This morning was the first morning that we've needed to employ our new fog light. Here in Belgium, it is a law that your vehicle have a rear one. The fog was as thick as pea soup this morning, so I was thankful I had it installed last week. Just in time!
It is also a requirement to have 3 important safety instruments in your car: 1. fire extinguisher 2. reflective vest 3. emergency triangle/cone. The first few weeks of being here, I had none of the above. When entering the base at S.H.A.P.E., we have to show our IDs to the military police. Sometimes, they do random car inspections. Of course, I was selected a couple times in those first few weeks, and didn't have what I needed. But, they were nice and just told me to get it. Now that I have had them in my car for months, I rarely get stopped. Go figure.
We also have to keep a box of breathalyzers in the car, in case we drive into France. It's a law that you carry your own in your vehicle. Also, in Germany, it's required for all cars to have snow tires in the winter. So, snow tires are next on the car list. We are only about an 1hr and a half/ 2 hours to the German border, so I'm surprised that it's not a law in Belgium. Since we live more in the country, we have been told it's a good idea.
A couple other things that are different here are that we have to buy special white trash bags from the local grocery stores. You can only have these bags, or they will not pick up your trash. We also have special blue bags that we have to put our recycling in. And there are strict rules that no glass can go in either of those bags. We have to take our glass bottles to a little recycling kiosk down the street. We can recycle our beer bottles at the stores and get 10 cents back per bottle. Sometimes that even buys a new 6-pack for free! :)
In our dishwasher, we have the little cleaner tablet like most people have. But we also have to add salt in a specific spout and keep it filled. And there is another spout where we have to add another liquid. The water here is hard. Our house does not have a water softener; some do though. We've had to buy different shampoos/conditioners that work better for hard water because you can feel the difference.
Our house has a septic tank underground in the front yard. So at least once per week, we have to flush these small bags of microorganisms down the toilet. The bag dissolves, and the microorganisms do their thing. If you don't do this, you will have plumbing problems. A lot of these things were told to us when we had our move-in inspection.
Our landlord built the house to collect rainwater and reuse it in the toilets and for the water spickets outside. There is a pump in our garage that takes care of that.
All in all, we are getting used to our house and feeling very much at home.
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