Sure, you can order a pommes-frites with curry ketchup and pronounce Dries Van Noten's name without a hitch. But can you really get by in Belgium? Our Slang Dictionary will make sure of it.
We'll be rolling out more Belgian slang throughout the month of June! Submit your own words to webstore@openingceremony.us with the subject line "Belgian Slang".![]()
Belgium’s a wonderful place, but you probably shouldn’t move there for the weather. With 200 rainy days a year, you’ll be caught in a drache just a little more often than you might like. And while our Belgian National Day is celebrated in the midst of summer (July 21), we’ve gotten so used to seeing the royal family struggle with umbrellas and fight its way through puddles every year, that we came up with an expression for it: drache nationale (something like “national downpour.”)
Example sentence: What a downpour, grab an umbrella! / Quelle drache, prends un parapluie!
