Brussels is the city that taught me what it means to feel at home in a place that wasn’t built for you. I arrived in 2018 with two suitcases and a language I couldn’t speak, and the city met me exactly where I was. It didn’t try to impress. It revealed itself slowly, in the gap between the grand and the ordinary.
The thing about Brussels that nobody tells you is how quiet it can be. Step off the main boulevards and you’re in a neighborhood that feels like a village. There’s a bakery on every corner, a park around every third turn, and someone’s cat watching you from a window ledge. It’s a city that lets you be anonymous without feeling alone.