What is this blog?

After five years as a spoiled expat employee in Paris, I arrived in Antwerp as an non-EU national.

I am married to an EU national, so my position is less tenuous than when I first came to live in Europe. However, I am still not a European, so I have to follow the rules of any outsider.  This blog chronicles those rules as they relate to me.

A gift from a Chinese diamond trader to the city of Antwerp. The statue features a boy and his dog from the 19th-century publication "A Dog of Flanders." This book found fame in Japan long before the locals started reading it.