17 December, Wednesday:
No one knows how Brussels got started. There were no big abbeys here, no big trade routes, etc., but suddenly Brussels just started turning up in the historical records, and when it did start turning up, it was already important. None of these big-time Belgian historians seem to have any idea. Maybe it was aliens? The tree in our garden was pollarded today, as is the Belgian custom. That means that just about everything above head height was viciously chopped off. So now we have about a 7-foot trunk with a half dozen knobby branches sticking off it, and no signs of life. The tree was gorgeous and big with lots of leaves when we arrived, and now it looks like a sad skeleton. But we are assured that in the spring it will produce all sorts of shoots and leaves and become beautiful again. We did some marketing today, some desultory Christmas shopping, and went for another walk in the Forêt de Soignes.
18 December, Thursday:
This afternoon we drove to Gent for Frederik Buylaert’s “soutenance, the public defense of his doctoral thesis. Marc is Frederik’s sponsor, and Frederik was a student of Beagle’s when he was at Columbia getting a Master’s degree. The defense was in a big room, and there were at least 125 people there, including all the usual suspects, plus An Kint’s father, Frederik’s parents (who we had met before, both in NYC and in Gent), etc. The jury consisted of Beagle, Walter, Wim Blockmans, a German man named Werner Paravicini (doesn’t sound very German to me), and a Belgian professor who I didn’t know. Unlike in Brussels, Marc couldn’t speak until after the defense was over since he was Frederik’s sponsor. Beagle went first, and spoke and asked questions in English. Frederik responded in English. Paravicini asked questions in French, Frederik responded in English, and Paravicini responded in English. The others asked questions in Dutch/Flemish and Frederik responded in Dutch/Flemish. It seemed to me that the questioning was much tougher than was the case earlier in the week in Brussels, particularly Wim’s questions. When Paravicini asked, in French, why Frederik had not had spent more time (actually any time) in his thesis discussing what was going on in the French speaking part of Belgium, Wallonia, Walter rolled his eyes, and Frederik responded in English. As our Flemish friends have told us, the French speaking part of Belgium was never part of Belgium (history to the contrary) and in any event never deserved to be. It used to be that the French speaking part of Belgium was the richest and the French-speakers looked down their noses as the Flemish peasants who, according to the French-speakers, spoke a crude Dutch dialect. Now the Flemish –speaking part of Belgium is the richest part and the tables have turned. It is now the Flemish-speakers who are looking down their noses at the French-speakers. As the Prime Minister of Belgium…a Flammand with a French-speaking father and now in deep trouble over the Fortis affair…once said, the reason that the people in the French speaking part of Belgium don’t learn to speak Dutch is that they are stupid. He got in a little trouble for that. Of course the real French look down their noses at all Belgians, French-speaking or not. Moving on…During Frederik’s defense there was much less talk about what a wonderful person Frederik was and how wonderful his thesis was, and more criticism, pointing out weaknesses, etc. There was also a quite a lot of “why didn’t you pursue this point further” type of questioning, which seemed a little strange to me since the thesis was already 500+ pages long and had an accompanying CD just for footnotes and citations. I think there is a difference between the French and Flemish/Dutch styles…the French are more flowery and less direct, while the Flemish/Dutch style is to be more direct and blunt. Everyone actually thought Frederik’s thesis was a real triumph, and he was awarded his doctorate, although with less ceremony than was the case in Brussels…the jury and faculty members left the room, came back about 5 minutes later, announced that Frederik had passed and everyone clapped. Then Marc gave a speech that was evidently very funny because everyone laughed. Unlike in Brussels, there were no academic robes (which the Belgians call togas…every time they say that, I think of Animal House), no fancy diploma, etc. But we did have a ” pot de thèse,” a big drinks party with champagne (of course), wine, and all sorts of Belgian hors d’oeuvres. Simon, Marc and Thérèse’s son, could not make it to the defense, but he did manage to make it to the pot de thèse, as did many other people at the University of Gent. After drinks Frederik and his parents treated the members of the jury, their spouses and a few friends/colleagues to a wonderful dinner in a restaurant looking out on one of the main canals in Gent. It was a beautiful site, and a great meal. Then we drove home.
19 December, Friday:
Last night on the way to Gent I filled the car with gas for the first time since the first day we picked it up, over a month ago. We had gone 862 kilometers (536 miles) and could have gone another 100k or so before the tank was empty. According to the on-board computer and my own calculations, we have been getting something like 38-39 miles per gallon. Not bad considering we have spent a lot of time driving in the city and in traffic jams trying to get out of Brussels. Today was a very sunny day, and the temperature was around 9 degrees Celsius (48F), so we ditched our other plans and got on the number 94 tram, went all the way to the end which is also the Herrmann-Debroux Metro stop, the last stop on the 1A Metro line, and went for a walk. We walked past some pretty lakes with lots of ducks, and then went into Forêt de Soignes, in a part we hadn’t been in before, and walked for a couple of hours. There were a few people walking dogs, a few people on mountain bikes, a few runners, a few people on horseback and a few people collecting firewood, but otherwise we had the woods pretty much to ourselves. The forêt is very nice. It is pretty flat, with lots of paths and tiny roads going pretty much in a straight line in every direction, so you have a lot of choices. The forêt has some very big trees, but not too many are very old, and it is clear that it is pretty heavily “managed” for wood. In this portion there were plenty of signs of logging, as well as small groves where new trees had been planted. When it started getting dark we walked to the village of Watermael-Boisfort, got on the 94 tram again, and went home. Riding on the tram is fun. Trams move much faster than automobile traffic because in some places trams have their own portion of the road that is forbidden for anyone but taxis and trams to use, plus there are special traffic lights for trams, and finally because trams have the absolute right of way. If a car gets in the way of a tram the tram driver blasts his horn until the car gets out of the way. And if they don’t get out of the way, well…the tram has the absolute right of way. We saw an example of that the other day. A woman driving a Mercedes had apparently challenged a tram’s right of way and got an expensive education. She lost the right front side of her car, including the wheel, and the tram was apparently unscathed…and unconcerned.
20 December, Saturday:
Today was warm but foggy and grey and wet. Good thing we took our walk yesterday. We did some pre-Christmas shopping at the market at Place Flagey and the Delhaise, and then walked around Brussels trying to figure out what we should show the boys of Brussels when they are here. Then we came home and had tea and went to gym. There was a lot on TV about the latest political scandal which is unfolding in Belgium. It seems that some members of the current government had inappropriately interfered in the Fortis affair (involving a bank that had to be rescued by the Belgians and the French). The government has submitted its resignation, and now it is up to the king to figure out what to do. As far as I can tell, most Belgians are sort of delighted to see that their government continues to be hopelessly corrupt and ineffective. One result of all of this appears to be that Fortis is in trouble again. Since Beagle has her checking account there, perhaps she should be worried! When I had had enough of that I watched ski jumping on German TV. My other choice was a very serious pool match on English TV. I miss Saturday afternoon sports on American TV. What do Belgians do on a rainy Saturday afternoon? Actually I know the answer to that question. Based on my observation this afternoon, I think they all go to bars and drink beer.
21 December, Sunday:
William and John and Vic arrived this morning, so I got up well before the crack of dawn (which is about 8:30 AM in Brussels these days) and drove to the airport to meet them. We got home, had breakfast, and then went out for a walking tour of Brussels, ending up at La Becasse, an old Brussels restaurant down a narrow alley off a busy touristy street that is the outlet of a brewery where you can get a simple lunch and pitchers of various beers (mostly lambics). We then went home and everyone napped. We went to dinner at l’Ultime Atom…steak frites mostly. People were tired. Beagle has still not yet gotten used to the idea that doors in Belgium open in, as opposed to out. At every door we came to, she tugged mightily until I reminded her that she had to push, not pull. Isn’t there a cartoon somewhere that shows a child at a “School For The Gifted” showing a kid pushing hard on a door that has a big sign saying “Pull”?
22 December, Monday:
Skim milk and eggs are my topics of the day. It is almost impossible to get skim milk in Belgium. They have something they call demi-ecrémé or Halfvolle, which tastes like cream to me and is probably 2 – 3% fat. This comes both in the form of fresh milk and also in those little square boxes that have been irradiated with gamma rays or something and can last for decades without refrigeration. When you look in the fresh milk place at the supermarket, there are always only a half-dozen bottles of demi-ecrémé left, whereas there are dozens of bottles of regular milk. One might deduce something about consumer buying preferences from this, but that does not appear to have occurred to the buyers at Delhaise. Everywhere you go it is the same…there appears to have been a run on demi-ecrémé, leaving that portion of the case almost empty, while the regular milk case is full. Today, however, I found actual skim milk in an Express, one of those mini-supermarkets. Admittedly, it is in the long-life irradiated form, but I snapped up a case of it before they ran out. While we are on the subject of food, did you know that the Belgians and the French don’t believe in refrigerating eggs? They just have them on the shelves like cold cereal. Julia Childs discovered this about the French years ago, and scolded them unmercifully for such backwards and health-hazardous practices, but the French paid no attention. Neither did the Belgians. So enough of this filler. Today we took the boys and Vic to Gare du Midi where they were getting a train for Amsterdam. They will spend 2 days in Amsterdam and then return to Brussels on Christmas Eve. We then bought some chocolates for Aurélie, our French teacher, and delivered them to Amira (the school) along with some CDs she had loaned us. The school was shut, but totally by chance Aurélie was there doing some work so we exchanged Christmas wishes, returned her CDs and gave her the chocolates. She says that Belgian chocolates are like a drug for her. We then went to a very nice bookstore nearby called Filigranes and had lunch. Of course you can get lunch in a Belgian bookstore. Filigranes is crowded, chaotic, and has a piano player who entertains you while you eat your sandwich and read books. Unusually for this part of town, it is open 7 days a week. Later on I went to the Post Office, which had been shut for several weeks. The old post office had thick Plexiglas windows behind which the postal clerks lurked, telling jokes to each other, drinking coffee, and occasionally shouting at the patrons on the other side of the counters through little holes drilled in the Plexiglas. It sort of felt like you were trying to buy a bottle of Thunderbird on the Bowery…or for that matter, like going to the Post Office on W. 83rd St. The new post office, however, is a totally different matter. No more Plexiglas, just open counters behind which the postal clerks sit and tell jokes to each other, drink coffee and occasionally snarl at customers on the other side of the counter. The process is the same…you take a number and wait for an hour until your number flashes on the screen and then go to the counter indicated on the screen. While waiting I saw Aurélie again…the post office is not particularly close to the school, but is one of the few left in Brussels, and thus she has few choices. I had to send a big envelope to the US, and needed it to get there quickly. I was told I had 3 options; (1) I could send it Express, which would take a couple of days and cost €33, (2) I could send it Special Priority which cost something like €5 and meant that the recipient had to sign for the envelope, and (3) I could send it Regular Priority (otherwise called airmail) which was no different from Special Priority except that a signature wasn’t required and it cost €2.70 and would get there by the end of the week. Hmmm.
23 December, Tuesday:
Today was another beautiful day. It was cold, with blue skies and sun. We went to the Musées Royaux des Beaux Arts to see some medieval art, but initially got waylaid by a special exhibit on “COBRA,” a revolutionary abstract expressionism “movement” that existed from 1948 – 1951. The movement was founded by artists from COpenhagenBRusselsandAmsterdam (hence “COBRA”). Needless to say, the movement was founded in Paris. The guides to the exhibit said that the movement was very important, but was not known at all outside of Europe. I understand why. After spending a while at the COBRA exhibition, we searched for the medieval art section of the museum. We were told the modern art section of the museum was closed because of a lack of staff, and that the area that normally exhibited medieval art was closed for renovations, but that a portion of the medieval collection was displayed in the “Ancient Art” section. Having absorbed this news, we then were told that the museum was about to close, since it closed for lunch between 12 and 2 every day. How this affected the business at the museum cafeteria we never found out, since we went for a walk. We walked to the Marolles, which is a very old (and quite poor) section of the city which is “down the hill” from the Palais de Justice. When I say “down the hill,” I mean it. To get there from the Palais de Justice you literally take an elevator down. We wandered about for a bit, and ended up at “Place du Jeu des Balles” where there is a huge flea market that is apparently there every day. There were hundreds of vendors, each of whom had their wares spread out on rugs. They had everything…computers, shoelaces, light bulbs, chairs, clothes, paintings, bicycle wheels, etc. You name it, they had it. Beagle complained that I didn’t spend any time looking at all the stuff in the flea market. My position was that there wasn’t any point in looking at stuff I knew I wasn’t going to buy. Besides, what I was really interested in was what the whole scene looked like, not whether they had a pair of shoelaces that matched the ones I had (which are still perfectly good). So some of us looked at junk and some of us contemplated the scene. We wandered a bit more in the neighborhood and found lots of public housing, a police station, and hundreds of junk/antique shops. As we got closer to the Sablon, the junk stores started to look more like expensive antique stores, and I started walking faster. At the Sablon we stopped at a café. Beagle had her usual salade niçoise. Since it was cold out and I was feeling skinny, I had the stoemp du jour with sausage. Excellent. Then we went back to the museum (running into Claire right in front of the museum…Brussels is a small place!) and spent a good bit of the afternoon looking at the medieval art. Even though I guess only a portion of the collection was on display, they had a lot, and it was very interesting. Then back home, then a trip to the Delhaise to do a big pre-Christmas shopping. We had pre-ordered a capon, which is supposed to be very good, and which surprisingly cost about twice as much as a turkey. We also tried to buy Brussels sprouts, but interestingly enough, they were all out of them. Imagine…no Brussels sprouts in Brussels.
Wednesday, December 24, 2008
Thursday, December 18, 2008
Week 6 - In which I deal with a Belgian Notary, we eat brilliantly in Sint-Pauwels, participate in doctrinal defenses and Thérèse is stumped by stoemp
10 December, Wednesday:
Today was the last day of class with Aurélie. That was OK with me. The classes were useful in that they got me speaking French, and I did learn stuff, but I didn’t feel that I was making that much progress, and that I’d probably be better off just reading books and watching TV in French. Besides, half the time Aurélie just wanted to talk, and I didn’t think that was what I was paying for! We’ll see. It was cold today. Beagle keeps complaining about the lack of heat in the apartment. I don’t know what she’s complaining about. The thermostat downstairs, which is conveniently placed near a large radiator, reads a toasty 21.4 degrees Celsius (70.5 degrees Fahrenheit). She has turned off all the radiators upstairs (where her desk is) and wonders why she is cold! But is a bit odd that she wears her ski clothes to dinner. I’ll have to get her another scarf. As compensation for freezing her, I booked a hotel in Comblain-la-tour, near Liege, over New Years. They promise all sorts of good meals and festivities, and since it is the “gateway to the Ardennes,” there is supposedly lots of walking and hiking nearby.
11 December, Thursday:
It turns out that the Christmas lights at the Ixelles Town Hall (right around the corner) are meant to look like snow falling. I guess they do, if you think of snow as foot-long flashes of blue light. But they do sort of flash downwards, so if you squint your eyes....you sort of get the idea. It also turns out that the white cloth that covers the front lawn and front steps of the Town Hall is made our of some sort of biodegradable material so it is supposed to melt in the rain and disappear altogether in a few weeks. I hope it lasts until Christmas. Luckily it hasn’t rained much in the past few days. Today was the final French class with Gabrielle, a nice young woman whom we have had once before. I am not sure who is learning more in these classes…Gabrielle or me. Last time she learned from me that there was actually a New York State as well as a New York City, and I taught her that Vermont was not in the Midwest. Today she learned that “melting-pot” was not originally a Belgian word. She was astonished. Time sort of got out of control tonight, and by the time we had finished answering e-mails, scanning stuff to insurance agents, etc., it was 8 PM and we had had no dinner. So on the pretext of scouting out places for when the boys visit, we went to Au Vieux Brussels for dinner. We had moules et frites, washed down with beer. I had a salade friesée avec lardons (which means a little bit of friesée lettuce and a lot of chopped up pork/bacon) to start. If you are determined to clog up your arteries, this is a great way to start. Next time I am having the sausages with stoemp and sauerkraut, which looked very good. The dinner was great, and we loved the restaurant. It was quite small, very drafty, and very Belgian. Not at all like those big synthetic moules et frites places you find near the Grand Place. We will go back. We left at about 10:30, and it looked like all the restaurants in the neighborhood were still busy, but had a few empty tables. In this neighborhood it seems like you had better eat early or late. And by early, I mean 7:30 PM. Most places don’t even open until then. Late is 10 PM or so.
12 December, Friday:
This afternoon we went to Gent. Beagle had to be part of a jury that was conducting a “private” examination of Frederik Buylaert’s doctoral thesis. Frederik is a nice young man who is a student of Marc’s, and was a student of Beagle’s when he was at Columbia a while ago. The thesis itself was 600 pages long, with a CD containing footnotes, all in Dutch. Beagle labored over that for several days and concluded that while Frederik could use a good editor, the thesis itself was an excellent piece of work. While the jury deliberated, and while Frederik worried, I read a book, recognizing that my sole function in this enterprise was to be the driver. There appeared to be unanimity on the jury, so the examination went quickly. Marc, Thérèse, Wim Blockmans and a couple of other people from the history department at U Gent then went with us to the “Vooruit” for a beer. The Vooruit used to be the headquarters of the Socialist party in Gent, and is a splendid building that was designed to rival the Christian Democratic headquarters elsewhere in Gent. Given the demise of the Socialists (I guess) it has been turned into a cultural center and a café/bar/brasserie. The latter was packed with students, children, etc. Some reading, some eating, some drinking, all having a good time. After a few beers, we went to a Turkish restaurant for dinner with Marc and Thérèse (good, and very inexpensive) and then drove back to Brussels.
13 December, Saturday:
Today was the formal investiture of Marc as a member of the Royal Flemish Academy in Brussels. This is a big deal, so we went. The ceremony started at 10:30 AM, and seemed to go on forever. There were a number of people being admitted as members of the Academy, a couple being given prizes, a couple being given awards, etc. There was a program (in Flemish) giving the bios of each person being honored, which all 400 of us in the hall read with interest. The ceremony started with an attractive young woman, fashionably dressed with a scarf casually (but very carefully) thrown around her neck and over her shoulder, introducing the first speaker, and telling us what he was going to say. Then the first speaker, a distinguished-looking white-haired gentleman, got up and made a 30 minute speech in Flemish, introducing another white-haired gentleman who got up and made another long speech in Flemish and then gave the long version of the first honoree’s biography (Marc) , elaborating at length on the bio contained in our program. Marc got up, was applauded, and sat down. Then the attractive young woman (who turned out to be Inez, who we knew from our last stay in Brussels when Beagle was at the Academy) introduced the next white-haired gentleman, and so on. For a diversion between sections of the program, a violinist came out and played. As time went on the audience became somewhat restless, but the white-haired gentlemen kept being introduced and kept speaking at length in Flemish. I learned a few new words/phrases in Flemish, such as “soft-porn.” And almost all the speakers used the phrase (in English) “last but not least,” but unfortunately it was always in the middle of their discourse. One of the gentlemen started his comments by saying “and now for something completely different,” but then he went on for another 30 minutes in Flemish before he showed a film clip of a pretentious Belgian intellectual interviewing a pretentious American intellectual, in English with English subtitles. The most exciting part was when a woman (I forget whether she was an honoree or a presenter) fell when getting off the stage. That woke the audience up. At some point the speakers must have been told to speed things up, so they stopped elaborating and started just reading the bios of the honorees, and then started summarizing them. Finally one of the white-haired gentlemen stood up…he was evidently the President of the Academy and had spoken several times before…and introduced the new President of the Academy, a woman. She spoke briefly and was heartily applauded. Then she got a bouquet of flowers, as did the violinist. Then everyone bolted for the champagne reception in the next room. No wonder. The whole ceremony lasted for 2 ½ hours without a break. Trying to get to the bar at the reception was like being in a rugby scrum. I can tell you that a group of academics on the scent of champagne and various wonderful hors d’oeuvres is a formidable sight, especially after they have been imprisoned for 2 ½ hours without food or drink. We grabbed some food, drank a glass of champagne, talked to some friends and went home for a rest. Later in the afternoon Beagle went out to meet Thérèse at the Grand Place to do some shopping. That turned out to be an adventure. The Grand Place was jammed, Place Sainte Catherine was jammed, more Christmas booths had been installed everywhere. Beagle’s unerring sense of direction resulted in them getting on metros going in the wrong direction twice. They arrived home exhausted with a few things to show for their efforts. After resting for about a half hour we drove to Hermann and Monique Van Der Wee’s house near Antwerp for a dinner honoring Beagle. It was quite an affair. There were 14 people at the dinner, all academics or the spouses of academics, including two couples that we didn’t know and several old friends (the Prevenirs, the Blockmans, and Marc and Thérèse. We also got to meet Hermann’s dogs, which are two German hunting dogs that were sort of like chocolate labs but different. They were gorgeous…very excited to have guests, but very friendly and well trained. Hermann, who is 80, apparently takes an 1 ½ walk with them each day, as well as playing tennis. The dinner was most elegant, served by two young men dressed in black, with each course introduced by a young chef and accompanied by a different wine, and each course (I think there were 5) more spectacular than the last. It was a meal worthy of a top restaurant, and was very nice in that while each course was exquisite, none were very big so that at the end you didn’t feel stuffed. The whole thing was very baronial, which makes sense since Hermann is a Baron. He was made a Baron by the state because of his great distinction as a scholar, and, as we found out during dinner, the title is hereditary, at least as far as his male children are concerned. Women, including his wife, don’t rate. In any event, we felt very honored. How on earth do you pay that back? We don’t even know a chef, much less have the table settings (or the table) for 14! We all staggered up from the table at about midnight and headed home.
14 December, Sunday:
Our day started early, since we left the Van Der Wee’s at about midnight. The Van Der Wees have a very nice, very modern house in the outskirts of a very tiny town called Sint-Pauwels, which is part of the tiny town of Sint-Gillis-Waas, which is near the small town of Sint Niklaas, which is not far from Antwerp. We got there with no problem, using my GPS (aka Edith). Apparently the dinner was too much for Edith, since she seemed to have a massive brain cramp the minute we left the Van Der Wees and went totally berserk. She couldn’t locate the roads we were on, kept giving us totally inappropriate instructions such as telling us to make a U-turn in the middle of an 8 lane highway, telling us to turn sharp left on an 8 lane highway between exits, “recalculating” every 15 seconds, etc. We very rapidly discovered (a) that we had no idea where we were, (b) that Edith had less of an idea, and (c) that we had better rely on the fact that we knew there was a highway going directly from Antwerp to Brussels and that we had at least started close to Antwerp. We probably had gotten half way to Brussels, but in the face of a blizzard of contradictory instructions from Edith, we turned around, went back to more or less where we had started from, drove to Antwerp and headed to Brussels. Except for the fact that we had to drive through a roadblock where they were checking people for drunk driving, this went without incident. I had been careful at dinner, but the Belgians are very tough on drunk driving, and after having sampled (well, more than sampled) 5 different wines in the course of the evening, I was not sure how well I would do if I had to blow into a balloon. But since we had a French license plate, looked respectable and were studying the map, the gendarmes just waved us through. As we got close to Brussels, Edith seemed to recover her sanity and she guided us back home without further incident. I wonder whether it was a problem with the satellites? This whole adventure took a while, so we didn’t get home until about 1:30 AM, and we slept late this morning. Once we got up, we went to Place Flagey to shop at the market. Much to our surprise, we found that a giant “Christmas Market,” which was housed in several very big, heated, tents, had replaced the regular market. There were all sorts of Christmas stuff, along with the usual booths selling food, wine, beer, cheese, and there were, of course, several bars. Everyone was happy. We found some things, but weren’t so happy because the regular market, where we had planned on buying the ingredients for dinner, had disappeared. However, we found it along the side of one of the “Etangs d’Ixelle,” small lakes near Place Flagey. We even found our bread man. We bought dinner food and bread, went home, had lunch, put on our hiking boots and parkas and went for a walk in the Forêt des Soignes. It was cold (around freezing) and while we didn’t have the blue skies of last weekend, it was very nice. We walked for about 2+ hours, ending up at the Watermael-Boisfort village again. We stopped at a café, had a hot chocolate, and took the tram home.
15 December, Monday:
The excitement of the day was that I had to get a “bank guaranty” of my signature for some legal documents. In New York you get things notarized, but these documents originated in Boston, and I guess in Boston the banks guaranty things. Not in Belgium. We tried at Beagle’s bank, and they told us that banks in Belgium couldn’t do that sort of thing. But they referred us to a Notary down the street. I am not sure exactly what a Notary is in Belgium, but it is more than a notary public. We went to the place we had been told, were buzzed in through a heavy door, and went into a room filled floor to ceiling with what looked like law books and occupied by 6 women with computers, stacks of papers, etc. One of the women took care of us. She made a copy of my passport, stamped my documents multiple times with seals and stamps that said, in English, that they were authorized to do this, and signed and dated everything. Then we waited. Then an elegantly dressed man entered to room, shook my hand, looked me in the eye, checked the documents, and made a totally illegible mark on them, shook my hand again, and then left. Then the first lady laboriously made out a bill for €15. I gave her a €20 bill, which she gave to another lady who opened a huge safe and extracted €5 in change, which she gave to the first lady, who gave it to me. We all smiled and thanked everybody and left. At least it was cheaper than Paris, where a similar transaction (for which I had to make an appointment) cost €20. One thing I did note, both at the bank and at the Notary, is that in Brussels a large number of women of a “certain age” dress in…how shall we call it…age inappropriate clothing. Somehow it startles me to see a 50 year old woman wearing a mini-kilt that was clearly designed for a 13 year old. After the excitement of getting my documents notarized we went shopping and had lunch. Beagle went to Feldenkrais, then we went to gym, and then I had a 2 hour Butler Funds conference call.
16 December, Tuesday:
Determined not to be rousted out of bed by the cleaning lady again, we got up early. And waited. She was clearly playing a game of psychological warfare, since instead of turning up at 8:30 she turned up at 10. We’ll get her the next time. This afternoon we went to ULB to participate in/witness a “soutenance,” the public defense by a student of his doctoral thesis. This takes place in a classroom filled with all sorts of friends, family members and colleagues of the student, various and sundry faculty members, a 6 person jury and a presiding faculty member, and various hangers-on like us. First, the student gives a brief talk summarizing the essence of his thesis. Then the jury members, who have all read the thesis and represent various disciplines and are both internal and external faculty members, go to work. Each jury member starts by saying what an excellent thesis it is, what a wonderful person the student is, etc., etc. Then they make a few criticisms of the thesis, point out areas where the student made mistakes or could have done something better or differently, and then ask a few questions. My impression was that some of the comments and questions were pretty mild, but some were tougher, but not too tough. Then the student gets to respond. Sometimes there was a little back and forth with the professor asking the questions, and sometimes not. Then the jury (which included our friends Thérèse and Claire) and all the faculty members from ULB leave the room and huddle somewhere else for 30 minutes and vote on whether to accept the thesis or not. Then they return, the presiding faculty member, who is now wearing academic robes, announces that the student’s thesis has been accepted and that he has been awarded a PhD. They give him the formal document, which for some reason he signs, and everyone kisses everyone else. Then everyone leaves for another room elsewhere on campus where we have a “pot de thèse,” which is to say lots of champagne. The whole ceremony was interesting, and valuable to me in that I got to listen to a lot of academics speaking French, but it struck me as a little odd because if this is done the same way as it is in Gent, the real decision had been made in a private session a week earlier, and the only way the student wouldn’t have gotten his doctorate was if he had completely gone berserk during the public ceremony. And even then, who knows? Anyway, it was good practice because Beagle is on the jury for Frederik’s public defense in Gent on Thursday, and she needed to see how it was done, what the protocol was, etc. After the ceremony we went home with Marc and Thérèse, had tea, and then went out to dinner at Belgo Belge, a Belgian-style restaurant in our neighborhood that gets consistently good reviews. We received a warm welcome, the restaurant was nice and the service was excellent, but the food was mediocre at best. Martha and Marc had “back of hare” and I had escalope of veal smothered in cheese. However, the highlight of the evening was that Thérèse ordered the “Trio of Stoemp,” three different kinds of stoemp that came with about 3 feet of sausage. Thérèse is not exactly a picky eater, but even she was unable to plow through all of that. Incredible. I think it might have been a first.
Today was the last day of class with Aurélie. That was OK with me. The classes were useful in that they got me speaking French, and I did learn stuff, but I didn’t feel that I was making that much progress, and that I’d probably be better off just reading books and watching TV in French. Besides, half the time Aurélie just wanted to talk, and I didn’t think that was what I was paying for! We’ll see. It was cold today. Beagle keeps complaining about the lack of heat in the apartment. I don’t know what she’s complaining about. The thermostat downstairs, which is conveniently placed near a large radiator, reads a toasty 21.4 degrees Celsius (70.5 degrees Fahrenheit). She has turned off all the radiators upstairs (where her desk is) and wonders why she is cold! But is a bit odd that she wears her ski clothes to dinner. I’ll have to get her another scarf. As compensation for freezing her, I booked a hotel in Comblain-la-tour, near Liege, over New Years. They promise all sorts of good meals and festivities, and since it is the “gateway to the Ardennes,” there is supposedly lots of walking and hiking nearby.
11 December, Thursday:
It turns out that the Christmas lights at the Ixelles Town Hall (right around the corner) are meant to look like snow falling. I guess they do, if you think of snow as foot-long flashes of blue light. But they do sort of flash downwards, so if you squint your eyes....you sort of get the idea. It also turns out that the white cloth that covers the front lawn and front steps of the Town Hall is made our of some sort of biodegradable material so it is supposed to melt in the rain and disappear altogether in a few weeks. I hope it lasts until Christmas. Luckily it hasn’t rained much in the past few days. Today was the final French class with Gabrielle, a nice young woman whom we have had once before. I am not sure who is learning more in these classes…Gabrielle or me. Last time she learned from me that there was actually a New York State as well as a New York City, and I taught her that Vermont was not in the Midwest. Today she learned that “melting-pot” was not originally a Belgian word. She was astonished. Time sort of got out of control tonight, and by the time we had finished answering e-mails, scanning stuff to insurance agents, etc., it was 8 PM and we had had no dinner. So on the pretext of scouting out places for when the boys visit, we went to Au Vieux Brussels for dinner. We had moules et frites, washed down with beer. I had a salade friesée avec lardons (which means a little bit of friesée lettuce and a lot of chopped up pork/bacon) to start. If you are determined to clog up your arteries, this is a great way to start. Next time I am having the sausages with stoemp and sauerkraut, which looked very good. The dinner was great, and we loved the restaurant. It was quite small, very drafty, and very Belgian. Not at all like those big synthetic moules et frites places you find near the Grand Place. We will go back. We left at about 10:30, and it looked like all the restaurants in the neighborhood were still busy, but had a few empty tables. In this neighborhood it seems like you had better eat early or late. And by early, I mean 7:30 PM. Most places don’t even open until then. Late is 10 PM or so.
12 December, Friday:
This afternoon we went to Gent. Beagle had to be part of a jury that was conducting a “private” examination of Frederik Buylaert’s doctoral thesis. Frederik is a nice young man who is a student of Marc’s, and was a student of Beagle’s when he was at Columbia a while ago. The thesis itself was 600 pages long, with a CD containing footnotes, all in Dutch. Beagle labored over that for several days and concluded that while Frederik could use a good editor, the thesis itself was an excellent piece of work. While the jury deliberated, and while Frederik worried, I read a book, recognizing that my sole function in this enterprise was to be the driver. There appeared to be unanimity on the jury, so the examination went quickly. Marc, Thérèse, Wim Blockmans and a couple of other people from the history department at U Gent then went with us to the “Vooruit” for a beer. The Vooruit used to be the headquarters of the Socialist party in Gent, and is a splendid building that was designed to rival the Christian Democratic headquarters elsewhere in Gent. Given the demise of the Socialists (I guess) it has been turned into a cultural center and a café/bar/brasserie. The latter was packed with students, children, etc. Some reading, some eating, some drinking, all having a good time. After a few beers, we went to a Turkish restaurant for dinner with Marc and Thérèse (good, and very inexpensive) and then drove back to Brussels.
13 December, Saturday:
Today was the formal investiture of Marc as a member of the Royal Flemish Academy in Brussels. This is a big deal, so we went. The ceremony started at 10:30 AM, and seemed to go on forever. There were a number of people being admitted as members of the Academy, a couple being given prizes, a couple being given awards, etc. There was a program (in Flemish) giving the bios of each person being honored, which all 400 of us in the hall read with interest. The ceremony started with an attractive young woman, fashionably dressed with a scarf casually (but very carefully) thrown around her neck and over her shoulder, introducing the first speaker, and telling us what he was going to say. Then the first speaker, a distinguished-looking white-haired gentleman, got up and made a 30 minute speech in Flemish, introducing another white-haired gentleman who got up and made another long speech in Flemish and then gave the long version of the first honoree’s biography (Marc) , elaborating at length on the bio contained in our program. Marc got up, was applauded, and sat down. Then the attractive young woman (who turned out to be Inez, who we knew from our last stay in Brussels when Beagle was at the Academy) introduced the next white-haired gentleman, and so on. For a diversion between sections of the program, a violinist came out and played. As time went on the audience became somewhat restless, but the white-haired gentlemen kept being introduced and kept speaking at length in Flemish. I learned a few new words/phrases in Flemish, such as “soft-porn.” And almost all the speakers used the phrase (in English) “last but not least,” but unfortunately it was always in the middle of their discourse. One of the gentlemen started his comments by saying “and now for something completely different,” but then he went on for another 30 minutes in Flemish before he showed a film clip of a pretentious Belgian intellectual interviewing a pretentious American intellectual, in English with English subtitles. The most exciting part was when a woman (I forget whether she was an honoree or a presenter) fell when getting off the stage. That woke the audience up. At some point the speakers must have been told to speed things up, so they stopped elaborating and started just reading the bios of the honorees, and then started summarizing them. Finally one of the white-haired gentlemen stood up…he was evidently the President of the Academy and had spoken several times before…and introduced the new President of the Academy, a woman. She spoke briefly and was heartily applauded. Then she got a bouquet of flowers, as did the violinist. Then everyone bolted for the champagne reception in the next room. No wonder. The whole ceremony lasted for 2 ½ hours without a break. Trying to get to the bar at the reception was like being in a rugby scrum. I can tell you that a group of academics on the scent of champagne and various wonderful hors d’oeuvres is a formidable sight, especially after they have been imprisoned for 2 ½ hours without food or drink. We grabbed some food, drank a glass of champagne, talked to some friends and went home for a rest. Later in the afternoon Beagle went out to meet Thérèse at the Grand Place to do some shopping. That turned out to be an adventure. The Grand Place was jammed, Place Sainte Catherine was jammed, more Christmas booths had been installed everywhere. Beagle’s unerring sense of direction resulted in them getting on metros going in the wrong direction twice. They arrived home exhausted with a few things to show for their efforts. After resting for about a half hour we drove to Hermann and Monique Van Der Wee’s house near Antwerp for a dinner honoring Beagle. It was quite an affair. There were 14 people at the dinner, all academics or the spouses of academics, including two couples that we didn’t know and several old friends (the Prevenirs, the Blockmans, and Marc and Thérèse. We also got to meet Hermann’s dogs, which are two German hunting dogs that were sort of like chocolate labs but different. They were gorgeous…very excited to have guests, but very friendly and well trained. Hermann, who is 80, apparently takes an 1 ½ walk with them each day, as well as playing tennis. The dinner was most elegant, served by two young men dressed in black, with each course introduced by a young chef and accompanied by a different wine, and each course (I think there were 5) more spectacular than the last. It was a meal worthy of a top restaurant, and was very nice in that while each course was exquisite, none were very big so that at the end you didn’t feel stuffed. The whole thing was very baronial, which makes sense since Hermann is a Baron. He was made a Baron by the state because of his great distinction as a scholar, and, as we found out during dinner, the title is hereditary, at least as far as his male children are concerned. Women, including his wife, don’t rate. In any event, we felt very honored. How on earth do you pay that back? We don’t even know a chef, much less have the table settings (or the table) for 14! We all staggered up from the table at about midnight and headed home.
14 December, Sunday:
Our day started early, since we left the Van Der Wee’s at about midnight. The Van Der Wees have a very nice, very modern house in the outskirts of a very tiny town called Sint-Pauwels, which is part of the tiny town of Sint-Gillis-Waas, which is near the small town of Sint Niklaas, which is not far from Antwerp. We got there with no problem, using my GPS (aka Edith). Apparently the dinner was too much for Edith, since she seemed to have a massive brain cramp the minute we left the Van Der Wees and went totally berserk. She couldn’t locate the roads we were on, kept giving us totally inappropriate instructions such as telling us to make a U-turn in the middle of an 8 lane highway, telling us to turn sharp left on an 8 lane highway between exits, “recalculating” every 15 seconds, etc. We very rapidly discovered (a) that we had no idea where we were, (b) that Edith had less of an idea, and (c) that we had better rely on the fact that we knew there was a highway going directly from Antwerp to Brussels and that we had at least started close to Antwerp. We probably had gotten half way to Brussels, but in the face of a blizzard of contradictory instructions from Edith, we turned around, went back to more or less where we had started from, drove to Antwerp and headed to Brussels. Except for the fact that we had to drive through a roadblock where they were checking people for drunk driving, this went without incident. I had been careful at dinner, but the Belgians are very tough on drunk driving, and after having sampled (well, more than sampled) 5 different wines in the course of the evening, I was not sure how well I would do if I had to blow into a balloon. But since we had a French license plate, looked respectable and were studying the map, the gendarmes just waved us through. As we got close to Brussels, Edith seemed to recover her sanity and she guided us back home without further incident. I wonder whether it was a problem with the satellites? This whole adventure took a while, so we didn’t get home until about 1:30 AM, and we slept late this morning. Once we got up, we went to Place Flagey to shop at the market. Much to our surprise, we found that a giant “Christmas Market,” which was housed in several very big, heated, tents, had replaced the regular market. There were all sorts of Christmas stuff, along with the usual booths selling food, wine, beer, cheese, and there were, of course, several bars. Everyone was happy. We found some things, but weren’t so happy because the regular market, where we had planned on buying the ingredients for dinner, had disappeared. However, we found it along the side of one of the “Etangs d’Ixelle,” small lakes near Place Flagey. We even found our bread man. We bought dinner food and bread, went home, had lunch, put on our hiking boots and parkas and went for a walk in the Forêt des Soignes. It was cold (around freezing) and while we didn’t have the blue skies of last weekend, it was very nice. We walked for about 2+ hours, ending up at the Watermael-Boisfort village again. We stopped at a café, had a hot chocolate, and took the tram home.
15 December, Monday:
The excitement of the day was that I had to get a “bank guaranty” of my signature for some legal documents. In New York you get things notarized, but these documents originated in Boston, and I guess in Boston the banks guaranty things. Not in Belgium. We tried at Beagle’s bank, and they told us that banks in Belgium couldn’t do that sort of thing. But they referred us to a Notary down the street. I am not sure exactly what a Notary is in Belgium, but it is more than a notary public. We went to the place we had been told, were buzzed in through a heavy door, and went into a room filled floor to ceiling with what looked like law books and occupied by 6 women with computers, stacks of papers, etc. One of the women took care of us. She made a copy of my passport, stamped my documents multiple times with seals and stamps that said, in English, that they were authorized to do this, and signed and dated everything. Then we waited. Then an elegantly dressed man entered to room, shook my hand, looked me in the eye, checked the documents, and made a totally illegible mark on them, shook my hand again, and then left. Then the first lady laboriously made out a bill for €15. I gave her a €20 bill, which she gave to another lady who opened a huge safe and extracted €5 in change, which she gave to the first lady, who gave it to me. We all smiled and thanked everybody and left. At least it was cheaper than Paris, where a similar transaction (for which I had to make an appointment) cost €20. One thing I did note, both at the bank and at the Notary, is that in Brussels a large number of women of a “certain age” dress in…how shall we call it…age inappropriate clothing. Somehow it startles me to see a 50 year old woman wearing a mini-kilt that was clearly designed for a 13 year old. After the excitement of getting my documents notarized we went shopping and had lunch. Beagle went to Feldenkrais, then we went to gym, and then I had a 2 hour Butler Funds conference call.
16 December, Tuesday:
Determined not to be rousted out of bed by the cleaning lady again, we got up early. And waited. She was clearly playing a game of psychological warfare, since instead of turning up at 8:30 she turned up at 10. We’ll get her the next time. This afternoon we went to ULB to participate in/witness a “soutenance,” the public defense by a student of his doctoral thesis. This takes place in a classroom filled with all sorts of friends, family members and colleagues of the student, various and sundry faculty members, a 6 person jury and a presiding faculty member, and various hangers-on like us. First, the student gives a brief talk summarizing the essence of his thesis. Then the jury members, who have all read the thesis and represent various disciplines and are both internal and external faculty members, go to work. Each jury member starts by saying what an excellent thesis it is, what a wonderful person the student is, etc., etc. Then they make a few criticisms of the thesis, point out areas where the student made mistakes or could have done something better or differently, and then ask a few questions. My impression was that some of the comments and questions were pretty mild, but some were tougher, but not too tough. Then the student gets to respond. Sometimes there was a little back and forth with the professor asking the questions, and sometimes not. Then the jury (which included our friends Thérèse and Claire) and all the faculty members from ULB leave the room and huddle somewhere else for 30 minutes and vote on whether to accept the thesis or not. Then they return, the presiding faculty member, who is now wearing academic robes, announces that the student’s thesis has been accepted and that he has been awarded a PhD. They give him the formal document, which for some reason he signs, and everyone kisses everyone else. Then everyone leaves for another room elsewhere on campus where we have a “pot de thèse,” which is to say lots of champagne. The whole ceremony was interesting, and valuable to me in that I got to listen to a lot of academics speaking French, but it struck me as a little odd because if this is done the same way as it is in Gent, the real decision had been made in a private session a week earlier, and the only way the student wouldn’t have gotten his doctorate was if he had completely gone berserk during the public ceremony. And even then, who knows? Anyway, it was good practice because Beagle is on the jury for Frederik’s public defense in Gent on Thursday, and she needed to see how it was done, what the protocol was, etc. After the ceremony we went home with Marc and Thérèse, had tea, and then went out to dinner at Belgo Belge, a Belgian-style restaurant in our neighborhood that gets consistently good reviews. We received a warm welcome, the restaurant was nice and the service was excellent, but the food was mediocre at best. Martha and Marc had “back of hare” and I had escalope of veal smothered in cheese. However, the highlight of the evening was that Thérèse ordered the “Trio of Stoemp,” three different kinds of stoemp that came with about 3 feet of sausage. Thérèse is not exactly a picky eater, but even she was unable to plow through all of that. Incredible. I think it might have been a first.
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
WEEK 5 - In which the sun shines, we walk in the woods, I take a tram ride and eat stoemp and am happy.
3 December, Wednesday:
Unbelievable! Blue sky today. Very nice. Plus the Christmas lights have been turned on in the streets, and the Ixelles town hall, which is just around the corner, has a Christmas tree and all sorts of lights in the trees on the front lawn. The front lawn itself (and the front steps) are covered with white sheets so they are supposed to look like there is snow. I had French class, then hustled back home for a 4 hour conference call with the Butler Funds. More gloom. After the call we caught a bus to ULB, wandered through the campus and found the lecture hall where a colleague/friend/student was giving a lecture. A lot of the usual people from Gent and Brussels were there. The lecture was in French. It was a work in progress about the medieval conception of time and space. Or something like that. I understood most of the words, but the actual thoughts behind the words were somewhat more difficult. I particularly enjoyed the part about changing perceptions of colors, since I had heard that before in Paris, about 3 years ago. After the lecture, we went out to dinner with about a dozen people including Marc and Claire Billens (an extremely nice francophone woman at ULB who was one of Beagle’s sponsors for the Franqui prize) and some of the usual suspects. The restaurant advertised itself as specializing in traditional Belgian food, so I had “stoemp.” It is a Belgian specialty which consists of a huge mound of mashed potatoes with various vegetables (such as leeks) mixed in, topped with some sort of meat and gravy. The drill is that you first ask what kind of stuff is mixed in with the potatoes, and then decide what kind of meat you want on top (steak, pork, etc). I had pork. It was delicious. It is exactly the sort of meal that Ralph Arditi would love, and that Robin would be horrified to see him eat (How about that for a plug, Ralph?!).
4 December, Thursday:
Factoid of the day: In Brussels, the metro and the trams and the trolleys work pretty much on the honor system. I think most people must have monthly passes, or something like that, but we buy little fare-cards that are good for 10 rides. Each 10 ride card costs €11.50. You can buy the cards at machines in the street, but you need cash (in coins) or some sort of special bank-card which we don’t have. Some of the metro stations also have manned kiosks where you can buy cards for cash, including bills, or with a special bank-card. But no credit cards. So right off the bat, the system doesn’t encourage people to pay for their rides, since it is hard to buy the ride cards in the first place…how may foreigners have €11.50 in coins in their pocket, or have a special bank-card of the sort only found in Belgium?...and often the place where you can buy a fare-card using bills is a few metro or tram stops away from where you happen to be. In the second place, when you go into the metro or get on a tram, etc., you are supposed to “composter” your fare-card…that is stick it into a little machine that stamps it (just like when you ride a regular train in France…but not in Belgium). These little machines are few and far between, and they are not easy to find. Since there are no turnstiles, half the time you find that you are on the metro platform and haven’t “composted” your fare-card. You then have the option of (a) getting on the train which has just arrived or (b) going back to the entrance to the metro station (several floors away, by this point) and searching around for one of the machines to “compost” your ticket. In Paris they have groups of heavily armed policemen wandering through the metro, stopping people to make sure they have a valid ticket that has been appropriately “composted,” plus they have entry turnstiles and exit gates which keep you from getting on or off the metro without a valid ticket. Not in Brussels. There are no turnstiles or gates, and no one ever checks to see if you have a valid ticket. Since no one ever checks, you would think that the temptation to cheat would be great. But apparently that is not the case. We dutifully compost our fare-card every time we take a ride, and we seem to be the only ones, but perhaps everyone else has monthly passes or something. Other than that, not much to report today. It was cold and wet, and I had a lot of things to catch up on, so I mostly paid bills, did web research to try to figure out the cheapest way to get to Washington DC for a board meeting at the end of January, cleared up a lot of correspondence, read my French book, and had a couple of American Rivers calls. In other words I mostly procrastinated. Now I know why animals hibernate in the winter!
5 December, Friday:
What a horrible day. Dark, cold, and raining steadily all day. Even the Belgians were complaining about the weather. Now I know what those people in the WWI trenches went through. I got trench foot just looking outside. For entertainment, Beagle persuaded me to take a ride with her on the 92 tram, which she takes to visit her Feldenkrais PT person. Beagle said that the facades of the houses on the tram’s route were worth seeing. She was right…sort of. The facades were very interesting when I could see them, but for most of the 30 minute trip, the windows of the tram were all fogged up. It was actually an interesting ride, since it goes from the heart of Brussels into the “suburbs.” As you leave the center of Brussels behind you start to see more detached houses, houses with lawns, parks, and while you are still in Brussels proper, you go through several “village centers” such as Uccle, Wolvendael, St. Job and Fort Jaco. Interesting. I took the tram all the way to the end, and on the ride back the tram appeared to have hit something…there was a loud crash, the tram driver slammed on the brakes and everyone in the tram was startled. But I guess trams have the right of way, so the driver just kept going. My fellow passengers included a lot of students and 3 three or four year olds who were eating and squabbling over candy and in general ignoring their keeper, a somewhat frazzled looking woman. Pretty cute, even if all their teeth will rot out before they are six! Having no food in the house, we made an executive decision to go out to dinner, so after gym we set out to see who would have us…on Friday night at 8:30PM within 2 minutes of our apartment. Au Vieux Bruxelles said it would be a 45 minute wait. So did Belgo Belge. L’Ultime Atome (it is a play on words…say it 3 times quickly with a French accent) had room for us. It was a very buzzy, very hip place. Lots of dreadlocks, face-piercing, bluejeans worn around the knees, etc. It is a brasserie/bar that is clearly too cool for us, but we did see some people who were older than we were, and while the menu wasn’t extensive, the food was good and the service was great. We both had steak-frites and were very happy. Interestingly enough, it was the first place we had been to in Brussels that was really racially mixed. Perhaps that’s why Frania’s son, who is half black and half white, had recommended it to us. In any event, it is very close to our apartment, is open all day, has beer and frites and other good stuff. What more could we want?
6 December, Saturday:
Today was a great day. It rained lightly 3 or 4 times and rained hard 2 or 3 times, but in between the rain there was brilliant sunshine. The Belgians were running for cover, afraid that the sun would blind them or do something to their accustomed deathly pallor. We went to the market at Place Flagey. For some reason, the market doubled in size this weekend. There were a lot more people selling kitchenware, etc. But our bread man was nowhere to be found. Then we went to the Delahaise for grocery shopping. It was mobbed, and we had to wait 20 minutes to check out. After laboring up the hill carrying 3 heavy shopping bags, I decided that I couldn’t wait for the boys to be here. I will make them go there with me every day and carry back all sorts of heavy stuff, like water and juice and wine and long-life milk. We had a quick lunch and then went to Place Sainte Catherine where we found a very nice milk and cheese shop, which is run by a young couple who don’t appear to be American (at least not the wife, who waited on us), but speak American English to their child. We then went to the Brussels branch of Waterstones, a British bookshop, and ended up in City 2 (a huge indoor mall) and went to FNAC, a book/CD/DVD etc. store. It was unbelievably mobbed. We had to wait in line for 20 minutes just to check out, and that was with 5 or 6 checkout lines with two checkout counters per line. While waiting in line something struck me. Have you ever noticed that in the US, the people manning the cash registers at checkout counters at the grocery store or at a bookstore, etc., are always standing up? In Europe, or at least in Belgium or France, they are always sitting down. I wonder why. Must be the unions. After FNAC we walked down rue Neuve (New Street), a wide pedestrian shopping street that runs for several blocks, and is lined with every mid-priced store you could think of, complete with natives from Columbia playing music and selling knitted goods in the middle of the street. It was mobbed. These people clearly haven’t heard about the recession. We fought our way through the crowds, took the metro to Louise and bought some bread at Paul (the fancy bread store on Place Stephanie), and went home. I tried to find some sports on TV and discovered instead a telethon featuring all sorts of singing and dancing and wonderfully healthy looking children who have some malady that France 2, the TV station, is raising money for. From this I learned that French-speaking (or at least French-singing) black people can’t dance any better than French-speaking white people. Which is to say not at all. During dinner we watched our first movie from DVDPost, “Bienvenue chez les ch’tis.” It is a very sweet and very funny French film about a man from the south of France who is forced to move to the north of France, where they have a different climate and a very different accent. Part of the joke is that people from the south of France think that the north of France is like the North Pole. What must they think of Belgium?
7 December, Sunday:
Today was the best day since we arrived in Brussels. The ground was wet when we woke up, but we had blue sky and brilliant sunshine all day. In the afternoon we took a tram to the Bois de la Cambre and went for a long walk through the Bois and into the Foret de Soignes. On our walk we came across an old hippodrome (a horse racing track) which clearly hadn’t seen any horse racing for a while, but which featured a golf course in the “infield.” The golf course was pretty flat, and pretty wet…the tees were wooden platforms with Astroturf on them because it was clear that a regular tee would subside into the mud in no time. Beyond the hippodrome we entered a real forest…nothing but trees and, of course, paths and little roads going everywhere. It was glorious to be out of the city. Beagle was very happy. After a couple of hours we emerged from the forest at something called the International School of Brussels and the American Protestant Church. All we saw were huge playing fields, lots of signs telling people to keep out, etc. No sign of a church. And, since it was Sunday, there was no one around, church or no church. We walked across a busy road, into a small and not very interesting residential area, and then we blundered into the town center of Watermael-Boisfort. There was a very imposing town hall, a street market that was just closing down, and, totally unexpected in Brussels, about six restaurants all in a row, open for business. We went into an Italian restaurant that looked nice and were told that since it was 3:30PM, we had missed the main meal but we could have a “petit restauration,” where we had a choice of lasagna, spaghetti bolognaise, or penne with cheese. I had spaghetti. Beagle had penne. It cost €36 including a bottle of wine. We were happy. There was a tram stop right across from the restaurant, so we caught a tram back to Place Stephanie. The ride took 22 minutes, and was very interesting. Watermael-Boisfort appears to be a very affluent suburb…sort of like a close-in Greenwich. There were a lot of very important single-family, free standing houses with gardens, lots of Porsches and seriously big Audis, etc. That quickly gave way to attached houses and apartment buildings, then office buildings, etc. The tram took us right past ULB, the restaurant where I ate stoemp after the event at ULB the other night, Claire’s apartment, etc. Now Beagle knows a different way to get to ULB. We bought bread at Place Stephanie, went home, went to gym, had dinner and watched a movie…Caché, starring Juliette Binoche and Daniel Auteuil. It was very interesting and I had no idea what was going on. I followed the French, pretty much, but the plot pretty much escaped me. I then read a few reviews, which made me feel better. All of them say that this is one of the greatest movies ever, but also say that who does what to whom, and exactly what is going on, is totally shrouded in mystery and is open to dozens of explanations. I think it is James Bond for me.
8 December, Monday:
Another nice day. The skies weren’t exactly blue, but they weren’t grey either. There wasn’t much sun, but it didn’t rain. I did French homework, went to class, had a conference call and watched part of a movie…Mrs. Brown. It is about Queen Victoria and Mr. Brown, a Scot. I had seen it before in English, but it was interesting to see/hear Judi Dench speaking French. It seemed perfectly natural to hear the Scot speaking French, since Scots speak a foreign language anyway.
9 December, Tuesday:
The cleaning lady arrived at 8:45 this morning and refused to go away. She said she couldn’t come back later, since she had many other apartments to clean and she had to do ours first. She flailed around with the vacuum cleaner for a while, then went upstairs and spent about an hour on her cell phone. It was cold and wet today with some snow. Nasty. We went out shopping this afternoon, and went our neighborhood bread store. The young serveuse there recognized me again…she must like gentlemen of a certain age with grey hair…and asked, with a knowing look, how I liked the “pain tradition” I had bought the other day. I told her that the “ancienne” was much better and she gave me an “I told you so look” and stamped our carte de fidelité twice so we got a free loaf of bread. We had some packages to mail to the US, so we summoned up our courage and marched off to the Delahaise grocery store, which is where you have to go until the post offices reopen on 12 December. We thought it would be a horror, but it turned out to be just fine. There were no lines and no one was there renegotiating the national debt. In fact, there was no one there at all except for the woman behind the counter, her friend who was on our side of the counter and vigorously chatting her up, and a man behind her who was very meticulously, one at a time, throwing bottles into a trash bin, with a very satisfying crash and tinkle of glass each time. With no wait and no fuss, we got our packages weighed, stamped, and sent. Perhaps we’ll stick with Delahaise and forget the Post Office. We saw a movie tonight called “The Widow’s Journey.” I thought I had read the story before…the story I read was about a widow who, during WWI, traveled to the front to find her husband, who (unbeknownst to her) had been executed for destroying military property (he had shot himself in the foot to get out of military service). The reason for his execution was, as they say, “pour encourager les autres” (to encourage the others). The plot of the movie was somewhat different. It was about a group of civic officials who took an arduous journey to the front, complete with shelling, rain, mud, etc., with a portable guillotine to execute someone who had committed some offense. A different story, but pretty much the same idea. Those French have an interesting perspective on life.
3 December, Wednesday:
Unbelievable! Blue sky today. Very nice. Plus the Christmas lights have been turned on in the streets, and the Ixelles town hall, which is just around the corner, has a Christmas tree and all sorts of lights in the trees on the front lawn. The front lawn itself (and the front steps) are covered with white sheets so they are supposed to look like there is snow. I had French class, then hustled back home for a 4 hour conference call with the Butler Funds. More gloom. After the call we caught a bus to ULB, wandered through the campus and found the lecture hall where a colleague/friend/student was giving a lecture. A lot of the usual people from Gent and Brussels were there. The lecture was in French. It was a work in progress about the medieval conception of time and space. Or something like that. I understood most of the words, but the actual thoughts behind the words were somewhat more difficult. I particularly enjoyed the part about changing perceptions of colors, since I had heard that before in Paris, about 3 years ago. After the lecture, we went out to dinner with about a dozen people including Marc and Claire Billens (an extremely nice francophone woman at ULB who was one of Beagle’s sponsors for the Franqui prize) and some of the usual suspects. The restaurant advertised itself as specializing in traditional Belgian food, so I had “stoemp.” It is a Belgian specialty which consists of a huge mound of mashed potatoes with various vegetables (such as leeks) mixed in, topped with some sort of meat and gravy. The drill is that you first ask what kind of stuff is mixed in with the potatoes, and then decide what kind of meat you want on top (steak, pork, etc). I had pork. It was delicious. It is exactly the sort of meal that Ralph Arditi would love, and that Robin would be horrified to see him eat (How about that for a plug, Ralph?!).
4 December, Thursday:
Factoid of the day: In Brussels, the metro and the trams and the trolleys work pretty much on the honor system. I think most people must have monthly passes, or something like that, but we buy little fare-cards that are good for 10 rides. Each 10 ride card costs €11.50. You can buy the cards at machines in the street, but you need cash (in coins) or some sort of special bank-card which we don’t have. Some of the metro stations also have manned kiosks where you can buy cards for cash, including bills, or with a special bank-card. But no credit cards. So right off the bat, the system doesn’t encourage people to pay for their rides, since it is hard to buy the ride cards in the first place…how may foreigners have €11.50 in coins in their pocket, or have a special bank-card of the sort only found in Belgium?...and often the place where you can buy a fare-card using bills is a few metro or tram stops away from where you happen to be. In the second place, when you go into the metro or get on a tram, etc., you are supposed to “composter” your fare-card…that is stick it into a little machine that stamps it (just like when you ride a regular train in France…but not in Belgium). These little machines are few and far between, and they are not easy to find. Since there are no turnstiles, half the time you find that you are on the metro platform and haven’t “composted” your fare-card. You then have the option of (a) getting on the train which has just arrived or (b) going back to the entrance to the metro station (several floors away, by this point) and searching around for one of the machines to “compost” your ticket. In Paris they have groups of heavily armed policemen wandering through the metro, stopping people to make sure they have a valid ticket that has been appropriately “composted,” plus they have entry turnstiles and exit gates which keep you from getting on or off the metro without a valid ticket. Not in Brussels. There are no turnstiles or gates, and no one ever checks to see if you have a valid ticket. Since no one ever checks, you would think that the temptation to cheat would be great. But apparently that is not the case. We dutifully compost our fare-card every time we take a ride, and we seem to be the only ones, but perhaps everyone else has monthly passes or something. Other than that, not much to report today. It was cold and wet, and I had a lot of things to catch up on, so I mostly paid bills, did web research to try to figure out the cheapest way to get to Washington DC for a board meeting at the end of January, cleared up a lot of correspondence, read my French book, and had a couple of American Rivers calls. In other words I mostly procrastinated. Now I know why animals hibernate in the winter!
5 December, Friday:
What a horrible day. Dark, cold, and raining steadily all day. Even the Belgians were complaining about the weather. Now I know what those people in the WWI trenches went through. I got trench foot just looking outside. For entertainment, Beagle persuaded me to take a ride with her on the 92 tram, which she takes to visit her Feldenkrais PT person. Beagle said that the facades of the houses on the tram’s route were worth seeing. She was right…sort of. The facades were very interesting when I could see them, but for most of the 30 minute trip, the windows of the tram were all fogged up. It was actually an interesting ride, since it goes from the heart of Brussels into the “suburbs.” As you leave the center of Brussels behind you start to see more detached houses, houses with lawns, parks, and while you are still in Brussels proper, you go through several “village centers” such as Uccle, Wolvendael, St. Job and Fort Jaco. Interesting. I took the tram all the way to the end, and on the ride back the tram appeared to have hit something…there was a loud crash, the tram driver slammed on the brakes and everyone in the tram was startled. But I guess trams have the right of way, so the driver just kept going. My fellow passengers included a lot of students and 3 three or four year olds who were eating and squabbling over candy and in general ignoring their keeper, a somewhat frazzled looking woman. Pretty cute, even if all their teeth will rot out before they are six! Having no food in the house, we made an executive decision to go out to dinner, so after gym we set out to see who would have us…on Friday night at 8:30PM within 2 minutes of our apartment. Au Vieux Bruxelles said it would be a 45 minute wait. So did Belgo Belge. L’Ultime Atome (it is a play on words…say it 3 times quickly with a French accent) had room for us. It was a very buzzy, very hip place. Lots of dreadlocks, face-piercing, bluejeans worn around the knees, etc. It is a brasserie/bar that is clearly too cool for us, but we did see some people who were older than we were, and while the menu wasn’t extensive, the food was good and the service was great. We both had steak-frites and were very happy. Interestingly enough, it was the first place we had been to in Brussels that was really racially mixed. Perhaps that’s why Frania’s son, who is half black and half white, had recommended it to us. In any event, it is very close to our apartment, is open all day, has beer and frites and other good stuff. What more could we want?
6 December, Saturday:
Today was a great day. It rained lightly 3 or 4 times and rained hard 2 or 3 times, but in between the rain there was brilliant sunshine. The Belgians were running for cover, afraid that the sun would blind them or do something to their accustomed deathly pallor. We went to the market at Place Flagey. For some reason, the market doubled in size this weekend. There were a lot more people selling kitchenware, etc. But our bread man was nowhere to be found. Then we went to the Delahaise for grocery shopping. It was mobbed, and we had to wait 20 minutes to check out. After laboring up the hill carrying 3 heavy shopping bags, I decided that I couldn’t wait for the boys to be here. I will make them go there with me every day and carry back all sorts of heavy stuff, like water and juice and wine and long-life milk. We had a quick lunch and then went to Place Sainte Catherine where we found a very nice milk and cheese shop, which is run by a young couple who don’t appear to be American (at least not the wife, who waited on us), but speak American English to their child. We then went to the Brussels branch of Waterstones, a British bookshop, and ended up in City 2 (a huge indoor mall) and went to FNAC, a book/CD/DVD etc. store. It was unbelievably mobbed. We had to wait in line for 20 minutes just to check out, and that was with 5 or 6 checkout lines with two checkout counters per line. While waiting in line something struck me. Have you ever noticed that in the US, the people manning the cash registers at checkout counters at the grocery store or at a bookstore, etc., are always standing up? In Europe, or at least in Belgium or France, they are always sitting down. I wonder why. Must be the unions. After FNAC we walked down rue Neuve (New Street), a wide pedestrian shopping street that runs for several blocks, and is lined with every mid-priced store you could think of, complete with natives from Columbia playing music and selling knitted goods in the middle of the street. It was mobbed. These people clearly haven’t heard about the recession. We fought our way through the crowds, took the metro to Louise and bought some bread at Paul (the fancy bread store on Place Stephanie), and went home. I tried to find some sports on TV and discovered instead a telethon featuring all sorts of singing and dancing and wonderfully healthy looking children who have some malady that France 2, the TV station, is raising money for. From this I learned that French-speaking (or at least French-singing) black people can’t dance any better than French-speaking white people. Which is to say not at all. During dinner we watched our first movie from DVDPost, “Bienvenue chez les ch’tis.” It is a very sweet and very funny French film about a man from the south of France who is forced to move to the north of France, where they have a different climate and a very different accent. Part of the joke is that people from the south of France think that the north of France is like the North Pole. What must they think of Belgium?
7 December, Sunday:
Today was the best day since we arrived in Brussels. The ground was wet when we woke up, but we had blue sky and brilliant sunshine all day. In the afternoon we took a tram to the Bois de la Cambre and went for a long walk through the Bois and into the Foret de Soignes. On our walk we came across an old hippodrome (a horse racing track) which clearly hadn’t seen any horse racing for a while, but which featured a golf course in the “infield.” The golf course was pretty flat, and pretty wet…the tees were wooden platforms with Astroturf on them because it was clear that a regular tee would subside into the mud in no time. Beyond the hippodrome we entered a real forest…nothing but trees and, of course, paths and little roads going everywhere. It was glorious to be out of the city. Beagle was very happy. After a couple of hours we emerged from the forest at something called the International School of Brussels and the American Protestant Church. All we saw were huge playing fields, lots of signs telling people to keep out, etc. No sign of a church. And, since it was Sunday, there was no one around, church or no church. We walked across a busy road, into a small and not very interesting residential area, and then we blundered into the town center of Watermael-Boisfort. There was a very imposing town hall, a street market that was just closing down, and, totally unexpected in Brussels, about six restaurants all in a row, open for business. We went into an Italian restaurant that looked nice and were told that since it was 3:30PM, we had missed the main meal but we could have a “petit restauration,” where we had a choice of lasagna, spaghetti bolognaise, or penne with cheese. I had spaghetti. Beagle had penne. It cost €36 including a bottle of wine. We were happy. There was a tram stop right across from the restaurant, so we caught a tram back to Place Stephanie. The ride took 22 minutes, and was very interesting. Watermael-Boisfort appears to be a very affluent suburb…sort of like a close-in Greenwich. There were a lot of very important single-family, free standing houses with gardens, lots of Porsches and seriously big Audis, etc. That quickly gave way to attached houses and apartment buildings, then office buildings, etc. The tram took us right past ULB, the restaurant where I ate stoemp after the event at ULB the other night, Claire’s apartment, etc. Now Beagle knows a different way to get to ULB. We bought bread at Place Stephanie, went home, went to gym, had dinner and watched a movie…Caché, starring Juliette Binoche and Daniel Auteuil. It was very interesting and I had no idea what was going on. I followed the French, pretty much, but the plot pretty much escaped me. I then read a few reviews, which made me feel better. All of them say that this is one of the greatest movies ever, but also say that who does what to whom, and exactly what is going on, is totally shrouded in mystery and is open to dozens of explanations. I think it is James Bond for me.
8 December, Monday:
Another nice day. The skies weren’t exactly blue, but they weren’t grey either. There wasn’t much sun, but it didn’t rain. I did French homework, went to class, had a conference call and watched part of a movie…Mrs. Brown. It is about Queen Victoria and Mr. Brown, a Scot. I had seen it before in English, but it was interesting to see/hear Judi Dench speaking French. It seemed perfectly natural to hear the Scot speaking French, since Scots speak a foreign language anyway.
9 December, Tuesday:
The cleaning lady arrived at 8:45 this morning and refused to go away. She said she couldn’t come back later, since she had many other apartments to clean and she had to do ours first. She flailed around with the vacuum cleaner for a while, then went upstairs and spent about an hour on her cell phone. It was cold and wet today with some snow. Nasty. We went out shopping this afternoon, and went our neighborhood bread store. The young serveuse there recognized me again…she must like gentlemen of a certain age with grey hair…and asked, with a knowing look, how I liked the “pain tradition” I had bought the other day. I told her that the “ancienne” was much better and she gave me an “I told you so look” and stamped our carte de fidelité twice so we got a free loaf of bread. We had some packages to mail to the US, so we summoned up our courage and marched off to the Delahaise grocery store, which is where you have to go until the post offices reopen on 12 December. We thought it would be a horror, but it turned out to be just fine. There were no lines and no one was there renegotiating the national debt. In fact, there was no one there at all except for the woman behind the counter, her friend who was on our side of the counter and vigorously chatting her up, and a man behind her who was very meticulously, one at a time, throwing bottles into a trash bin, with a very satisfying crash and tinkle of glass each time. With no wait and no fuss, we got our packages weighed, stamped, and sent. Perhaps we’ll stick with Delahaise and forget the Post Office. We saw a movie tonight called “The Widow’s Journey.” I thought I had read the story before…the story I read was about a widow who, during WWI, traveled to the front to find her husband, who (unbeknownst to her) had been executed for destroying military property (he had shot himself in the foot to get out of military service). The reason for his execution was, as they say, “pour encourager les autres” (to encourage the others). The plot of the movie was somewhat different. It was about a group of civic officials who took an arduous journey to the front, complete with shelling, rain, mud, etc., with a portable guillotine to execute someone who had committed some offense. A different story, but pretty much the same idea. Those French have an interesting perspective on life.
Thursday, December 4, 2008
WEEK 4 - In which we celebrate Thanksgiving in the Belgian fashion, find a Belgian version of NetFlix, and go for a walk in the park
26 November, Wednesday:
Today Beagle had been asked by our friend Thérèse to attend an all day conference on Women’s History in Brussels. So she did. Since “the men” weren’t invited, Thérèse asked her husband Marc to take care of me. So he did. Marc and I went out to dinner at a place called “Au Stekerlapatte.” As far as I can tell, the name means nothing in either French or Dutch, but Marc says that the man who started the restaurant was Flemish, so the restaurant has a Flemish feel. At least Marc was able to speak Dutch to the waitresses without any linguistic or cultural problems (not always the case in Brussels). The restaurant is in a very dreary part of Brussels right behind the Palais de Justice, which is supposed to be one of the biggest buildings in the western world (or at least it was when it was built), and was supposedly Hitler’s favorite building in Brussels. You get the idea. To get to the restaurant you walk down a very wet, cold, dreary street with absolutely zero signs of life. Near the end of the street there is a little awning, a sign, a nice door, and a window through which you can see the interior of the restaurant. Very nice. But a sign on the door tells you to enter a few doors down, at #4. There is indeed a door at #4, but nothing else. It is a very narrow door that looks like it is the entrance to a tenement. No sign. Nothing but a little #4 painted on the door jam. So I pushed the door in (remember, in Belgium doors open in) and found myself in a bleak, narrow little corridor with an even bleaker narrow door at the end. So I pushed that door open and found myself in the middle of a very nice restaurant. Quite old fashioned, with what appear to be at least 5 or 6 separate dining rooms, some full, some empty. But all charming. Au Stekerlapatte appears to specialize in game and other manly food. There is fish on the menu, but it is clearly not what the restaurant specializes in. Marc wanted something light, so he had calves’ brains and hare. I had blood sausage and roast young boar. Excellent! Thérèse and Beagle finished their dinner at about the same time as Marc and I finished, so we drove halfway across Brussels to pick them up and then Marc and Thérèse dropped us off at our apartment on their way back to Gent.
27 November, Thursday:
Strange as it may seem, Belgians don’t celebrate Thanksgiving, Therefore today was pretty much like any other day…wet, grey and cold. We had French class this afternoon with a new teacher, Gabrielle. She will fill in for Aurélie one other time in this course. I had her alone for the first 2 hours. Gabrielle is young and very nice. At one point the conversation turned to world geography. She thought that Vermont was somewhere in the mid-west, and was surprised to learn that there was a New York State as well as a New York City. The class was mostly conversation. When it came to the point where she was about to teach me the passé simple (which is only used in writing), Beagle arrived so I was able to escape. Beagle had spent the day doing PT and dealing with the formidable bureaucracy of Université Libre de Bruxelles. It appears that Beagle needs a visa if she is going to be here for more than 3 months, and visas are very hard and complicated to get. However, a solution has been found…if Beagle leaves the EU and goes to some place like England or Switzerland to get her passport stamped after 3 months in Belgium, then she’ll be OK, since she will then have another automatic 3 month tourist visa. After that exercise, Beagle claimed to be too tired to cook, so after gym we went out for Thanksgiving dinner. We ate in a brasserie called Volle Gas, which means “full gas,” as in “full throttle.” Or so I am told. But it could mean something else. Don’t ask. The restaurant is about a block from our apartment, and is typically Belgian in that it doesn’t look like much from the outside. Inside it is warm, bustling, and quite large, with lots of dark wood, glass and brass. Beagle had rabbit and I had blanquette de veau. Both were excellent and the portions were huge. Beagle also had frites, which seemed to disappear before I could get at them. The service was good. We were happy. We went home, called family, etc. and went to bed.
28 November, Friday:
We slept obscenely late this morning, and then went shopping. First at Galeries Louise for things like a hat for Beagle, underwear for Beagle, an umbrella for Beagle, etc., and then we went to a wonderful patisserie at Place Stephanie and bought bread. Since I had behaved myself so well while shopping, we went to La Régence for lunch. Beagle had her usual cheese sandwich. I had half a pintadeau (a guinea hen) and croquettes, washed down with beer. It was very nice. Then we went to Delhaize and did a big pre-weekend shopping for food, shoe polish, etc. Back home, answered a batch of mail, and went to gym. I had several phone calls with John…it turns out that one of the dishwashers in our NYC apartment had decided to gush water all over the floor. This is the second time that has happened with a brand new Miele dishwasher. Next time I’m buying a GE. Having successfully fobbed that problem off onto John, we had dinner. Beagle had found a good movie (American, dubbed into French) on the TV, so we were planning to watch that during dinner. Unfortunately, her web research had a few flaws in it, and no such movie was on the TV. So we watched a movie about a Swedish woman who had been appointed Minister of the Environment in Sweden, all dubbed into French. I’m sure it was riveting, but it just didn’t grab our attention. So we watched stories about the attacks in Mumbai. Gruesome.
29 November, Saturday:
This morning as we were headed out the door, we heard police sirens going like crazy. We walked down our street and saw that police cars had boxed in another car and were struggling with a well-dressed black man in a Mercedes. They were trying to haul him out of his car, he was resisting, and 2 younger people, presumably his children, were yelling at/trying to explain things to the police. It was unclear what was going on, but there was a decidedly racist tinge to the whole thing. Very upsetting. Brussels is interesting that way. There are lots of black and North African people in the streets, but as far as I can tell there are no black TV personalities, no important business people who are black, no black politicians, no black academics, very few black salespeople in stores (except for those run by blacks or north Africans and except for waitresses), etc. I’m sure my Belgian friends could point out instances where I am wrong, but it seems to me that Brussels is even more segregated than Paris. After that cheery start to the morning, we marched about 5 kilometers across Brussels in search of an office supply store that Beagle had found on the web. It turned out to be exactly like the papeterie right around the corner from us, but it had the hanging file folders Beagle was looking for (but so did the store around the corner), so that was good. At least we got to see some new neighborhoods. On our way back home we stopped at a bakery in Place Stephanie called “Paul.” It always has lines stretching out the door, and their bread looked very good. We bought sandwiches and bread. It is a little too far from our apartment to just run down there to get a baguette for dinner, but we will stop by there for something special or if we’re in the neighborhood. After a quick lunch we walked all the way down Avenue Louise to the Bois de la Cambre and took a 2 hour walk through the park. It was pretty nice…lots of people there teaching their kids how to ride bikes, ducks and geese in a lake, people with dogs, people jogging and riding bikes, etc. The weather was OK. Grey, but dry. There were even some piles of snow left over from the snowstorm last weekend. I would say that the park is much smaller than Central Park, but it leads to a series of connected parks to the south and west of Brussels that are huge. We knew they were there and had walked in them before, but it is always a surprise to find such a huge expanse of open land in Brussels. We went home when it got dark. In the course of our travels today we had passed a video store and had discovered how to rent videos. It is sort of a pain, since you can only rent a video for a day and you have to return it before 7 PM the following day, but we figured that anything would be better than the movies on TV. Our plan was to return there on Sunday, leave a €25 deposit, and rent a movie. I couldn’t believe that there wasn’t a better solution than that, so I went on line and found the Belgian equivalent of Netflix. It is called DVDPost and it works more or less like NetFlix. The plan you pick limits the number of movies you can see per month (the most popular plan lets you watch 8), you get the movies by mail and return then by mail, etc. I signed up, and then we went out to dinner. We went to Mano à Mano, an Italian restaurant in Place Saint Boniface. It was great. Good food (pasta, pizza, etc.) and lots of it. It was crowded and fashionable. One review I read said it was the place for pseudo-trendy people, which suited us just fine. We hadn’t made a reservation, but only had to wait for 10 minutes or so before we got a table. We got there about 8:30 and the rush seemed to subside a bit by 9:00, but at 9:30 the pace picked up again. When we left at about 10:00 we walked by Au Vieux Bruxelles to see what the lines were like there on a Saturday night. It looked very inviting, but there were about a dozen people outside, waiting to get in. We’ll have to remember to avoid Saturday night when we go there with the boys.
30 November, Sunday:
Went to the market at Place Flagey to buy bread and cheese. We buy bread at the market from a very nice man who is a very good baker…but his assistant/daughter doesn’t let him make change because “he gets confused.” We tried one cheese place, but the cheese didn’t look so great. I think our cheese man on Chaussée d’Ixelles has better cheese. We ended up at an Italian booth. Beagle made friends with a moderately deranged Belgian lady, and the cheese man was nice. But his tomme was no good. On our way home we noticed that at the Ixelles town hall, they have covered the front steps and the lawn in front of the building with some sort of white blanket…presumably to look like snow. I guess Christmas must be coming. Since it was a nice day…cold, grey and only raining lightly, we thought a walk would be a good idea. We went to Place Sainte Catherine, the place where we couldn’t find the market when we first got here. Now it is covered with literally hundreds of little stalls selling all sorts of Christmas stuff. Plus every third stall is selling food, wine, etc. Most of the food is recognizable, and some of it, like boudin blanc (think of a huge white sausage in a bun), looked very appealing. Other food substances were harder to figure out…mostly they looked like a lot of melted cheese and sausage. Everyone is happily eating and drinking. There was also a gigantic Ferris wheel, 2 merry go rounds with fantastic (in both senses of the word) creatures to ride on, a skating rink, several temporary restaurants/bars, a large (temporary) refrigerated building that you could enter and see what it is like to live in -15 temperatures (why anyone would want to do that in Brussels is beyond me), plus a huge block long inflated “bug” which you were invited to enter and see if you could avoid being eaten. We skipped the freezer, being cold enough already, and declined the opportunity to become lunch for an inflated bug. Instead we had lunch at Le Pain Quotidien. After lunch we walked past more Christmas booths, which have popped up everywhere, went through the Grand Place (more of the same) and went to the Sablon, where Beagle bought napkins. Then back home to do ironing, French exercises, and to watch sports on TV. I still have to get used to Belgian TV. First of all, programs start and end at weird times. Like 8:40 and 9:10, etc. We get a raft of French, German, Dutch and Belgian TV channels, plus BBC, CNN, MSNBC, etc. And you would think that at least some of them would have sports on Saturday and Sunday afternoons. But you would be wrong. Mostly it’s sitcoms, game shows, etc. The only sports I could find this afternoon were (a) Albanian basketball, (b) highlights of some car race which was dominated by Seats (Spanish Fiats) and compact Chevvys, (c) a summary of a Belgian bicycle race which was half run on pavement and half in mud, (d) a horse jumping contest which has been on for what seems like the last month, and (e) bowls from England…you know, sort of like lawn bowling without the grass and like curling without the ice. It was hard to know what to pick. The Passé Simple won out.
1 December, Monday:
The event of the day was a piano recital at the Royal Flemish Academy to which we were invited by Walter and Frieda Prevenir, old friends from Gent. The concert was at 7PM, and since Walter and Frieda had to catch a train back to Gent after the recital we agreed to meet at 6PM for an early and quick dinner. Easier said than done. While Walter had made a reservation for 6PM at Cap Sablon (supposedly one of the few restaurants in Brussels where you can eat as early as 6PM) in the Grand Sablon, when we got there we were informed that there was no way they could serve us dinner…it was much too early. We tried two other places until we found one where the proprietor told us, very reluctantly, that he could serve us but it would take a while as they didn’t even turn the stoves on until 6:30 PM. He doubted that he could produce a meal quickly enough for us to get to our 7PM recital. But we decided to try any way, ordered salads and croquettes (undoubtedly heated in a microwave). While we were waiting for our meal a couple of burly men proceeded to haul huge bins of trash and empty wine bottles past us and deposit them on the street…clearly cleaning up after the previous night’s festivities. We managed to avoid being crushed by one of the huge bins, ate our dinner quickly, and got to our recital in time. The recital was at the Royal Academy, where there is a Royal Flemish Academy, a Royal francophone Academy, and as far as I know even a Royal German Academy under the same roof. The academy itself was the home of the son of the King of the Netherlands in the 19th Century. The Netherlands ruled Belgium at that time, and the King sent his son to keep an eye on the unruly Belgians. Obviously, the mission failed. The recital was in the ballroom of the King’s son’s house. The room was very grand, and the recital itself was quite good, although I don’t think the marble walls helped the acoustics much. The recital started with a long speech in Flemish by the former Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs of Belgium. Then the young Belgian pianist gave a long speech in Flemish. Then he played some Beethoven, Mendelssohn and Brahms. When he stopped, the former Prime Minister gave another long speech in Flemish. Then the pianist gave another speech and answered questions from the audience. We had a short break, then more piano playing, and then more speeches. Then there was a reception, and everyone bolted for the bar in the next room…clearly, everyone had been waiting for this. We met the former Prime Minister (whose father had also been Prime Minister). It turns out that he had been at Columbia studying economics in the ‘50s. He loves the US, and tries to go there at least once a year, but he misses the twin towers and but doesn’t think much of the most recent architectural additions to Columbia’s campus. I’d like to say that he was a profoundly interesting person, but after all, Belgium is a little country, and there can’t be that many people who want to be Prime Minister. After him, we were assaulted by a fast talking Frenchman who had studied at Gent, loved the US, and had just rented a house in Naples, Florida for two months so he could “participate in the intellectual life in the US.” We tactfully decided not to say anything about the likely intellectual life he would find in Naples. He had ideas on every subject and the more we tried to flee, the more animated and friendly he got. We finally escaped and went home.
2 December, Thursday:
French lesson of the day—do you know what the French word/term for making a scrap-book is? You’ll never guess. It is “le scrapbooking,” and according to our French teacher, it is a big deal in Belgium. She was surprised to find that we had a word for it in English. I went out to get bread for dinner this afternoon, and discovered that we are now officially members of this neighborhood. The restaurant/bread shop that we have decided is the best at least for baguettes, and is fortunately right around the corner, has two types of baguettes. We normally get an “ancienne,” but they also have something called a “tradition.” I decided to try the tradition tonight, but when I said I wanted a baguette, before I could specify that I wanted a tradition, the young lady marched over to the baguette bin and pulled out an ancienne. “You always get this kind,” she said. She was horrified to discover that I wanted to try something different. Feeling the bread on the way home, so am I. I’ll bet the ancienne is better. I had four hours of conference calls this evening. One hour for American Rivers and 3 hours for the Butler Funds. Quite a way to end the day, especially since most of the time was spent reviewing the carnage caused by the financial meltdown in the portfolios of these organizations.
26 November, Wednesday:
Today Beagle had been asked by our friend Thérèse to attend an all day conference on Women’s History in Brussels. So she did. Since “the men” weren’t invited, Thérèse asked her husband Marc to take care of me. So he did. Marc and I went out to dinner at a place called “Au Stekerlapatte.” As far as I can tell, the name means nothing in either French or Dutch, but Marc says that the man who started the restaurant was Flemish, so the restaurant has a Flemish feel. At least Marc was able to speak Dutch to the waitresses without any linguistic or cultural problems (not always the case in Brussels). The restaurant is in a very dreary part of Brussels right behind the Palais de Justice, which is supposed to be one of the biggest buildings in the western world (or at least it was when it was built), and was supposedly Hitler’s favorite building in Brussels. You get the idea. To get to the restaurant you walk down a very wet, cold, dreary street with absolutely zero signs of life. Near the end of the street there is a little awning, a sign, a nice door, and a window through which you can see the interior of the restaurant. Very nice. But a sign on the door tells you to enter a few doors down, at #4. There is indeed a door at #4, but nothing else. It is a very narrow door that looks like it is the entrance to a tenement. No sign. Nothing but a little #4 painted on the door jam. So I pushed the door in (remember, in Belgium doors open in) and found myself in a bleak, narrow little corridor with an even bleaker narrow door at the end. So I pushed that door open and found myself in the middle of a very nice restaurant. Quite old fashioned, with what appear to be at least 5 or 6 separate dining rooms, some full, some empty. But all charming. Au Stekerlapatte appears to specialize in game and other manly food. There is fish on the menu, but it is clearly not what the restaurant specializes in. Marc wanted something light, so he had calves’ brains and hare. I had blood sausage and roast young boar. Excellent! Thérèse and Beagle finished their dinner at about the same time as Marc and I finished, so we drove halfway across Brussels to pick them up and then Marc and Thérèse dropped us off at our apartment on their way back to Gent.
27 November, Thursday:
Strange as it may seem, Belgians don’t celebrate Thanksgiving, Therefore today was pretty much like any other day…wet, grey and cold. We had French class this afternoon with a new teacher, Gabrielle. She will fill in for Aurélie one other time in this course. I had her alone for the first 2 hours. Gabrielle is young and very nice. At one point the conversation turned to world geography. She thought that Vermont was somewhere in the mid-west, and was surprised to learn that there was a New York State as well as a New York City. The class was mostly conversation. When it came to the point where she was about to teach me the passé simple (which is only used in writing), Beagle arrived so I was able to escape. Beagle had spent the day doing PT and dealing with the formidable bureaucracy of Université Libre de Bruxelles. It appears that Beagle needs a visa if she is going to be here for more than 3 months, and visas are very hard and complicated to get. However, a solution has been found…if Beagle leaves the EU and goes to some place like England or Switzerland to get her passport stamped after 3 months in Belgium, then she’ll be OK, since she will then have another automatic 3 month tourist visa. After that exercise, Beagle claimed to be too tired to cook, so after gym we went out for Thanksgiving dinner. We ate in a brasserie called Volle Gas, which means “full gas,” as in “full throttle.” Or so I am told. But it could mean something else. Don’t ask. The restaurant is about a block from our apartment, and is typically Belgian in that it doesn’t look like much from the outside. Inside it is warm, bustling, and quite large, with lots of dark wood, glass and brass. Beagle had rabbit and I had blanquette de veau. Both were excellent and the portions were huge. Beagle also had frites, which seemed to disappear before I could get at them. The service was good. We were happy. We went home, called family, etc. and went to bed.
28 November, Friday:
We slept obscenely late this morning, and then went shopping. First at Galeries Louise for things like a hat for Beagle, underwear for Beagle, an umbrella for Beagle, etc., and then we went to a wonderful patisserie at Place Stephanie and bought bread. Since I had behaved myself so well while shopping, we went to La Régence for lunch. Beagle had her usual cheese sandwich. I had half a pintadeau (a guinea hen) and croquettes, washed down with beer. It was very nice. Then we went to Delhaize and did a big pre-weekend shopping for food, shoe polish, etc. Back home, answered a batch of mail, and went to gym. I had several phone calls with John…it turns out that one of the dishwashers in our NYC apartment had decided to gush water all over the floor. This is the second time that has happened with a brand new Miele dishwasher. Next time I’m buying a GE. Having successfully fobbed that problem off onto John, we had dinner. Beagle had found a good movie (American, dubbed into French) on the TV, so we were planning to watch that during dinner. Unfortunately, her web research had a few flaws in it, and no such movie was on the TV. So we watched a movie about a Swedish woman who had been appointed Minister of the Environment in Sweden, all dubbed into French. I’m sure it was riveting, but it just didn’t grab our attention. So we watched stories about the attacks in Mumbai. Gruesome.
29 November, Saturday:
This morning as we were headed out the door, we heard police sirens going like crazy. We walked down our street and saw that police cars had boxed in another car and were struggling with a well-dressed black man in a Mercedes. They were trying to haul him out of his car, he was resisting, and 2 younger people, presumably his children, were yelling at/trying to explain things to the police. It was unclear what was going on, but there was a decidedly racist tinge to the whole thing. Very upsetting. Brussels is interesting that way. There are lots of black and North African people in the streets, but as far as I can tell there are no black TV personalities, no important business people who are black, no black politicians, no black academics, very few black salespeople in stores (except for those run by blacks or north Africans and except for waitresses), etc. I’m sure my Belgian friends could point out instances where I am wrong, but it seems to me that Brussels is even more segregated than Paris. After that cheery start to the morning, we marched about 5 kilometers across Brussels in search of an office supply store that Beagle had found on the web. It turned out to be exactly like the papeterie right around the corner from us, but it had the hanging file folders Beagle was looking for (but so did the store around the corner), so that was good. At least we got to see some new neighborhoods. On our way back home we stopped at a bakery in Place Stephanie called “Paul.” It always has lines stretching out the door, and their bread looked very good. We bought sandwiches and bread. It is a little too far from our apartment to just run down there to get a baguette for dinner, but we will stop by there for something special or if we’re in the neighborhood. After a quick lunch we walked all the way down Avenue Louise to the Bois de la Cambre and took a 2 hour walk through the park. It was pretty nice…lots of people there teaching their kids how to ride bikes, ducks and geese in a lake, people with dogs, people jogging and riding bikes, etc. The weather was OK. Grey, but dry. There were even some piles of snow left over from the snowstorm last weekend. I would say that the park is much smaller than Central Park, but it leads to a series of connected parks to the south and west of Brussels that are huge. We knew they were there and had walked in them before, but it is always a surprise to find such a huge expanse of open land in Brussels. We went home when it got dark. In the course of our travels today we had passed a video store and had discovered how to rent videos. It is sort of a pain, since you can only rent a video for a day and you have to return it before 7 PM the following day, but we figured that anything would be better than the movies on TV. Our plan was to return there on Sunday, leave a €25 deposit, and rent a movie. I couldn’t believe that there wasn’t a better solution than that, so I went on line and found the Belgian equivalent of Netflix. It is called DVDPost and it works more or less like NetFlix. The plan you pick limits the number of movies you can see per month (the most popular plan lets you watch 8), you get the movies by mail and return then by mail, etc. I signed up, and then we went out to dinner. We went to Mano à Mano, an Italian restaurant in Place Saint Boniface. It was great. Good food (pasta, pizza, etc.) and lots of it. It was crowded and fashionable. One review I read said it was the place for pseudo-trendy people, which suited us just fine. We hadn’t made a reservation, but only had to wait for 10 minutes or so before we got a table. We got there about 8:30 and the rush seemed to subside a bit by 9:00, but at 9:30 the pace picked up again. When we left at about 10:00 we walked by Au Vieux Bruxelles to see what the lines were like there on a Saturday night. It looked very inviting, but there were about a dozen people outside, waiting to get in. We’ll have to remember to avoid Saturday night when we go there with the boys.
30 November, Sunday:
Went to the market at Place Flagey to buy bread and cheese. We buy bread at the market from a very nice man who is a very good baker…but his assistant/daughter doesn’t let him make change because “he gets confused.” We tried one cheese place, but the cheese didn’t look so great. I think our cheese man on Chaussée d’Ixelles has better cheese. We ended up at an Italian booth. Beagle made friends with a moderately deranged Belgian lady, and the cheese man was nice. But his tomme was no good. On our way home we noticed that at the Ixelles town hall, they have covered the front steps and the lawn in front of the building with some sort of white blanket…presumably to look like snow. I guess Christmas must be coming. Since it was a nice day…cold, grey and only raining lightly, we thought a walk would be a good idea. We went to Place Sainte Catherine, the place where we couldn’t find the market when we first got here. Now it is covered with literally hundreds of little stalls selling all sorts of Christmas stuff. Plus every third stall is selling food, wine, etc. Most of the food is recognizable, and some of it, like boudin blanc (think of a huge white sausage in a bun), looked very appealing. Other food substances were harder to figure out…mostly they looked like a lot of melted cheese and sausage. Everyone is happily eating and drinking. There was also a gigantic Ferris wheel, 2 merry go rounds with fantastic (in both senses of the word) creatures to ride on, a skating rink, several temporary restaurants/bars, a large (temporary) refrigerated building that you could enter and see what it is like to live in -15 temperatures (why anyone would want to do that in Brussels is beyond me), plus a huge block long inflated “bug” which you were invited to enter and see if you could avoid being eaten. We skipped the freezer, being cold enough already, and declined the opportunity to become lunch for an inflated bug. Instead we had lunch at Le Pain Quotidien. After lunch we walked past more Christmas booths, which have popped up everywhere, went through the Grand Place (more of the same) and went to the Sablon, where Beagle bought napkins. Then back home to do ironing, French exercises, and to watch sports on TV. I still have to get used to Belgian TV. First of all, programs start and end at weird times. Like 8:40 and 9:10, etc. We get a raft of French, German, Dutch and Belgian TV channels, plus BBC, CNN, MSNBC, etc. And you would think that at least some of them would have sports on Saturday and Sunday afternoons. But you would be wrong. Mostly it’s sitcoms, game shows, etc. The only sports I could find this afternoon were (a) Albanian basketball, (b) highlights of some car race which was dominated by Seats (Spanish Fiats) and compact Chevvys, (c) a summary of a Belgian bicycle race which was half run on pavement and half in mud, (d) a horse jumping contest which has been on for what seems like the last month, and (e) bowls from England…you know, sort of like lawn bowling without the grass and like curling without the ice. It was hard to know what to pick. The Passé Simple won out.
1 December, Monday:
The event of the day was a piano recital at the Royal Flemish Academy to which we were invited by Walter and Frieda Prevenir, old friends from Gent. The concert was at 7PM, and since Walter and Frieda had to catch a train back to Gent after the recital we agreed to meet at 6PM for an early and quick dinner. Easier said than done. While Walter had made a reservation for 6PM at Cap Sablon (supposedly one of the few restaurants in Brussels where you can eat as early as 6PM) in the Grand Sablon, when we got there we were informed that there was no way they could serve us dinner…it was much too early. We tried two other places until we found one where the proprietor told us, very reluctantly, that he could serve us but it would take a while as they didn’t even turn the stoves on until 6:30 PM. He doubted that he could produce a meal quickly enough for us to get to our 7PM recital. But we decided to try any way, ordered salads and croquettes (undoubtedly heated in a microwave). While we were waiting for our meal a couple of burly men proceeded to haul huge bins of trash and empty wine bottles past us and deposit them on the street…clearly cleaning up after the previous night’s festivities. We managed to avoid being crushed by one of the huge bins, ate our dinner quickly, and got to our recital in time. The recital was at the Royal Academy, where there is a Royal Flemish Academy, a Royal francophone Academy, and as far as I know even a Royal German Academy under the same roof. The academy itself was the home of the son of the King of the Netherlands in the 19th Century. The Netherlands ruled Belgium at that time, and the King sent his son to keep an eye on the unruly Belgians. Obviously, the mission failed. The recital was in the ballroom of the King’s son’s house. The room was very grand, and the recital itself was quite good, although I don’t think the marble walls helped the acoustics much. The recital started with a long speech in Flemish by the former Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs of Belgium. Then the young Belgian pianist gave a long speech in Flemish. Then he played some Beethoven, Mendelssohn and Brahms. When he stopped, the former Prime Minister gave another long speech in Flemish. Then the pianist gave another speech and answered questions from the audience. We had a short break, then more piano playing, and then more speeches. Then there was a reception, and everyone bolted for the bar in the next room…clearly, everyone had been waiting for this. We met the former Prime Minister (whose father had also been Prime Minister). It turns out that he had been at Columbia studying economics in the ‘50s. He loves the US, and tries to go there at least once a year, but he misses the twin towers and but doesn’t think much of the most recent architectural additions to Columbia’s campus. I’d like to say that he was a profoundly interesting person, but after all, Belgium is a little country, and there can’t be that many people who want to be Prime Minister. After him, we were assaulted by a fast talking Frenchman who had studied at Gent, loved the US, and had just rented a house in Naples, Florida for two months so he could “participate in the intellectual life in the US.” We tactfully decided not to say anything about the likely intellectual life he would find in Naples. He had ideas on every subject and the more we tried to flee, the more animated and friendly he got. We finally escaped and went home.
2 December, Thursday:
French lesson of the day—do you know what the French word/term for making a scrap-book is? You’ll never guess. It is “le scrapbooking,” and according to our French teacher, it is a big deal in Belgium. She was surprised to find that we had a word for it in English. I went out to get bread for dinner this afternoon, and discovered that we are now officially members of this neighborhood. The restaurant/bread shop that we have decided is the best at least for baguettes, and is fortunately right around the corner, has two types of baguettes. We normally get an “ancienne,” but they also have something called a “tradition.” I decided to try the tradition tonight, but when I said I wanted a baguette, before I could specify that I wanted a tradition, the young lady marched over to the baguette bin and pulled out an ancienne. “You always get this kind,” she said. She was horrified to discover that I wanted to try something different. Feeling the bread on the way home, so am I. I’ll bet the ancienne is better. I had four hours of conference calls this evening. One hour for American Rivers and 3 hours for the Butler Funds. Quite a way to end the day, especially since most of the time was spent reviewing the carnage caused by the financial meltdown in the portfolios of these organizations.
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
WEEK 3 - In which I am introduced to a classic American board game,the exploration and conquest of Bruxelles, the post office and the weather
19 November, Wednesday:
We slept late, raced through our French homework, went to a 4 hour French class, went shopping, went to gym, ate dinner and collapsed. Oh yes. It was cold and grey. Yesterday was the same except with more rain.
20 November, Thursday:
Beagle gave up on French class today. Instead she went to the bank to try to get her bank account straightened out. One problem is that when she tries to e-mail the lady who is helping her, the bank rejects her e-mail. The bank's e-mail system says they have never heard of Beagle's friend. When Beagle told her that, the lady said oh yes, lots of people have told me that. I guess I should look into it.
Beagle tells me that she now has a bank account. It has no money in it, and she can't access it, but she has a bank account. Unlike Beagle, I did my French homework and went to class. It was the last class with Tanner. His accent is horrible, he can't understand anything anyone says, and he can't say anything much, but he knows all the grammatical rules. At the end of the class we played a game called 'Boogle.' It consists of trying to see how many French words you can make out of something like 36 randomly chosen letters - sort of like scrabble. We played 5 games. Tanner creamed me in all of them. Oh dear. I dragged my wounded pride back home, went to gym, etc. Oh yes. It was colder today, and grey. But there was no rain, or at least none that you would really count.
21 November, Friday:
No class today. It is wet and grey out, and it is supposed to get much colder. Last Friday I went to the Post Office near us. It was pretty chaotic, but things seemed to work pretty well. I was pleased because I had heard that the postal authorities had closed a lot of post offices in Brussels, leaving ours as one of the few left open. This week the Belgians decided to really reorganize the Post Office. I don't know everything that is involved in the restructuring, but the first step involves shutting down ALL the post offices in Brussels (and perhaps in all of Belgium as far as I know) until December 12th. What people are supposed to do in the interim, I don't know. Some supermarkets are going to sell stamps and accept outgoing mail, but it is hard for me to see how that is a real solution. I guess it is easier for them to get away with this in Belgium than it would be in the US, since no one here pays bills by mail any more, or for that matter uses checks. I suppose the only people who will be really affected are foreigners without Belgian bank accounts - such as us and the thousands of North-African immigrants, who were the ones jamming the post office last week! In the afternoon I went to Galerie Louise, a very upscale multilevel shopping mall a few blocks from here. It has entrances on Avenue Louise and Toison d'Or, and the entrances look more or less like those of any other fancy shop. But when you get inside there is a maze of shops, restaurants, etc. There are dozens of shops on 3 levels, without any map or guide or anything to tell you what stores are there or where they are located. It was very disorienting. I would be wandering around on one level and then discover that somehow I had ended up on a totally different level. In any event, I found a pretty good bookstore, so I was happy. We went to gym early, had an early dinner and then went to a dance performance where the choreographer and one of the dancers was the son of Beagle's Feldenkrais guru in NYC, Frania Zins. Frania had flown in for the occasion. The performance was in a remote part of Brussels, and we got lost getting there, which was fun in the rain, but the performance space was gorgeous and the dance was very modern and I thought very good. There were two parts; the first consisted of 4 or 5 young dancers doing sort of dance kind of things, clumping around in big heavy sneakers. The second part, which I loved, was 6 or 7 older people (and I mean older - median age was probably 80) doing somewhat the same. It was great. And as a bonus, in the process of finding the dance studio we also found the market at Place Sainte Catherine, which we had been unable to find the other day. There were dozens of stalls, dozens of restaurants, etc. How we could have missed it last week, I don't know.
22 November, Saturday:
It was dark, cold and snowing when we got up. I went grocery shopping after breakfast, and on my way to the grocery store thing cleared up and there was actually blue sky - a beautiful, cold, winter's day. There were Belgians in the street cheering. When I came out of the grocery store it was dark and wet and snowing again. Beagle had to go to a conference in Antwerp (which the French foppishly call Anvers), so we drove there through a mixture of light rain, heavy rain, snow, sleet, hail and slush. It changed every five minutes. Beagle's conference was in a big complex of buildings, courtyards, multiple entryways, etc. The conference organizers had printed up a brochure that had a map of the area showing parking garages, streets, etc. Unfortunately, none of the parking garages shown on the map existed. Plus once we found a parking garage (with NYC prices, almost), and found the entrance to the complex, we discovered (a) that the brochure neglected to say where in the complex Beagle's conference was taking place and (b) that none of the 3 people we found while wandering around the complex had ever heard of Beagle's conference. So we wandered around for a while, tried entrances G, F, E, D, C, B and A. By the time we got to entrance B for at least the second time, Madame was starting to do her imitation of Krakatoa about to erupt, and that attracted the attention of a young man who was 3 floors above us, and hearing English being spoken, figured that we were looking for the conference, and came and got us. In the meantime Beagle had called our friend Marc, who was also at the conference, and he also came to get us. But he took the elevator down and we took the stairs up, so we missed each other. Sort of like a Keystone Cops routine. In the end we found the conference and had lunch. In very un-Belgian fashion, lunch was cheese and egg sandwiches and water, eaten standing up. We thought it was fine, and the people from Gent are used to it. After all, the people from Gent tell us, Antwerp is in Northern Belgium, almost in Holland, so what do you expect (For that matter, so is Gent, but I guess that is something different). The conference was supposed to start after lunch, so I left. I wandered through a big garden, and when it started snowing hard, I took refuge in something that looked like a big greenhouse. As it turned out, part of it was a very warm and dry room with all sorts of cactuses and sand, and another room was hot and humid with all sorts of exotic rain forest vegetation. Interesting, and it got me out of the snow. After that I went to a museum that is in the house of a wealthy Belgian who lived in the late 19th and early 20th century. He was a big collector of paintings, furniture, etc., and the house was full of all sorts of Low Countries art and artifacts, a lot of it from the 15th and 16th centuries. Plus, in a modern portion of the museum, there was an exhibition of almost photographic still life paintings done by a contemporary artist. After that I went to Rubinshuis, which is exactly that…Ruben's house and studio in the middle of Antwerp. It was very crowded, but interesting. The museum has some painting by Rubens, but it mostly shows how the house was furnished when he lived there, and many of the paintings are those from his contemporaries that he had bought for his own collection. It was pretty interesting, and made more so by the audio guide that you got when you paid your admission. Then I wandered up and down the Meir, which is a very wide street, totally closed to traffic at that hour, and lined with fancy shops of all descriptions. There were literally thousands of people in the street, most of them with shopping bags. If the Belgian economy is in a recession, the people of Antwerp haven't heard about it. I bought an Economist magazine. The conference was supposed to be over by about 5:30, so I returned and after some stumbling around found my way back. There was the usual post-conference milling about, and then about 20 of us went across the street to get a beer at a bar. It was a great scene. There were lots of different kinds of beer (each in its own special glass), lots of conviviality, etc. Interestingly enough, some of the French people at the conference had never even heard of some of the Belgian beers (Kriek, for example), much lest tasted them. After beer, about half the original group joined up with another group and walked (for a long way) to the Belgian-American Club, where we had dinner. It was unclear exactly what the Belgian-American club is all about, but it had all sorts of American military memorabilia hanging around, including regimental plaques, wooden propellers, etc. The club itself a treat - in a lovely old building with a lot of 30's, 40's and 50's style. Sort of like the Harvard club without the stuffed animal heads hanging on the wall. I am told that the club is divided in a typically Belgian fashion - the Americans are on one side of the club and the Belgians are on the other. We must have been on the Belgian side, because except for some wandering Spanish guitar players who serenaded us at top volume and then asked for money and handed out business cards, we saw no foreigners on our side. Other than not being able to hear what anyone was saying until the guitar players quit, the dinner was fabulous. We had lots of Belgian specialties and they were all good. The conversation was in a mixture of French, Dutch and English. I am OK on the first and the last, but Dutch is Chinese to me. After dinner, everyone had to go home. In spite of the fact that a number of the people at the dinner were students or professors at the University of Antwerp, none of them appeared to live in Antwerp. They were all gong back to Gent or Brussels. Interesting, because Antwerp is a very nice city. New Belgian fact: At least one story has it that Antwerp got its name because of a giant living on the river Scheldt used to collect a toll from people crossing the river at the current site of Antwerp. If someone refused to pay the toll, the giant would chop off one of their hands and throw it in the river. One day a young man came along and killed the giant, chopped off his hand, and threw it in the river. If you believe the legend, 'hand werpen,' Dutch for 'hand' and 'throw,' got changed into Antwerpen, Dutch for Antwerp. With that interesting fact buzzing around in our heads, we drove back to Brussels, giving a ride to a young German man who had been at the conference.
23 November, Sunday:
Today was very cold and, of course, grey. But except for the occasional snowflake, it was relatively dry. None of yesterday's snow seems to have stuck. Beagle had to go to a seance with Frania, her NYC Feldenkrais guru. I went to Place Flagey to the market and bought food. Love those roast chickens! After Beagle's Feldenkrais session she and Frania went to a Pain Quotidien (one of the few places that is open in Brussels on Sunday, and which serves non-stop) for a late lunch. Frania's son, Andros, his girlfriend, and I were all supposed to meet there. Everybody got lost, as the restaurant was near Frania's son's apartment but not near much else. It was cold (-3 degrees Celsius, 26-27 degrees Fahrenheit), very wet, very windy, and was snowing like mad. We all finally got there, dripping wet with shoes soaked through, in time for a 4 PM lunch. After lunch the streets were very slushy and icy, and we slid home. Our garden had about an inch of snow in it. We have outdoor lights that light up the garden, and it is quite pretty in the snow. I am off to gym in a bit. Beagle says she has to stay home and work and then we'll have a late dinner.
24 November, Monday:
Today started out warmer, and there were even a few glimpses of blue sky. By early afternoon, however, it was back to rain mixed with sleet and snow. Today was the first day of our new French classes. We will have the same teacher most of the time, but it is just the two of us for around three hours a day, 3 days a week, for the next 3 weeks. We are going to split the classes so each of us has about 1 1/2 hours of private lessons, 3 days a week. By Christmas I should be able to order a beer. The first class went pretty well. We did a few exercises with the subjonctif passe, but mostly it was conversation. One thing I learned was that the French hate repetition, both in speaking and in writing. Plus they are by nature pessimistic. So, to use an example from a book I am reading, if you want to say that Mr.X's wife committed suicide in 1979 and then (several sentences later) that Mr. X himself committed suicide in 1980, you have to use two different ways of saying "committed suicide." Somehow I think that Americans would use a different example. After French class, we went to gym. Our gym is small, but perfectly nice. It is not used very much, but there appear to be a few regulars. One is a young man who speaks some sort of Slavic language, flails around on all the machines having set them at almost zero resistance, thus not getting much of a workout. Mostly he talks to a friend. And in spite of the fact that he doesn't seem to break into a sweat, most of the time he has a body odor that would make a New York City homeless person's eyes water. We have discovered that he generally turns up at around 8PM, so we try to leave before then. The gym also has a changing room that has lockers, showers, a steam room, a seating area, etc. The men's changing room appears to be bigger than the gym itself. People go in there and stay for hours. The gym is two doors down from our apartment, so we just walk down the street in our gym clothes. Belgians who see us think we are mad. They may have a point.
25 November, Tuesday:
This morning the ground was wet, and it was cloudy and cold, but there were patches of blue sky. That didn't last long. Grey and wet again. Did French exercises this morning and went to class. On the way there and on the way home, I did some more exploring in our neighborhood. The other day I had found a nice looking square right near us with a few restaurants. When I looked at my Routard (a guide book) I discovered that they recommended one of the restaurants. Then Frania's son told us about a bunch of good restaurants in our neighborhood that happened to be on that square, including one that was mentioned in my Routard. Today I saw another restaurant called Au Vieux Bruxelles. I looked it up, and it is one of the 5 or 6 top restaurants recommended by Frommer or Fodor, or one of those guys. Not because it is fancy, but because it is 100 years old and serves great moules et frites in an authentic setting with no tourists. At least the sign over the door looks to be 100 years old. It turns out that Place Boniface (which is where these places are) is so named because there is a lovely Gothic church (so I am told - the church is being renovated and is completely wrapped in some sort of material - sort of like a Christo installation) called Saint Boniface at the head of the square. Place Boniface, according to the web, is one of the trendiest places in Brussels for those in the know, with a bunch of restaurants and bars, etc. It is sort of in the middle of the African quarter of Brussels, which may explain why it is off the main tourist route. In any event, it is only a few blocks from us, and once Beagle stops being consumed by conferences and the like, we may have a chance to explore it. I certainly plan to go there with the boys and Vic for moules and frites and beer when they are here for Christmas.
We slept late, raced through our French homework, went to a 4 hour French class, went shopping, went to gym, ate dinner and collapsed. Oh yes. It was cold and grey. Yesterday was the same except with more rain.
20 November, Thursday:
Beagle gave up on French class today. Instead she went to the bank to try to get her bank account straightened out. One problem is that when she tries to e-mail the lady who is helping her, the bank rejects her e-mail. The bank's e-mail system says they have never heard of Beagle's friend. When Beagle told her that, the lady said oh yes, lots of people have told me that. I guess I should look into it.
Beagle tells me that she now has a bank account. It has no money in it, and she can't access it, but she has a bank account. Unlike Beagle, I did my French homework and went to class. It was the last class with Tanner. His accent is horrible, he can't understand anything anyone says, and he can't say anything much, but he knows all the grammatical rules. At the end of the class we played a game called 'Boogle.' It consists of trying to see how many French words you can make out of something like 36 randomly chosen letters - sort of like scrabble. We played 5 games. Tanner creamed me in all of them. Oh dear. I dragged my wounded pride back home, went to gym, etc. Oh yes. It was colder today, and grey. But there was no rain, or at least none that you would really count.
21 November, Friday:
No class today. It is wet and grey out, and it is supposed to get much colder. Last Friday I went to the Post Office near us. It was pretty chaotic, but things seemed to work pretty well. I was pleased because I had heard that the postal authorities had closed a lot of post offices in Brussels, leaving ours as one of the few left open. This week the Belgians decided to really reorganize the Post Office. I don't know everything that is involved in the restructuring, but the first step involves shutting down ALL the post offices in Brussels (and perhaps in all of Belgium as far as I know) until December 12th. What people are supposed to do in the interim, I don't know. Some supermarkets are going to sell stamps and accept outgoing mail, but it is hard for me to see how that is a real solution. I guess it is easier for them to get away with this in Belgium than it would be in the US, since no one here pays bills by mail any more, or for that matter uses checks. I suppose the only people who will be really affected are foreigners without Belgian bank accounts - such as us and the thousands of North-African immigrants, who were the ones jamming the post office last week! In the afternoon I went to Galerie Louise, a very upscale multilevel shopping mall a few blocks from here. It has entrances on Avenue Louise and Toison d'Or, and the entrances look more or less like those of any other fancy shop. But when you get inside there is a maze of shops, restaurants, etc. There are dozens of shops on 3 levels, without any map or guide or anything to tell you what stores are there or where they are located. It was very disorienting. I would be wandering around on one level and then discover that somehow I had ended up on a totally different level. In any event, I found a pretty good bookstore, so I was happy. We went to gym early, had an early dinner and then went to a dance performance where the choreographer and one of the dancers was the son of Beagle's Feldenkrais guru in NYC, Frania Zins. Frania had flown in for the occasion. The performance was in a remote part of Brussels, and we got lost getting there, which was fun in the rain, but the performance space was gorgeous and the dance was very modern and I thought very good. There were two parts; the first consisted of 4 or 5 young dancers doing sort of dance kind of things, clumping around in big heavy sneakers. The second part, which I loved, was 6 or 7 older people (and I mean older - median age was probably 80) doing somewhat the same. It was great. And as a bonus, in the process of finding the dance studio we also found the market at Place Sainte Catherine, which we had been unable to find the other day. There were dozens of stalls, dozens of restaurants, etc. How we could have missed it last week, I don't know.
22 November, Saturday:
It was dark, cold and snowing when we got up. I went grocery shopping after breakfast, and on my way to the grocery store thing cleared up and there was actually blue sky - a beautiful, cold, winter's day. There were Belgians in the street cheering. When I came out of the grocery store it was dark and wet and snowing again. Beagle had to go to a conference in Antwerp (which the French foppishly call Anvers), so we drove there through a mixture of light rain, heavy rain, snow, sleet, hail and slush. It changed every five minutes. Beagle's conference was in a big complex of buildings, courtyards, multiple entryways, etc. The conference organizers had printed up a brochure that had a map of the area showing parking garages, streets, etc. Unfortunately, none of the parking garages shown on the map existed. Plus once we found a parking garage (with NYC prices, almost), and found the entrance to the complex, we discovered (a) that the brochure neglected to say where in the complex Beagle's conference was taking place and (b) that none of the 3 people we found while wandering around the complex had ever heard of Beagle's conference. So we wandered around for a while, tried entrances G, F, E, D, C, B and A. By the time we got to entrance B for at least the second time, Madame was starting to do her imitation of Krakatoa about to erupt, and that attracted the attention of a young man who was 3 floors above us, and hearing English being spoken, figured that we were looking for the conference, and came and got us. In the meantime Beagle had called our friend Marc, who was also at the conference, and he also came to get us. But he took the elevator down and we took the stairs up, so we missed each other. Sort of like a Keystone Cops routine. In the end we found the conference and had lunch. In very un-Belgian fashion, lunch was cheese and egg sandwiches and water, eaten standing up. We thought it was fine, and the people from Gent are used to it. After all, the people from Gent tell us, Antwerp is in Northern Belgium, almost in Holland, so what do you expect (For that matter, so is Gent, but I guess that is something different). The conference was supposed to start after lunch, so I left. I wandered through a big garden, and when it started snowing hard, I took refuge in something that looked like a big greenhouse. As it turned out, part of it was a very warm and dry room with all sorts of cactuses and sand, and another room was hot and humid with all sorts of exotic rain forest vegetation. Interesting, and it got me out of the snow. After that I went to a museum that is in the house of a wealthy Belgian who lived in the late 19th and early 20th century. He was a big collector of paintings, furniture, etc., and the house was full of all sorts of Low Countries art and artifacts, a lot of it from the 15th and 16th centuries. Plus, in a modern portion of the museum, there was an exhibition of almost photographic still life paintings done by a contemporary artist. After that I went to Rubinshuis, which is exactly that…Ruben's house and studio in the middle of Antwerp. It was very crowded, but interesting. The museum has some painting by Rubens, but it mostly shows how the house was furnished when he lived there, and many of the paintings are those from his contemporaries that he had bought for his own collection. It was pretty interesting, and made more so by the audio guide that you got when you paid your admission. Then I wandered up and down the Meir, which is a very wide street, totally closed to traffic at that hour, and lined with fancy shops of all descriptions. There were literally thousands of people in the street, most of them with shopping bags. If the Belgian economy is in a recession, the people of Antwerp haven't heard about it. I bought an Economist magazine. The conference was supposed to be over by about 5:30, so I returned and after some stumbling around found my way back. There was the usual post-conference milling about, and then about 20 of us went across the street to get a beer at a bar. It was a great scene. There were lots of different kinds of beer (each in its own special glass), lots of conviviality, etc. Interestingly enough, some of the French people at the conference had never even heard of some of the Belgian beers (Kriek, for example), much lest tasted them. After beer, about half the original group joined up with another group and walked (for a long way) to the Belgian-American Club, where we had dinner. It was unclear exactly what the Belgian-American club is all about, but it had all sorts of American military memorabilia hanging around, including regimental plaques, wooden propellers, etc. The club itself a treat - in a lovely old building with a lot of 30's, 40's and 50's style. Sort of like the Harvard club without the stuffed animal heads hanging on the wall. I am told that the club is divided in a typically Belgian fashion - the Americans are on one side of the club and the Belgians are on the other. We must have been on the Belgian side, because except for some wandering Spanish guitar players who serenaded us at top volume and then asked for money and handed out business cards, we saw no foreigners on our side. Other than not being able to hear what anyone was saying until the guitar players quit, the dinner was fabulous. We had lots of Belgian specialties and they were all good. The conversation was in a mixture of French, Dutch and English. I am OK on the first and the last, but Dutch is Chinese to me. After dinner, everyone had to go home. In spite of the fact that a number of the people at the dinner were students or professors at the University of Antwerp, none of them appeared to live in Antwerp. They were all gong back to Gent or Brussels. Interesting, because Antwerp is a very nice city. New Belgian fact: At least one story has it that Antwerp got its name because of a giant living on the river Scheldt used to collect a toll from people crossing the river at the current site of Antwerp. If someone refused to pay the toll, the giant would chop off one of their hands and throw it in the river. One day a young man came along and killed the giant, chopped off his hand, and threw it in the river. If you believe the legend, 'hand werpen,' Dutch for 'hand' and 'throw,' got changed into Antwerpen, Dutch for Antwerp. With that interesting fact buzzing around in our heads, we drove back to Brussels, giving a ride to a young German man who had been at the conference.
23 November, Sunday:
Today was very cold and, of course, grey. But except for the occasional snowflake, it was relatively dry. None of yesterday's snow seems to have stuck. Beagle had to go to a seance with Frania, her NYC Feldenkrais guru. I went to Place Flagey to the market and bought food. Love those roast chickens! After Beagle's Feldenkrais session she and Frania went to a Pain Quotidien (one of the few places that is open in Brussels on Sunday, and which serves non-stop) for a late lunch. Frania's son, Andros, his girlfriend, and I were all supposed to meet there. Everybody got lost, as the restaurant was near Frania's son's apartment but not near much else. It was cold (-3 degrees Celsius, 26-27 degrees Fahrenheit), very wet, very windy, and was snowing like mad. We all finally got there, dripping wet with shoes soaked through, in time for a 4 PM lunch. After lunch the streets were very slushy and icy, and we slid home. Our garden had about an inch of snow in it. We have outdoor lights that light up the garden, and it is quite pretty in the snow. I am off to gym in a bit. Beagle says she has to stay home and work and then we'll have a late dinner.
24 November, Monday:
Today started out warmer, and there were even a few glimpses of blue sky. By early afternoon, however, it was back to rain mixed with sleet and snow. Today was the first day of our new French classes. We will have the same teacher most of the time, but it is just the two of us for around three hours a day, 3 days a week, for the next 3 weeks. We are going to split the classes so each of us has about 1 1/2 hours of private lessons, 3 days a week. By Christmas I should be able to order a beer. The first class went pretty well. We did a few exercises with the subjonctif passe, but mostly it was conversation. One thing I learned was that the French hate repetition, both in speaking and in writing. Plus they are by nature pessimistic. So, to use an example from a book I am reading, if you want to say that Mr.X's wife committed suicide in 1979 and then (several sentences later) that Mr. X himself committed suicide in 1980, you have to use two different ways of saying "committed suicide." Somehow I think that Americans would use a different example. After French class, we went to gym. Our gym is small, but perfectly nice. It is not used very much, but there appear to be a few regulars. One is a young man who speaks some sort of Slavic language, flails around on all the machines having set them at almost zero resistance, thus not getting much of a workout. Mostly he talks to a friend. And in spite of the fact that he doesn't seem to break into a sweat, most of the time he has a body odor that would make a New York City homeless person's eyes water. We have discovered that he generally turns up at around 8PM, so we try to leave before then. The gym also has a changing room that has lockers, showers, a steam room, a seating area, etc. The men's changing room appears to be bigger than the gym itself. People go in there and stay for hours. The gym is two doors down from our apartment, so we just walk down the street in our gym clothes. Belgians who see us think we are mad. They may have a point.
25 November, Tuesday:
This morning the ground was wet, and it was cloudy and cold, but there were patches of blue sky. That didn't last long. Grey and wet again. Did French exercises this morning and went to class. On the way there and on the way home, I did some more exploring in our neighborhood. The other day I had found a nice looking square right near us with a few restaurants. When I looked at my Routard (a guide book) I discovered that they recommended one of the restaurants. Then Frania's son told us about a bunch of good restaurants in our neighborhood that happened to be on that square, including one that was mentioned in my Routard. Today I saw another restaurant called Au Vieux Bruxelles. I looked it up, and it is one of the 5 or 6 top restaurants recommended by Frommer or Fodor, or one of those guys. Not because it is fancy, but because it is 100 years old and serves great moules et frites in an authentic setting with no tourists. At least the sign over the door looks to be 100 years old. It turns out that Place Boniface (which is where these places are) is so named because there is a lovely Gothic church (so I am told - the church is being renovated and is completely wrapped in some sort of material - sort of like a Christo installation) called Saint Boniface at the head of the square. Place Boniface, according to the web, is one of the trendiest places in Brussels for those in the know, with a bunch of restaurants and bars, etc. It is sort of in the middle of the African quarter of Brussels, which may explain why it is off the main tourist route. In any event, it is only a few blocks from us, and once Beagle stops being consumed by conferences and the like, we may have a chance to explore it. I certainly plan to go there with the boys and Vic for moules and frites and beer when they are here for Christmas.
WEEK 2 - Printers, riot police and our encounter with them, and supermarkets in Bruxelles
12 November, Wednesday:
A routine day. Sleep late, work, prepare for class, go to class, go to gym, have dinner and sleep for another 12 hours. Oh yes…it is dark and grey and rainy. Like every other day. A few Belgian facts…did you know that in Brussels, all doors to commercial establishments open in? In the US they open out, presumably so that in case of a fire, people can more easily get outside. My theory is that in Brussels, doors open in, because if there is a fire people want to rush inside to get warm. The only apparent exception to this rule is in the building where we take our French classes. It is a smallish office building with an imposing lobby, and the doors are all big and heavy, and open out. This has evidently caused a lot of confusion so there are signs on all the doors as you enter the building and the inner lobby that say “Pull” in big letters. Another Belgian fact: In French, a Walkie Talkie is called a Talkie Walkie. No kidding. Or at least that’s what our French teacher seems to think.
13 November, Thursday:
Went back to Carrefour to try to return the printer which I couldn’t get to work. No only did they happily take it back, but they also refunded Beagle’s money in cash! That so excited us that we bought some extension cords and went next door and bought a floor lamp. It makes all the difference in the living room. Now instead of a few 40 watt bulbs burning feebly in the dark, we have a 300 watt halogen lamp blasting light up to the veiling and an attached reading lamp that can be aimed at your book. Now I can read in the living room. I don’t know why, but it seems to me that all European rooms are poorly lit. Don’t those people ever read?
14 November, Friday:
Beagle was up half the night with what seemed like a less serious version of the infection she had when we were in France in September. She did some web research and got a 10 AM appointment at a clinic close to the apartment. They gave her a couple of prescriptions and all seems well. Then she went to ULB (Université Libre de Bruxelles) to meet people, sign millions of forms, and discover that she has an office there. Since it was cold and wet and dark, I went shopping. There is a little stereo system in the apartment, but it doesn’t have a way to hook up an external source, so I couldn’t play my iPod. I went back to our friendly electronics man and he advised me to buy a Logitech system…it works like the Bose SoundDock which I have in NYC but has a clock and an alarm and was much cheaper. It works fine. As I was leaving the store I told the man that the cell phone and the printer were working fine. He said “À bientôt,” which loosely translated means “see you later, sucker.” I also went to the post office. Quite an experience. You take a number from a machine, just like at the cheese counter at Zabars. Then you mill around for a while with a lot of other people. There are about 20 windows, but only 3 of them have people behind them, and they are all talking or stamping forms or something. Every once in a while someone’s number shows up on an TV screen and that person goes and renegotiates the national debt or something which only takes 30 minutes. It actually isn’t too bad, since the wait is so long that half the people in line get disgusted and leave…so in the end, things move along reasonably quickly. Sort of like what Yogi Berra said about a restaurant, “Nobody goes there anymore because it’s too crowded.” I also picked up a prescription for Beagle, bought a sandwich for lunch (the man asked to be remembered to Madame), and got back to the apartment in enough time to meet up with Reuben, the handyman, who was at the apartment to change a few of the 40 watt bulbs that had failed. Just the name you’d expect for a Belgian handyman, right? When Beagle got home we went to the newly discovered big Delhaize supermarket. It is great. It is sort of strangely laid out, but it seems to have everything. Plus it has several of those bottle disposal things right across from the entrance, which is handy. In Brussels you have to separate your trash into regular garbage, paper trash, and metal and plastic trash. Each has its own colored plastic bag, and each has a scheduled collection day. Heaven forbid you should mix paper with garbage or put something out on the wrong day. But you will note there is no bag for glass. That you have to put in these glass disposal containers which are hidden in various places in Brussels. So far we have discovered two…one at the Delhaize and one on the way to school. It is sort of fun…you throw the bottle in, it lands inside with a big crash of breaking glass. What you do if you don’t have one of these things nearby, I don’t know. I guess you just sneak around and stuff the bottles in the small trash bins meant for cigarette butts and used tissues that are on some lamp posts. Take it from me, those things only hold 3 bottles, tops. And did I forget? Today was dark and wet and cold.
15 November, Saturday:
We got up at the crack of dawn…or at least for us the crack of dawn…and drove to Lille, in France, for the 12th annual exposition of independent vignerons of France. The deal is that about 400 or so wine makers from all over France (plus assorted paté makers, etc.) turn up to have people taste and buy their wines. These are mostly small producers that you have never heard of, and because you are skipping many layers of middlemen, the prices are pretty low. We had arranged to meet our friend Marc Boone, his son Simon, and another American friend named Susie there at 10AM, just when the exposition opened. We got there in plenty of time, but it took us 45 minutes to get into the parking garage. We finally hooked up with Marc and followed him around from booth to booth, tasting all sorts of wines and buying when he bought. Marc was in a rush to get to lunch, so we finished our business quickly, borrowed a few of those hand carts that you use to lug wine cases around with, and tried to return with our purchases to our car. We had bought enough to fill up two hand carts, so we had to do this in two trips. I did the first trip on my own. What a mistake! I got terminally lost in this multi-level, cavernous garage, which helpfully had everything color coded. Being color blind, knowing that we were in the “section rose” didn’t do me much good. I wandered around for about 45 minutes lugging huge quantities of wine, sweating profusely, and cursing the madman who had designed the garage. I finally found our car by accident, unloaded the wine, and got back to the exhibition hall by taking the stairs (which were pretty well marked, in contrast to the ramps you had to use if you were using a hand cart). The second load of wine we carried by hand. Then we went to lunch, which Marc was anxious not to miss. On our way to lunch we wandered through Lille, which is a very pretty city, at least in the old part. Lovely old buildings in the northern style, all cleaned up and lit, etc. After lunch we wandered around some more, stopping twice for coffee, and then drove back to Brussels. It rained some, but not much.
16 November, Sunday:
We slept late and staggered down to the Place Flagey to buy food, including a roast chicken I had been lusting for all week. The weather was pretty much normal except that it poured rain most of the time. No one at the market seemed to mind, or even notice, except for one guy who had an umbrella with writing on it that said “Merde, Il pleut.” Then back home for gym and dinner and work.
17 November, Monday:
Much to everyone’s surprise, it rained today. We went to the bank to straighten out some of the details about Beagle’s bank account. It seems that you need a bunch of papers, a bank card, and a code. All three require separate transactions. You get the card in person, but they have to mail the code to you. Beagle’s code never came. It appears that they mailed it to New York. It is clear that it will take a while for this bank account to be set up. Perhaps it will be done by the time we leave. After the bank we went to French class. This one went until 5:30, so that pretty much took care of the afternoon. We went to gym and then had dinner.
18 November, Tuesday:
When we first got here, we noticed an apparently abandoned department store (or something like that…large, anyway) on Chaussée d’Ixelles. The store appeared to have been taken over by a bunch of people protesting the treatment of immigrants, “sans papiers,” etc. There were generally people hanging around the front of the building, people ducking in and out under a half lowered security gate, all sorts of posters out front, etc. All very peaceful, but you had to wonder. The other day this made the news, and there was a demand from the city administration that the squatters leave the building. If they wouldn’t go peacefully, there was the threat of force. This afternoon, as we were preparing to leave for Gent, I heard some noise outside. I looked out the window and saw about 30 riot police, complete with helmets and shields and truncheons, double-timing down the street, with about 30 people with cameras running after them. Hmmm, thought I. So we went to our garage (it is an underground garage, 2 doors down from our apartment), got our car, and drove onto rue Souveraine, on our way to Gent. The street looked a little empty, but we didn’t think much of it until we got to the end of the block, about 30 yards away. There we discovered that our neighborhood had been all cordoned off by the police, all traffic diverted, etc. while the police evacuated the squatters from the building. Other than dozens of police cars, riot vans, huge armored trucks with water cannons mounted on them, etc., we were the only car in the area. The police were as surprised to see us as we were to see them! But they took one look at us, all dressed up to go to a ceremony in Gent, and rapidly concluded that we weren’t squatters and posed no immediate threat to law and order, so they escorted us out of the “zone sanitaire” and let us go. We drove down the street to Place Flagey, at the bottom of the hill, and discovered an even bigger assemblage of police and trucks, etc. Apparently these were the reserves in case the situation got out of hand. We quickly maneuvered past this group, picked up a friend and a woman who had been described as being very distinguished, very old, and incapable of making the train journey to Gent. I’m sure she was distinguished, but she didn’t look frail at all to me, she had a wicked sense of humor, very strong opinions, and was more or less our age or perhaps a few years older. Oh dear. The ceremony in Gent featured s a lecture given by our heroine to kick off the “Year of Henri Pirenne,” a year celebrating the life and works of Henri Pirenne, Belgium’s and Gent’s most famous historian. A bunch of people gave speeches. Some in Dutch, some in French, some in English, and some in all three. The Rector of the University of Gent made a speech and gave Beagle a medal. The head of the Franqui Foundation officially gave Beagle the Franqui award, and gave her a medal. He pointed out that quite a few of the previous recipients of this award had gone on to get Nobel prizes. He also told a little bit about the history of the Franqui Foundation. It seems that it was established after WWI by M. Franqui, a Belgian industrialist (and presumably, in the grand Belgian tradition, a looter and pillager of the Congo) and Herbert Hoover. As you will recall, Hoover was in charge of US relief work in Europe after WWI, and with the money “left over” from that, he and M. Franqui founded the Franqui Foundation. In any event, after the Franqui guy spoke and gave Beagle her medal, she gave a lecture. The lecture was called “Lost in Translation,” and covered such subjects as how Americans use Pirenne in their studies, the differences between the European and American educational systems, the differences between Jacksonian and Jeffersonian democracy, the influence of Frederick Turner and his theory of the frontier, and Sarah Palin. Her talk was well received, especially the Sarah Palin part. The lecture was given in a grand old hall in a place called the “Belfry” (you know, as in “you’ve got bats in your belfry”), which was just that. There was a minor acoustical problem during Beagle’s speech…there was a lot of noise overhead, a lot of thumping and crashing. As it turns out right above the grand hall there is another large room where the Gent fencing club was having a practice! Anyway, the lecture was concluded with much applause. Then our friend from the Université Libre de Bruxelles got up and gave a speech and gave Beagle a medal. Then the representative of the University of Antwerp gave a speech saying that he was very sorry but that the University of Antwerp didn’t have any medals. Then we all went to dinner at a place called het Pand, which as far as I can tell is a place where they serve extraordinary meals to University of Gent people on special occasions. We’ve eaten there before, and I can tell you, Columbia could only dream of serving a meal like that. We staggered out, found our car and drove everybody home to Brussels.
A routine day. Sleep late, work, prepare for class, go to class, go to gym, have dinner and sleep for another 12 hours. Oh yes…it is dark and grey and rainy. Like every other day. A few Belgian facts…did you know that in Brussels, all doors to commercial establishments open in? In the US they open out, presumably so that in case of a fire, people can more easily get outside. My theory is that in Brussels, doors open in, because if there is a fire people want to rush inside to get warm. The only apparent exception to this rule is in the building where we take our French classes. It is a smallish office building with an imposing lobby, and the doors are all big and heavy, and open out. This has evidently caused a lot of confusion so there are signs on all the doors as you enter the building and the inner lobby that say “Pull” in big letters. Another Belgian fact: In French, a Walkie Talkie is called a Talkie Walkie. No kidding. Or at least that’s what our French teacher seems to think.
13 November, Thursday:
Went back to Carrefour to try to return the printer which I couldn’t get to work. No only did they happily take it back, but they also refunded Beagle’s money in cash! That so excited us that we bought some extension cords and went next door and bought a floor lamp. It makes all the difference in the living room. Now instead of a few 40 watt bulbs burning feebly in the dark, we have a 300 watt halogen lamp blasting light up to the veiling and an attached reading lamp that can be aimed at your book. Now I can read in the living room. I don’t know why, but it seems to me that all European rooms are poorly lit. Don’t those people ever read?
14 November, Friday:
Beagle was up half the night with what seemed like a less serious version of the infection she had when we were in France in September. She did some web research and got a 10 AM appointment at a clinic close to the apartment. They gave her a couple of prescriptions and all seems well. Then she went to ULB (Université Libre de Bruxelles) to meet people, sign millions of forms, and discover that she has an office there. Since it was cold and wet and dark, I went shopping. There is a little stereo system in the apartment, but it doesn’t have a way to hook up an external source, so I couldn’t play my iPod. I went back to our friendly electronics man and he advised me to buy a Logitech system…it works like the Bose SoundDock which I have in NYC but has a clock and an alarm and was much cheaper. It works fine. As I was leaving the store I told the man that the cell phone and the printer were working fine. He said “À bientôt,” which loosely translated means “see you later, sucker.” I also went to the post office. Quite an experience. You take a number from a machine, just like at the cheese counter at Zabars. Then you mill around for a while with a lot of other people. There are about 20 windows, but only 3 of them have people behind them, and they are all talking or stamping forms or something. Every once in a while someone’s number shows up on an TV screen and that person goes and renegotiates the national debt or something which only takes 30 minutes. It actually isn’t too bad, since the wait is so long that half the people in line get disgusted and leave…so in the end, things move along reasonably quickly. Sort of like what Yogi Berra said about a restaurant, “Nobody goes there anymore because it’s too crowded.” I also picked up a prescription for Beagle, bought a sandwich for lunch (the man asked to be remembered to Madame), and got back to the apartment in enough time to meet up with Reuben, the handyman, who was at the apartment to change a few of the 40 watt bulbs that had failed. Just the name you’d expect for a Belgian handyman, right? When Beagle got home we went to the newly discovered big Delhaize supermarket. It is great. It is sort of strangely laid out, but it seems to have everything. Plus it has several of those bottle disposal things right across from the entrance, which is handy. In Brussels you have to separate your trash into regular garbage, paper trash, and metal and plastic trash. Each has its own colored plastic bag, and each has a scheduled collection day. Heaven forbid you should mix paper with garbage or put something out on the wrong day. But you will note there is no bag for glass. That you have to put in these glass disposal containers which are hidden in various places in Brussels. So far we have discovered two…one at the Delhaize and one on the way to school. It is sort of fun…you throw the bottle in, it lands inside with a big crash of breaking glass. What you do if you don’t have one of these things nearby, I don’t know. I guess you just sneak around and stuff the bottles in the small trash bins meant for cigarette butts and used tissues that are on some lamp posts. Take it from me, those things only hold 3 bottles, tops. And did I forget? Today was dark and wet and cold.
15 November, Saturday:
We got up at the crack of dawn…or at least for us the crack of dawn…and drove to Lille, in France, for the 12th annual exposition of independent vignerons of France. The deal is that about 400 or so wine makers from all over France (plus assorted paté makers, etc.) turn up to have people taste and buy their wines. These are mostly small producers that you have never heard of, and because you are skipping many layers of middlemen, the prices are pretty low. We had arranged to meet our friend Marc Boone, his son Simon, and another American friend named Susie there at 10AM, just when the exposition opened. We got there in plenty of time, but it took us 45 minutes to get into the parking garage. We finally hooked up with Marc and followed him around from booth to booth, tasting all sorts of wines and buying when he bought. Marc was in a rush to get to lunch, so we finished our business quickly, borrowed a few of those hand carts that you use to lug wine cases around with, and tried to return with our purchases to our car. We had bought enough to fill up two hand carts, so we had to do this in two trips. I did the first trip on my own. What a mistake! I got terminally lost in this multi-level, cavernous garage, which helpfully had everything color coded. Being color blind, knowing that we were in the “section rose” didn’t do me much good. I wandered around for about 45 minutes lugging huge quantities of wine, sweating profusely, and cursing the madman who had designed the garage. I finally found our car by accident, unloaded the wine, and got back to the exhibition hall by taking the stairs (which were pretty well marked, in contrast to the ramps you had to use if you were using a hand cart). The second load of wine we carried by hand. Then we went to lunch, which Marc was anxious not to miss. On our way to lunch we wandered through Lille, which is a very pretty city, at least in the old part. Lovely old buildings in the northern style, all cleaned up and lit, etc. After lunch we wandered around some more, stopping twice for coffee, and then drove back to Brussels. It rained some, but not much.
16 November, Sunday:
We slept late and staggered down to the Place Flagey to buy food, including a roast chicken I had been lusting for all week. The weather was pretty much normal except that it poured rain most of the time. No one at the market seemed to mind, or even notice, except for one guy who had an umbrella with writing on it that said “Merde, Il pleut.” Then back home for gym and dinner and work.
17 November, Monday:
Much to everyone’s surprise, it rained today. We went to the bank to straighten out some of the details about Beagle’s bank account. It seems that you need a bunch of papers, a bank card, and a code. All three require separate transactions. You get the card in person, but they have to mail the code to you. Beagle’s code never came. It appears that they mailed it to New York. It is clear that it will take a while for this bank account to be set up. Perhaps it will be done by the time we leave. After the bank we went to French class. This one went until 5:30, so that pretty much took care of the afternoon. We went to gym and then had dinner.
18 November, Tuesday:
When we first got here, we noticed an apparently abandoned department store (or something like that…large, anyway) on Chaussée d’Ixelles. The store appeared to have been taken over by a bunch of people protesting the treatment of immigrants, “sans papiers,” etc. There were generally people hanging around the front of the building, people ducking in and out under a half lowered security gate, all sorts of posters out front, etc. All very peaceful, but you had to wonder. The other day this made the news, and there was a demand from the city administration that the squatters leave the building. If they wouldn’t go peacefully, there was the threat of force. This afternoon, as we were preparing to leave for Gent, I heard some noise outside. I looked out the window and saw about 30 riot police, complete with helmets and shields and truncheons, double-timing down the street, with about 30 people with cameras running after them. Hmmm, thought I. So we went to our garage (it is an underground garage, 2 doors down from our apartment), got our car, and drove onto rue Souveraine, on our way to Gent. The street looked a little empty, but we didn’t think much of it until we got to the end of the block, about 30 yards away. There we discovered that our neighborhood had been all cordoned off by the police, all traffic diverted, etc. while the police evacuated the squatters from the building. Other than dozens of police cars, riot vans, huge armored trucks with water cannons mounted on them, etc., we were the only car in the area. The police were as surprised to see us as we were to see them! But they took one look at us, all dressed up to go to a ceremony in Gent, and rapidly concluded that we weren’t squatters and posed no immediate threat to law and order, so they escorted us out of the “zone sanitaire” and let us go. We drove down the street to Place Flagey, at the bottom of the hill, and discovered an even bigger assemblage of police and trucks, etc. Apparently these were the reserves in case the situation got out of hand. We quickly maneuvered past this group, picked up a friend and a woman who had been described as being very distinguished, very old, and incapable of making the train journey to Gent. I’m sure she was distinguished, but she didn’t look frail at all to me, she had a wicked sense of humor, very strong opinions, and was more or less our age or perhaps a few years older. Oh dear. The ceremony in Gent featured s a lecture given by our heroine to kick off the “Year of Henri Pirenne,” a year celebrating the life and works of Henri Pirenne, Belgium’s and Gent’s most famous historian. A bunch of people gave speeches. Some in Dutch, some in French, some in English, and some in all three. The Rector of the University of Gent made a speech and gave Beagle a medal. The head of the Franqui Foundation officially gave Beagle the Franqui award, and gave her a medal. He pointed out that quite a few of the previous recipients of this award had gone on to get Nobel prizes. He also told a little bit about the history of the Franqui Foundation. It seems that it was established after WWI by M. Franqui, a Belgian industrialist (and presumably, in the grand Belgian tradition, a looter and pillager of the Congo) and Herbert Hoover. As you will recall, Hoover was in charge of US relief work in Europe after WWI, and with the money “left over” from that, he and M. Franqui founded the Franqui Foundation. In any event, after the Franqui guy spoke and gave Beagle her medal, she gave a lecture. The lecture was called “Lost in Translation,” and covered such subjects as how Americans use Pirenne in their studies, the differences between the European and American educational systems, the differences between Jacksonian and Jeffersonian democracy, the influence of Frederick Turner and his theory of the frontier, and Sarah Palin. Her talk was well received, especially the Sarah Palin part. The lecture was given in a grand old hall in a place called the “Belfry” (you know, as in “you’ve got bats in your belfry”), which was just that. There was a minor acoustical problem during Beagle’s speech…there was a lot of noise overhead, a lot of thumping and crashing. As it turns out right above the grand hall there is another large room where the Gent fencing club was having a practice! Anyway, the lecture was concluded with much applause. Then our friend from the Université Libre de Bruxelles got up and gave a speech and gave Beagle a medal. Then the representative of the University of Antwerp gave a speech saying that he was very sorry but that the University of Antwerp didn’t have any medals. Then we all went to dinner at a place called het Pand, which as far as I can tell is a place where they serve extraordinary meals to University of Gent people on special occasions. We’ve eaten there before, and I can tell you, Columbia could only dream of serving a meal like that. We staggered out, found our car and drove everybody home to Brussels.
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