We’ve been in Leuven for almost a month now, and, to be completely honest, the charm of living in an old European city is starting to wear off. Whatever romantic notions we had about this year prior to our arrival here have since been replaced by the distinct ‘quirkiness’ of life abroad.
Living in a former medieval convent has its upsides: beautiful buildings, a quaint river running through the grounds, a beautiful garden outside our back door. But you should know that the day-to-day isn’t quite so picturesque.
Given our origins in the land of Costco and extra freezers in the garage, the experience of making due with a tiny, college-dorm-sized refrigerator has been an adjustment, to say the least. It means many trips to the store each week (which are often accompanied by sloshing rain and driving wind) and a strict limit to the number of Belgian beers Paul can have in the fridge at a given time.
Also, the walls are thin at the Groot Begijnhof. We know, for instance, the entire daily routine of the lovely family living above us, down to the nursery rhymes that the two-year-old prefers to have sung to him, and his predilection for throwing some heavy, rolling object about the apartment just around the time Max is ready for bed. We’ve resorted to an elaborate array of white-noise apps on our phones to buffer Milian from the world and into dreamland.
And the cobblestones. Oh, the cobblestones. They are beautiful in the photos, but an unequivocal pain in the ass for us on a daily basis. Max’s stroller can’t traverse the cobblestones surrounding our home, so we have resorted to carrying Max, the stroller, and whatever else we happen to have with us from our door to the Begijnhof entrance a few streets away. It makes even the shortest of trips a major undertaking.
Despite these challenges, we are falling into a daily routine: with each passing day, Leuven is feeling more and more like home. It helps that we are beginning to make friends with other couples and young families, and that academic life is now in full swing at the KUL.
Paul heads out in the morning to the central library to study. He sits in a cavernous reading room, paneled with ornately carved wood and punctuated with stained-glass windows.
When he’s not relishing old-world academe, its a pretty sure bet that you can find Paul in a cafe sipping espresso. Paul has found every amazing coffee shop in town, as you might imagine.
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Amanda and Max spend their days walking around town, running errands, and having play dates. They walk to the grocery store at least three times a week. Luckily for Max (who loves carbs in all its forms), markets have the most amazing selection of fresh bread. The bins are full of every kind of bread, and Max salivates as the bread slicer churns out our loaf each week.
Often, they also walk to HEMA (a mini-Target) and Kruidvat (the slightly disheveled, disorganized cousin of CVS/Walgreens). Max also gets his fair share of waffles (in Dutch, ‘warme wafel’) each week from our favorite waffle and crepe stand in the center of town, Crocantino. We’re 100% sure warme wafel will be the first words Max learns to say in Dutch.
We recently bought Max a new playpen to house his toys and give him his own space in our small apartment. He loves to play ‘jailbreak’ from the playpen when he’s not throwing all his toys on the ground (more on the joys of living with Max-the-Destroyer in a future post).
We’ll leave you with a quick sketch of an afternoon last week, which was pretty much a perfect Belgian day: Paul rode our newly-acquired bike over the cobblestones to the central library, where he spent the morning reading Augustine in gorgeous environs; after lunch, we left Milian with a nanny for the afternoon so that we could go out for a bit; we sat in a cafe claiming to have the most extensive beer list in the world, and drank two beers from Belgian micro-breweries (don’t worry, Paul’s working on a beer-themed post for the near future); then we enjoyed waffles as we walked around and Paul pointed out the different KUL faculties to Amanda; and we wrapped up the day sitting in a cafe drinking coffee before heading home to our Maximilian.
Hmm, perhaps the joys of living in Leuven outweigh the challenges.
More to come soon…