Triple threat bureaucracies

Because I'm essentially lazy, this posting is bits and pieces of what I've already sent to several of you.

We have arrived in Belgium and are staying in a pretty nice, if somewhat spartan, hotel a few meters from the town square in Mons, a small city southwest of Brussels not far from SHAPE. This square is called the Grand Place, too, just like the real Grand Place in Brussels, and it's near 'bout as big as the real one. The whole town seems kind of nice. Since we have only rudimentary cooking arrangements, we're eating out pretty much every meal, but Mons offers zillions (give or take an oodle) of choices.

We got to our office for the first time Thursday and plowed through part of the bureaucracy. As I've mentioned to some of you, we have to work our way through three of them: the Belgian one, the SHAPE one, and the US one. It seems we'll be carrying about 2,000 ID cards while we're here, and we have to show different ones at different times. I've been watching what the guy in line in front of me pulls out to show the clerk/cashier/guard/whatever and doing the same thing. It's all going fairly well for us, actually, because we speak French. Many "Shapians" (the semi-official term for the folks from NATO's 26 member countries) don't speak French (they've all spent too much time learning their excellent English), so the Belgians are very helpful to the people who do. (One of the fun things about being there--well, fun for a linguist--is watching a Slovak and a Lithuanian carry on a conversation in good solid English.) When we bought our pay-as-you-go cell phones yesterday, for example, the salesmen took us to the front of the electronics department line, then personally escorted us past the regular cashiers to make sure we got where we needed to be. And we had a great time chatting with the lady who opened our Belgian bank account.

We have a rental car: a BMW 118d. It's a little 6-speed hatchback with a funky push-button starter. And it will get up and go, too--at least enough for the city/suburban roads we've been driving on. It's sort of Mazda 3 meets the autobahn. Alas, it's too small and (relatively) inexpensive to ever be exported to the US, though, because it would probably spoil BMW's image; so don't look for it on a showroom floor near you soon.

Next on our list is finding a house, which we have to do to get our Belgian national ID card. We saw one (a house, not an ID card) on the board at SHAPE that looked really, really nice. And we were first on the list for it! Then we got home and realized why: it's an hour from work. Blast and tarnation! But we're going to drive out there today to take a look anyways, because we figure we'll see some countryside and might discover something else.

Now it's time to go to breakfast.