company, I feel like I am not just visiting this country. I am living in it.
The sun is starting to get low over the rooftops, and the evening is warm. I walk back towards the canal with the faint, sweet smell of the friterie round the corner already calling my name. Tonight I will eat a portion of Belgian frites with a generous squirt of sauce, about 3.50 euros, standing up at a counter with the locals. And tomorrow, I will go looking at flats again, because the studio in Forest will not rent itself. But that is tomorrow. Today has been about learning the terrain, one tram stop at a time, and finding out that this city, in its quiet August month, rewards anyone willing to walk it.
The only thing left to do tonight is the thing I have been looking forward to all day: a visit to the Foire du Midi after dark, when the rides are lit up and the whole boulevard sounds like a carnival. The forecast said possible rain, but the sky is clear and the lights are on. I can hear the music from two blocks away, not a melody, just the thump and spark of a city at play. I walk towards it, pocket full of change for waffles and a ticket for the big wheel. This is why you come to Brussels in August. The city is half-empty, but the half that is here is having a party, and there is always room for one more person who is willing to learn the neighbourhoods, try the sour beer, and eat the frites standing up.
That is the whole trick, I think, to settling in somewhere new. You do the paperwork. You open the accounts. You ride the trams and learn the names of the communes. And somewhere between the bank and the brewery, you stop being a visitor and start being a resident. I am not there yet. But I can see the place from here, and it looks a lot like a summer night at the funfair, with a waffle in one hand and a tram ticket in the other, and three more weeks of August still ahead of me.