I've lived in Belgium's capital, Brussels, for just over four years. I don't know much about the country outside of Brussels, and my view is skewed because I speak French better than Dutch. Below is some hopefully-useful info from what I do know. I also have a similar page of info about Ireland.
You can do most of the sight-seeing in two or three days. The usual sight seeing involves:
There's also a beer museum about two kilometres outside the city centre, but I've never met anyone who's managed to visit it.
Someone from Wallonia (the French-speaking southern Belgium) told me that there are great the local festivals there. Many of them are in February, just before the christian period of Lent. The Carnival of Binche is one example.
Belgium has hundreds of beers. It has the world's largest selection. A lot of them are very nice, and the variety is fantastic. Please don't come to Belgium, find a beer you like, and then continue drinking that beer. What a waste! This drives me crazy. For beer, Belgium's strong point is variety.
My recommendation is, if you're here for a week or less, never drink the same beer twice. Always try a new beer, and if you're in a bar that doesn't have any beers you haven't tried, leave and find a better bar.
There must be at least 30 Irish bars in Brussels and they also serve as expat bars, sports bars, etc. The selection of beer is usually not very good, but some of them are good craic.
I'm still struggling to find Belgian culture. In any country, the "cultural" things that are obvious to a foreigner are usually just whatever the international marketing companies are pushing. Naming ten famous Belgians is easier than you'd think, but that's not how to find the country's culture. My language limits currently bias my selection toward francophones, but I'm exploring the Dutch speakers too now.
Here are some singers and writers that I call Belgian culture:
Of course, there are Belgians who hate all of these people, but then again, most people from Ireland don't read Pat Ingoldsby, but he's clearly still Irish culture. One thing that's for sure is that Belgians don't want to talk about Jean-Claude Van Damme.
If you're looking for a nice Belgian restaurant in Brussels city centre, there's one at the high end of Grand Place called " 't Kelder". I recommend the Flemmish Carbonade. There is another restaurant beside it, called "Cave du Roy", with the same style and the menu looks the same, but 't Kelder is always full and Cave du Roy is always empty. Go figure.
Another option is to head to Rue des Bouchers. That's a street with nothing but restaurants, and a few of the ajoining streets are also filled with restaurants. Monday to Thursday, many of the restaurants offer a nice (albeit minimal) three-course meal for €12, or sometimes even a little less, and if you haggle lightly they sometimes give you a free beer too.
If you're looking for an expensive restaurant, try the top ball of The Atomium.
Almost everything is closed in Brussels on Sundays, and during the week only very basic shops are open after 6 or 7pm. For someone who works full-time and studies five nights a week plus Saturday 9am->3:30pm, this is very annoying. The workers' unions seem to be the main reason for this.
There are three bookshops open on Sundays. When I want a book, I usually wait until Sunday and buy it in one of these shops:
When the government proposed allowing shops to open on Sundays, the unions marched through the streets with the slogan "Don't touch my weekend!" I think this was misguided. The union members are mostly native Belgians of more than 25 years old. They wouldn't have to work on Sundays. The Sunday work would be done by young people and immigrants. Maybe this is a factor in Belgium's high unemployment among young people and immigrants. Unemployment among immigrants is not only costly for the state but also surely fuels racism directly, and it fuels racism indirectly by making social integration more difficult.
Opening hours are also highly regulated (all my comparisons are with Ireland). Finding a chemist open after 6pm is either impossible or almost impossible. What we call a newsagent in Ireland (a smallish shop with milk, bread, newpapers, lottery tickets, chocolate, etc.) is not allowed sell newspapers or magazines in Belgium. Instead, you have to find a press shop, and they're all closed by 6pm and closed on Sundays (except for one in Gare du Midi, one in Galerie Royale, and you can buy newspapers in Filigranes bookshop near Arts-Loi).
Further, these newspaperless newsagents are only allowed to be open for a certain number of hours per day, so they have to choose to either be a day shop or a night shop. This usually leads to a day shop being right beside a night shop, and neither will sell fresh milk because the stock turnover is half what it should be and they can't sell fresh milk quick enough.
This frustrates me, and I think this will hurt the Belgian economy because people will stop using local shops and start buying things online (which will be mostly from foreign shops).
Sections: Foreign languages, For language learning, English, Dutch, French.
Another option is the Boeken Festijn, a travelling bookshop that stops for a few days at a time in cities in North Belgium and the Netherlands.
I'll only list the most useful few. Open even on Sundays:
Useful, but closed on Sundays:
The prices of books are almost the same in all shops, so I prefer to choose a shop based on which one I would like to see grow. I avoid Fnac because it is closed on Sundays, they don't answer their phone, and the last time they reorganised their shop, they replaced a book section with electronics goods.
Brussels can be a cheap place to live, but you have to shop around. There are a lot of politicians, executives, and diplomats here, so a lot of shopping districts are geared towards attracting these expense-account people. Once you dig a little further, you discover the places where the normal Belgians and the large immigrant community do their shopping.
There is an outdoor market at Gare du Midi every Sunday from 6am until 2pm. Fruit, vegetables, clothes, kitchenware, spices, basic electronics, and household items are cheap here.
Brussels has good second hand shops. On Boulevard Maurice Lemonier, you'll find second hand shops for books, DVDs, and computers. As well as helping you to live cheaply, buying second hand goods also reduces waste.
There's also Cash Converters, which is a chain of second hand shops.
Another cheap place to shop is Rue de Brabant, near Gare du Nord, parallel to the red light district. The shops there are open on Sunday too, which is rare in Brussels. There you'll mostly find clothes, shoes, and household items.
In Brussels you can drink on the streets and even when walking around in shops. One nice way to enjoy a few beers is to buy cans in the shop or supermarket and stroll around the city or sit in Grand Place.
The next cheapest option is to drink in Celtica, The Old Oak, Michael Collins', or de Valera's, where pints are €2 until midnight, 10pm, 8pm, and <I-don't-know>, respectively.
Another good option is to buy French wine in the supermarkets. It's quite cheap for good quality stuff. A €4 or €5 bottle of red from the Rhone Valley is usually quite good.
One thing to avoid in Brussels is spirits. There's a big tax on these in the bars, so it's better to buy nice Irish whiskey and drink it at home.
Learning languages is a hobby of mine. I also have a Learning Languages page with general info. In Brussels, there is one bookshop dedicated to languages: Maison des Langues Vivants, but you have to go early because they usually close at 5:30pm or earlier (even if the sign in the window says they open til 6).
To find teachers for private lessons, see the "Languages" and "French" sections of quefaire.be.
There are also other sites but they're smaller, and smaller sites sometimes disappear:
You might also be interested in my Learning French page.
In general, Dutch courses are quite expensive and there is not much to choose from. A lot of schools have elaborate schedules on their websites, but when you phone them, they say most are cancelled due to lack of interest.
See also: http://www.dorifor.be/ - somewhere on that site there is a listing of cheap Dutch courses. I know because someone printed the list for me, but I don't know where they found the list on that site.
Mid-priced courses don't exist. I think this is because of a policy of the Flemish government that backfired. The Flemish goverment subsidise Dutch courses for French-speaking residents (or maybe just job seekers) of Belgium. I suspect that this motivated the Dutch schools to double their prices because people looking for Dutch courses are spending government money and are less fussy about finding a fair price.
When learning Japanese, after a lot of searching and asking people, I found the below list of places. Another good option is to get a private tutor.
This is cheap, but you either do a September-June evening course or there are Saturday morning courses from September-January and from February-June.
This is cheap but they only have September to May courses, nothing shorter or more flexible. It can be hard to find information on their website, so here are direct links to the pages that contain related info:
Just off the roundabout at Montgomery metro stop. They do one-to-one lessons at the school for €30 per hour. Maybe there are other options too. Here's their website with phone number:
And here are schools that I know nothing about, but they have some Japanese courses:
The official Belgian government tests for French and Dutch are organised by Selor. In 2008, the tests were held on the first Monday of June and of November, and you had to register 6 weeks in advance.
For French there are internationally recognised tests organised by the Alliance Française in Brussels.
For Dutch there is the "Certificaat Nederlands als Vreemde Taal" (CNaVT). The test takes place just once a year on the first Wednesday of May, and you have to register in February. Places where you can do the exam include:
There is also a list of exam centres, but the list doesn't include KUL (which is Belgium's main CNaVT centre), and the number of centres in the Netherlands is strangely small. I'm not sure I'd trust that list.
Here are some language institutes where you can do official exams. I found this information with help from the EUNIC site.
If you want to start a third-level studies in Belgium - university or college ("hogeschool"/"Haute école") - you'll need to prove that you have sufficient education (secondary school - whatever certificate your country gives you at age 16-18), and you'll have to pass French or Dutch tests.
In terms of language tests, the French community of Belgium have a unified system. If you pass, you get a "diplôme d'aptitude à l'enseignement supérieur" (DAES) and you can attend any French speaking university in Belgium. In a place where I enrolled, I also had to sit their own French language test, but it was simple compared to the DAES. It was just a formality really.
The Dutch community seems much less organised on this matter. Each university sets their own criteria and their own exams, so finding info requires searching each university's website and phoning them to confirm that their webpages are accurate and to ask for clarifications.
Here's some info I found once:
Flanders is the Dutch-speaking northern region of Belgium, and Wallonia is the French-speaking southern region.
Big, has a zoo.
Has two city centres. One centre is the student area with some bars open until morning.
Big, nice city. If you arrive at Liege-Guillemins train station, the buses numbers 1 and 4 will take you to the city centre, which is the stop St. Lambert.
There is a Sunday morning market along the river, like the one at Gare du Midi in Brussels. Anyone will be able to tell you where it is.
Not so big. Has a nice castle on a hill that is worth walking to the top of. At the top of the hill there's just an expensive restaurant, so you might want to bring your own snack/drink.
Not many people will find this useful, but here's a list of books by Irish authors which are available in both French and Dutch.
Here's where I'll dump useful links I find.
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