Author: Anita

About the Author: Anita is a crazy cat lady, a fashion enthusiast and a writer (yes, an online marketer, too). She likes to cook, eat, travel and drive. She is also crazy about planes, design, photography and fast cars. Follow her on Twitter or .

Ordering Organic Food in Brussels

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Yesterday I got two steps closer to become the more health and environment conscious human being I always wanted to be.

First, I bought myself a yoga mat in decathlon. Second, I have just found a perfect way to get fresh organic food quickly, with no fuss at all. I order it in surprise boxes.

What are the most common problems I encountered when started clean eating?

  • eating the same things over and over again, no variety
  • not consuming enough fruit and vegetables
  • not in the mood for going out shopping, then to cook after
  • while out shopping, sneaking around and buying fast food because it is quicker

Be fair. Most of us know about 10 recipes by heart, and when there is limited time to make something quickly in the evening, no one ever gets adventurous with new, never tried recipes. After a long day of work, the least I want to do is to google recipes, buy ingredients and start cooking at 8PM. We tried to have a list of meals we wanted to eat each week beforehand, but we ended up putting the same menu over and over again. So I figured, that variety in cooking needs inspiration, surprise and a wider choice of ingredients. And we need to cut out shopping time.

To solve the problem of not eating enough fruit and veg I opted in for pushing fruit and veg on us harder. If it enters our flat by itself it will have to be eaten.

So I ordered from Reason2.be.

So it got delivered.

Last evening we received our first box (actually, it arrived in 2 boxes and a bag) of food, and it contained a huge cut of rump steak, chicken legs, smoked beef slices, 6 eggs, a litre of milk and all this fruit and veg heaven:

essentials box from reason2be

This is the smallest order possible for the essentials package. I also ordered some healthy snacks which contained nuts, dried fruit and chocolate. The content of the box is pre-set and changes every week depending on what is in season. You cannot change what is in there, but you can set a dislike list. Anything that is on the list will never be sent. The contents of the box is not a complete mystery, as there is an option on the page to look in the boxes but I prefer not to. When the box arrives it is Christmas all over again 😉

You can manually add extra items, such as yoghurts, beer, organic wines, jams, the list seems endless. There is a wide variety of boxes: fruit only, veg only, benelux only, organic essentials, recipe boxes (I will try this once, for sure), beers and wine mixes, meat boxes, grill boxes, snack boxes and so on.

What I really like about this, that we receive and are forced to eat food that we would probably never ever have otherwise. For example, yesterday evening I made leek, mushroom and smoked beef omelette with a salad of endives and leek. It was the best omelette we had in years, but this is not something you walk into the local Delhaize for. The amount of fruit seem immense to us, I don’t think we ever had this much at home. I am contemplating to make a fruit salad later. 🙂 For today, half of the chicken legs is next on the list, they will be roasted and eaten with some potato mash tonight. I am saving the steaks for the weekend, will make one more omelette and a vegetable curry, too.

Soon, there will be Wednesday again, for my mystery box to arrive. Can’t wait 🙂

 

Life update

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Dear Diary,

I thought it was time I reflected back on things that changed since last year. It is immense, so I am going to be comparing life to the point when I wrote down my new year’s resolutions.

Life has changed around completely. We moved to a different country and both have different jobs. We kind of re-started our lives. What stayed the same is that we still have the cats and each other. And that, for me, is enough. For now. 😀

So let’s see my resolutions, and how they turned out:

And for the new year?

Go to a yoga class! (Okay, maybe “go to many yoga classes”…)

Smile and give thanks for everything I have.

Worry less about things that are really not that important.

Kiss the cats often. (occasionally the boyfriend, too. :-))

Let the past go fully and concentrate on the new things in my life.

Continue clean eating and cook more.

Stick with one hair color and let that be blonde eventually. 😀

Well, yoga classes kind of happened. We had office yoga with the girls twice (or 3 times?) since I am in my new job, and did yoga classes at home with the doyogawithme guy. So I definitely check this, but it could be really good if I could just go once a week or so.

I try to smile more, and it sort of happens a lot more since we moved. I try hard to be thankful for everything I get, and at the end of the day I always think about how lucky I am to have a fantastic boyfriend and the cutest cats in the world. Worrying less is kind of happening, too, but this is something I still need to work on. I can, still, get into loops when I worry about our jobs, our flat, our bills, our lives. Even now, when everything looks just fine.

I think I got to a point where my past seems to vanish. There were people in my life that I don’t need back, and there are some who I needed, and they came back. Funny, but when we moved I just figured that I missed a certain period in my life. Sometimes you feel like you miss something or someone, but you just miss the way you were at that very moment. Sometimes you link people to each other who were present at that same moment. And when you feel like you want to go back there, and be what you were, you might just need a chat with those people you were with. It did happen and it made me not miss those times anymore.

Continue clean eating, check. We go to markets, buy bio, cook bio and it is just awesome. And yes, occasionally we have a burger. And fries. And pizza. But I really think we are on the best track ever. Also, organic burgers are served just around the corner. 😉

And I am still blonde. Since january, how good is that? I didn’t think I could stick to one hair colour for this long (apart from my original one, duh).

About creativity and photography. Not a lot of progress to be fair. I am doing an online photography course on open2study and reading the book called Drawing on the right side of the brain so I really hope, that by next January I’ll be able to present some self made art and spam this blog with it completely. I also made the first photos of moving human beings, and I’m gonna show one around without their permission.

couple

The cats

They are all fine. They enjoy the space and looking out to the garden. They meet new cats through the window and eat huge spiders. Did you know, that the giant house spider is very common in Brussels? Me neither! Luckily Blacket eats all of them, so I only find legs and dead bodies in the morning. Phew!

They might even enjoy eating them. Apart from that, I booked the girls in for neutering surgery for the first week of October, and I will probably be dead worried. I don’t even think about it. Yet.

To close it, here is a picture of Blacket during work hours.

The adventures of business cat
Business Cat

Dealing With Humidity In a Basement Flat

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Basement flats are great for so many reasons. They usually have a separate entrance and their own patio plus most of them come with storage rooms, too. They are also cheap. You can get a decent 100 sqm apartment for the price of a 60 sqm one. For this same reason, if you need a well located flat, this is the one to go for. In central London with sky high rents and immense competition the only way of getting a well situated place for a reasonable price is to go down under.

On the other hand, the  common belief is that these flats are dark, damp and smell of mold. Most people try to avoid them at all costs. I admit, there are basement flats that are damp, dark and covered in mold, but this is not the target market.
To know what to look for, you have to know what to look for :). The main enemy of these properties is water. Insulation should solve the problem, but most horror stories you can hear prove the opposite.

Fact: a basement flat needs to be very well insulated.

Water from surrounding soil can make the walls soaking wet, and where’s water, there will be mold.
So why are there dozens of people complaining about wet walls and mold in flats that just have been thoroughly waterproofed?
Well, what happens if you seal a waterproof box completely with an evaporator inside?
All the water that can not escape will be on the walls once again.

But where is the water coming from?

Basically? You. Humidity is formed by breathing, cooking, washing, drying, having a bath, a shower.. Simply said, by living. So if a flat is well-insulated, it will keep the water out from the outside, but also the water in that is formed inside. Both result in wet walls.

Is there a solution for humidity?

Ventilation. Fresh air.
Being under ground kind of limits the size and quantity of windows, so getting fresh air in can pose a challenge. Any fans that are connected to the outside world can be huge help. It is a necessity in rooms where the most humidity is produced, such as the kitchen and the bathroom. During summer having all possible windows open for a few hours is a huge help.
A great solution can be a dehumidifier. It filters the air and gets the water out of it. These circulate the air inside, meaning windows don’t have to be open and you don’t end up heating the street.
Mold needs humidity levels above 75% for 72 hours, so if you make sure to have ventilation sorted out, mold will stay away.

My advice

I live in a basement flat (a duplex really, as I have rooms on the ground floor, too) so I thought sharing my daily routine could help. When we moved in we soon ended up having a whole wall completely soaked and it took me quite some time and research to dry them out and it still needs constant attention to make it stay this way.
(Buy a higrometer!)
Every morning when we get up we open all windows for at least 15 minutes downstairs. If it is warm outside we open all windows as soon as we get home and only close them when it starts to get dark outside. Every time we cook or take a bath the fan is switched on. And we also open the windows after meal or shower time.
In countries like England and Belgium sometimes simply opening windows can not help as the humidity outside is just as high. On cold and/or humid days we still open the windows for 10 minutes in the morning and in the afternoon, but before going to bed we also switch on the dehumidifier for 1-2 hours.
In the beginning, when your walls are very wet, try to have the dehumidifier on for at least 6 hours a day until the water clears off.

There are weeks when the humidity levels are lower outside and I only need to open windows to have humidity under control and there are days when the machine is needed. I learned to balance it and with a bit of attention we live in a mold-free, dry-walled basement flat. Which has the location, the size and the looks for half price. 

These are the pics I took of the apartment after the first visit with the estate agent. It was love at first sight. The kitchen and the living area are on the ground floor, 2 rooms and the bathroom are on the basement level.

kitchenlivingbathroomdownstairsdownstairs

Renting In Brussels With 3 Cats

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Our experience: renting in Brussels.

For starters, you might want to know that we were considered majorly “handicapped” when it came to finding a suitable place to live, for the below reasons:

  • We are a foreign couple. We are a couple considered to be Eastern European. I am not making a discrimination case out of this, as my experiences have always been good with foreign acceptance in any countries I moved to, but it is a disadvantage. We are Hungarian. Budapest often gets confused with a Bucharest and people who have no idea that this is an existing country simply refer to the brilliant and overly creative “are you hungry?” joke. 🙂 But most landlords don’t really feel secure renting to…us.
  • We were living back in Hungary at the time when we had to find our accommodation. When you move to another country to work, you need to have a place to live, but to have a place to live you need to have a job. Flat hunt is easy on the Internet, but when you live 1400 kilometres away it is pretty time and money consuming to arrange viewings.
  • We have three cats (let me just refer to the name of the blog :)). If you have a pet, you are not an eligible tenant. If you have 3, you are insane in the eyes of a landlord.
  • Only one of us had a Belgian job, which he – matter of fact – has not even started. So when it came to showing 2 paychecks, well…
  • We don’t speak French or Dutch. I find that all people here possess some knowledge of English, but when it comes to rental matters, a lot passes.

With this said, we found our dream home in a week. Two weeks before the moving date the contract was signed. Did we experience the miracle? The impossible just decided to happen?

None. I admit, we probably were lucky on one hand. But I am pretty sure the way of doing this flat hunt helped a lot, so here is my advice on how to look for a new home when you feel like the impossible is about the happen:

  • Announce beforehand that you have pets and say the amount proudly. There is no reason to not tell, or be embarrassed about the fact that you are such a great person that 3 cats chose to live with you. This will protect you from a lot of disappointments. You will receive a lot of “no”s. People will be rude. But in fairness, would you really want to live in someone’s property who has this kind of an attitude towards your beloved pets? Do you really want to explain yourself every time you talk to your landlord?
  • If you are an expat find agencies that specialize in renting to expats. Use their property list to make sure the landlord won’t rent the apartment to someone less eligible just because they are local.
  • Don’t rush and jump on a plane every time you are invited to visit a property. Tell everything to the agent, or the landlord and make it clear that you need to schedule a certain appointment. Ask for everything they need from you for the decision and take those with you. If you go prepared they will appreciate the effort and see that you are an organized, responsible person who is ready to rent their property.
  • Expect downsides and learn to compromise. No property will ever be a hundred percent perfect. Consider your needs and adjust expectations.
  • Not everything is what is seems. Our flat is beautiful, huge and still cozy. We love it. It has a garden a fireplace and everything we can imagine. Oh, and by the way, 3 months into the contract turns out that our laundry is shared but only we are paying for the electricity plus all the common areas are connected to our meter, too. We have humidity issues on one wall, and the heating system is really loud. My point is to make sure you know every single detail about the apartment beforehand, because if something is too good to be true, it probably is. So don’t be afraid to talk about the bills, consumption estimation and the price you are going to pay for the rent. If you feel like, you can ask the landlord to adjust the price to your needs.

Are we still happy with our decision? So far, yes. Slowly everything is getting fixed and at least we learnt a lot about renting and our apartment. If we move to another place, we will know what to look for. Then again, a new place can have new hidden problems. You can never be a 100% sure, but you can be prepared. My main advice is to always have a plan, and a plan B. And C. Maybe D, too. 🙂

Living in Brussels – Pros and Cons

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All the things I like and don’t like about living in Brussels 🙂

I am gonna be quick and blunt about this. First impressions – listed.

Things I do not like about Brussels:

  • People can’t drive or park
  • 5+ way junctions. “Hello, roundabouts have been invented!”
  • Pieces of pavement that move
  • Pieces of pavement that move when it rains. Water fills the hole up underneath, so when someone steps on them it is like stepping on a geysir.
  • Humidity. It’s ok that my hair looks like a mess all the time, but humidity creeps into our flat and causes wet walls. I have to have constant focus on not to have ideal conditions for mold.

Things I like about Brussels:

  • It is really calm and has a pretty good atmosphere. (I am comparing it to Budapest.)
  • Everything is walking distance. At least for us. But seriously, there are no long distances. Once I went into a tunnel in the city centre and came out on the highway out of the city. It wasn’t even that long of a tunnel.
  • Hidden parks. They are great.
  • Architecture.

Things I don’t really care about:

  • Rain. I don’t really mind rain, but I hate it when its so hot outside you cannot breathe. I don’t like any temperatures to be higher than 28 Celsius or below -5. So it is great here.

Moving with Cats In Europe

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As some might already know, after getting a job offer (too good to turn down) for the other half at the European Comission and several hours of repeating “OMG” histerically, we decided to move to Brussels. Making the decision was the easiest part even though I had a hard time accepting that I will need to learn French at some point.

We never even gave a second thought to leaving the cats behind, so I started to organize their move to Brussels.

Choosing the way of travel

It is really up to your comfort level. Belgium is pretty easy to travel to and from all parts of Europe, and there are pretty basic rules to adhere. Unlike the UK, where animals can only travel to as cargo small animals can enter Belgium in the cabin of an airplane if their container box matches the airline’s criteria. Also, the number of pets that can be carried on the aircraft for a journey is limited. You can find all info for Brussels Air here. Please bear in mind, that low cost airlines will generally refuse to ship animals, even in cargo.

Going on a train is an option, but bus companies generally won’t accept animals on board. As I wanted to take my car with me, the cheapest option remained to drive to Brussels. The journey from Hungary (1340km) is about 13 hours, but when you travel with pets it will last longer as you will have to stop more frequently.

Paperwork

All they need is an EU  pet passport for movements within the EU. A valid rabies vaccination is the only requirement for travel across borders. To connect the pet to the passport, the animal must be fitted with an electronic microchip or have a clearly readable tattoo, applied before 3 July 2011. More info can be found on this link.

If you are travelling to or from the UK please read this through: click 🙂 as tapeworm treatment might be needed and rules seem to be very strict.

eu pet passport
EU pet passports

Preparation

Check all papers and dates of vaccination beforehand and make sure your carrier box is suitable for the travel and your pet has space to move around in it. Doors must be closed firmly. If you accept my advice, dog nappy should be put in the bottom of the container, as little “accidents” can happen in 16 hours. Avoid feeding your pet at least for 12 hours before the travel, as they will be nervous and can get motion sick, too. I don’t recommend sedating them fully, as their body temperature can drop and it can cause kidney and liver failures.

They will want to come out. Don’t fall for it 🙂

You can, and should offer them water but they won’t drink until they calmed down.

They will survive the journey, even when their meowing sounds very desperate. 🙂

Here is my story of our trip: Málna was completely calm. No meows, no moving around. She was staring out the window and sleeping most of the time. Xeni had a few tries on the “meows”. She was given a little portion of a very weak sedative, which was completely natural and our vet was happy to offer. She didn’t sleep a lot, but wasn’t nervous either. On the other hand, Blacket was a nightmare. He was given a little sedative but nothing worked. He managed to meow for 11 hours full-stop. Without a break. His voice was literally going after 8 hours, so I though the will be mute by the time we get there. He desparately wanted out, the tried to tear the box apart, he peed in the box, and pushed his nose to the sides of the container so hard it almost bled. He does not like to travel at all.

These things are normal, they happen, don’t panic. He was all fine when we arrived, he ran around happily the next minute. Ate, drank normally and explored the new home. He slept with me that night and I woke up to his huge cat kisses. 🙂

How To Make Perfect Roast Potatoes

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Now, if you are English you might just frown at me. What on Earth does a foreigner know about roasts of any kind? Well. Not much.

I fell in love with roast potatoes and Hungary is not the country where you can just sit in _any_ bar and get them. If you want them, you make them. End of story. So I looked up about 200 recipes and tried quite some of those before settling for this one. From one suggesting that potatoes must be raw, to ones including fluor, goose fat and cinnamon. Yes. That, too.

I would not say mine is average but I learnt to avoid the extremes.

Perfect Roast Potatoes

  • Servings: 2-4
  • Difficulty: easy
  • Print

Ingredients:

– 7-8 new potatoes

– 5 cloves of garlic

– fresh rosemary leaves (in full, not minced or dried and ground)

– tablespoon of fresh lemon peel

– salt and pepper to taste

– olive oil and butter

 

Instructions:

Boil the peeled potatoes until semi-coocked. Heat the oven to 190 degrees. Put 2 tablespoons of butter in, heat until it sizzles. Add the rosmary, garlic, lemon peel and the potatoes. Season it, and add a tablespoon of olive oil. Cook them until golden brown. The lemon peel and the rosmary will add the incredible taste, and the olive oil will give the roasties some crust. Once you tried this, you might never return to your old roast potato recipe. 🙂

 

This is how mine looked like (please excuse the mess and the quality of the pic).

how to make perfect roast potatoes
roast dinner

Enjoy!

Realizing my Cats are All Grown Up

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God, I can’t believe a month has passed so quickly. I am already 1,5 months into my new job. 🙂

Days are passing me by way too quickly. Not a lot has changed, I still have three, incredibly bad cats to start with. I started to miss the times when they were only kittens. Cuter, smaller and less noisy. However, adulthood gave them way more personality and they tend to have weirder habits.

Blacket, for example, comes to the bathroom with us every evening and grooms himself in the sink, constantly yapping about something. We still do not speak cat unfortunately, but we assume he tells us how his day went. Sometimes the story gets more passionate, sometimes he is meowing more to himself. It is usually a 10-15 minutes story which he only tells while we are taking a bath. I wonder if the neighbors can hear our little conversations. 😀

black cat in the sink

Xeni invented a new „room” for herself. She likes to have her own personal space where she is not often disturbed. Once I find her hiding spot, she starts looking for a new one. She had a „room” in my lingerie drawer, on the top shelf in the bedroom, in the printer box situated on the top of the wardrobe, on the chair under the dining table and now she lives in the laundry box. I wonder what the next one will be, and the length of time it will take for me to find out about it.

Nothing really changed with Raspberry, she still thinks she is a human being. She watches less television lately, on the other hand, Blacket watches big cat diaries a lot.

black cat watching tv

Oh and he can, now,  open doors with his „hand”.

I wonder what they are doing while we are at work if they are this busy when we are home. I am contemplating getting a camera installed in the front room to see what they are up to when they think „mom” can not see them. Hoping to catch some funny videos like this one:

This could do really well in a funny cat compilation 🙂

2014 New Year’s Resolutions

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We survived Christmas and New Year’s Eve, even the tree! My previous tips proved to work well again. Proud!

There are some projects I started back in 2013, and it is high time I give you a little summary on them, so read on. 🙂

Water Challenge: ended! I have to admit, I did not do it for the whole 30 days. For those who missed it, you can read about my water challenge here and here. It went well but I found managing 3 litres very difficult every day. I could not fit carrying litres of water to my daily schedule and my body literally hated drinking that much. Have you ever had the feeling that you cannot stand the “taste” of water anymore? I got there, and I decided to stop it 4 days early. I did not want to risk my relationship with fluids 🙂 However, it helped a lot, and solved my drinking problem. Now I drink around 2 litres every day, which is plenty compared to my 2 glasses per day water intake. I shocked my body and it adapted to the situation. I don’t even realize how much I drink now, it comes naturally.

Things the water challenge solved:

  • increase natural water intake
  • bladder problems
  • higher blood pressure and hearth rate (lowered both)
  • fitness (I can walk more, stand more; did not try running just yet)

Things I thought the water challenge will solve, but didn’t:

  • sleeping problems
  • skin issues (acne, cellulite)
  • skin and hair hydration
  • dark circles under the eyes

Over all, it helped a lot in my whole well-being, so I am happy to recommend the method! It won’t hurt!

Design and photography: I left Higher Click mid December and now have a new Online Marketing role at an established Hungarian company, so I concentrate most of my time and attention on that, but as soon as I’m trained in I will find the time to improve there.

Gluten free eating: not for me. I traded it in for simply clean eating, and still lost weight. I now think keeping “normal” weight is a matter of attention not a matter of diet. I do spend a lot of time on buying food at farmers markets, breaking up with processed food and eating quality meals. I keep quantities smaller but more indulging. Works well so far.

Running: definite no so far, but I might work on it a little more and see if I like it better!

And for the new year?

  • Go to a yoga class! (Okay, maybe “go to many yoga classes”..)
  • Smile and give thanks for everything I have.
  • Worry less about things that are really not that important.
  • Kiss the cats often. (occasionally the boyfriend, too. :-))
  • Let the past go fully and concentrate on the new things in my life.
  • Continue clean eating and cook more.
  • Stick with one hair color and let that be blonde eventually. 😀
Happy New Year - Life with the cats
Happy New Year from Anita and the Cats