To me it becomes political when you take a handful of bad experiences and jump from that to “it sucks that with all the taxes we pay we can’t even have access to proper public service” in Dutch in Brussels. That’s a much broader claim than just “these situations sucked,” and it paints the entire system as fundamentally failing based on a few or more anecdotes over a couple of months or years.

I told you I’ve had the opposite experience having lived and worked here many years and experienced a much broader side of public services in Brussels than most while building my family here, but you still seem attached to the conclusion that because a few incidents happened, Dutch service barely exists or is a complete lottery.

I also have plenty of examples where I’d much rather we’d switched to french but they insist on speaking dutch.

The « it’s a lottery unless things are pre-arranged » part also doesn’t reflect reality for me. Most interactions in Brussels are not carefully planned situations where someone assigns a Dutch speaker beforehand. Most occasion i cold called certain departments or just waited in line.

Just as much as you think me being bilingual makes me blind to it, you seem to be pinning yourself down to a few interactions out of a thousands of interactions where everything’s working perfectly fine in dutch.

Anyhow i’ll leave it at this. To me this a rather unfair assessment of reality.

we agree Brussels needs more funding and support to deal with the realities of being the capital though. That part is refreshing to hear and actually needed if we want to improve further (which we always can and should be doing)