Trash

So the Belgians take a lot of things very seriously including their beer and chocolate but nothing has been drilled into our heads more these past few days than their strict rules and regulations regarding trash.  Basically you cannot just throw whatever you want into a Glad bag and chuck it out on the curb.  You actually have to buy specific trash bags at a grocery store in your commune (neighborhood) for plastics (blue bags), papers (yellow bags), yard waste (green bags) and household waste (white bags). The reason you have to buy them in your commune is because every commune charges differently for these bags and they are specific to your commune.  And of course in an effort to get you to take the time to sort your trash the household waste bags are the most expensive.  Some communes charge as much as 50 euros for these bags if you can believe that!  So prior to Monday no one mentioned anything to us about the trash so I have just been collecting it as usual.  Finally when the housing person from the Embassy came on Monday to do our residence walkthru he explained everything to me.  So Baby and I took the tram to Carrefour (our grocery store) yesterday to pickup some trash bags.  I was fearful of the price but ours where pretty cheap about 2.5 euros for the regular trash bags and 1.5 euro for the paper and plastic bags.  While we were pretty good about recycling before we are going to get real proficient during our tour in Brussels because if you do not sort correctly the "trash police" will ticket you and even diplomats cant get out of those tickets.  While the initial sort was less than fun, since I had already been compiling all this trash in one large Glad bag, the subsequent trash collection should go much more smoothly.  And now you know.....