I've been promising them for weeks so here they are, some pictures of our apartment here in Brussels. I kept putting off this post, hoping to get the place more fixed up, furnished, decorated, etc...but enough people have asked now that I felt I needed to go ahead and post some photos, ready or not! As you can see it's obviously still a work in progress, and given our tight budget and the limited items we were able to ship over here, the decorating department still needs a lot of work! :-) We do have a pretty nice view from our many windows though, which is great!
There's a few items I want to point out about the kitchen, since it seems people are pretty curious about it. First, you may notice that there's no oven below the stovetop like there normally is in the States. Here it isn't a given that an apartment, even the size of ours, will have an oven. So in addition to a microwave, we ended up buying a countertop convection oven, which we LOVE!! It bakes, grills, and does rotisserie, and in general just does a terrific job of cooking things! Second, we've got a pretty large refrigerator/freezer, at least by Belgian standards. I took a close-up of it with the doors open so you can see. It does get full when we return from a big trip to the store, though what's considered a "big" trip for us is probably a lot smaller than you're thinking, since we have to carry everything home by hand! Third and final point on the kitchen: we do not have a dishwasher, and our kitchen sink is pretty small. The lack of a dishwasher isn't bothering us too much, as we knew ahead of time that it was a luxury that we probably couldn't afford. The little sink is a challenge however, as is our only semi-functioning hot water heater (which is probably almost as old as I am and is about to be replaced). At the moment that means that we have to get hot water from the bathtub and wash our dishes in "waves", since the sink fills up so fast. We're managing though, and it's interesting how quickly we've adjusted to not having some of the modern conveniences, even after having them for most or all of our lives.
So this is our home for the next year - questions or comments anyone? Is it bigger/smaller, nicer/uglier than you had imagined it would be? I'm really curious to hear what you think!
2 comments:
Nice post and pics! No oven at all? Wow! All the apartments we looked at here have them but they are tiny - no way to cook a turkey in one! The convection oven sounds awesome - I may have to keep my eye out for one! I had to laugh that you're getting dishwashing water from the bathtub while I'm using our for laundry... who knew they were so versatile! We get our keys to our apartment on Monday so I'll probably post a similar entry in ym blog soon! Oh yeah - we definitely want to come meet you for Mexican some weekend - how fun!
So it indeed looks like Belgium is even weirder than Switzerland. Here at least we have ovens but everything is on electricity, so it took me at least 2 months to learn how to cook on electric stove... in POland we cook on gas stoves. Convection oven sounds like fun!
How great about Cheddar! Yesterday I went through new Carrefour add and they had CHeddar on promotion, I just had to think about you!
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