Do the Homework Before Anyone Adopts You
There's a version of moving abroad where you wait. You wait for a Belgian to take an interest, to walk you through the references, the old shops, the local nicknames, the things everyone here just knows. You wait to be adopted.
I don't think you should wait. Not because nobody would eventually do it. Some people would, genuinely, happily, the first time. But the first time is not the tenth time, and if you're a foreigner in a country that already absorbs a lot of foreigners, the person explaining the same collective memory to you is very likely explaining it for the fifth or sixth time that year. Generous the first time. By the sixth, it's work.
So do your own homework first. Not to replace the relationships. To arrive at them already partly equipped, so the people who do eventually let you in get to skip the tedious part and go straight to the parts that are actually interesting to them too.
Where you actually find the homework
Here's the part that surprised me: the people who hold a city's memory most carefully are rarely the busy professionals you meet at networking events. They're the older generation, the ones with time to be nostalgic, the ones constantly posting about what used to be here, what's been lost, what young people don't appreciate anymore.
And you find them, in 2018 at least, on Facebook.
My French was close to nonexistent when I joined my first Brussels Facebook groups. Some of them ran largely in Brusseleir, the Brussels dialect, which I understood even less. I joined anyway.
I didn't post. I didn't ask questions. I just checked in on and off and watched. What people mentioned constantly. What photos they posted. What they argued about. You don't need any tool for this. You just need to observe and absorb.
What showed up, over time
A lot, it turns out. Local dishes I'd never heard named. Old shops that don't exist anymore but that people still reference like landmarks. Small anecdotes, some probably a little exaggerated by now, still worth knowing. An entire, specific passion for cars that I wouldn't have guessed at from the outside. Which communes people actually live in: Uccle, Dilbeek, Watermael-Boitsfort, some even further out, some in France, still showing up in a Brussels group because Brussels is still home even from across the border.
And I learned about the fire. In 1967, a department store on Rue Neuve, À l'Innovation, burned down. Over 250 people died. It remains the deadliest fire in Belgian history, and it's the reason the store rebranded afterward to the shorter, lighter name it still carries today: Inno. Nobody currently shopping there lived through it. Most of the people posting about it in that Facebook group hadn't been born yet either. It didn't matter. The memory outlived the people who experienced it directly, and it had become collective property regardless.
I also followed the actors. Which is how I learned about Benoît Poelvoorde, and about C'est arrivé près de chez vous, the mock-documentary that made him famous. It started, I learned, as fellow filmmaker Rémy Belvaux's graduation project at INSAS, the Brussels film school, made largely without the school's blessing, after they'd rejected his original pitch. The school only claimed it once Cannes did, in 1992.
Where the homework actually paid off
A few weeks ago I was walking through central Brussels with a close friend of mine, someone who grew up ten minutes on foot from where I've now lived for eight years. We passed the Inno on Rue Neuve, and he said, almost in passing, that it has an important place in Brussels' heart.
I already knew. Not because he'd told me before. Because I'd gone looking for it myself, years earlier, in a Facebook group full of strangers, most of whom were also born after the fact.
The second moment came at a freelancer event. We were talking about making videos, and he mentioned editing some in his teens, back when it wasn't easy yet. I brought up C'est arrivé près de chez vous immediately, the INSAS connection and all. I wanted him to see that I'd done the work. Not to impress him for its own sake, but because I wanted a real Belgian, someone who actually grew up here, to know that I carried some of this heritage too, unprompted, without him having to hand it to me first.
He replied: "Wow, quelle culture!" ;)
What this actually costs, and what it buys
None of this required contacts. It required humility and a willingness to sit in a Facebook group and just watch, for a long time, without any guarantee it would ever be useful.
What it bought me is small but real: the people I've since gotten close to here don't have to start from zero with me. They get to skip the tedious re-explaining and go straight to the parts of a friendship that are actually theirs to build. That's rare enough here that it gets noticed.