WEEK 1: In which I have much to say

This is a repost of my journal, originally sent out in e-mail form.
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5 November 2008, Wednesday:

Departure Day. After several days of trying to cram all of the stuff we would need into two suitcases each, we gave up. We each ended up with 2 suitcases and a backpack, all stuffed to the gills…and a lot of things were left behind. I’m sure we’ll discover that we packed a lot of stuff that we’ll never use, and that we left behind all sorts of things that we will desperately need. Off we went to Newark and Jet Airlines. Jet Airlines is an Indian airline that for some strange reason has its European hub in Brussels. We chose it because it was dramatically cheaper than any other airline, and because Beagle insisted on traveling business class because of her back. As it turned out, we had a splendid experience. They checked all our bags without any question (or charge) and a young lady escorted us to a lounge where we made a spectacle of ourselves by wolfing down enough tea sandwiches so we could skip dinner on the plane. Once on board, the stewards and stewardesses were horrified that I didn’t want any dinner. They kept trying to tempt me with offers of soup, or dessert, etc., but I remained firm. For me, the smell of Indian food was enough to kill any appetite I might have had. Our seats went totally flat, so we actually got a fair amount of sleep.

6 November 2008, Thursday:

Beagle says that her breakfast on the plane was wonderful. I slept through breakfast, even though I had asked to be awakened. After landing, we picked up our bags and went to the Europcar rental desk to pick up a car that we had leased under a special French program. As I understand it, about 50 years ago the French government, trying to encourage the sale of French cars, created a program whereby tourists could lease brand new French cars, tax free, for periods of up to 170 days. The bottom line of this is that people like us get a brand new French car for much less than it would cost to rent from Hertz or even Europcar. There was no hassle on picking the car up…I just had to show them my passport and a document showing that I had paid for the lease of the car, and sign a piece of paper. We now have a silver Renault Megane (diesel), 5 doors, etc. with something like .5 kilometers on the odometer. The car also appears to have come with a built-in GPS device, but after a quick look at the half inch thick instruction manual and the 10 buttons that you had to push to make it work, I quickly put all that stuff back in the glove compartment and hooked up the Garmin GPS which I had recently bought. The Garmin has a 4 page instruction manual which basically tells you how to turn the thing on. Other than that it is all intuitive and/or self-explanatory. So I turned it on and it delivered us to 24 rue Souveraine without any problem. We are on a fairly narrow street that runs between Avenue Louise and Chaussée d’Ixelles. Louise is a big wide street with trolleys, etc. running down the middle. It is very elegant and has all sorts of very fancy shops on it, and hardly any people. Chaussée d’Ixelles is narrow with narrow sidewalks (which are being dug up about every 5 feet), and it has every sort of shop you can imagine on it. The vehicular traffic on it is always very heavy, as is pedestrian traffic. It is clearly the place to be, and it is about a half block from our apartment. Our apartment is nice…big and airy, with 3 big double glass doors in the living room that open onto a nice garden with grass and a tree. It is furnished, but without a lot of fairly basic kitchen stuff (you would think that a furnished 3 bedroom apartment would have enough glasses and dishes for 3 or 4 people for more than 1 meal!), the knives are dull, there are no big casseroles, there are no reading lamps in the living room, the router only has an outlet for one ethernet cable so only one computer can be hooked up at a time, etc. So we made lists of what we needed, and to give ourselves strength we went to lunch at a place called La Régence, a sort of tavern/brasserie place right around the corner. It was wonderful. Beagle had a vegetarian cheese and cruditiées sandwich, which, this being Belgium, came with a large and very thick slice of ham. I had the rabbit cooked in beer with frites, washed down with beer. It was great. Very lively, very buzzy. It may become our local if we eat out at all. After lunch we walked down Chaussée d’Ixelles to Place Flagey and found a small and totally inadequate supermarket where we laid in some basic provisions for dinner. We walked back to the apartment and Beagle immediately took a long nap. I futzed around trying to make our computers work. I finally figured out that you had to reboot both the router and your computer to connect to the internet. If you want to use another computer, you have to do the same thing again. This has got to change.

7 November 2008, Friday:

We set off this morning to find a bank so Beagle could open a bank account. The Franqui Foundation is going to be paying her and reimbursing her for a bunch of expenses, so she needs some place to easily deposit and withdraw euros. We walked to Louise, turned right and stopped at the first bank we saw. It was Fortis, a bank which had recently failed and had to be rescued by the French and Belgian governments. That didn’t faze Beagle. Better to open an account in a bank which had failed and been rescued rather than one which had not yet failed but was going to. In any event, all the posters in the lobby claimed that it wasn’t the bank itself that had failed, but rather the holding company. That made us feel better. So Beagle announced to a sort of concierge type person that she wanted to open an account. This came as quite a shock to the Fortis people. It appeared that no one had even considered opening an account there for several weeks, since it was a failed bank. We were escorted upstairs and were greeted by a cheerful woman whose desk was completely clear of any papers. She rapidly remedied that, pulling out masses of forms that had to be signed, etc. In the course of the process of demonstrating some features of the account she also managed to dump the contents of her purse onto the desk (she was searching for her Fortis bank card). Anyway, she was very nice and we learned all about her…her child had been sick the prior day so he hadn’t gotten much sleep. We learned about her plans for the weekend (it is a long weekend since Tuesday is a holiday and everyone is going to “faire le pont” (make a bridge) and take Monday off as well. And for that matter, Friday afternoon as well! So Beagle got her bank account…confirmed in a call that afternoon from madame…without depositing a dime! Interestingly enough we learned that in Belgium no one uses checks. It just isn’t done anymore. You transfer money from your account to the other person’s account…all done electronically. After that adventure we went to a local electronics store and Beagle bought a cell phone. She got a pink one. Hmmm. After that we went home, stopping off at a small grocery store to buy some lunch. We picked out sandwiches and took them to the cashier, but he refused to sell them to us, explaining that we could get something much better for less money at the cheese store across the street. Somewhat stunned by this, we went across the street and a nice man in the cheese store made us sandwiches, which were indeed pretty good, and cheaper than at the grocery store. We have gone back several times since to buy sandwiches and cheese, and Beagle appears to have made a conquest. If I go there alone, the man always asks after ”Madame.” We then went home and, while eating our sandwiches we got an urgent call from Amira, the language school where we are going to take classes, asking us to come and register. So we did. The school is only about a 10 minute walk from the apartment, and is actually very close to the Academy, where Beagle had an office the last time we were in Brussels. You can see her old office window from the school. The school itself is in a quite swank office building which, like all the office buildings in that neighborhood, appears to be almost entirely occupied by ING, a Dutch bank. We are signed up for classes 3 afternoons a week for the next 5 weeks. The first 2 weeks it will be the two of us with one other person. The next three weeks will be just the two of us. The literature for the school talked all about group lessons, etc., but it appears that the only people who signed up for courses at our level (or should I say levels, since Beagle is much better than I am, or so she tells me…I can’t understand a word she says. Sounds like she is speaking a foreign language). Having gotten banks, phones, lunch and French courses out of the way, we got in our car and drove to a Carrefour, a huge Walmart kind of place, where we bought tons of food, glasses, etc., and a printer. The bill was staggering. We went back to the apartment so Beagle could relax and so I could install the printer. That did not go well. I tried for about 8 hours to make the damn thing work. I just couldn't. The printer seemed to work fine (it copied, printed test pages, etc.), but I just couldn't get it hooked up to SWMBO's computer or mine. I was about to bust a gut I was so mad, but decided to go to bed instead, since it was about 1AM.

8 November, Saturday:

Seeing the kind of mood I was in, Beagle wisely suggested a solution to the printer problem. Namely that we go to the electronics store a few minutes from our apartment where we had bought her Belgian cell phone...which, by the way, we had to bring back because I couldn't get the SIM card to stay in it...the nice man there showed me how to do it. And buy another new printer there and worry about returning the first printer some other time. This seemed profligate to me, but Beagle insisted that (a) she needed a functional computer NOW and (b) her research account was paying anyway. So we schlepped over to the electronics store, carrying Beagle's computer because her theory was that we would ask the nice man in the store to set the printer up for us. Now this guy already clearly thought we were a little strange because we couldn't put a SIM card into the phone (plus Beagle got him to activate it for her, get her phone number, etc.), but when we told him that we had just bought a printer which we couldn't get to work and we wanted to buy another one, he clearly thought we should be institutionalized. After seeing that the printer we had bought at Carrefour, the big discount place, was being sold at the fancy electronics store for 25 euros less than at Carrefour, I agreed. Anyway, he said he was not able to help us set up the new printer we were going to buy from him...a violation of store policy or something...but he said that this was really easy to do, and that any idiot could do it (he said this while looking at me, having earlier recognized that Beagle was incapable of even turning her phone on without help). In any event, we got the printer home, followed the directions and got it up and running in about 10 minutes. I think the software that came with the other computer was defective...I couldn't even get my computer to load it. Now everyone is happy. Our new printer doesn’t have a fax, but it can scan and copy, so all we need to do is call up tech support (John or William) and have them tell us how to scan things. I can’t cope with a fax…I can’t even figure out how to work the phone in the apartment. The damn thing blinked at me for several days before I figured out how to turn off the message light. But incredibly enough, I managed to figure out the user ID and password for the previous tenant’s voicemail! They had no messages! After our triumph with the printer, we walked down Chausée d’Ixelles again and found a big outdoor market at Place Flagey. Not as good as those in Paris, but pretty good. We think it is there on Saturday and Sunday, but we’ll see. A website covering all of Brussels says otherwise, but we have discovered that that kind of website in Brussels is generally extremely inaccurate. Place Flagey has apparently been under construction for several years and is one of those large sort of soulless places that Brussels seems to specialize in, but it is supposed to be the heart of Ixelles (our commune or arrondissement) and is right next to some pretty “lakes,” so we’re not complaining.

9 November, Sunday:

This was a quiet day, mostly spent at home working. We did take a walk across the city to Place Catherine where there is supposed to be a daily market…mostly flowers and fish… we remembered it from our last time in Brussels. As it turned out, our memory wasn’t so good! We looked and looked, and could find no trace of a market, even though it is featured in all the guides to markets. Hmmm. We’ll find it eventually! On our way back home we managed to buy some napkins in the Sablon (you know who has a thing about napkins) and buy some bread at Le Pain Quotidien.

10 November, Monday:

This was our first day of French class. Our teacher is a young French woman named Aurélie Delacencellerie. She is originally from a town near Lille and has been living in Brussels for a while. It is clear from her physique that she has developed a fondness for Belgian food. She also appears to be fond of low cut blouses and sweaters that display her considerable rubenesque charms. She claims that food speaks to her, saying “eat me!” She claims all sorts of academic degrees and honors, but why she is teaching French in a language school is beyond me. The other student in our class is a young American man named Tanner. He comes from San Francisco but is originally from South Carolina. He has a shaved head, a cute little goatee, a squeaky voice and he giggles a lot. He has an American accent that makes mine sound like Jacques Chirac. He works for an outfit he calls “my company.” I am not sure exactly what it is, but it is some sort of Christian organization that works with immigrants in Belgium. He has been in Brussels for 6 months with his wife and daughter, and plans to stay here forever. His “job” at the moment is to learn French. That’s all he and his wife do, except for taking care of their child (and his wife, who is now pregnant, apparently spends much of the day being sick!). Apparently the plan is to do nothing for the first year or so except learn French. After that he will start to work with immigrants. His past includes living in Tunisia and working as a tourist guide, going to some sort of seminary, etc. I don’t probe too deeply! In any event, he is sort of sweet. I am not sure how old he is, but an answer he gave to some question indicated that he thought anyone who was 30 was quite old. Oh well. On our way to class we stopped by the local halal (sort of kosher for Moslems) butcher to order a roast chicken for dinner…we had noticed over the weekend that they had a big display of roasting chickens, and they looked good. The butcher said that if we wanted a chicken that we’d better reserve one, so we did, and he marked that down in his order book. When we went back after class, the butcher first denied that we’d ordered a chicken, and when we wouldn’t buy that, he just mumbled that he had forgotten. So no chicken for us. Beagle says we’re never going back there! Today was “officially” a regular work day, but since tomorrow is a holiday, most people took today off as well and consequently most stores are shut. Beans for dinner.

11 November, Tuesday:

Today is a holiday…Armistice Day, which Europeans take very seriously. Almost everything is closed except for shops run by north africans/arabs…which are always open. Beagle stayed home and worked, waiting for her friend and colleague Claire to come by with some forms to sign. I explored the neighborhood. I followed directions I got from the official Brussels website for the Post Office. I ended up at the police station, which is handily close to our apartment. The Post Office was somewhere else and, of course, it was shut. I looked for an alternative butcher so we wouldn’t have to patronize our surly friend. I found one on the web, which is quite close to our apartment, but it appears to have been closed by the health authorities. Not a good sign. Then I found a great big Delhaize supermarket, quite close to our apartment…or at least a lot closer that the totally inadequate mini-Delhaize supermarket we shopped at our first day here. Needless to say, it was shut, but at least I now know it is there. I also went across town to check out some bookstores. Waterstones, a British chain, had observed 2 minutes of silence in honor of the holiday. Sterling, an English language bookstore that I had patronized when we were last in Brussels, was closed.
I wandered some more and found a Le Pain Quotidien close to us, on Louise. This is good, because we have been finding it hard to get really good bread in Brussels. Everyone sells what they call baguettes, but they really aren’t. Apparently a real French baguette is called pain français, but most people don’t have them. I also found a sort of arty movie theatre right around the corner from us. Most of the movies they have seem to be in English. Apparently in Brussels all movies are shown in their original language, unlike in Paris where most are dubbed into French.