Forecast: Rain All Week

After a beautiful weekend of lounging in the Bois de la Cambre and house hunting (more to follow), the weather has now reverted itself to what we were warned against: chronic rain.

The Bulletin was also so kind as to point out, in a lovely article by Leona Francombe, that "Belgium occupies roughly the same parallel as Irkutsk and Moose Jaw."

I believe we're in for a long, wet winter.

Primers

We've been doing a bit of recce, and I just learned that we will have to decide whether to live in the French- or Dutch-speaking district of the city. Apparently, the inner areas are French, and the outlying parts - only 10 km from the center - are Dutch. This allows certain guide books I've picked up to declare Brussels to be "one of very few cities that can claim a spilt personality." A city with dissociative identity disorder - imagine that.

In order to learn about the EU, which is a topic most Americans (including me) haven't the first clue about, we've been pointed in the direction of the latest (2008) edition of The European Union: How Does it Work? by Elizabeth Bomberg.

Finally, the most useful advice we've gotten to date is probably to "bring umbrellas and raincoats!" Thank goodness I have a closetful of absurd-looking print wellies.