Our soon-to-be new home in Belgium

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Well, SWIFT certainly seem to have got their money's worth from our Orientation trip to Belgium this week! We not only found a great serviced apartment that will become our home for the next 4-6 weeks (from next Thursday the 12th -- more details and photos of that coming soon) but we also found a really cool house in the beautiful, provincial town of La Hulpe that we'll be moving into after that.

We took a few photos of the place, which is a lovely, recently renovated terrace house on Rue de L'Eglise. (For those of you with high-school French, yes, we will be living on "Church St", right near the impressive L'église Saint Nicolas)

After a really long day of house-hunting with Sandra (our relocation consultant from SIRVA) we were both drained and tired, and just looking forward to getting home to chill out. This was the last place we were looking at, and from the outside, it really didn't look like much. The moment we walked in though, both Jeannie and I got a really good vibe about the place, and that was that!

We went back the next day for a second look when we were a little less road-weary, then told Sandra that we wanted it. The owner's father rang back to triple-check that we were interested, because he had other people wanting to see it too, but he thought we were good tenants (obviously the married, professional couple with personal relocation consultant/translator helped make a positive first impression!)

As you can see from the pics, we have a typical European backyard ("typical" means really thin, but looong, so the dogs have plenty of room to run, if they don't mind doing laps :-)

It is only minutes away from where I'll be working, close to the train, in a really cool/artsy/old-money town with easy access to Brussels city centre (for those who know Perth, it has a kinda Subiaco/Dalkeith feel about it, but everyone speaks French) close to forests, lakes and all sorts of fun things in beautiful Walloon Brabant province where Napoleon met his Waterloo. Most importantly, it has plenty of room for visitors! *hint* *hint*

We both think we'll be really happy and comfortable here for as long as it takes to work out what is involved in buying our own place, and whether that makes sense for our circumstances.