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.