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.