A view of where we are staying

The area where we are staying in Brussels is at Square Montgomery - here's a picture of the man himself:

Statue of Field Marshall Montgomery at Square Montgomery, with Cinquantenaire in the background

We are 500 metres from the square, where it meets Avenue Tervuren, and Boulevard St Michel.  The nearest metro is Boileau, about 50 metres away (in fact, underneath us) but Metro Montgomery has more links, so we normally use this.

This is our apartment in Brussels - http://www.eu-brussels.be/apartments/lucca.shtml

Daniel and Laura's apartment next door - http://www.eu-brussels.be/apartments/pisa.shtml

the garden (but not at this time of year!)

more photos in the slideshow ....

Learning different languages

We arrived in Brussels the first time on 11 November 2011, and as it was Remembrance Day, all the shops were closed, except for a little Polish supermarket.  We bought a jar of instant coffee (for Alek, I can't stand the stuff) and on the side it says "Bogaty Smak" which sounded to me like a character from Harry Potter.  I asked Alek what it meant, but because of the way I said it - like a character from Harry Potter - he said he didn't know.  I've just looked it up, and it means "rich taste", as I thought, and when Alek looked at the actual words he found he did in fact recognise it, as it's almost the same as Serbian.

TV is interesting too, as here in Brussels we only have Dutch, German, French, and Italian.  In Serbia, apart from Serbian news, which was always about the European Union, the soap operas were Turkish and Indian, with Serbian subtitles - hard to follow, especially in Cyrillic, for example   αβγδεζηθικλμνξοπρςστυφχψω - I just get the letters worked out and there's a new lot on the screen. 

And I only remember half a dozen words from Turkish, so I spent the week in Serbia not understanding a thing.