r/belgium

As soon as a Belgian, especially 25+ years old sees me or gets to talk to me, they immediately ask if i can travel back to my country or send money back home. Does the average Belgian think all POC (Sub-Saharan Africa) who don’t speak dutch or aren’t fluent here lives on OCMW?
With all the world class universities and colleges here, people still think every black person is a refugee? Especially those who aren’t fluent in Dutch. I have had to explain myself countless times that i am an international student and not an immigrant nor refugee and students only get tagged immigrants when they graduate and decide to stay.

Is there any particular reason for such ideology? I understand there are many people from Sub-Saharan Africa especially East-Africa in Belgium but what is the primary reason to tag everyone as a refugee who doesn’t want to learn to speak dutch? I paid €6,000 for the most intensive dutch course in all of Belgium and just got a B2 after 6 months. Normally i still have to follow the rules and ensure my sentences are correct grammatically and are natural so I can’t speak as fast but some folks just don’t care and switch to English when they speak or get annoyed that i didn’t understand the dialect.

WHY?

Edit: My primary issue is being labeled as a refugee at first glance. And thinking i live off of government money or arms.

As per the heading, I want to know what big and little things foreigners do in Belgium that annoy or frustrate you. Maybe how close they stand, or how loud they speak. I don’t know, you tell me!

I live in Flanders. I have a B2 level of Dutch (working on C1). I have a political science degree.

An update.

Bye bye rain, looks like summer is starting this weekend.

Time to light the bbq

Hi All! Traveling to Belgium from the U.S. in July for Tomorrowland and I’m trying everything in my will power to make it over to Plopsaland. I know - everything is saying it’s basically a waste of a day just traveling .. but I’m figure out all the options.

Trying to plan out our itinerary and was wondering if any of these were possible? Or if anyone has a better way to go about this?

Option A) Bite the bullet and take the 2 1/2+ train from Brussels to Plopsaland and back.

Option B) Go to Plopsaland via train (2 1/2 hr) before park open, do major attractions, leave around 16:00 and take the train to Ghent (1 1/2 hr) and spend the rest of the day there before going back to Brussels (1 hr). I believe the sun goes down around 21:00 in the summer, no?

Option C) Rent a car? Worried about this option — don’t really know driving laws/rules in Europe.

Option D) Forget Plopsaland and just got to Walibi instead.

Thanks for your insight!

might be a strange question but does anyone know where to buy chinese cigarettes in belgium? online i cannot find much information so before i make the trip to various chinese stores in the country i wanted to inform myself online.

obviously i dont mean counterfeit cigarettes, but rather chinese brands of cigarettes

thxx

Wat een rot irritante vent. Kan iemand mij vertellen welke meerwaarde hij biedt in eender welk programma?

Ik zou straks de match willen zien(van thuis uit) maar het lijkt erop dat dazn geen dagpassen geeft.

Iemand een idee hoe ik de match toch zou kunnen zien?

Based on another post it kind of dawned on me that there's basically zero knowledge exchange from Wallonia to Flanders and back. I don't know who is famous in Wallonia, what shows are playing, what is living societally.

I could follow Walloon media (which I do to a certain degree, just nothing too local, only national news), but I feel like the federal government isn't doing anything at all to make us feel like one singular country.

Do you share this opinion? Would you like more overlap? How would you see this if so? And if not: are you separatistic? Or just not very interested and happy with what it's like now?

Extra points if you're a Belgian with a mix of Flemish/Walloon parents: do you follow media on both country sides?

Have a great evening!