22 April, Wednesday:
I drove out to the airport this morning and dropped off the car. I had scheduled the drop off for today since Beagle was supposed to be flying in this morning, but obviously her plans had changed. Dropping of the car was as simple as dropping off a normal rental car. If anyone is thinking of spending a few weeks or more in France or Belgium, etc. and needs to rent a car, check out IdeaMerge. We had a brand new car, complete insurance, etc., and it all costs much less than renting a car from Hertz. We had no problems with our car, a Renault Megane, a sort of funny looking little car…but it had plenty of room, plenty of power, and it averaged 43 mpg for our entire trip, which included a fair amount of city driving, being struck in traffic jams, etc. I took the train back into Brussels and gloomily contemplated packing, but I was rescued by a three-hour French lesson with Aurélie, my last. We spent a lot of time on colloquial French expressions…none of which I knew. That made Aurélie happy, and I picked up a few new expressions…such as “être en nage,” which means “bathed in sweat,” which is frequently my state. Sufficiently cheered up, I packed up Beagle’s office. There goes one suitcase. It’s a little one, but it now weighs a ton. Lamb chops for dinner.
23 April, Thursday:
Today was my first day of serious clothes packing. I was stunned to see how many different articles of clothing Beagle has here. Her clothes plus jackets, etc. took up my biggest suitcase. I managed to sneak in hiking boots, etc., but getting everything else into the one remaining suitcase will be a challenge. I had an American Rivers conference call this afternoon, went out to try to retrieve Beagle’s watch from the watch repair place, and had dinner with Claire and Jacques, who had taken pity on me. It was a lovely dinner, and Claire and Jacques are very nice. The whole dinner was in French, since their English is even more limited than my French. I may not have gotten the pluperfect subjunctive just right, but I don’t think I disgraced myself either. Jacques is a big film buff. I asked him if he liked Ernst Lubitsch’s work and he almost jumped out of his chair. Apparently Lubitsch is his favorite director. I asked him if he knew David Mamet’s work, and he didn’t. I urged him to watch “House of Games,” my favorite, as William and John both know.
24 April, Friday:
Today was another gorgeous day in a string of gorgeous days. Apparently it was lovely in NYC as well. Beagle went to a physiatrist (a specialist in pain management, spinal problems, etc.) today. He looked at MRIs and confirmed that her back was a mess. He is going to give her a bunch of injections on Monday and we’ll take it from there. I spent much of the day packing. I pretty much filled up the 4th suitcase and I still don’t have most of my clothes packed. I can see this is going to be a problem. I turned my attention to Beagle’s medicine cabinet. Yikes! That alone will take a suitcase. I had hopes of using my backpack to accommodate most of my clothes, but that hope is fading fast. Lucky thing there are several luggage stores on Chaussée d’Ixelles!
25 April, Saturday:
This morning Jeun, one of Beagle’s students, and Erik, a young German man who is doing his doctoral work in England but is in Brussels for a year, turned up to pick up Beagle’s printer, my iPod speakers, a bunch of left over wine, etc. It was either that or leave that stuff in the apartment. As it is, we are leaving a lot of food, sparking water, etc. for the people who clean the apartment. I went out and bought another suitcase this morning. I was looking for a medium sized one, but the shop only had a big one of the kind I was looking for, so I bought it. That turns out to have been a good thing. The new suitcase is absolutely full and weighs a ton…but I was able to fit my briefcase, backpack, several pairs of shoes and most of my clothes in it, not to mention about a dozen books. Now I have 5 full suitcases and one carry on bag that contains 2 computers, etc. I will have to pay a staggering amount of money for 2 extra bags, since I am only allowed 3, and in excess weight charges, but there’s nothing that can be done about that. I just wonder how I’ll get all this from the cab to the check-in desk! To celebrate having finished packing, I treated myself to a farewell lunch at La Régence. It is sort of a dive, but I like it. A very mixed crowd…some people having lunch alone, some families, some people having drinking beer, etc. I had a beer and pintadau à la Normande. Very satisfying!
26 April, Sunday:
Departure day. I got up at the crack of dawn, hauled my 5 suitcases and 2 computers out of the apartment, and got a cab to the airport. Fortunately I had called a cab the night before, so I didn’t have to go looking for one on Chaussée d’Ixelles, which was deserted. It rained on the way to the airport, which somehow seemed fitting. At the airport there was some confusion since I was two bags over the limit, 4 of my 5 bags were over the weight limit, and the person checking me in was a trainee. I did have to pay €232 for the extra bags, but they took pity on me and didn’t charge me an excess weight penalty as well. The flight was uneventful, I got back to our apartment in NYC with no problem, and spent the afternoon unpacking. It was good to be home and to see Beagle after two weeks of being on my own. Unpacking was better than packing. We had dinner with John and Vic. Vic served us home-made ravioli. A real treat!
27 April, Monday:
This morning I took Beagle to the Hospital For Special Surgery to get some cortisone injections in her back. That all seemed to go well. The anesthetic they give you before they give you the cortisone is supposed to make you feel better, but not to last too long. The cortisone takes about a week to take effect, so we’ll see. In any event, Beagle felt relatively good all day, which was nice.
28 April, Tuesday:
This is the last entry in this journal. A good thing, since there is not much to report. Beagle feels OK. I spent the day sorting through mail, paying bills, etc. Very satisfying, but not very interesting!
Thursday, April 30, 2009
Friday, April 24, 2009
Week 24 - In which Aurélie tortures us some more, I eat lamb snout and go to London, and Beagle decides to stay in New York
15 April, Wednesday:
I was in the Delhaize supermarket today, laying in provisions. A British lady of a “certain age” was pushing a baby stroller filled with groceries and was heading for the exit, where she was intercepted by the staff. I don’t think she was trying to steal the stuff…I just think that she in her inimitable British way, was confused and was barging ahead. She tried to explain to the staff that she had the stuff in the baby stroller because she was staying at her son’s home in Brussels and didn’t know how to drive his car. The problem was that she was explaining this in English, and when the staff did not seem to understand, she just kept saying it louder and slower, as if they were quite stupid children who were hard of hearing. I was tempted to intervene, but did not. Partly because I was bored and needed some entertainment, and partly because if this woman was so stupid that she didn’t understand that the way to exit a grocery store was to stand in line like everybody else at the checkout counters and pay for her goods, then she deserved what was coming to her. Finally, an English speaking staff person was located, and she explained that in Brussels there is a quaint (“old World”) custom that people have to pay for things they pick off the shelves at a grocery store, even if you are English. This appeared to have sunk in, and then the woman started looking for her husband, who, she claimed, had the money. The poor man, totally mortified was hiding in the adult magazine section pretending that he didn’t know his wife, but he finally appeared, brandishing his wallet. You have to love the Brits. After my supermarket adventure I had to get serious, as I had a 3 hour French class with Aurélie. Aurélie had e-mailed us a website which was supposed to test our level of proficiency in French. Beagle took it and said it was really hard. I took it and Beagle was right. I had no clue on about half of the questions, and ended up scoring 17 out of 30, which qualified my French level as “moyen.” Beagle says that she got the same score…but that she would have gotten one or two more right answers if she had spent more time. Ha!! Although I will admit that any French test on which I score the same as she does is a stupid and misleading test. Anyway, we were discouraged, and when Aurélie turned up I told her. She was delighted. She said that scores like that were very good. She had taken the test herself and got 28 out of 30, and many of her colleagues had done much worse. 17 out of 39 was a great accomplishment! Those French! How about a test that encourages you as opposed to discouraging you? Speaking of which, I get an e-mail every day with a new French word. Today’s was a word that you could use in the phrase “My father was arrested by the police today.” Recovering from French class, I was on the phone to Beagle when a male pigeon flew into our garden and started molesting a female pigeon who decided to flee from his amorous advances into our living room through the open French doors. It was a good thing I was there to usher her out. I went from Aurélie to gym to dinner. Typically, I had bought twice as much as I cooked, and I ate half of what I cooked. The meat I had bought was something from the bio section, something that was lamb of some variety. When I examined the package closely it turned lout to be something called noisette d’agneau (in French) and Lambsnoot (in Dutch). Holey moley! Did I really buy lamb snout? Lamb’s nose? It didn’t look like anything that would come from the nose of any lamb I had ever seen, but I decided to cook it before I looked into what it was any further. It was delicious, was not lamb’s snout, and went well with my salad. The prehistoric broccoli that II had bought was another story. After dinner I consulted google and wickipedia. It turns out that noisette d’agneau or lambsnoot is really a lump (piece/nut) of lamb without a bone. Whew! I’ll be glad when someone who knows what they’re doing in the kitchen returns to this apartment.
16 April, Thursday:
After at least two weeks of glorious weather, today was rainy and cooler…but still in the 60s. I am bored stiff here and may go somewhere else for the weekend. This is easy to do from Brussels. Brilliantly cooked lamb chops for dinner (tiny and very good, but not as good as NDF lamb chops). Stunningly enough, the avocado I bought this afternoon to spice up my salad was ripe and ready to eat. I pitched the broccoli and am ready for someone who knows what they are doing to take over the cooking. I looked at all sorts of fish, but realized that I had no idea how to cook it.
17 April, Friday:
I needed a change and was able to get a Eurostar ticket to London for a cheap price as well as a reservation at my “usual” London fleabag hotel, so I went to London this afternoon. Like Brussels, it was wet and rainy. I planed on visiting my usual haunts and reveling in the company of the flight crews from Trashkanistan, who seem to frequent this hotel. But instead I went to the Windsor Castle pub and had a pint of London Pride and had dinner there.
18 April, Saturday:
Today was a glorious day, and London “showed” very well. The first thing I noticed was that it is very clean, especially compared to Brussels. The sidewalks are wide and clean, and there is no dog poop to be seen. There are street sweeper people everywhere, picking up trash, sweeping the gutters and cleaning up dead leaves and flower petals. All the buildings are clean, the streets are pretty, and there are trees and fllowers and grass everywhere. The parks are lush and green and full of people lying on the grass, playing soccer, learning how to ride bikes, etc. Quite a change from Brussels. I spent most of the day walking, although I did go into Harrods and bought a book. While there I gazed admiringly at a sculpture of Princess Diana and Dodi al-Fayed entitled “Innocent Victims,” which was commissioned by Mohamed Al-Fayed, Dodi’s father, the odious owner of Harrods. It was quite wonderful, if you like things in grotesque bad taste. There appears to be no recession in London. Ferraris and Porsches everywhere, every other house seems to be under renovation, and the streets are full of people. At least the center of the city gives off an aura of being rich. And I thought that (a) London depended on the City of London (the financial sector) more than New York depends on Wall Street, and (b) that the City was hemorrhaging money and laying off anyone they could find. It didn’t look like that to me.
19 April, Sunday:
Today was another wonderful day. Cool and sunny in the morning and warm and sunny in the afternoon. Shirtsleeve weather. In spite of the fact that it was Sunday, most stores and restaurants seemed to be open, and there were people everywhere. I went to the Saatchi Gallery in Chelsea, close to Sloane Square. It is in a big, fancily renovated old building, and is, I guess, dedicated to modern art. Today they were focused on Iranian artists, most of whom I could have done without. But in the basement there was a wonderful “installation.” There were about 10 very realistic mannequins (I guess that’s what you’d call them) that were made up and dressed to look like old arab men, some dressed in robes, some in military uniforms, some in business suits, etc. All asleep and seated in electric wheelchairs. The wheelchairs rolled quietly around in the gallery, changing direction every time they bumped into a wall or a pillar or another wheelchair. You could watch this little “ballet” going on from a small balcony, but you could also go onto the floor of the gallery and walk around the wheelchairs, making sure not to run into them, and jumping 10 feet when one of them ran into you. It was marvelous. And admission was free! After that I went to the Royal Academy and saw an extraordinary exhibit of color woodblock prints by a Japanese artist named Kuniyoshi who lived from 1797 – 1861. The prints were fabulous…very detailed with vibrant colors, etc. In some respects reminiscent of the elaborate grafitti and comic book artists that modern Japanese and Europeans (and William and John) like so much, but with an incredible attention to detail. How you could cut so much detail into a woodblock is beyond me. I walked back to my hotel through Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens, had a British version of a club sandwich (chicken and huge slabs of incredibly greasy bacon…Yum) and caught my train back to Brussels. It was sort of foggy and gloomy when we came out of the tunnel into France, but in Brussels it looked like it had been a warm and sunny weekend. But the streets were empty, the sidewalks were covered in dog poop, and I almost fell into a huge hole in the sidewalk. Welcome to Brussels!
20 April, Monday:
Today was a lovely sunny day in Brussels. I kept the French doors to the garden open all day, went food shopping, took a walk and generally wasted time.
21 April, Tuesday:
Beagle has decided that she is not coming back to Brussels, and I will be leaving as soon as I can manage it. She has seen the hip doctor, who tells her that the problem in her hip has gotten better, but that her current pain is coming from her back. She is going to see someone called a physiatrist, which is apparently a doctor who specializes in pain management and restoring functionality to people with injuries or disabilities, but in the interim the thought of getting on a plane back to Belgium is too much for her. I am trying to figure how to pack up everything in the apartment in 4 suitcases, since we arrived here with 4 suitcases and 2 backpacks, and have accumulated a lot of junk while we were here. Yuck. I had lamb snout again tonight. I’m getting pretty good at cooking it, but I did manage to generate enough smoke in the kitchen that the smoke alarm went off.
I was in the Delhaize supermarket today, laying in provisions. A British lady of a “certain age” was pushing a baby stroller filled with groceries and was heading for the exit, where she was intercepted by the staff. I don’t think she was trying to steal the stuff…I just think that she in her inimitable British way, was confused and was barging ahead. She tried to explain to the staff that she had the stuff in the baby stroller because she was staying at her son’s home in Brussels and didn’t know how to drive his car. The problem was that she was explaining this in English, and when the staff did not seem to understand, she just kept saying it louder and slower, as if they were quite stupid children who were hard of hearing. I was tempted to intervene, but did not. Partly because I was bored and needed some entertainment, and partly because if this woman was so stupid that she didn’t understand that the way to exit a grocery store was to stand in line like everybody else at the checkout counters and pay for her goods, then she deserved what was coming to her. Finally, an English speaking staff person was located, and she explained that in Brussels there is a quaint (“old World”) custom that people have to pay for things they pick off the shelves at a grocery store, even if you are English. This appeared to have sunk in, and then the woman started looking for her husband, who, she claimed, had the money. The poor man, totally mortified was hiding in the adult magazine section pretending that he didn’t know his wife, but he finally appeared, brandishing his wallet. You have to love the Brits. After my supermarket adventure I had to get serious, as I had a 3 hour French class with Aurélie. Aurélie had e-mailed us a website which was supposed to test our level of proficiency in French. Beagle took it and said it was really hard. I took it and Beagle was right. I had no clue on about half of the questions, and ended up scoring 17 out of 30, which qualified my French level as “moyen.” Beagle says that she got the same score…but that she would have gotten one or two more right answers if she had spent more time. Ha!! Although I will admit that any French test on which I score the same as she does is a stupid and misleading test. Anyway, we were discouraged, and when Aurélie turned up I told her. She was delighted. She said that scores like that were very good. She had taken the test herself and got 28 out of 30, and many of her colleagues had done much worse. 17 out of 39 was a great accomplishment! Those French! How about a test that encourages you as opposed to discouraging you? Speaking of which, I get an e-mail every day with a new French word. Today’s was a word that you could use in the phrase “My father was arrested by the police today.” Recovering from French class, I was on the phone to Beagle when a male pigeon flew into our garden and started molesting a female pigeon who decided to flee from his amorous advances into our living room through the open French doors. It was a good thing I was there to usher her out. I went from Aurélie to gym to dinner. Typically, I had bought twice as much as I cooked, and I ate half of what I cooked. The meat I had bought was something from the bio section, something that was lamb of some variety. When I examined the package closely it turned lout to be something called noisette d’agneau (in French) and Lambsnoot (in Dutch). Holey moley! Did I really buy lamb snout? Lamb’s nose? It didn’t look like anything that would come from the nose of any lamb I had ever seen, but I decided to cook it before I looked into what it was any further. It was delicious, was not lamb’s snout, and went well with my salad. The prehistoric broccoli that II had bought was another story. After dinner I consulted google and wickipedia. It turns out that noisette d’agneau or lambsnoot is really a lump (piece/nut) of lamb without a bone. Whew! I’ll be glad when someone who knows what they’re doing in the kitchen returns to this apartment.
16 April, Thursday:
After at least two weeks of glorious weather, today was rainy and cooler…but still in the 60s. I am bored stiff here and may go somewhere else for the weekend. This is easy to do from Brussels. Brilliantly cooked lamb chops for dinner (tiny and very good, but not as good as NDF lamb chops). Stunningly enough, the avocado I bought this afternoon to spice up my salad was ripe and ready to eat. I pitched the broccoli and am ready for someone who knows what they are doing to take over the cooking. I looked at all sorts of fish, but realized that I had no idea how to cook it.
17 April, Friday:
I needed a change and was able to get a Eurostar ticket to London for a cheap price as well as a reservation at my “usual” London fleabag hotel, so I went to London this afternoon. Like Brussels, it was wet and rainy. I planed on visiting my usual haunts and reveling in the company of the flight crews from Trashkanistan, who seem to frequent this hotel. But instead I went to the Windsor Castle pub and had a pint of London Pride and had dinner there.
18 April, Saturday:
Today was a glorious day, and London “showed” very well. The first thing I noticed was that it is very clean, especially compared to Brussels. The sidewalks are wide and clean, and there is no dog poop to be seen. There are street sweeper people everywhere, picking up trash, sweeping the gutters and cleaning up dead leaves and flower petals. All the buildings are clean, the streets are pretty, and there are trees and fllowers and grass everywhere. The parks are lush and green and full of people lying on the grass, playing soccer, learning how to ride bikes, etc. Quite a change from Brussels. I spent most of the day walking, although I did go into Harrods and bought a book. While there I gazed admiringly at a sculpture of Princess Diana and Dodi al-Fayed entitled “Innocent Victims,” which was commissioned by Mohamed Al-Fayed, Dodi’s father, the odious owner of Harrods. It was quite wonderful, if you like things in grotesque bad taste. There appears to be no recession in London. Ferraris and Porsches everywhere, every other house seems to be under renovation, and the streets are full of people. At least the center of the city gives off an aura of being rich. And I thought that (a) London depended on the City of London (the financial sector) more than New York depends on Wall Street, and (b) that the City was hemorrhaging money and laying off anyone they could find. It didn’t look like that to me.
19 April, Sunday:
Today was another wonderful day. Cool and sunny in the morning and warm and sunny in the afternoon. Shirtsleeve weather. In spite of the fact that it was Sunday, most stores and restaurants seemed to be open, and there were people everywhere. I went to the Saatchi Gallery in Chelsea, close to Sloane Square. It is in a big, fancily renovated old building, and is, I guess, dedicated to modern art. Today they were focused on Iranian artists, most of whom I could have done without. But in the basement there was a wonderful “installation.” There were about 10 very realistic mannequins (I guess that’s what you’d call them) that were made up and dressed to look like old arab men, some dressed in robes, some in military uniforms, some in business suits, etc. All asleep and seated in electric wheelchairs. The wheelchairs rolled quietly around in the gallery, changing direction every time they bumped into a wall or a pillar or another wheelchair. You could watch this little “ballet” going on from a small balcony, but you could also go onto the floor of the gallery and walk around the wheelchairs, making sure not to run into them, and jumping 10 feet when one of them ran into you. It was marvelous. And admission was free! After that I went to the Royal Academy and saw an extraordinary exhibit of color woodblock prints by a Japanese artist named Kuniyoshi who lived from 1797 – 1861. The prints were fabulous…very detailed with vibrant colors, etc. In some respects reminiscent of the elaborate grafitti and comic book artists that modern Japanese and Europeans (and William and John) like so much, but with an incredible attention to detail. How you could cut so much detail into a woodblock is beyond me. I walked back to my hotel through Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens, had a British version of a club sandwich (chicken and huge slabs of incredibly greasy bacon…Yum) and caught my train back to Brussels. It was sort of foggy and gloomy when we came out of the tunnel into France, but in Brussels it looked like it had been a warm and sunny weekend. But the streets were empty, the sidewalks were covered in dog poop, and I almost fell into a huge hole in the sidewalk. Welcome to Brussels!
20 April, Monday:
Today was a lovely sunny day in Brussels. I kept the French doors to the garden open all day, went food shopping, took a walk and generally wasted time.
21 April, Tuesday:
Beagle has decided that she is not coming back to Brussels, and I will be leaving as soon as I can manage it. She has seen the hip doctor, who tells her that the problem in her hip has gotten better, but that her current pain is coming from her back. She is going to see someone called a physiatrist, which is apparently a doctor who specializes in pain management and restoring functionality to people with injuries or disabilities, but in the interim the thought of getting on a plane back to Belgium is too much for her. I am trying to figure how to pack up everything in the apartment in 4 suitcases, since we arrived here with 4 suitcases and 2 backpacks, and have accumulated a lot of junk while we were here. Yuck. I had lamb snout again tonight. I’m getting pretty good at cooking it, but I did manage to generate enough smoke in the kitchen that the smoke alarm went off.
Friday, April 17, 2009
Week 23 - In which we eat brilliantly in Dranouter, I get sick again but rise from my bed on Easter, and Beagle goes to NYC to get jabbed
8 April, Wednesday:
Today met our friends Walter and Frieda Prevenier at In deWulf, a small inn in a town called Dranouter near Ypres, deep in the Flemish countryside. Dranouter is part of a relatively newly formed municipality called Heuvelland (hilly country in Dutch, although the highest hill is Mount Kemmel at 156 meters). There is no town called Huevelland, it is just a governmental creation which contains the towns of Dranouter, Kemmel, De Klijte, Loker, Niewkerke, Westouter, Wijtschate and Wulvergem. Huevelland’s total population…all 8 towns…is 8,217. So when I say it is deep in the Flemish countryside, you know what I mean. We got to the inn (or perhaps I should say that it is a restaurant with rooms) at about 5:15, having been delayed by a huge traffic jam with no apparent cause…more on that later. We went for a pre-dinner walk on tiny roads that allowed us to circle the inn. Smells of cow manure abounded. Made me homesick for the farm. The restaurant has been in business for many years, but a while ago the woman who was running it decided to turn it over to her son, who had been studying cooking at a variety of places, including France and Spain. It had been raining as we drove to Dranouter, but by the time we got there the sun had come out. Dinner started with, of course, champagne, and about 4 amuse-gueules (literally, mouth entertainers). Then we went to our table and had a magnificent meal. We all took the “modest” tasting menu as opposed to the big time tasting menu, which was a good thing. We started off with about 4 appetizers, which were followed by about 4 main courses, which were followed by 4 desserts. Plus we had a riesling from Austria, a chardonnay from Chile, and a red wine from Italy that contained cabernet sauvignon, merlot, and one other obscure grape the name of which our wine waiter had forgotten. Incredibly enough, it was a pretty light meal. All of the portions were very small…sort of like tapas…there was a fair amount of fish, etc. Everything was beautifully served and imaginatively presented, and at the end of the evening while we were ready to stop eating, we weren’t really full. Very nice. Michelin gives this tiny place one star, but there are those who think it is the best restaurant in Belgium.
9 April, Thursday:
After breakfast we went for a walk around and up Mount Kemmel. I had been there before on a tour of WWI battlefields and graveyards. Interestingly enough, Mount Kemmel features prominently in a letter that my father has from his father when he was fighting nearby during WWI. On my last visit, many years ago, I even saw a monument to the men of a US machine gun company that I think was my grandfather’s. Mount Kemmel, being the highest point for miles around, was a great vantage point and artillery location, and when the Germans occupied Mount Kemmel, they kept pretty busy shooting at and shelling the soldiers down below, including my grandfather,. As I recall he talked in his letter about the “accursed Mount Kemmel” lurking over them. In any event, this whole area is beautiful and sobering at the same time. There is a monument on the side of Mount Kemmel to 5,237 unknown French soldiers who are buried there, along with 57 who were identified. At Ypres, only a few kilometers away, the Menen Gate has inscribed on it the names of 54,896 British and Commonwealth soldiers who died in that area before August 16, 1917 but whose bodies were never recovered. It is estimated that there were 90,000 British soldiers who died in this area whose bodies were never recovered. And that is just the ones whose bodies weren’t found. There are dozens of military cemeteries, seemingly down every little road, containing the bodies of those who were recovered and identified. So on to more cheerful things. It seemed that the cause of the big traffic jam yesterday was a big bicycle race from Gent to somewhere nearby. It is run on tiny little roads, and one of the most interesting parts is where they ride up and down Mount Kemmel. Twice. On a steep, narrow, wet, slippery, cobblestoned road. As we were walking up, we saw a huge tractor trailer truck that was trying to make it up the hill, which advertised a 23% grade in addition to cobblestones so slippery you could barely walk on them. The truck was from an equipment rental company, and was clearly trying to get to the top of Mount Kemmel to pick up tents and other bicycle race paraphernalia at the top. The driver tried heroically, but failed about 5 times. Each time he’d get about a third of the way up, just before it started to get really steep, and then would run out of power and traction. Then he would have to back down this steep, slippery hill, around a slight corner, avoiding the French cemetery on one side and a café on the other. We were terrified that he would loose it and crash into us, so we took to the woods and made it up to the top. As we started down the other side, we observed that the road was not quite as steep and not quite as slippery as on the other side, although it was longer and had more curves. And who should appear again but our friend the truck driver, driving us off the road once again. I guess he gave up on the other side and thought he’d try to make it from this side. Nice try, but no cigar. After watching him make a few more tries, we took to the woods again and the last we saw of him he was almost to the top, but stopped and partially off the road sort of leaning into a steep bank. We finished our walk and tried to get lunch in Kemmel, the tiny town we had parked in. As we were taking off our hiking boots, who should reappear but our friend the truck driver! It took him about 10 minutes to get through the town, since the road was so narrow, his truck was so wide, and there were cars parked on either side of the road. When last seen he was happily picking up tents, etc. left over from the bicycle race in Kemmel. Other than the people taking down tents and loading trucks, the village appeared deserted, but when we went into the only restaurant in town, we discovered that it was jammed. No room for us, so we drove 10 minutes to Ypres to get something light…a sandwich or something. It was getting late for lunch, but the restaurant we picked was pretty elegant and they said that they could still give us the menu of the day, which we agreed to. I should have been alerted by the words “puréed potatoes,” but I was hungry and this was our last chance. We had a lovely vegetable soup, elegantly presented. This was followed by stoemp with a huge sausage on top. It was Beagle’s first experience with stoemp and she handled it quite well. Even though Madame was not amused, she ate about half.
10 April, Friday:
Friday was a gorgeous day. It was sunny and in the high 70s. We walked around, checked out a restaurant in Place Saint Catherine and learned that not only is there a Mannekin Pis statue in Brussels, but there has also been a female equivalent since 1987 called Jeanneke Pis and there is even a statue of a dog lifting his leg on a fire hydrant. Those Belgians sure know how to attract the tourist crowd! We also did some shopping, and since Beagle is going back to NYC tomorrow, she went to about 100 stores looking for chocolates and other stuff to make Easter baskets for John and Vic. En route we stopped and had our first ice cream cones of the season. Very satisfactory. I got wobblier and wobblier as the afternoon went on, and by the time we got home, I had to lie down. I had a fever and as far as I was concerned, I had heat stroke! These New Englanders just can’t stand the hot weather!
11 April, Saturday:
Beagle left for New York today. She is going to see my hip doctor to see what can be done about her hip. Her back surgery was a success, and that pain is gone, but it appears to have been masking other pain that originates in her hip. She is getting better, slowly, but this is ridiculous. This has been going on for months, and looks likely to continue forever, so she finally decided to try something other than Feldenkrais and PT…which help, but which, in my opinion, can’t cure the underlying problem. So I packed her bag for her yesterday (including some of my winter gear, which was the excuse she gave for making me pack for her) and drove her to the airport this morning. I was still feeling sick, so I went back to bed for about 3 hours, then did some grocery shopping and pretty much stayed inside except for that. I did manage to watch most of a rugby match between Cardiff and Toulouse, which was evidently very important…part of some tournament or something. Anyway, Cardiff won. I had to do the grocery shopping because Sunday is Easter and Monday is a holiday as well…which means that all of the grocery stores and 95% of the restaurants will be closed. One of Beagle’s students who is in Belgium for a year or two is a Catholic and he tried to find a church where he could attend Easter service in Brussels. Apparently there are none. Despite Belgium being a Catholic country (when it is not being Socialist or “Free”), the churches appear to be shut on holidays, including religious holidays like Easter…and, as far as I can tell all churches are shut on Sundays anyway. A day of rest and all that.
12 April, Sunday:
Today was Easter. Supposedly a religious holiday, but as far as I can tell it is an excuse for Belgians to eat chocolate. I watched French TV last night, and they said that the average annual per person consumption of chocolate in France is 4 kilos (8.8 pounds) and they were proud of it. But Belgians apparently eat 11 kilos (24 pounds) per year. So there, you stuck up Frenchies! Even the US, at 5.6 kilos (12 pounds) whips them. I went out today to see what Belgians actually do on Easter. Other than the young man who was checking all the cars on rue Souveraine to see which cars were worth breaking into, the streets were pretty much empty. Everyone had either left town or was lying on the grass in a park. Spring is really here. The tree in our garden, which had been violently pollarded, is sporting little green leaves everywhere they cut branches off. They’re not big, but they have appeared in the last few days and show promise. On another subject, did I tell you that the other day, when we were investigating rue Molière, we walked through a square that is apparently famous for its parrots. Evidently, some time ago some people released domestic parrots, and now there is a big colony there that has survived. They have built huge round nests in trees, telephone poles, etc., that are evidently communal lodging places. Quite impressive, especially when you are expecting pigeons.
13 April, Monday:
This being Belgium, today was another holiday. The city was deserted, and it was another gorgeous day. I can’t get enough of this Belgian weather! The big news of the day is that Beagle had an appointment with the famous Dr. Buly, one of the world’s leading hip doctors, and the guy who not only fixed my hip a number of years ago but also told me that I didn’t need my knees replaced, contrary to the advice of the quack who operated on (and made worse) my right knee. Being famous, there are all sorts of pictures of Dr. Buly in the halls of the Hospital For Special Surgery in NYC, all of which show him with large amounts of curly blond hair. It comes as quite a shock when you see him in person and discover that he is bald as an egg. Either he was wearing a wig in the pictures or he was starting to go bald and decided to shave his head. In any event, he poked and prodded and looked at X-rays and MRIs and told Beagle that she did not need hip surgery and that her problem was, in fact, severe tendonitis in her psoas muscle, a muscle that runs from your back around in front of your hip and down. The cure for this is rest and a great whacking cortisone shot. So she got her shot (actually shots…Beagle said they did 5 shots in each of 4 spots), and we’ll see. It apparently takes somewhere between 2 and 8 days for the cortisone to take effect, so it will be a while. It is nice to know what the problem was, and even nicer to know that surgery is not required. Now if we can just keep her from continuing to inflame that muscle by maniacally exercising! She should eat more stoemp and relax.
14 April, Tuesday:
Things got off to a bad start today when the cleaning lady turned up at 8:30 AM. I told her that being a gentleman of leisure, it was too early for me to do my usual routine of scuttling around the apartment trying to stay out of her way, and she left. I, however, finished my morning ablutions and desperate for something to do, drove out to Turvuren to the Africa Museum. It was a beautiful day, and I walked through the park and then into the forêt for a while. I returned to the museum and gave it a thorough going over and then repaired to the cafeteria. I had been under the impression that the museum had a pretty good restaurant, run by the same people who have restaurants in several other museums in Brussels, and which are pretty good. This turned out to be wrong. The bill of fare was pretty pathetic, and my mind was made up for me when about 50 hearty Belgians wearing “Hi, My Name Is Jean-Pierre” nametags turned up. I fled back home, only to find that as punishment for having rejected our regular cleaning lady earlier in the day, two Amazons who were doing their best to demolish our apartment had replaced her. I fled and returned after they had gone, only to find that we were without internet access, that Beagle’s computer was inert, etc. I spent the next two hours trying to figure out the problem…which turned out to be that the cleaning ladies had unplugged the surge protector into which Beagle’s computer is plugged, had whacked the cable modem with the vacuum cleaner in a subtle way so that the cable connection at the wall was disabled (but not visibly so), etc., etc. Exhausted by my labors in putting everything right, I repaired to La Régence for dinner and had veal kidneys and frites to give me strength. That did the trick…put me in a much better mood, but dining alone at a restaurant is not really high on my list of things I love to do. If Uncle Brian were to go into La Régence he’d know everyone there before the evening was out. Not me.
Today met our friends Walter and Frieda Prevenier at In deWulf, a small inn in a town called Dranouter near Ypres, deep in the Flemish countryside. Dranouter is part of a relatively newly formed municipality called Heuvelland (hilly country in Dutch, although the highest hill is Mount Kemmel at 156 meters). There is no town called Huevelland, it is just a governmental creation which contains the towns of Dranouter, Kemmel, De Klijte, Loker, Niewkerke, Westouter, Wijtschate and Wulvergem. Huevelland’s total population…all 8 towns…is 8,217. So when I say it is deep in the Flemish countryside, you know what I mean. We got to the inn (or perhaps I should say that it is a restaurant with rooms) at about 5:15, having been delayed by a huge traffic jam with no apparent cause…more on that later. We went for a pre-dinner walk on tiny roads that allowed us to circle the inn. Smells of cow manure abounded. Made me homesick for the farm. The restaurant has been in business for many years, but a while ago the woman who was running it decided to turn it over to her son, who had been studying cooking at a variety of places, including France and Spain. It had been raining as we drove to Dranouter, but by the time we got there the sun had come out. Dinner started with, of course, champagne, and about 4 amuse-gueules (literally, mouth entertainers). Then we went to our table and had a magnificent meal. We all took the “modest” tasting menu as opposed to the big time tasting menu, which was a good thing. We started off with about 4 appetizers, which were followed by about 4 main courses, which were followed by 4 desserts. Plus we had a riesling from Austria, a chardonnay from Chile, and a red wine from Italy that contained cabernet sauvignon, merlot, and one other obscure grape the name of which our wine waiter had forgotten. Incredibly enough, it was a pretty light meal. All of the portions were very small…sort of like tapas…there was a fair amount of fish, etc. Everything was beautifully served and imaginatively presented, and at the end of the evening while we were ready to stop eating, we weren’t really full. Very nice. Michelin gives this tiny place one star, but there are those who think it is the best restaurant in Belgium.
9 April, Thursday:
After breakfast we went for a walk around and up Mount Kemmel. I had been there before on a tour of WWI battlefields and graveyards. Interestingly enough, Mount Kemmel features prominently in a letter that my father has from his father when he was fighting nearby during WWI. On my last visit, many years ago, I even saw a monument to the men of a US machine gun company that I think was my grandfather’s. Mount Kemmel, being the highest point for miles around, was a great vantage point and artillery location, and when the Germans occupied Mount Kemmel, they kept pretty busy shooting at and shelling the soldiers down below, including my grandfather,. As I recall he talked in his letter about the “accursed Mount Kemmel” lurking over them. In any event, this whole area is beautiful and sobering at the same time. There is a monument on the side of Mount Kemmel to 5,237 unknown French soldiers who are buried there, along with 57 who were identified. At Ypres, only a few kilometers away, the Menen Gate has inscribed on it the names of 54,896 British and Commonwealth soldiers who died in that area before August 16, 1917 but whose bodies were never recovered. It is estimated that there were 90,000 British soldiers who died in this area whose bodies were never recovered. And that is just the ones whose bodies weren’t found. There are dozens of military cemeteries, seemingly down every little road, containing the bodies of those who were recovered and identified. So on to more cheerful things. It seemed that the cause of the big traffic jam yesterday was a big bicycle race from Gent to somewhere nearby. It is run on tiny little roads, and one of the most interesting parts is where they ride up and down Mount Kemmel. Twice. On a steep, narrow, wet, slippery, cobblestoned road. As we were walking up, we saw a huge tractor trailer truck that was trying to make it up the hill, which advertised a 23% grade in addition to cobblestones so slippery you could barely walk on them. The truck was from an equipment rental company, and was clearly trying to get to the top of Mount Kemmel to pick up tents and other bicycle race paraphernalia at the top. The driver tried heroically, but failed about 5 times. Each time he’d get about a third of the way up, just before it started to get really steep, and then would run out of power and traction. Then he would have to back down this steep, slippery hill, around a slight corner, avoiding the French cemetery on one side and a café on the other. We were terrified that he would loose it and crash into us, so we took to the woods and made it up to the top. As we started down the other side, we observed that the road was not quite as steep and not quite as slippery as on the other side, although it was longer and had more curves. And who should appear again but our friend the truck driver, driving us off the road once again. I guess he gave up on the other side and thought he’d try to make it from this side. Nice try, but no cigar. After watching him make a few more tries, we took to the woods again and the last we saw of him he was almost to the top, but stopped and partially off the road sort of leaning into a steep bank. We finished our walk and tried to get lunch in Kemmel, the tiny town we had parked in. As we were taking off our hiking boots, who should reappear but our friend the truck driver! It took him about 10 minutes to get through the town, since the road was so narrow, his truck was so wide, and there were cars parked on either side of the road. When last seen he was happily picking up tents, etc. left over from the bicycle race in Kemmel. Other than the people taking down tents and loading trucks, the village appeared deserted, but when we went into the only restaurant in town, we discovered that it was jammed. No room for us, so we drove 10 minutes to Ypres to get something light…a sandwich or something. It was getting late for lunch, but the restaurant we picked was pretty elegant and they said that they could still give us the menu of the day, which we agreed to. I should have been alerted by the words “puréed potatoes,” but I was hungry and this was our last chance. We had a lovely vegetable soup, elegantly presented. This was followed by stoemp with a huge sausage on top. It was Beagle’s first experience with stoemp and she handled it quite well. Even though Madame was not amused, she ate about half.
10 April, Friday:
Friday was a gorgeous day. It was sunny and in the high 70s. We walked around, checked out a restaurant in Place Saint Catherine and learned that not only is there a Mannekin Pis statue in Brussels, but there has also been a female equivalent since 1987 called Jeanneke Pis and there is even a statue of a dog lifting his leg on a fire hydrant. Those Belgians sure know how to attract the tourist crowd! We also did some shopping, and since Beagle is going back to NYC tomorrow, she went to about 100 stores looking for chocolates and other stuff to make Easter baskets for John and Vic. En route we stopped and had our first ice cream cones of the season. Very satisfactory. I got wobblier and wobblier as the afternoon went on, and by the time we got home, I had to lie down. I had a fever and as far as I was concerned, I had heat stroke! These New Englanders just can’t stand the hot weather!
11 April, Saturday:
Beagle left for New York today. She is going to see my hip doctor to see what can be done about her hip. Her back surgery was a success, and that pain is gone, but it appears to have been masking other pain that originates in her hip. She is getting better, slowly, but this is ridiculous. This has been going on for months, and looks likely to continue forever, so she finally decided to try something other than Feldenkrais and PT…which help, but which, in my opinion, can’t cure the underlying problem. So I packed her bag for her yesterday (including some of my winter gear, which was the excuse she gave for making me pack for her) and drove her to the airport this morning. I was still feeling sick, so I went back to bed for about 3 hours, then did some grocery shopping and pretty much stayed inside except for that. I did manage to watch most of a rugby match between Cardiff and Toulouse, which was evidently very important…part of some tournament or something. Anyway, Cardiff won. I had to do the grocery shopping because Sunday is Easter and Monday is a holiday as well…which means that all of the grocery stores and 95% of the restaurants will be closed. One of Beagle’s students who is in Belgium for a year or two is a Catholic and he tried to find a church where he could attend Easter service in Brussels. Apparently there are none. Despite Belgium being a Catholic country (when it is not being Socialist or “Free”), the churches appear to be shut on holidays, including religious holidays like Easter…and, as far as I can tell all churches are shut on Sundays anyway. A day of rest and all that.
12 April, Sunday:
Today was Easter. Supposedly a religious holiday, but as far as I can tell it is an excuse for Belgians to eat chocolate. I watched French TV last night, and they said that the average annual per person consumption of chocolate in France is 4 kilos (8.8 pounds) and they were proud of it. But Belgians apparently eat 11 kilos (24 pounds) per year. So there, you stuck up Frenchies! Even the US, at 5.6 kilos (12 pounds) whips them. I went out today to see what Belgians actually do on Easter. Other than the young man who was checking all the cars on rue Souveraine to see which cars were worth breaking into, the streets were pretty much empty. Everyone had either left town or was lying on the grass in a park. Spring is really here. The tree in our garden, which had been violently pollarded, is sporting little green leaves everywhere they cut branches off. They’re not big, but they have appeared in the last few days and show promise. On another subject, did I tell you that the other day, when we were investigating rue Molière, we walked through a square that is apparently famous for its parrots. Evidently, some time ago some people released domestic parrots, and now there is a big colony there that has survived. They have built huge round nests in trees, telephone poles, etc., that are evidently communal lodging places. Quite impressive, especially when you are expecting pigeons.
13 April, Monday:
This being Belgium, today was another holiday. The city was deserted, and it was another gorgeous day. I can’t get enough of this Belgian weather! The big news of the day is that Beagle had an appointment with the famous Dr. Buly, one of the world’s leading hip doctors, and the guy who not only fixed my hip a number of years ago but also told me that I didn’t need my knees replaced, contrary to the advice of the quack who operated on (and made worse) my right knee. Being famous, there are all sorts of pictures of Dr. Buly in the halls of the Hospital For Special Surgery in NYC, all of which show him with large amounts of curly blond hair. It comes as quite a shock when you see him in person and discover that he is bald as an egg. Either he was wearing a wig in the pictures or he was starting to go bald and decided to shave his head. In any event, he poked and prodded and looked at X-rays and MRIs and told Beagle that she did not need hip surgery and that her problem was, in fact, severe tendonitis in her psoas muscle, a muscle that runs from your back around in front of your hip and down. The cure for this is rest and a great whacking cortisone shot. So she got her shot (actually shots…Beagle said they did 5 shots in each of 4 spots), and we’ll see. It apparently takes somewhere between 2 and 8 days for the cortisone to take effect, so it will be a while. It is nice to know what the problem was, and even nicer to know that surgery is not required. Now if we can just keep her from continuing to inflame that muscle by maniacally exercising! She should eat more stoemp and relax.
14 April, Tuesday:
Things got off to a bad start today when the cleaning lady turned up at 8:30 AM. I told her that being a gentleman of leisure, it was too early for me to do my usual routine of scuttling around the apartment trying to stay out of her way, and she left. I, however, finished my morning ablutions and desperate for something to do, drove out to Turvuren to the Africa Museum. It was a beautiful day, and I walked through the park and then into the forêt for a while. I returned to the museum and gave it a thorough going over and then repaired to the cafeteria. I had been under the impression that the museum had a pretty good restaurant, run by the same people who have restaurants in several other museums in Brussels, and which are pretty good. This turned out to be wrong. The bill of fare was pretty pathetic, and my mind was made up for me when about 50 hearty Belgians wearing “Hi, My Name Is Jean-Pierre” nametags turned up. I fled back home, only to find that as punishment for having rejected our regular cleaning lady earlier in the day, two Amazons who were doing their best to demolish our apartment had replaced her. I fled and returned after they had gone, only to find that we were without internet access, that Beagle’s computer was inert, etc. I spent the next two hours trying to figure out the problem…which turned out to be that the cleaning ladies had unplugged the surge protector into which Beagle’s computer is plugged, had whacked the cable modem with the vacuum cleaner in a subtle way so that the cable connection at the wall was disabled (but not visibly so), etc., etc. Exhausted by my labors in putting everything right, I repaired to La Régence for dinner and had veal kidneys and frites to give me strength. That did the trick…put me in a much better mood, but dining alone at a restaurant is not really high on my list of things I love to do. If Uncle Brian were to go into La Régence he’d know everyone there before the evening was out. Not me.
Sunday, April 12, 2009
Week 22 - In which Jean arrives, we find a new restaurant and learn about Audrey Hepburn, and Beagle buys still more black pants
1 April, Wednesday:
Some April Fool’s Day. I picked up Beagle’s sister Jean at the train station this morning. She had just flown into Paris from DC, and is spending a few days with us in Brussels before she goes to Provence for a month. Our day was full, what with Jean’s arrival, 3 hours of French lessons with Aurélie, multiple conference calls for both Beagle and me, and an afternoon meeting for Beagle. Jean napped and made a few forays into the neighborhood. We thought about having dinner out, but ended up punting and having spaghetti at home.
2 April, Thursday:
Jean needed to revisit Brussels and it was a nice spring day so we walked to the Grand Place, had lunch at La Becasse…where the gueuze was wasted on Jean…, walked back along Avenue Louise and into Saint Gilles, visited the Horta House, and looked at lovely houses on rue Molière. There were even streets with trees in flower…very unusual for Brussels. By the time we got to Bois de la Cambre everyone was walked out, so we took a tram home. After a long bout of talking and foot rubbing (during which I absented myself), we went to Au Vieux Bruxelles and ate moules and frites for dinner. Everyone was happy and tired and we went to bed early.
3 April, Friday:
Today was a lovely spring/summer day. It was sunny, with temperatures in the 70s. We walked to the lakes near Place Flagey, then to the Abbaye de la Cambre, then along Avenue Roosevelt, and then into the Bois de la Cambre and the Forêt des Soignes. It was just wonderful. There were flowers everywhere, trees in bud and starting to turn green, etc. We left the forêt at Watermael-Boitsfort and went to our “usual” restaurant and had a lunch of pizza and beer sitting outside. We took the tram home, opened all the doors to our garden and enjoyed the weather. We had dinner at Les Brassins, a restaurant in our neighborhood on Kleienveldstraat/rue Keyenveld that was recently recommended to us. This was exactly as advertised. This turned out to be a great restaurant in the Belgian fashion with all sorts of typical Belgian food. Jean had tuna, Beagle and I had lapin à la kriek (rabbit cooked in cherry beer…you could choose one leg or two, and we both chose one), and we had frites, stoemp and boiled potatoes on the side. The restaurant has an extraordinarily broad beer list…maybe 30 different beers plus about a dozen beer “specials”… plus wine, etc. It was very informal, and not super expensive (at least I think so, but Jean paid), and it was a few doors down the street from the house where Audrey Hepburn was born. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Audrey Hepburn’s life story, she was born on this tiny, dingy street in Brussels in 1929. Her original name was Audrey Kathleen Ruston, and she was descended from, among others, King Edward III of England and the consort of Mary Queen of Scots, James Hepburn, 4th Earl of Bothwell, who was apparently also an ancestor of Katharine Hepburn. She was also a distant cousin of Humphrey Bogart and Prince Ranier III of Monaco, but then again, I am sure that I am related to Vlad the Impaler of Transylvania and Brittany Spears. Her father was a Nazi sympathizer and her mother was a fascist, and that seems to have caused family problems. Her parents got divorced in 1935 and her mother moved Audrey to Holland in 1939 to be safe from the Nazis. As we all know, this did not work out so well, since the Nazis arrived in Holland shortly after Audrey did. Audrey danced to raise money for the Resistance, and among her childhood memories were those of seeing her uncle and her cousin being executed by Germans for being members of the Resistance. While she was in Holland she assumed the name Edda van Heerrnstra so as not to have too English a sounding name. She moved to London in 1948 where, apparently, her film career took off. I hope she got to eat at Les Brassins before she left Brussels.
4 April, Saturday:
Today started out as cool and foggy. Jean had a 10:21 train from Gare de Midi to Avignon, so needless to say, she was ready to go at about 6AM. We were not so alert. Jean and I took the Metro to Gare de Midi, which perhaps was a mistake. They were inaugurating a new service on the Metro today…two new lines, much improved displays that tell you how long you have to wait for a train, better and more frequent schedules, etc. According to all the signs, on the weekends the metros should run every 5 minutes on the line we were taking. We waited for about 10 minutes and then, when the train came, it sat in the station for another 10 minutes, etc. Good thing we had allowed a lot of time for the Metro ride. A ride that should have taken 5 minutes took 30. I am not impressed with the new Metro. The same was true on the way back…and even more annoying was that after I had searched all over the place for one of those ticket “composting” machines I finally found one and managed to pay, but then heard an announcement that in honor of the inaguration of the “new” Metro, everyone could ride for free. Once I got back home we were free, but we couldn’t figure out what to do. So, since it was a grey and depressing day, we went to the movies…the first time since we have been in Brussels. We went around the corner (literally) to the Styxx, which is a tiny theatre with two screens and a seating capacity in each screening room of about 35 seats. We saw “Entre les murs,” which is distributed in the US under the title “The Class.” In good European fashion, they run about 8 movies at the theatre, but since there are only two screens, each of them has different viewing times…so if you want to see a particular movie, you have to go there at, say Saturday at 4:45 PM, when it is playing that day. The next day it will be at a different time, etc. Very confusing. We had to arrange our schedule so we could see this movie. But since it was a sort of grey and foggy day, that was fine. It was a great movie…more or less a documentary about a teacher and his class of mixed-race, mixed-culture junior high school students in the 20th arrondissement of Paris. How anyone is a high school teacher is beyond me.
5 April, Sunday:
Today started out being gray and unpromising, but it warmed up and turned into a real spring day. We did one of our standard walks and ended up in the Bois de la Cambre. Everyone in Brussels was there with their kids, all of whom were learning to ride bicycles except for the ones who were playing soccer or sleeping on the grass. It got pretty hot…into the 70s…and people were taking full advantage of it.
6 April, Monday:
Another day with an unpromising beginning that ended up being really nice. I went grocery shopping, did e-mail, etc., and then went to Filigranes and bought a guidebook for Lille, because we are going to be there next month with some British friends. Beagle went clothes shopping and…hold your breath…bought some black pants. I spent part of the afternoon reading my book in the garden. It was very pleasant, and the first time I had spent more than 2 minutes in the garden.
7 April, Tuesday:
On Wednesday we are going to be meeting our friends the Preveniers in a town called Dranouter, in West Flanders, so we had to reschedule our regular Wednesday French lesson for today. However, Aurélie called at about 8 AM to say that she couldn’t make it, that she had been stricken with a terrible case of the flu, that she had been vomiting all night, etc., etc. Hmmm. It does seem that Aurélie misses more classes than she makes. But no big deal. Instead of having a French lesson I read an excellent trashy book.
Some April Fool’s Day. I picked up Beagle’s sister Jean at the train station this morning. She had just flown into Paris from DC, and is spending a few days with us in Brussels before she goes to Provence for a month. Our day was full, what with Jean’s arrival, 3 hours of French lessons with Aurélie, multiple conference calls for both Beagle and me, and an afternoon meeting for Beagle. Jean napped and made a few forays into the neighborhood. We thought about having dinner out, but ended up punting and having spaghetti at home.
2 April, Thursday:
Jean needed to revisit Brussels and it was a nice spring day so we walked to the Grand Place, had lunch at La Becasse…where the gueuze was wasted on Jean…, walked back along Avenue Louise and into Saint Gilles, visited the Horta House, and looked at lovely houses on rue Molière. There were even streets with trees in flower…very unusual for Brussels. By the time we got to Bois de la Cambre everyone was walked out, so we took a tram home. After a long bout of talking and foot rubbing (during which I absented myself), we went to Au Vieux Bruxelles and ate moules and frites for dinner. Everyone was happy and tired and we went to bed early.
3 April, Friday:
Today was a lovely spring/summer day. It was sunny, with temperatures in the 70s. We walked to the lakes near Place Flagey, then to the Abbaye de la Cambre, then along Avenue Roosevelt, and then into the Bois de la Cambre and the Forêt des Soignes. It was just wonderful. There were flowers everywhere, trees in bud and starting to turn green, etc. We left the forêt at Watermael-Boitsfort and went to our “usual” restaurant and had a lunch of pizza and beer sitting outside. We took the tram home, opened all the doors to our garden and enjoyed the weather. We had dinner at Les Brassins, a restaurant in our neighborhood on Kleienveldstraat/rue Keyenveld that was recently recommended to us. This was exactly as advertised. This turned out to be a great restaurant in the Belgian fashion with all sorts of typical Belgian food. Jean had tuna, Beagle and I had lapin à la kriek (rabbit cooked in cherry beer…you could choose one leg or two, and we both chose one), and we had frites, stoemp and boiled potatoes on the side. The restaurant has an extraordinarily broad beer list…maybe 30 different beers plus about a dozen beer “specials”… plus wine, etc. It was very informal, and not super expensive (at least I think so, but Jean paid), and it was a few doors down the street from the house where Audrey Hepburn was born. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Audrey Hepburn’s life story, she was born on this tiny, dingy street in Brussels in 1929. Her original name was Audrey Kathleen Ruston, and she was descended from, among others, King Edward III of England and the consort of Mary Queen of Scots, James Hepburn, 4th Earl of Bothwell, who was apparently also an ancestor of Katharine Hepburn. She was also a distant cousin of Humphrey Bogart and Prince Ranier III of Monaco, but then again, I am sure that I am related to Vlad the Impaler of Transylvania and Brittany Spears. Her father was a Nazi sympathizer and her mother was a fascist, and that seems to have caused family problems. Her parents got divorced in 1935 and her mother moved Audrey to Holland in 1939 to be safe from the Nazis. As we all know, this did not work out so well, since the Nazis arrived in Holland shortly after Audrey did. Audrey danced to raise money for the Resistance, and among her childhood memories were those of seeing her uncle and her cousin being executed by Germans for being members of the Resistance. While she was in Holland she assumed the name Edda van Heerrnstra so as not to have too English a sounding name. She moved to London in 1948 where, apparently, her film career took off. I hope she got to eat at Les Brassins before she left Brussels.
4 April, Saturday:
Today started out as cool and foggy. Jean had a 10:21 train from Gare de Midi to Avignon, so needless to say, she was ready to go at about 6AM. We were not so alert. Jean and I took the Metro to Gare de Midi, which perhaps was a mistake. They were inaugurating a new service on the Metro today…two new lines, much improved displays that tell you how long you have to wait for a train, better and more frequent schedules, etc. According to all the signs, on the weekends the metros should run every 5 minutes on the line we were taking. We waited for about 10 minutes and then, when the train came, it sat in the station for another 10 minutes, etc. Good thing we had allowed a lot of time for the Metro ride. A ride that should have taken 5 minutes took 30. I am not impressed with the new Metro. The same was true on the way back…and even more annoying was that after I had searched all over the place for one of those ticket “composting” machines I finally found one and managed to pay, but then heard an announcement that in honor of the inaguration of the “new” Metro, everyone could ride for free. Once I got back home we were free, but we couldn’t figure out what to do. So, since it was a grey and depressing day, we went to the movies…the first time since we have been in Brussels. We went around the corner (literally) to the Styxx, which is a tiny theatre with two screens and a seating capacity in each screening room of about 35 seats. We saw “Entre les murs,” which is distributed in the US under the title “The Class.” In good European fashion, they run about 8 movies at the theatre, but since there are only two screens, each of them has different viewing times…so if you want to see a particular movie, you have to go there at, say Saturday at 4:45 PM, when it is playing that day. The next day it will be at a different time, etc. Very confusing. We had to arrange our schedule so we could see this movie. But since it was a sort of grey and foggy day, that was fine. It was a great movie…more or less a documentary about a teacher and his class of mixed-race, mixed-culture junior high school students in the 20th arrondissement of Paris. How anyone is a high school teacher is beyond me.
5 April, Sunday:
Today started out being gray and unpromising, but it warmed up and turned into a real spring day. We did one of our standard walks and ended up in the Bois de la Cambre. Everyone in Brussels was there with their kids, all of whom were learning to ride bicycles except for the ones who were playing soccer or sleeping on the grass. It got pretty hot…into the 70s…and people were taking full advantage of it.
6 April, Monday:
Another day with an unpromising beginning that ended up being really nice. I went grocery shopping, did e-mail, etc., and then went to Filigranes and bought a guidebook for Lille, because we are going to be there next month with some British friends. Beagle went clothes shopping and…hold your breath…bought some black pants. I spent part of the afternoon reading my book in the garden. It was very pleasant, and the first time I had spent more than 2 minutes in the garden.
7 April, Tuesday:
On Wednesday we are going to be meeting our friends the Preveniers in a town called Dranouter, in West Flanders, so we had to reschedule our regular Wednesday French lesson for today. However, Aurélie called at about 8 AM to say that she couldn’t make it, that she had been stricken with a terrible case of the flu, that she had been vomiting all night, etc., etc. Hmmm. It does seem that Aurélie misses more classes than she makes. But no big deal. Instead of having a French lesson I read an excellent trashy book.
Friday, April 3, 2009
Week 21 - In which we walk on the Belgian Champs-Elysées, are frustrated with french lessons, Thérèse cooks dinner and we go on daylight savings time
25 March, Wednesday:
If you were to walk through our apartment, through our garden, through the next garden and through the building on the other side, you would come to a street called Champs-Elysées. This is not like the Champs-Elysées in Paris, which is a long, wide avenue which the Parisians think is the most beautiful avenue in the world, and which has some of the most expensive real estate in the world. The Champs-Elysées in Brussels is a different matter. It is a narrow street with narrow sidewalks that runs about three blocks, and if you follow it down the hill to the end, you get to some bottle recycling bins and the Delhaize supermarket, which we frequent. The street itself has a few nice buildings on it, but is generally grim. You have to watch where you step because a lot of people seem to use the sidewalks as a place to walk their dogs, and there is generally some broken glass on the sidewalks where some delinquent has broken a car window to rob what was inside. But if you look carefully you see that on the left-hand side, as you go down the hill, there is a big yellow house which, behind a high metal wall, has a huge garden. It is a little hard to say how big the garden is, because you can only see it if you peek through holes in the fence, or stand on a bench or something. But it surrounds the house on two sides, and I would say it is 1 - 2 acres in size. And on the other size of the street, also behind a wall, is another house with what looks like another nice garden. And down the hill a bit you can get a glimpse through a gate of a big free-standing house that overlooks what must be a huge garden, entirely surrounded by a very high concrete wall. It is hard to guess exactly how big this garden is…when you look at a map, it shows a big green space…but based on the layout of the streets and the fact that it completely occupies the space between two streets, all the way down to the Delhaize, I would say that it is at least 2 complete city blocks big, which is about 11 acres. And this is hidden from view in the middle of what appears to be a pretty grimy neighborhood in the middle of Brussels.
26 March, Thursday:
The weather here has developed a new pattern. In the morning it is rainy, or at least there are signs that it has rained during the night…the ground is wet, it is grey, etc. Then the sun comes out, and while it is cool and sometimes cloudy, the days are pretty nice. And it is now light until 7PM…and that will be later soon, since we go on daylight savings time this Sunday. I spent much of the day doing French exercises, and being frustrated by them. Part of my problem appears to be that my mind works (when it works) differently from a French person’s mind. An example: One of my chores was to write a description of what was going on in a comic strip. The comic strip depicted a man trying to unravel a bunch of rope or electrical cables that had become hopelessly snarled. He tries and tries, and is very frustrated, but in the end he succeeds, and is briefly very elated. But then he becomes despondent and unhappy. This is a French comic strip. The French think it is very funny. I couldn’t figure it out. I got the part about being frustrated by trying to untangle a tangle of rope/string/electrical cables. I understand that. I understand the elation when you are successful. But the despondency I couldn’t figure out. It was later explained to me that it was the unhappiness that follows success that was so funny. Apparently the French would rather be miserable than happy, and the man was unhappy after he untangled the wire because he suddenly realized that he had no more impossible challenges to face. My view is that you are frustrated when trying to untangle the wire, and then you are happy when you succeed. Then you are on to something else that is more interesting than untangling wire. The French see it differently. Ha Ha.
27 March, Friday:
Beagle had to get up at the crack of dawn today to go to a Pirenne colloquium (whatever that is) starting at 9 AM in Gent, where she was delivering the opening statement at 9:30 AM. I was offered the opportunity to get up at the crack of dawn as well and drive her to Gent and then hang around all day while the colloquium was going on. I declined and instead stayed in Brussels and had a 3-hour French lesson with Aurélie. I have decided that Aurélie is not a very good teacher, but we are sort of stuck with her. She loves to talk, so you have to remind her from time to time that we are paying for a lesson, not paying to listen to her talk. She also has a tendency to explain to you the 365 different ways of saying something…I simply can’t remember 365 ways of saying the same thing. What I want to do is to learn one way of saying something, and then learn one way of saying something else. Once I have learned one way of how to say a lot of things, then I’ll focus on learning how to say them differently. My objective is to be able to carry on a conversation, to be able to express myself in French, etc. I’ll deal with how elegantly I say things later. The exercise book that Aurélie gives us homework from is also, in my opinion, deficient. It simply gives you exercises to do without giving you any instruction in what you are supposed to be learning. This, needless to say, is frustrating, since after flailing away for a while doing exercises, you then go over them with Aurélie who points out all the mistakes you have made since you didn’t know the rule you were supposed to be learning, not to mention the 35 exceptions to that rule. I have another French grammar book that I use on my own, and Aurélie cheerfully admits that that book is much better as a teaching tool than hers. Yet she persists in using the other one. She claims that the French like variety! Today was a particularly frustrating class, for some reason. We were working on “indirect discourse” and “reported discourse,” and things like that…for example, when someone says to you “I just strangled my French teacher,” you would report that to someone else by saying “He told me that he had just strangled his French teacher.” Except you do that in French. I have had this lesson many times before, but it is always useful to review things like this, especially since my mind is a sieve. So there are rules about how you do this, including something called “concordance des temps.” These are rigid rules that must always be followed. I object to this in certain situations because it sometimes appears to me that there would be a better way of expressing it. For example, when someone says to you “I believe that wife-beating is bad,” you would “report” that by saying “He told me that he thought wife-beating was bad.” I would like to report that by saying “He told me that he thought wife-beating is bad.” By the way, this is a real example from today’s class…all the exercises you have in French involve people arguing, robbing or being robbed, being cheated at the store, loosing their job, etc. The French don’t have a positive or optimistic bone in their bodies. Aurélie kept slapping me down, saying that I had to follow the rule of “concordance des temps.” So I did, but then about halfway through that particular set of exercises she changed her mind, and then told me that while I should obey the rule and say things in a certain way, I could in fact say it the way I wanted, and that it all depended on the sense of the sentence. And that sometimes disobeying the rule was better. I wept with frustration at this point. Aurélie was very happy. The French like strife, argument and misery, so she had done her job. I threw her out and drove to Gent for a marvelous dinner with all the speakers at Beagle’s Pirenne colloquium. All the usual suspects were there, plus a few new faces. The dinner was at Het Pand, which is sort of like the University of Gent faculty club. We have eaten there several times, and each time I come away impressed. It is like eating in a starred restaurant. The food is excellent, beautifully presented, and well served in a beautiful space. And of course you have different wines matched with every course. Beagle says that the Columbia Faculty Club has improved a lot in recent years, and we have had some excellent meals at the President’s house, but Columbia still has a long way to go to match this. After dinner we drove back to Brussels, giving a ride to a German man and a French man who were staying at a hotel near our apartment, and to a very lively Belgian French-speaking woman who also lives nearby. She gave us the name of a restaurant in our neighborhood that is supposed to be great. As usual it is hidden away, down an alley that you’d never walk down at night unless you knew where you were going. We’ll check it out. It is open 7 days a week, including Sundays, which is unusual.
28 March, Saturday:
The Pirenne colloquium continued, today in Brussels. I guess that means the papers were in French, not Dutch. The colloquium went well, except one of the presenters, the nice German man we gave a ride home to last night, was apparently outraged that his presentation wasn’t received with enough respect by the Belgians. The Belgians were not impressed. Stunningly enough, there was no dinner afterwards. So Beagle and Thérèse and Marc decided they’d come back to our apartment and cook dinner. Thérèse was in charge of cooking. Beagle was her assistant. Marc and I were in charge of wine and cheese. We failed, because the cheese shop was closed when we got to it. We called Thérèse and Beagle, caught them at the grocery store, and settled down to watch the news, comfortable that we had done our best. Thérèse and Beagle came back from the supermarket with a wonderful dinner…smoked duck breast and roasted chèvre on toast rounds on salad, lieu noir (pollock) with spinach, and four different kinds of chees bought at the Delhaize supermarket. Why don’t we find that kind of stuff when we are there? Anyway, it was a great dinner with good wine (a sparking wine from the Lille wine fair, a white wine with the fish and a red with the cheese, both from Delhaize.
29 March, Sunday:
Daylight savings time started last night in Europe. So we celebrated by sleeping late, and then went to the market in Place Flagey to buy some food and plants. While there we noticed that there were a bunch of tents and a lot of people at the end of Place Flagey. So we went to see what was going on. It was a spring festival sponsored by the Socialist party, and while there didn’t appear to be a lot of political activity, there was food and drink everywhere…literally every kind of food and drink you could think of. I guess Belgian politicians know their audience. We went home and planned our day. Beagle wanted to take a walk, but I didn’t. So we compromised and took a walk. We started out in the direction of Parc Cinquentenaire, but veered off to Place Jourdan, which has a famous frites stand. On the way we ran into an older gentleman who claimed that he lived in Brussels but was lost in the whole EU complex. We helped him with some directions and he gave us candy. Somewhere in the back of my mind there is some warning bell that sounds when I talk about nice old gentlemen giving me candy, but I suspect that this was something different. Imagine the headlines…63 year old molested by 86 year old pervert! So we escaped that, and went in the direction of Place Jourdan. On the way we saw a 6 year old kicking a soccer ball back and forth with his older brother. The first time he kicked it, we thought it was cute, but perhaps an accident…he kicked it hard, and straight, and with great force…enough so that had you been in the way you would have been driven back. I would not have wished to be in the path of that ball. Then he did the same thing ten times. This kid was fantastic. A true rival to Graham. After watching this future Pélé or David Beckham for a bit, we continued to Place Jourdan where there was, in fact, the famous frites stand, which I had visited before. I was about to stand in line to get frites, but since there were 2 lines, and each was 30 people deep, and since Beagle refused to eat anything fried, we ended up in a café where we had a great lunch. I had spaghetti bolognaise and Beagle had salade niçoise. We left the café and walked to Parc Cinquentenaire, where we had been planning to visit the art museum. But since we had started late, by the time we got there it was about 30 minutes before closing time. So we gave up and walked home. On the way we saw a group of young men playing 4 to a side soccer in a “field” the size of a tennis court with wooden walls. It was very reminiscent of pickup basketball games in NYC. The game was very fast, and the players were very good…the key to the game was ball control, and they were good at it. We then walked towards home, through Square Ambiorix and Square Marie Louise, very pretty residential areas with huge EU buildings looming up behind them. On the way we also stopped at Filigranes, a bookstore that is open on Sunday. It is a great bookstore with very narrow aisles and lots of people. It has books in all sorts of languages…except Dutch. And this is officially a Dutch/French speaking country. Go figure.
30 March, Monday:
Today was another nice spring day. It was sunny and in the 50s. I did some French homework, went marketing, etc. and went to the post office to mail a package. The way it works at the post office is that when you enter you get a little slip of paper with a number on it from a machine. Eventually your number will pop up on a video screen, and it tells you on the screen which window to go to. It is a pretty efficient system, but the place was jammed, so I was prepared for a long wait. But an older man came up to me as I was getting my number from the machine and offered me his slip of paper, which had a much lower number on it than the one I had. I guess he had given up and was leaving. I thanked him and took his slip, and was pondering the ethics of using it to cut the line, when that number was called. Rather than upset the smoothly working post office system, I marched up to the window indicated on the screen, mailed my package and was out of there.
31 March, Tuesday:
Today was a day of conference calls and board meetings and not much else. 3 ½ hours for the Butler Funds and 1 ½ hour for IRRC. Those plus lunch and gym and a little French homework and the day was pretty much used up.
If you were to walk through our apartment, through our garden, through the next garden and through the building on the other side, you would come to a street called Champs-Elysées. This is not like the Champs-Elysées in Paris, which is a long, wide avenue which the Parisians think is the most beautiful avenue in the world, and which has some of the most expensive real estate in the world. The Champs-Elysées in Brussels is a different matter. It is a narrow street with narrow sidewalks that runs about three blocks, and if you follow it down the hill to the end, you get to some bottle recycling bins and the Delhaize supermarket, which we frequent. The street itself has a few nice buildings on it, but is generally grim. You have to watch where you step because a lot of people seem to use the sidewalks as a place to walk their dogs, and there is generally some broken glass on the sidewalks where some delinquent has broken a car window to rob what was inside. But if you look carefully you see that on the left-hand side, as you go down the hill, there is a big yellow house which, behind a high metal wall, has a huge garden. It is a little hard to say how big the garden is, because you can only see it if you peek through holes in the fence, or stand on a bench or something. But it surrounds the house on two sides, and I would say it is 1 - 2 acres in size. And on the other size of the street, also behind a wall, is another house with what looks like another nice garden. And down the hill a bit you can get a glimpse through a gate of a big free-standing house that overlooks what must be a huge garden, entirely surrounded by a very high concrete wall. It is hard to guess exactly how big this garden is…when you look at a map, it shows a big green space…but based on the layout of the streets and the fact that it completely occupies the space between two streets, all the way down to the Delhaize, I would say that it is at least 2 complete city blocks big, which is about 11 acres. And this is hidden from view in the middle of what appears to be a pretty grimy neighborhood in the middle of Brussels.
26 March, Thursday:
The weather here has developed a new pattern. In the morning it is rainy, or at least there are signs that it has rained during the night…the ground is wet, it is grey, etc. Then the sun comes out, and while it is cool and sometimes cloudy, the days are pretty nice. And it is now light until 7PM…and that will be later soon, since we go on daylight savings time this Sunday. I spent much of the day doing French exercises, and being frustrated by them. Part of my problem appears to be that my mind works (when it works) differently from a French person’s mind. An example: One of my chores was to write a description of what was going on in a comic strip. The comic strip depicted a man trying to unravel a bunch of rope or electrical cables that had become hopelessly snarled. He tries and tries, and is very frustrated, but in the end he succeeds, and is briefly very elated. But then he becomes despondent and unhappy. This is a French comic strip. The French think it is very funny. I couldn’t figure it out. I got the part about being frustrated by trying to untangle a tangle of rope/string/electrical cables. I understand that. I understand the elation when you are successful. But the despondency I couldn’t figure out. It was later explained to me that it was the unhappiness that follows success that was so funny. Apparently the French would rather be miserable than happy, and the man was unhappy after he untangled the wire because he suddenly realized that he had no more impossible challenges to face. My view is that you are frustrated when trying to untangle the wire, and then you are happy when you succeed. Then you are on to something else that is more interesting than untangling wire. The French see it differently. Ha Ha.
27 March, Friday:
Beagle had to get up at the crack of dawn today to go to a Pirenne colloquium (whatever that is) starting at 9 AM in Gent, where she was delivering the opening statement at 9:30 AM. I was offered the opportunity to get up at the crack of dawn as well and drive her to Gent and then hang around all day while the colloquium was going on. I declined and instead stayed in Brussels and had a 3-hour French lesson with Aurélie. I have decided that Aurélie is not a very good teacher, but we are sort of stuck with her. She loves to talk, so you have to remind her from time to time that we are paying for a lesson, not paying to listen to her talk. She also has a tendency to explain to you the 365 different ways of saying something…I simply can’t remember 365 ways of saying the same thing. What I want to do is to learn one way of saying something, and then learn one way of saying something else. Once I have learned one way of how to say a lot of things, then I’ll focus on learning how to say them differently. My objective is to be able to carry on a conversation, to be able to express myself in French, etc. I’ll deal with how elegantly I say things later. The exercise book that Aurélie gives us homework from is also, in my opinion, deficient. It simply gives you exercises to do without giving you any instruction in what you are supposed to be learning. This, needless to say, is frustrating, since after flailing away for a while doing exercises, you then go over them with Aurélie who points out all the mistakes you have made since you didn’t know the rule you were supposed to be learning, not to mention the 35 exceptions to that rule. I have another French grammar book that I use on my own, and Aurélie cheerfully admits that that book is much better as a teaching tool than hers. Yet she persists in using the other one. She claims that the French like variety! Today was a particularly frustrating class, for some reason. We were working on “indirect discourse” and “reported discourse,” and things like that…for example, when someone says to you “I just strangled my French teacher,” you would report that to someone else by saying “He told me that he had just strangled his French teacher.” Except you do that in French. I have had this lesson many times before, but it is always useful to review things like this, especially since my mind is a sieve. So there are rules about how you do this, including something called “concordance des temps.” These are rigid rules that must always be followed. I object to this in certain situations because it sometimes appears to me that there would be a better way of expressing it. For example, when someone says to you “I believe that wife-beating is bad,” you would “report” that by saying “He told me that he thought wife-beating was bad.” I would like to report that by saying “He told me that he thought wife-beating is bad.” By the way, this is a real example from today’s class…all the exercises you have in French involve people arguing, robbing or being robbed, being cheated at the store, loosing their job, etc. The French don’t have a positive or optimistic bone in their bodies. Aurélie kept slapping me down, saying that I had to follow the rule of “concordance des temps.” So I did, but then about halfway through that particular set of exercises she changed her mind, and then told me that while I should obey the rule and say things in a certain way, I could in fact say it the way I wanted, and that it all depended on the sense of the sentence. And that sometimes disobeying the rule was better. I wept with frustration at this point. Aurélie was very happy. The French like strife, argument and misery, so she had done her job. I threw her out and drove to Gent for a marvelous dinner with all the speakers at Beagle’s Pirenne colloquium. All the usual suspects were there, plus a few new faces. The dinner was at Het Pand, which is sort of like the University of Gent faculty club. We have eaten there several times, and each time I come away impressed. It is like eating in a starred restaurant. The food is excellent, beautifully presented, and well served in a beautiful space. And of course you have different wines matched with every course. Beagle says that the Columbia Faculty Club has improved a lot in recent years, and we have had some excellent meals at the President’s house, but Columbia still has a long way to go to match this. After dinner we drove back to Brussels, giving a ride to a German man and a French man who were staying at a hotel near our apartment, and to a very lively Belgian French-speaking woman who also lives nearby. She gave us the name of a restaurant in our neighborhood that is supposed to be great. As usual it is hidden away, down an alley that you’d never walk down at night unless you knew where you were going. We’ll check it out. It is open 7 days a week, including Sundays, which is unusual.
28 March, Saturday:
The Pirenne colloquium continued, today in Brussels. I guess that means the papers were in French, not Dutch. The colloquium went well, except one of the presenters, the nice German man we gave a ride home to last night, was apparently outraged that his presentation wasn’t received with enough respect by the Belgians. The Belgians were not impressed. Stunningly enough, there was no dinner afterwards. So Beagle and Thérèse and Marc decided they’d come back to our apartment and cook dinner. Thérèse was in charge of cooking. Beagle was her assistant. Marc and I were in charge of wine and cheese. We failed, because the cheese shop was closed when we got to it. We called Thérèse and Beagle, caught them at the grocery store, and settled down to watch the news, comfortable that we had done our best. Thérèse and Beagle came back from the supermarket with a wonderful dinner…smoked duck breast and roasted chèvre on toast rounds on salad, lieu noir (pollock) with spinach, and four different kinds of chees bought at the Delhaize supermarket. Why don’t we find that kind of stuff when we are there? Anyway, it was a great dinner with good wine (a sparking wine from the Lille wine fair, a white wine with the fish and a red with the cheese, both from Delhaize.
29 March, Sunday:
Daylight savings time started last night in Europe. So we celebrated by sleeping late, and then went to the market in Place Flagey to buy some food and plants. While there we noticed that there were a bunch of tents and a lot of people at the end of Place Flagey. So we went to see what was going on. It was a spring festival sponsored by the Socialist party, and while there didn’t appear to be a lot of political activity, there was food and drink everywhere…literally every kind of food and drink you could think of. I guess Belgian politicians know their audience. We went home and planned our day. Beagle wanted to take a walk, but I didn’t. So we compromised and took a walk. We started out in the direction of Parc Cinquentenaire, but veered off to Place Jourdan, which has a famous frites stand. On the way we ran into an older gentleman who claimed that he lived in Brussels but was lost in the whole EU complex. We helped him with some directions and he gave us candy. Somewhere in the back of my mind there is some warning bell that sounds when I talk about nice old gentlemen giving me candy, but I suspect that this was something different. Imagine the headlines…63 year old molested by 86 year old pervert! So we escaped that, and went in the direction of Place Jourdan. On the way we saw a 6 year old kicking a soccer ball back and forth with his older brother. The first time he kicked it, we thought it was cute, but perhaps an accident…he kicked it hard, and straight, and with great force…enough so that had you been in the way you would have been driven back. I would not have wished to be in the path of that ball. Then he did the same thing ten times. This kid was fantastic. A true rival to Graham. After watching this future Pélé or David Beckham for a bit, we continued to Place Jourdan where there was, in fact, the famous frites stand, which I had visited before. I was about to stand in line to get frites, but since there were 2 lines, and each was 30 people deep, and since Beagle refused to eat anything fried, we ended up in a café where we had a great lunch. I had spaghetti bolognaise and Beagle had salade niçoise. We left the café and walked to Parc Cinquentenaire, where we had been planning to visit the art museum. But since we had started late, by the time we got there it was about 30 minutes before closing time. So we gave up and walked home. On the way we saw a group of young men playing 4 to a side soccer in a “field” the size of a tennis court with wooden walls. It was very reminiscent of pickup basketball games in NYC. The game was very fast, and the players were very good…the key to the game was ball control, and they were good at it. We then walked towards home, through Square Ambiorix and Square Marie Louise, very pretty residential areas with huge EU buildings looming up behind them. On the way we also stopped at Filigranes, a bookstore that is open on Sunday. It is a great bookstore with very narrow aisles and lots of people. It has books in all sorts of languages…except Dutch. And this is officially a Dutch/French speaking country. Go figure.
30 March, Monday:
Today was another nice spring day. It was sunny and in the 50s. I did some French homework, went marketing, etc. and went to the post office to mail a package. The way it works at the post office is that when you enter you get a little slip of paper with a number on it from a machine. Eventually your number will pop up on a video screen, and it tells you on the screen which window to go to. It is a pretty efficient system, but the place was jammed, so I was prepared for a long wait. But an older man came up to me as I was getting my number from the machine and offered me his slip of paper, which had a much lower number on it than the one I had. I guess he had given up and was leaving. I thanked him and took his slip, and was pondering the ethics of using it to cut the line, when that number was called. Rather than upset the smoothly working post office system, I marched up to the window indicated on the screen, mailed my package and was out of there.
31 March, Tuesday:
Today was a day of conference calls and board meetings and not much else. 3 ½ hours for the Butler Funds and 1 ½ hour for IRRC. Those plus lunch and gym and a little French homework and the day was pretty much used up.
Saturday, March 28, 2009
Week 20 - In which I am banished from the house, we find 4 new parks, I watch rugby and spring arrives
18 March, Wednesday:
Beagle has a student, Jeun Joh, who she thinks is brilliant and who has just arrived in Brussels for a year of study/research. Being Korean, he is naturally working on medieval Europe. Beagle decided she should have a lunch party to introduce him to some of the “young people” in the Brussels and Gent history mafia. So I was dispatched to buy bread and cakes and quiches and wine etc. and help organize the apartment to host the group. Unfortunately (well…one could debate that), we only have 8 chairs and only enough room at the table for 8 people, and since I made the 9th person, it was my job to take everyone’s coat, give them a glass of wine, and then slope off to parts unknown. So I went to L’Ultime Atom (a play on words…say Ultime Atom twice quickly) , a local brasserie, and had a salad. After my lunch I was joined by our French teacher, Aurélie, and had a 3-hour French lesson. L’Ultime Atom is pretty big, and is supposedly a very trendy place, and can be quite crowded, but in the middle of the afternoon it is pretty quiet. Aurélie and I monopolized a table, spread papers all over it, and had our class. I was there from 1 PM until 5 PM, and everyone seemed to think that was perfectly normal. The waiters didn’t even bother to come by and try to persuade us to order anything. All of the time that I was there, there was also a group of about 8 men in a back room reserved for smokers, smoking and talking up a storm, and I don’t think they even bought anything except perhaps a few coffees. No one cared. Beagle informed me that the lunch was a big success, and dinner tonight was leftover quiche. Pretty good if I do say so myself.
19 March, Thursday:
Today was another bright sunny day. Love this Belgian weather! Today was also a day for cultural experiences. I had to go to the post office, and while there I witnessed a huge fight between a client and the staff. The client, a man, North African by appearance and with a very thick accent, was vigorously protesting something, and the members of the staff were equally vigorously rejecting his claims. I never could figure out what they were arguing about…perhaps I should take a French class focused on terms to use during an argument…but everyone was very excited and seemed to be having a good time. All the clients took sides, and from time to time the staff would summon reinforcements from the back room. All this slowed down the service a bit, but I got my package mailed and snuck out before I got in the middle of whatever it was. At gym we seem to have had another changing of the guard. There are three Italian women who are there most evenings, and they spend their time monopolizing the aerobic machines, darting from one to another and talking non-stop, very loudly. There is also a very quiet Italian man who sits on a machine, does a few repetitions of some exercises, and then wanders around looking at himself mournfully in the mirrors. And I don’t mean just admiring his physique as he walks by. This guy goes right up close to a mirror and examines his face at great length and in great detail, rubbing his beard, which is sort of one of those Yasser Arafat numbers. After about 30 minutes of this, he leaves. Perhaps he was expecting something else.
20 March, Friday:
Beagle had to teach another “master class” this afternoon in Brussels. She was quite confused about it. The norm is that after this type of event, there is a dinner to which Beagle is invited. I generally tag along. But there was been no discussion of a dinner after this afternoon’s class. Perhaps because Marc was not there…he was in France. Beagle didn’t know what to do. I stayed home, spent an hour or so on a conference call and watched some men pollarding two big trees in the next garden. They had done this to the tree in our garden last November, but these were much bigger trees…I’d say 40 feet tall. They clambered up them using long ladders and chopped off virtually every piece of growth that is less than about 3 inches in diameter. This left the trees looking like skeletons, not to mention a huge pile of branches on the ground. I hope they knew what they were doing. The theory is that the tree will sprout new branches where the old ones were cut off, so it will have lots of leaves, etc., but it will never get too tall. We’ll see. The tree in our garden shows no sign of sprouting anything. While I was watching men at work and having conference calls, Beagle was teaching her master class. She says that it was not a great success because the students appeared to have done none of the reading she had assigned them. I gather that the day was saved because our friends Walter Prevenier and Peter Stabel were there, and they carried the discussion. Amazingly, there was no dinner afterwards. Beagle was in shock. Luckily we still had leftover quiche.
21 March, Saturday:
Today was a lovely day, so we walked to Parc de Wolvendael and Parc Brugmann, which in Ixelles (or perhaps Uccle) and are fairly close to us. They are nice small parks. Then we walked along Avenue Moliere, which is a very elegant residential street…very wide, and unusually for Brussels, the houses have small yards in front of them, which makes a huge difference in how the street looks. On the way back, I stopped and got a haircut. This morning I had read an article in the NY Times about the latest thing in women’s fashion in Paris, which is hot pants worn over black tights. This trend appears to have spread to Brussels, because there were several very well turned out young women wearing exactly that. Plus everything else in black. I felt a little dowdy, wearing blue jeans and a very ratty and frayed LLBean work shirt, but I got a good haircut anyway. Then I went home to watch the finals of the 6 Nations Rugby tournament, a match between Wales and Ireland. If Wales won by 13 points, they would win the match and the tournament. If Ireland won, it would win not only the match and the tournament but also the “Grand Slam.” Whatever the Grand Slam is, it is apparently a big deal. The Irish had only won it once before, 61 years ago. So there was a lot at stake and it was a very good game. Wales took the lead with a field goal with 5 minutes to go, and the TV commentators pretty much conceded the match then. But Ireland went ahead with 2 minutes to go by scoring its own field goal. And then Wales had a penalty kick from 48 meters with no time left, and it just fell short. Very exciting. After the game all the players seemed to be in good spirits and shook each others’ hands, but they all looked like they had been in a prize fight or a car wreck…covered with blood, eyes swollen shut, etc. What a game. I saw part of the match while at gym, where the Italian women were holding court. With the TV blaring the rugby match, and the aerobic machines all occupied and making a huge racket, the Italian women kept up a constant stream of conversation, at top volume, shouting back and forth to each other across the gym. Two vaguely Swedish looking people were also in the gym, and after wincing every time the Italian women shouted, they finally left.
22 March, Sunday:
This is getting boring. Another lovely day. Bright sunshine, temperature in the 50’s, etc. We walked to Parc de Forest and Duden Parc, two parks which are sort of connected in the Forest district, a part of town that we had never visited before. The parks, which together are over 100 acres in size, are surrounded on three sides by apartment buildings and houses, some of them gorgeous Art Deco type houses from the early 1900s. One of them had a 15 -20 foot diameter window as its “focal point” on the parlor floor, and was quite striking. The fourth side of the parks is sort of an industrial zone, and the parks slope rather steeply down to that. The parks themselves are very hilly, and have big areas of lawn that were full of people playing games and taking in the sun, as well as heavily wooded areas. The whole neighborhood reminded me a lot of Riverside Park in the 1970s…it is quite nice, but obviously was once much more elegant (indeed, Duden Parc used to be a private estate and was given to the Belgian state years ago), and is now showing signs of very heavy use and no maintenance for years. They need a Riverside Park Conservatory for these places! After walking through the parks we went home, changed, and drove to dinner in Gent-Mariakerke at Wim and An Blockmans’ house. We were treated with a visit by their daughter Leen and her 6 year old son Felix, a very cute and extremely energetic little boy, and I made friends with Maiko, a very nice Jack Russell terrier who sat on my lap. Felix had to go home to bed, so we had dinner with An and Wim, people we have known for years. An claims to have a collection of all of our Christmas cards for the past 28 years! We exchanged all sorts of family and academic gossip, had a great dinner, and then drove back to Brussels. Sunday night traffic going back into Brussels is supposed to be horrible, but we were late enough so that we missed it all.
23 March, Monday:
Brussels is an interesting city. The streets are generally quite dirty, although it is hard to tell where all the dirt comes from. The sidewalks are full of holes, missing paving blocks, etc., and there is dog poop everywhere. The streets themselves are also dirty, since there is no way for the street sweepers to clean the streets underneath parked cars, and since there is no system for leaving one side of the street empty so the street sweepers can do their job. The houses themselves are a mix of styles. As you walk down a street, every house looks different, some simple, some ornate, and from many different periods. Belgium was incredibly rich in the late 1800s and early 1900s, with a lot of the money coming from the Congo, and there were a lot of very lovely houses built then in the Art Nouveau and Art Deco styles. Then, I suspect in the 1960s, there were a lot of fairly low-rise apartment buildings built that are pretty awful. But the sidewalks tend to be narrow, the streets tend to be dirty and busy, the buildings themselves tend to be dirty, and generally the only way to get a look at the façade of a building is from the other side of the street. So as you wander around Brussels, except in the Grand Place and areas like that which have been meticulously cleaned and gilded and restored, you tend to ignore some of the lovely facades and get the impression that it is sort of a grim city. What you don’t realize, however, is that behind those dirty facades there is generally a large and quite lovely garden. Walking down the Avenue Charleroi the other day, a very busy, dirty street, I peeked through an open doorway and saw that there was an enormous park behind the buildings…all green and lovely, and totally bidden from the view of anyone on the street. Sort of like the French, it seems as if the Belgians present a drab architectural exterior to the street, and reserve the lovely parts for private view. It is like our apartment. We are on a long block, on a street that is narrow, with very narrow sidewalks (one person at a time, please) that are uneven and broken up, and with dirty and generally unappetizing facades facing the street. But inside, each house has a fairly large private garden, and the gardens stretch pretty much the length of the block. Interesting.
24 March, Tuesday:
The weather has changed, and it is now cool and rainy, as predicted by the weatherman. But the sun keeps breaking out, the days are getting dramatically longer, and it is warmer. Daffodils and crocuses are everywhere in the parks, forsythia is blooming and stuff is greening up. Spring is here.
Beagle has a student, Jeun Joh, who she thinks is brilliant and who has just arrived in Brussels for a year of study/research. Being Korean, he is naturally working on medieval Europe. Beagle decided she should have a lunch party to introduce him to some of the “young people” in the Brussels and Gent history mafia. So I was dispatched to buy bread and cakes and quiches and wine etc. and help organize the apartment to host the group. Unfortunately (well…one could debate that), we only have 8 chairs and only enough room at the table for 8 people, and since I made the 9th person, it was my job to take everyone’s coat, give them a glass of wine, and then slope off to parts unknown. So I went to L’Ultime Atom (a play on words…say Ultime Atom twice quickly) , a local brasserie, and had a salad. After my lunch I was joined by our French teacher, Aurélie, and had a 3-hour French lesson. L’Ultime Atom is pretty big, and is supposedly a very trendy place, and can be quite crowded, but in the middle of the afternoon it is pretty quiet. Aurélie and I monopolized a table, spread papers all over it, and had our class. I was there from 1 PM until 5 PM, and everyone seemed to think that was perfectly normal. The waiters didn’t even bother to come by and try to persuade us to order anything. All of the time that I was there, there was also a group of about 8 men in a back room reserved for smokers, smoking and talking up a storm, and I don’t think they even bought anything except perhaps a few coffees. No one cared. Beagle informed me that the lunch was a big success, and dinner tonight was leftover quiche. Pretty good if I do say so myself.
19 March, Thursday:
Today was another bright sunny day. Love this Belgian weather! Today was also a day for cultural experiences. I had to go to the post office, and while there I witnessed a huge fight between a client and the staff. The client, a man, North African by appearance and with a very thick accent, was vigorously protesting something, and the members of the staff were equally vigorously rejecting his claims. I never could figure out what they were arguing about…perhaps I should take a French class focused on terms to use during an argument…but everyone was very excited and seemed to be having a good time. All the clients took sides, and from time to time the staff would summon reinforcements from the back room. All this slowed down the service a bit, but I got my package mailed and snuck out before I got in the middle of whatever it was. At gym we seem to have had another changing of the guard. There are three Italian women who are there most evenings, and they spend their time monopolizing the aerobic machines, darting from one to another and talking non-stop, very loudly. There is also a very quiet Italian man who sits on a machine, does a few repetitions of some exercises, and then wanders around looking at himself mournfully in the mirrors. And I don’t mean just admiring his physique as he walks by. This guy goes right up close to a mirror and examines his face at great length and in great detail, rubbing his beard, which is sort of one of those Yasser Arafat numbers. After about 30 minutes of this, he leaves. Perhaps he was expecting something else.
20 March, Friday:
Beagle had to teach another “master class” this afternoon in Brussels. She was quite confused about it. The norm is that after this type of event, there is a dinner to which Beagle is invited. I generally tag along. But there was been no discussion of a dinner after this afternoon’s class. Perhaps because Marc was not there…he was in France. Beagle didn’t know what to do. I stayed home, spent an hour or so on a conference call and watched some men pollarding two big trees in the next garden. They had done this to the tree in our garden last November, but these were much bigger trees…I’d say 40 feet tall. They clambered up them using long ladders and chopped off virtually every piece of growth that is less than about 3 inches in diameter. This left the trees looking like skeletons, not to mention a huge pile of branches on the ground. I hope they knew what they were doing. The theory is that the tree will sprout new branches where the old ones were cut off, so it will have lots of leaves, etc., but it will never get too tall. We’ll see. The tree in our garden shows no sign of sprouting anything. While I was watching men at work and having conference calls, Beagle was teaching her master class. She says that it was not a great success because the students appeared to have done none of the reading she had assigned them. I gather that the day was saved because our friends Walter Prevenier and Peter Stabel were there, and they carried the discussion. Amazingly, there was no dinner afterwards. Beagle was in shock. Luckily we still had leftover quiche.
21 March, Saturday:
Today was a lovely day, so we walked to Parc de Wolvendael and Parc Brugmann, which in Ixelles (or perhaps Uccle) and are fairly close to us. They are nice small parks. Then we walked along Avenue Moliere, which is a very elegant residential street…very wide, and unusually for Brussels, the houses have small yards in front of them, which makes a huge difference in how the street looks. On the way back, I stopped and got a haircut. This morning I had read an article in the NY Times about the latest thing in women’s fashion in Paris, which is hot pants worn over black tights. This trend appears to have spread to Brussels, because there were several very well turned out young women wearing exactly that. Plus everything else in black. I felt a little dowdy, wearing blue jeans and a very ratty and frayed LLBean work shirt, but I got a good haircut anyway. Then I went home to watch the finals of the 6 Nations Rugby tournament, a match between Wales and Ireland. If Wales won by 13 points, they would win the match and the tournament. If Ireland won, it would win not only the match and the tournament but also the “Grand Slam.” Whatever the Grand Slam is, it is apparently a big deal. The Irish had only won it once before, 61 years ago. So there was a lot at stake and it was a very good game. Wales took the lead with a field goal with 5 minutes to go, and the TV commentators pretty much conceded the match then. But Ireland went ahead with 2 minutes to go by scoring its own field goal. And then Wales had a penalty kick from 48 meters with no time left, and it just fell short. Very exciting. After the game all the players seemed to be in good spirits and shook each others’ hands, but they all looked like they had been in a prize fight or a car wreck…covered with blood, eyes swollen shut, etc. What a game. I saw part of the match while at gym, where the Italian women were holding court. With the TV blaring the rugby match, and the aerobic machines all occupied and making a huge racket, the Italian women kept up a constant stream of conversation, at top volume, shouting back and forth to each other across the gym. Two vaguely Swedish looking people were also in the gym, and after wincing every time the Italian women shouted, they finally left.
22 March, Sunday:
This is getting boring. Another lovely day. Bright sunshine, temperature in the 50’s, etc. We walked to Parc de Forest and Duden Parc, two parks which are sort of connected in the Forest district, a part of town that we had never visited before. The parks, which together are over 100 acres in size, are surrounded on three sides by apartment buildings and houses, some of them gorgeous Art Deco type houses from the early 1900s. One of them had a 15 -20 foot diameter window as its “focal point” on the parlor floor, and was quite striking. The fourth side of the parks is sort of an industrial zone, and the parks slope rather steeply down to that. The parks themselves are very hilly, and have big areas of lawn that were full of people playing games and taking in the sun, as well as heavily wooded areas. The whole neighborhood reminded me a lot of Riverside Park in the 1970s…it is quite nice, but obviously was once much more elegant (indeed, Duden Parc used to be a private estate and was given to the Belgian state years ago), and is now showing signs of very heavy use and no maintenance for years. They need a Riverside Park Conservatory for these places! After walking through the parks we went home, changed, and drove to dinner in Gent-Mariakerke at Wim and An Blockmans’ house. We were treated with a visit by their daughter Leen and her 6 year old son Felix, a very cute and extremely energetic little boy, and I made friends with Maiko, a very nice Jack Russell terrier who sat on my lap. Felix had to go home to bed, so we had dinner with An and Wim, people we have known for years. An claims to have a collection of all of our Christmas cards for the past 28 years! We exchanged all sorts of family and academic gossip, had a great dinner, and then drove back to Brussels. Sunday night traffic going back into Brussels is supposed to be horrible, but we were late enough so that we missed it all.
23 March, Monday:
Brussels is an interesting city. The streets are generally quite dirty, although it is hard to tell where all the dirt comes from. The sidewalks are full of holes, missing paving blocks, etc., and there is dog poop everywhere. The streets themselves are also dirty, since there is no way for the street sweepers to clean the streets underneath parked cars, and since there is no system for leaving one side of the street empty so the street sweepers can do their job. The houses themselves are a mix of styles. As you walk down a street, every house looks different, some simple, some ornate, and from many different periods. Belgium was incredibly rich in the late 1800s and early 1900s, with a lot of the money coming from the Congo, and there were a lot of very lovely houses built then in the Art Nouveau and Art Deco styles. Then, I suspect in the 1960s, there were a lot of fairly low-rise apartment buildings built that are pretty awful. But the sidewalks tend to be narrow, the streets tend to be dirty and busy, the buildings themselves tend to be dirty, and generally the only way to get a look at the façade of a building is from the other side of the street. So as you wander around Brussels, except in the Grand Place and areas like that which have been meticulously cleaned and gilded and restored, you tend to ignore some of the lovely facades and get the impression that it is sort of a grim city. What you don’t realize, however, is that behind those dirty facades there is generally a large and quite lovely garden. Walking down the Avenue Charleroi the other day, a very busy, dirty street, I peeked through an open doorway and saw that there was an enormous park behind the buildings…all green and lovely, and totally bidden from the view of anyone on the street. Sort of like the French, it seems as if the Belgians present a drab architectural exterior to the street, and reserve the lovely parts for private view. It is like our apartment. We are on a long block, on a street that is narrow, with very narrow sidewalks (one person at a time, please) that are uneven and broken up, and with dirty and generally unappetizing facades facing the street. But inside, each house has a fairly large private garden, and the gardens stretch pretty much the length of the block. Interesting.
24 March, Tuesday:
The weather has changed, and it is now cool and rainy, as predicted by the weatherman. But the sun keeps breaking out, the days are getting dramatically longer, and it is warmer. Daffodils and crocuses are everywhere in the parks, forsythia is blooming and stuff is greening up. Spring is here.
Friday, March 20, 2009
Week 19 - In which we tour Belgium with Jane, stopping for lunch as we go, visit places where we lived when we were students, and eat waterzooi
11 March, Wednesday:
Jane and I went to the musical instruments museum today. It is a wonderful place. It is in a fantastic art deco building (in every sense of the word) made out of glass and iron, dating from the early 1900’s. It is called the “Old England Building,” which is in big letters high up on the front of the building. I guess it must have been a store of some sort when it was first built. Now it houses a very extensive collection of musical instruments from all over the world. As you wander through the collection, spread over 5 floors, the headsets they provide you play music made by the instruments in the exhibit in front of you. It is interesting to see how the same sort of instruments were invented separately in many different parts of the world at more or less the same time. In addition to the museum, there is also, in true Belgian fashion, a restaurant on the 6th floor. We will try it. The afternoon was spent in French lessons with Aurélie and conference calls. Jane, in her new incarnation as “Jane Freeman, Consultant,” has to spend a lot of time on conference calls. I try hard to keep up with her. Jane uses Skype, which enables her to make free telephone calls using her computer anywhere in the world (except for Belgium, where they try to charge her VAT). She wears a headset while she does it, so she looks really professional…like an air traffic controller or, dare I say it, a consultant. I will have to sign up for Skype and get a headset. We went to a restaurant called Flaneries Gourmandes for dinner. It is very small (only about 10 tables), the service was great, the hospitality was wonderful, etc. They had reserved a special table for 3 for us, but unfortunately it was right next to a table of about a half dozen women who were celebrating something…loudly. Beagle wanted to move. I thought that was bad form, but relented and asked the Maitre d’hotel if we could move. He said we could move if we wanted, but he recommended against it, as the table we had our eye on was situated so that every time the door opened, a blast of cold air would hit the people at that table. So we stayed put, and as the restaurant filled up the women next door either got quieter, or their racket was absorbed in the general noise level of the restaurant, or something. The dinner itself was interesting…all sorts of inventive (and sometimes odd) mixtures of flavors and textures, etc., all very inventively presented. There was a lot of “foam of seaweed and coulis of asparagus spears” and stuff like that. It all looked gorgeous on the plate, and was interesting to taste, but when we compared notes we found that we all agreed that although it was very interesting, it just didn’t taste that extraordinary. Ah well, another dining adventure. Maybe we caught it on a bad night.
12 March, Thursday:
Our plan for today was to go to Louvain-la-Neuve, where Jane had spent a year as a graduate student, spend a few minutes and then go to Leuven (Louvain, in French), perhaps for lunch, and then go to Bruges for the afternoon. We got off to a slow start, as everyone seemed to have a lot of computer work to do. Since we didn’t leave the apartment until noon, we figured that our schedule might have to be changed. Perhaps we would skip Leuven. So off we went to Louvain-la-Neuve, which is an interesting place. In the ‘60s, when students were generally up in arms about lots of things (hence the term “revolting students”), in Leuven, an old Belgian university town, the students at the Catholic University of Louvain were having language riots…Dutch speakers versus French speakers. As a result of this, the Belgian government decided to create an entirely new university, complete with its own town. The Dutch speaking part of the university was left in Leuven, and in 1968 the French speaking part of the university was moved to this new town, imaginatively named Louvain-la-Neuve (new Leuven). Since this was going to be the first new town created in Belgium since Charleroi was founded in 1666, the Belgians decided to try something new. The center of town, and indeed most of the town, is completely vehicle free (except for bicycles). There are huge car parks and underground garages on the outskirts of town, the train station is underground, etc. The town itself is a maze of curving streets, open plazas, hills, lakes, university buildings, apartment buildings, dozens of restaurants, cafés, and fast food places, etc., with everything covered in one form of brick or another. We got there at around lunch time, and the streets were full of students, most on foot but some on bikes, and all of them eating sandwiches. Amazingly enough, there were virtually no trees or bushes of plants or grass or anything living. Bizarre. It looked and felt a lot like a movie set for some science fiction movie about life in the future. It was impressive, but not very pretty and sort of bleak. The fact that it was drizzling didn’t help much. Jane had spent an academic year here back in the ‘70s, when the town was much smaller and was still mostly a construction site, so it was hard for her to get her bearings, but after much map consulting we finally found what we decided was the apartment she had lived in and took an appropriate number of pictures. We then returned to the town center and after much indecision realized that it was too late to go to Leuven for lunch, so we randomly picked an inexpensive café and had a very satisfactory, and fairly late, lunch. By this time it was too late to do much of anything else, so we gave up on Bruges and drove back to Brussels and went to the Horta museum. This was originally the home and office of Victor Horta, a famous Belgian architect who worked in the Art Deco style. It was really interesting and in many ways spectacular…the architecture, the construction techniques, the “style” of the house, and just seeing how a rich and famous architect lived in the 1920’s. I highly recommend it if you find yourself in Brussels with a few hours to kill. We went back home and had leeks gratinée with ham….except that Beagle forgot to add the ham. No one minded.
13 March, Friday:
The daffodil in our garden has burst into bloom. Spring is coming fast to Brussels. Today we had lunch at the Music Museum (not bad, but not great) and went shopping for baby clothes at Le Petit Bateau. Jane’s niece (?) is having a baby, and that gave us an excuse to go to a baby store. Everyone was happy, including me, who generally hates to shop. After spending too much time there we went to the Musée Van Buuren, which is a house that was owned by some rich Belgian patrons of the arts. It was interesting, once again, to wander through a house that had been lived in by rich Belgian patrons of the arts in the ‘20s. There was also a great garden, which I missed because I had to run back for a conference call. Jane and Beagle did visit the gardens, and got lost in the maze. Jane managed to lead Beagle out of the maze in enough time to get home for her conference call. We went to gym, and then went to the restaurant Saint-Boniface, in our neighborhood. It was excellent, as usual. A real find. It has a great atmosphere, great service, nice décor and fabulous food. No wonder it makes all the guidebooks.
14 March, Saturday:
Jane and I went grocery shopping in the morning, and then we all drove to Tervuren, parked at the Africa museum and went for a walk in the park. This was a great idea, except for the fact that it was raining lightly. We walked for an hour or so to the town of Jesus-Eik and had lunch at a brasserie we had visited before. The lunch was very satisfactory, and by the time we left it had more or less stopped raining. Either that or we had gotten used to it. We went back home and I watched two rugby matches; Italy vs. Wales, which was not a very well played match which Wales won…barely, and Scotland vs. Ireland, which Ireland won, after having been behind during the first half. I continue to be impressed by what an incredibly fast and violent game rugby is. I am looking forward to the finals of this “6 Nations Tournament,” which should be next weekend. Inspired by Thérèse, we had jambonneau and sauerkraut for dinner.
15 March, Sunday:
We finally made it to Bruges today. It was a gorgeous spring day, with flowers everywhere, and Bruges is pretty much as it was 33 years ago. There is a huge parking garage on the outskirts of town, next to the train station, where you are encouraged to leave your car. After an abortive attempt to find some place to park closer to the center of town, we parked there and walked into town. Bruges is lovely…well preserved, or at least very well recreated, with canals, cobblestone streets, pretty buildings, etc. We walked around and found the building where Beagle lived 33 summers ago…what had been a rundown building housing College of Europe students is now a 4 star hotel. Then we visited a museum (that had once been a hospital), saw some paintings by Hans Memling, and had a very satisfactory lunch. On our return to Brussels we were all too tired to do anything about dinner, so we went to La Roue d’Or, a classic Belgian brasserie near the Grand Place, which is not only a good restaurant but is also open on Sundays and is open late. Jane had been talking about Waterzooi all week, so she had that. Waterzooi is a specialty of Gent and is generally called Gentse Waterzooi or Waterzooi gantoise, depending on whether you speak Dutch or French. The literal translation of waterzooi from the Dutch is “watery mess,” but it is hardly that. It is a sort of stew with cream and butter and vegetables and either chicken or fish. It was originally a fish dish, but the story is that the water around Gent got so polluted that they stopped using fish and substituted chicken. It is also a dish that was supposedly made out of tough chicken, or spoiled chicken. In any event, Jane liked it a lot. It was as good as she remembered. It reminded me of fricasseed chicken, which I ate a lot of as a kid. Beagle had sole and I had veal kidneys. It was a great meal…not fancy, but probably the best we’ve had in Brussels.
16 March, Monday:
Beagle had to attend the opening of the “Henri Pirenne Year” at the University of Gent, so Jane and I drove her to Gent and let her perform her academic duties while we had a tour of Gent. We had planned to go to the tapestry exhibit, which Beagle and I had seen before but agreed was worth seeing again, but it was closed on Monday. So we saw the “Ghent Altarpiece,” a polyptych painting made up of 24 compartmented scenes that was started by Hubert van Eyck and finished after Hubert’s death by his younger brother Jan van Eyck in 1432. It is quite spectacular. The painting is in the cathedral, and when you enter you have to pay an admission fee that entitles you to an audio guide that provides you with a seemingly endless description of each one of the 24 panels. After about an hour of this, Jane and I felt educated enough and went in search of napkin and lace stores and lunch. Fortunately all the interesting stores were closed, since it was Monday. After inspecting and rejecting about a dozen restaurants, and almost settling on an outdoor café on a canal where we would have been able to inhale the second hand smoke from the other patrons and be serenaded by jackhammers from a construction site which was between us and the canal, we finally found a modest restaurant which had the advantage of being totally empty. Being in Gent, we of course both had Gantse Waterzooi. It was excellent. Just as we ordered our lunch, Beagle called. Her ceremony had ended early, so she grabbed something to eat at the reception and then came to meet us. We did some more sightseeing, guided by Beagle, who knows Gent pretty well, and then returned to Brussels. No one had much of an appetite for dinner, which was a good thing, since by the time we got around to shopping for dinner, everything was closed. So we had spaghetti and went to bed.
17 March, Tuesday:
I took Jane to the airport this morning. We left at around 7:30 AM, expecting that the trip would take about 20 minutes, which is what it has taken the other times I have done it. Not on a Tuesday morning, evidently. The traffic going out of Brussels was terrible, but we made it to the airport in plenty of time, especially since Jane’s plane was an hour late in taking off. Going back to our apartment was much worse. It took me over an hour, a lot of which was spent just sitting in gridlocked traffic in the middle of a tunnel. If this is what the traffic is normally like on a weekday morning in Brussels, then it is a mystery to me why anyone would drive to work. That was my excitement for the day, other than going to gym and doing some shopping for a party Beagle is giving tomorrow. I also went for a walk, because it was another great day. When I looked at the long-range weather forecast for the time that Jane was going to be in Brussels, it was pretty depressing…rain was predicted for every day. In fact, the weather has been mostly gorgeous except for 1 day. Lots of sun, temperatures in the low 50s, etc. Our Belgian friends tell us not to get used to it. They say that it will revert to cold and wet before long. But we are convinced that spring is here. There are flowers everywhere, the forsythia are coming out, and the days are dramatically longer.
Jane and I went to the musical instruments museum today. It is a wonderful place. It is in a fantastic art deco building (in every sense of the word) made out of glass and iron, dating from the early 1900’s. It is called the “Old England Building,” which is in big letters high up on the front of the building. I guess it must have been a store of some sort when it was first built. Now it houses a very extensive collection of musical instruments from all over the world. As you wander through the collection, spread over 5 floors, the headsets they provide you play music made by the instruments in the exhibit in front of you. It is interesting to see how the same sort of instruments were invented separately in many different parts of the world at more or less the same time. In addition to the museum, there is also, in true Belgian fashion, a restaurant on the 6th floor. We will try it. The afternoon was spent in French lessons with Aurélie and conference calls. Jane, in her new incarnation as “Jane Freeman, Consultant,” has to spend a lot of time on conference calls. I try hard to keep up with her. Jane uses Skype, which enables her to make free telephone calls using her computer anywhere in the world (except for Belgium, where they try to charge her VAT). She wears a headset while she does it, so she looks really professional…like an air traffic controller or, dare I say it, a consultant. I will have to sign up for Skype and get a headset. We went to a restaurant called Flaneries Gourmandes for dinner. It is very small (only about 10 tables), the service was great, the hospitality was wonderful, etc. They had reserved a special table for 3 for us, but unfortunately it was right next to a table of about a half dozen women who were celebrating something…loudly. Beagle wanted to move. I thought that was bad form, but relented and asked the Maitre d’hotel if we could move. He said we could move if we wanted, but he recommended against it, as the table we had our eye on was situated so that every time the door opened, a blast of cold air would hit the people at that table. So we stayed put, and as the restaurant filled up the women next door either got quieter, or their racket was absorbed in the general noise level of the restaurant, or something. The dinner itself was interesting…all sorts of inventive (and sometimes odd) mixtures of flavors and textures, etc., all very inventively presented. There was a lot of “foam of seaweed and coulis of asparagus spears” and stuff like that. It all looked gorgeous on the plate, and was interesting to taste, but when we compared notes we found that we all agreed that although it was very interesting, it just didn’t taste that extraordinary. Ah well, another dining adventure. Maybe we caught it on a bad night.
12 March, Thursday:
Our plan for today was to go to Louvain-la-Neuve, where Jane had spent a year as a graduate student, spend a few minutes and then go to Leuven (Louvain, in French), perhaps for lunch, and then go to Bruges for the afternoon. We got off to a slow start, as everyone seemed to have a lot of computer work to do. Since we didn’t leave the apartment until noon, we figured that our schedule might have to be changed. Perhaps we would skip Leuven. So off we went to Louvain-la-Neuve, which is an interesting place. In the ‘60s, when students were generally up in arms about lots of things (hence the term “revolting students”), in Leuven, an old Belgian university town, the students at the Catholic University of Louvain were having language riots…Dutch speakers versus French speakers. As a result of this, the Belgian government decided to create an entirely new university, complete with its own town. The Dutch speaking part of the university was left in Leuven, and in 1968 the French speaking part of the university was moved to this new town, imaginatively named Louvain-la-Neuve (new Leuven). Since this was going to be the first new town created in Belgium since Charleroi was founded in 1666, the Belgians decided to try something new. The center of town, and indeed most of the town, is completely vehicle free (except for bicycles). There are huge car parks and underground garages on the outskirts of town, the train station is underground, etc. The town itself is a maze of curving streets, open plazas, hills, lakes, university buildings, apartment buildings, dozens of restaurants, cafés, and fast food places, etc., with everything covered in one form of brick or another. We got there at around lunch time, and the streets were full of students, most on foot but some on bikes, and all of them eating sandwiches. Amazingly enough, there were virtually no trees or bushes of plants or grass or anything living. Bizarre. It looked and felt a lot like a movie set for some science fiction movie about life in the future. It was impressive, but not very pretty and sort of bleak. The fact that it was drizzling didn’t help much. Jane had spent an academic year here back in the ‘70s, when the town was much smaller and was still mostly a construction site, so it was hard for her to get her bearings, but after much map consulting we finally found what we decided was the apartment she had lived in and took an appropriate number of pictures. We then returned to the town center and after much indecision realized that it was too late to go to Leuven for lunch, so we randomly picked an inexpensive café and had a very satisfactory, and fairly late, lunch. By this time it was too late to do much of anything else, so we gave up on Bruges and drove back to Brussels and went to the Horta museum. This was originally the home and office of Victor Horta, a famous Belgian architect who worked in the Art Deco style. It was really interesting and in many ways spectacular…the architecture, the construction techniques, the “style” of the house, and just seeing how a rich and famous architect lived in the 1920’s. I highly recommend it if you find yourself in Brussels with a few hours to kill. We went back home and had leeks gratinée with ham….except that Beagle forgot to add the ham. No one minded.
13 March, Friday:
The daffodil in our garden has burst into bloom. Spring is coming fast to Brussels. Today we had lunch at the Music Museum (not bad, but not great) and went shopping for baby clothes at Le Petit Bateau. Jane’s niece (?) is having a baby, and that gave us an excuse to go to a baby store. Everyone was happy, including me, who generally hates to shop. After spending too much time there we went to the Musée Van Buuren, which is a house that was owned by some rich Belgian patrons of the arts. It was interesting, once again, to wander through a house that had been lived in by rich Belgian patrons of the arts in the ‘20s. There was also a great garden, which I missed because I had to run back for a conference call. Jane and Beagle did visit the gardens, and got lost in the maze. Jane managed to lead Beagle out of the maze in enough time to get home for her conference call. We went to gym, and then went to the restaurant Saint-Boniface, in our neighborhood. It was excellent, as usual. A real find. It has a great atmosphere, great service, nice décor and fabulous food. No wonder it makes all the guidebooks.
14 March, Saturday:
Jane and I went grocery shopping in the morning, and then we all drove to Tervuren, parked at the Africa museum and went for a walk in the park. This was a great idea, except for the fact that it was raining lightly. We walked for an hour or so to the town of Jesus-Eik and had lunch at a brasserie we had visited before. The lunch was very satisfactory, and by the time we left it had more or less stopped raining. Either that or we had gotten used to it. We went back home and I watched two rugby matches; Italy vs. Wales, which was not a very well played match which Wales won…barely, and Scotland vs. Ireland, which Ireland won, after having been behind during the first half. I continue to be impressed by what an incredibly fast and violent game rugby is. I am looking forward to the finals of this “6 Nations Tournament,” which should be next weekend. Inspired by Thérèse, we had jambonneau and sauerkraut for dinner.
15 March, Sunday:
We finally made it to Bruges today. It was a gorgeous spring day, with flowers everywhere, and Bruges is pretty much as it was 33 years ago. There is a huge parking garage on the outskirts of town, next to the train station, where you are encouraged to leave your car. After an abortive attempt to find some place to park closer to the center of town, we parked there and walked into town. Bruges is lovely…well preserved, or at least very well recreated, with canals, cobblestone streets, pretty buildings, etc. We walked around and found the building where Beagle lived 33 summers ago…what had been a rundown building housing College of Europe students is now a 4 star hotel. Then we visited a museum (that had once been a hospital), saw some paintings by Hans Memling, and had a very satisfactory lunch. On our return to Brussels we were all too tired to do anything about dinner, so we went to La Roue d’Or, a classic Belgian brasserie near the Grand Place, which is not only a good restaurant but is also open on Sundays and is open late. Jane had been talking about Waterzooi all week, so she had that. Waterzooi is a specialty of Gent and is generally called Gentse Waterzooi or Waterzooi gantoise, depending on whether you speak Dutch or French. The literal translation of waterzooi from the Dutch is “watery mess,” but it is hardly that. It is a sort of stew with cream and butter and vegetables and either chicken or fish. It was originally a fish dish, but the story is that the water around Gent got so polluted that they stopped using fish and substituted chicken. It is also a dish that was supposedly made out of tough chicken, or spoiled chicken. In any event, Jane liked it a lot. It was as good as she remembered. It reminded me of fricasseed chicken, which I ate a lot of as a kid. Beagle had sole and I had veal kidneys. It was a great meal…not fancy, but probably the best we’ve had in Brussels.
16 March, Monday:
Beagle had to attend the opening of the “Henri Pirenne Year” at the University of Gent, so Jane and I drove her to Gent and let her perform her academic duties while we had a tour of Gent. We had planned to go to the tapestry exhibit, which Beagle and I had seen before but agreed was worth seeing again, but it was closed on Monday. So we saw the “Ghent Altarpiece,” a polyptych painting made up of 24 compartmented scenes that was started by Hubert van Eyck and finished after Hubert’s death by his younger brother Jan van Eyck in 1432. It is quite spectacular. The painting is in the cathedral, and when you enter you have to pay an admission fee that entitles you to an audio guide that provides you with a seemingly endless description of each one of the 24 panels. After about an hour of this, Jane and I felt educated enough and went in search of napkin and lace stores and lunch. Fortunately all the interesting stores were closed, since it was Monday. After inspecting and rejecting about a dozen restaurants, and almost settling on an outdoor café on a canal where we would have been able to inhale the second hand smoke from the other patrons and be serenaded by jackhammers from a construction site which was between us and the canal, we finally found a modest restaurant which had the advantage of being totally empty. Being in Gent, we of course both had Gantse Waterzooi. It was excellent. Just as we ordered our lunch, Beagle called. Her ceremony had ended early, so she grabbed something to eat at the reception and then came to meet us. We did some more sightseeing, guided by Beagle, who knows Gent pretty well, and then returned to Brussels. No one had much of an appetite for dinner, which was a good thing, since by the time we got around to shopping for dinner, everything was closed. So we had spaghetti and went to bed.
17 March, Tuesday:
I took Jane to the airport this morning. We left at around 7:30 AM, expecting that the trip would take about 20 minutes, which is what it has taken the other times I have done it. Not on a Tuesday morning, evidently. The traffic going out of Brussels was terrible, but we made it to the airport in plenty of time, especially since Jane’s plane was an hour late in taking off. Going back to our apartment was much worse. It took me over an hour, a lot of which was spent just sitting in gridlocked traffic in the middle of a tunnel. If this is what the traffic is normally like on a weekday morning in Brussels, then it is a mystery to me why anyone would drive to work. That was my excitement for the day, other than going to gym and doing some shopping for a party Beagle is giving tomorrow. I also went for a walk, because it was another great day. When I looked at the long-range weather forecast for the time that Jane was going to be in Brussels, it was pretty depressing…rain was predicted for every day. In fact, the weather has been mostly gorgeous except for 1 day. Lots of sun, temperatures in the low 50s, etc. Our Belgian friends tell us not to get used to it. They say that it will revert to cold and wet before long. But we are convinced that spring is here. There are flowers everywhere, the forsythia are coming out, and the days are dramatically longer.
Week 18 - In which we discover Parc Tenbosch and look at real estate, have dinner at Marc and Thérèse's, and greet Jane, who brings Spring with her
4 March, Wednesday:
The postal strike is over. I know that because we got a whole bunch of mail, most of which had been mailed over a week ago. It was pretty rotten outside so I spent the day catching up on mail, having a French class with Aurélie, and being on conference calls with American Rivers.
5 March, Thursday:
Today was a lovely day. It was almost warm, and there were blue skies and sunshine. I had seen an article in the New York Times about a house on a park that was for sale, and just out of curiosity I went to see the park. It is Parc Tenbosch, and while it is on the other side of Avenue Louise from us, it is still in the commune of Ixelles. It is a gem of a park, about 2 1/2 acres in size, sort of hilly, with lots of winding paths, children’s playgrounds, a small “sports field” for older kids, lots of benches, small ponds (supposedly with turtles in the summer), and all beautifully landscaped and maintained. There were some daffodils in bloom as well as crocuses, snowdrops, etc. Very spring like and lovely, and in a very quiet neighborhood with a lot of very nice looking houses, some of them on a street called rue Americaine. Makes our neighborhood look like a dump! Beagle was out being treated to lunch by a Dutch colleague, but I was so enthusiastic about the park that when she came back we walked there again.
6 March, Friday:
There is a daffodil in our garden which is close to being in bloom…at least you can see the bud which will turn into a flower. There are also a bunch of other green things poking up, presumably daffodils as well. Spring is coming. Our garden is now regularly visited by pigeons and some kind of black bird with a colored beak that is also a ground feeder. That is because at about 4:30 every afternoon a bunch of chickadees arrive and start feeding at my birdfeeder (it is the kind that only small birds can use). The chickadees are very discriminating, and they root around in the birdseed looking for the stuff they like, knocking the stuff they don’t like onto the ground. The pigeons and the black birds have learned this, and they wait for the chickadees to arrive and happily feed on the leftovers. The weather was supposed to be horrible today, but it turned out to be another nice day. Beagle had to return a book to the library at ULB (Université Libre de Bruxelles), and we used that as an excuse to take a walk. We walked to Place Flagey, past the Etangs d’Ixelles, through the Abbey de la Cambre, and along Avenue Franklin Roosevelt to ULB. Avenue Franklin Roosevelt is a very wide street with very grand houses on both sides, and on one side the houses back up to the Bois de la Cambre. On our walk to Parc Tenbosch yesterday we went by a bunch of embassies and missions for places like Bosnia and Herzegovina. On the Avenue Franklin Roosevelt there were embassies for places like Venezuela and Iran and Syria. You get the idea. ULB has two campuses, and the one housing the History Department is the smaller campus. A lot of the buildings were constructed after W.W. I by Herbert Hoover (The “Great Engineer”), who was in charge of US post-war aid to Europe, and he tried to make the campus look like a US college campus, complete with pseudo-gothic architecture, etc. So part of the campus looks like the University of Iowa or something, but the newer part has a mélange of more modern architectural styles, and as ULB has grown it has also spilled out across Avenue Franklin Roosevelt into some of the grand houses there. The campus has very much of a college feel to it, with dozens of students in jeans wandering around and earnestly discussing whatever it is that students earnestly discuss.
7 March, Saturday:
Another day in which the weather was supposed to be horrible, but turned out to be nice. We were going to go to Gent to a museum before having dinner at Marc and Thérèse’s, but we stayed in Brussels and went shopping, walked down Avenue Louise to the Abbey de la Cambre, to the Parc de la Cambre, ULB, etc. Then we drove to Gent for dinner. Claire and Jacques were there, having spent the afternoon in a splendid exhibition of Flemish tapestries. Walter and Frieda were there as well, and we had, as usual at Marc and Thérèse’s, a spectacular dinner. We had three different hors d’oeuvres, including a tiny pot of soup that contained something which was ultimately identified, after much discussion, as “razor clams” in English. There was some confusion as to what was the Dutch name for a razor clam. In any event, the soup was wonderful. This was followed, of course, by a spectacular dinner featuring a number of wines, including a really nice 1990 red wine, and ended with a 30 year old sherry. The dinner ended at midnight, and we got back to Brussels at about 1 AM. Good thing I have nothing to do tomorrow.
8 March, Sunday:
Whoops! I did have something to do. Our friend Jane arrived on a 7:40 AM plane, so I had to get up at 6:30 to go to the airport to get her. We got home, had breakfast, and then everybody had a nap. Figuring that it was a bad idea to sleep all day, and since it was a nice day, we roused Jane and went for a walk. We walked to Parc Tenbosch (where there were daffodils), then to the Park de la Cambre, then to Avenue Roosevelt and ULB. We ended up at Place Flagey and had a hot chocolate. We had decided to eat out, and purposely went out early to Au Vieux Bruxelles, since the last few times we had tried to go there on the weekend it was jammed and we couldn’t get in. For some reason, tonight it was only about half full, and stayed that way the whole time we were there. We had moules frites, beef carbonnade, porc à la something or other and drank beer. Nice. Jane has decided that she likes gueuze. Me too.
9 March, Monday:
We had a walking tour of Brussels today with Jane. We went across town, through the Grand Place, bought cookies, went to Place Sainte Catherine, looked at fish restaurants and a great cheese store, had lunch at Le Pain Quotidien, bought all sorts of cheese from the cheese store (the only one we have found in Brussels) that is run by a man who speaks native English (plus, of course, French and Dutch). The only negative part of our outing was that at one point as we were walking down the street, a truck driver lost his grip on the back door of a delivery truck and it swung out and smacked Jane in the face. Being a hardy sort, Jane shrugged this off and we continued on our walk. The truck driver was “vraiment désolé” and Jane has a lump above her eye, but it could have been much worse. We went home, Jane and I went shopping while Beagle was at a session with her PT, and we had dinner.
10 March, Tuesday:
Beagle and Jane went to a Beagle’s regular Feldenkrais class today. Jane thought it was great. I stayed home, for fear of being kidnapped by the Feldenkrais cult. In payment I suffered through a huge racket as several men used jackhammers to drill through the walls just outside our apartment. They ended up, after much noise and about 30 cigarette breaks, exposing all sorts of pipes that are on the other side of our bathroom wall. I have no idea of what problem they were investigating, but assume it is something serious, since the noise made it impossible to think and the pipes are now totally exposed. We will see what tomorrow brings. Jane went shopping after Feldenkrais and had a 2 hour conference call. Beagle had a meeting with her student Jun (a brilliant Korean man who is studying European medieval history and is living in Brussels for the year). I had an American Rivers conference call, which reminded me of how lucky we were to have such a great CEO of American Rivers. Rebecca Wodder, our CEO, is the kind of person who never comes to you with a problem. She comes to you telling you that she had identified a problem and had implemented a solution. We are very lucky, although the current financial situation is a killer. Not only are we having to abandon our plans for expansion, we are having to scale back in a very dramatic and painful fashion.
The postal strike is over. I know that because we got a whole bunch of mail, most of which had been mailed over a week ago. It was pretty rotten outside so I spent the day catching up on mail, having a French class with Aurélie, and being on conference calls with American Rivers.
5 March, Thursday:
Today was a lovely day. It was almost warm, and there were blue skies and sunshine. I had seen an article in the New York Times about a house on a park that was for sale, and just out of curiosity I went to see the park. It is Parc Tenbosch, and while it is on the other side of Avenue Louise from us, it is still in the commune of Ixelles. It is a gem of a park, about 2 1/2 acres in size, sort of hilly, with lots of winding paths, children’s playgrounds, a small “sports field” for older kids, lots of benches, small ponds (supposedly with turtles in the summer), and all beautifully landscaped and maintained. There were some daffodils in bloom as well as crocuses, snowdrops, etc. Very spring like and lovely, and in a very quiet neighborhood with a lot of very nice looking houses, some of them on a street called rue Americaine. Makes our neighborhood look like a dump! Beagle was out being treated to lunch by a Dutch colleague, but I was so enthusiastic about the park that when she came back we walked there again.
6 March, Friday:
There is a daffodil in our garden which is close to being in bloom…at least you can see the bud which will turn into a flower. There are also a bunch of other green things poking up, presumably daffodils as well. Spring is coming. Our garden is now regularly visited by pigeons and some kind of black bird with a colored beak that is also a ground feeder. That is because at about 4:30 every afternoon a bunch of chickadees arrive and start feeding at my birdfeeder (it is the kind that only small birds can use). The chickadees are very discriminating, and they root around in the birdseed looking for the stuff they like, knocking the stuff they don’t like onto the ground. The pigeons and the black birds have learned this, and they wait for the chickadees to arrive and happily feed on the leftovers. The weather was supposed to be horrible today, but it turned out to be another nice day. Beagle had to return a book to the library at ULB (Université Libre de Bruxelles), and we used that as an excuse to take a walk. We walked to Place Flagey, past the Etangs d’Ixelles, through the Abbey de la Cambre, and along Avenue Franklin Roosevelt to ULB. Avenue Franklin Roosevelt is a very wide street with very grand houses on both sides, and on one side the houses back up to the Bois de la Cambre. On our walk to Parc Tenbosch yesterday we went by a bunch of embassies and missions for places like Bosnia and Herzegovina. On the Avenue Franklin Roosevelt there were embassies for places like Venezuela and Iran and Syria. You get the idea. ULB has two campuses, and the one housing the History Department is the smaller campus. A lot of the buildings were constructed after W.W. I by Herbert Hoover (The “Great Engineer”), who was in charge of US post-war aid to Europe, and he tried to make the campus look like a US college campus, complete with pseudo-gothic architecture, etc. So part of the campus looks like the University of Iowa or something, but the newer part has a mélange of more modern architectural styles, and as ULB has grown it has also spilled out across Avenue Franklin Roosevelt into some of the grand houses there. The campus has very much of a college feel to it, with dozens of students in jeans wandering around and earnestly discussing whatever it is that students earnestly discuss.
7 March, Saturday:
Another day in which the weather was supposed to be horrible, but turned out to be nice. We were going to go to Gent to a museum before having dinner at Marc and Thérèse’s, but we stayed in Brussels and went shopping, walked down Avenue Louise to the Abbey de la Cambre, to the Parc de la Cambre, ULB, etc. Then we drove to Gent for dinner. Claire and Jacques were there, having spent the afternoon in a splendid exhibition of Flemish tapestries. Walter and Frieda were there as well, and we had, as usual at Marc and Thérèse’s, a spectacular dinner. We had three different hors d’oeuvres, including a tiny pot of soup that contained something which was ultimately identified, after much discussion, as “razor clams” in English. There was some confusion as to what was the Dutch name for a razor clam. In any event, the soup was wonderful. This was followed, of course, by a spectacular dinner featuring a number of wines, including a really nice 1990 red wine, and ended with a 30 year old sherry. The dinner ended at midnight, and we got back to Brussels at about 1 AM. Good thing I have nothing to do tomorrow.
8 March, Sunday:
Whoops! I did have something to do. Our friend Jane arrived on a 7:40 AM plane, so I had to get up at 6:30 to go to the airport to get her. We got home, had breakfast, and then everybody had a nap. Figuring that it was a bad idea to sleep all day, and since it was a nice day, we roused Jane and went for a walk. We walked to Parc Tenbosch (where there were daffodils), then to the Park de la Cambre, then to Avenue Roosevelt and ULB. We ended up at Place Flagey and had a hot chocolate. We had decided to eat out, and purposely went out early to Au Vieux Bruxelles, since the last few times we had tried to go there on the weekend it was jammed and we couldn’t get in. For some reason, tonight it was only about half full, and stayed that way the whole time we were there. We had moules frites, beef carbonnade, porc à la something or other and drank beer. Nice. Jane has decided that she likes gueuze. Me too.
9 March, Monday:
We had a walking tour of Brussels today with Jane. We went across town, through the Grand Place, bought cookies, went to Place Sainte Catherine, looked at fish restaurants and a great cheese store, had lunch at Le Pain Quotidien, bought all sorts of cheese from the cheese store (the only one we have found in Brussels) that is run by a man who speaks native English (plus, of course, French and Dutch). The only negative part of our outing was that at one point as we were walking down the street, a truck driver lost his grip on the back door of a delivery truck and it swung out and smacked Jane in the face. Being a hardy sort, Jane shrugged this off and we continued on our walk. The truck driver was “vraiment désolé” and Jane has a lump above her eye, but it could have been much worse. We went home, Jane and I went shopping while Beagle was at a session with her PT, and we had dinner.
10 March, Tuesday:
Beagle and Jane went to a Beagle’s regular Feldenkrais class today. Jane thought it was great. I stayed home, for fear of being kidnapped by the Feldenkrais cult. In payment I suffered through a huge racket as several men used jackhammers to drill through the walls just outside our apartment. They ended up, after much noise and about 30 cigarette breaks, exposing all sorts of pipes that are on the other side of our bathroom wall. I have no idea of what problem they were investigating, but assume it is something serious, since the noise made it impossible to think and the pipes are now totally exposed. We will see what tomorrow brings. Jane went shopping after Feldenkrais and had a 2 hour conference call. Beagle had a meeting with her student Jun (a brilliant Korean man who is studying European medieval history and is living in Brussels for the year). I had an American Rivers conference call, which reminded me of how lucky we were to have such a great CEO of American Rivers. Rebecca Wodder, our CEO, is the kind of person who never comes to you with a problem. She comes to you telling you that she had identified a problem and had implemented a solution. We are very lucky, although the current financial situation is a killer. Not only are we having to abandon our plans for expansion, we are having to scale back in a very dramatic and painful fashion.
Wednesday, March 4, 2009
Week 17 - In which I buy an aiguiseur, Thérèse has a wonderful idea, and we go hiking in a peat bog
25 February, Wednesday:
I diligently studied French today, and then had a class with Aurélie. Aurélie says that we need to practice speaking more. I agree. I know, or at least have studied, most of the rules, and it is more a matter of practice since (a) there are a million exceptions to every rule and (b) the French have a dozen different ways of saying anything, and hate repeating a word or a phrase. Plus if there is an easy and straightforward way of saying something and a convoluted and flowery and complex way of saying the same thing, the French will go for the latter every time. And they are very critical of you don’t say it correctly. There was a YouTube clip of President Sarkozy circulating the other day. He was talking about the forces of resistance to his policies having “the power to say no” and “not having the power to say yes,” and these two things counterbalancing each other, with the result that nothing gets done. The French found this hilarious, since how could you have two similar forces counterbalance each other, and how could you call the lack of power a power, etc.? They kept saying that they couldn’t understand what he was talking about. The clip came from a TV show where everyone was laughing at a clip of Sarkozy making a speech. I have to admit that Sarko’s formulation was a little inelegant, but I understood the point he was trying to make. It sounded to me like George Bush on a good day. And what would the French make of Rumsfeld with his” known unknowns” and “unknown unknowns?” In any event, Beagle and I have promised to practice our “indirect discourse” this week…you know, “He said that…” We thought we’d start with Obama’s speech to Congress. It will give us a chance to read the speech and practice our French.
26 February, Thursday:
A fair bit of yesterday and today was spent on American Rivers business. We are trying to figure out the slate of officers for the coming year, etc. This has been made more complicated because (a) the man who was Vice-Chair, my presumed successor the year after this one, has left the Board because he has been appointed Assistant Secretary of the Interior and (b) two logical candidates to replace him have flatly refused, and a third logical candidate is in the middle of business and personal crises so he is unavailable. It looks like I will have to stay on for an extra year, extending the normal 3 year term to 4. I feel like Guiliani. Or Bloomberg. To cheer myself up I went to a very fancy cooking store on Avenue Louise to buy a knife sharpener, because all of our knives are impossibly dull. I’m sure there must be dozens of stores nearby where you can buy stuff like that, but this was the only one I have seen since we’ve been in Brussels. And let me tell you, it is the Tiffany of cooking stores. I had neglected to look up the French word for knife sharpener before I left our apartment, but I figured that this would be a good chance to practice my French. It was. After much struggling and pantomime and the like, the salesman led me to the section where they had “aiguiseurs.” Ah ha! That’s how you say it! Now I know. Having gotten that far, I figured I’d better buy one of the things, but was a little shocked when the first model he showed me cost €106 ($135). I choked and asked if he didn’t have anything cheaper, and he showed me the €76 model. We finally got down to a €41 model, the cheapest he had, which I bought. I figured that considering I’d had a French lesson and had also bought an aiguiseur that I could take home to NYC with me, that wasn’t so bad…although the same thing at Zabars would probably cost $15. So now we have sharp knives.
27 February, Friday:
Thérèse had a wonderful idea. It is a long-standing tradition of the Medieval History Department at the University of Gent that graduate students go on occasional weekend trips together, led or at least accompanied by faculty members. In 1976 we were invited on one of those trips, a hiking trip in the Ardennes. I remember sleeping in a freezing cold barn, taking cold showers, and being introduced to chocopasta. It seemed pretty disgusting to me…eating chocolate paste smeared on bread for breakfast…but it actually tasted pretty good after a cold shower. And besides, as the Belgians pointed out to me, Americans eat peanut paste smeared on bread, so who were we to talk. In any event, Thérèse’s idea was to have a reunion of the same group 33 years later. She rented a gîte in Hockai, a little town near Spa (Spa is famous for its drinking water, its casino and thermal baths, etc. When you go to a health spa in the US, that’s where the term “spa” comes from). 12 people ended up being able to make it, coming from Gent, Antwerp and Brussels. There was Marc and Thérèse, André and Ghislaine, Eric and B (Birgit), Philippe and Leen, Claire and Jacques and Beagle and me. We all arrived in Hockai on Friday afternoon and spent the first hour with everybody trying to remember if they had actually been on that original trip, and trying to remember each other. Since we were all 33 years older, that was not an easy job. Luckily, Philippe had brought a photo album with pictures of the actual event, so we were able to confirm, and in most cases sharpen, our memories. The only people who hadn’t been on the original trip were Claire and Jacques who were relatively new friends. They were the last to arrive, and before they turned up Thérèse and Marc explained to the rest of the group that neither of them spoke Dutch or English, or at least not much. The others, all Flemish, could forgive the lack of English, but were horrified that they didn’t speak Dutch. Somebody asked, “Aren’t they Belgians?” But everybody liked them when they arrived, and we spent the rest of the weekend speaking a mélange of French, Dutch and English. Most conversations started in French but quickly moved to Dutch, and then occasionally veered into English. By the end of the weekend everybody seemed to understand everyone else, and everyone turned out to speak something other than his or her primary language…not necessarily well, but adequately. What was interesting to me was that most of the Flemish speakers didn’t have very good French…I had always assumed that most Flemish speakers also had good French but just didn’t like to used it, as a matter of principle. Not true, as it turns out. Our gîte was large and well equipped, and we settled down to a simple dinner of wine and cheese, which Marc and Thérèse had brought. Some simple dinner. We must have had 20 different kinds of cheese, all bought from a cheese store in Gent that makes its own cheese, plus bread, rolls, champagne and several different wines.
28 February, Saturday:
Today everyone staggered out of bed, had a big breakfast, and took a short walk through the town of Hockai. It is evidently a cross-country skiing center, because there were several ski rental places and lots of trails, but other than clumps here and there, the snow was pretty much gone. We then had a quick lunch and drove to the Hautes Fagnes, a big (4,500 acre) natural preserve, where we were to meet a guide. According to the dictionary, Hautes Fagnes means “high mud,” but a more accurate translation might be “high bog.” This is an area that is pretty flat, but is the highest part of Belgium. It is right on the border with Germany, and in the past at various times belonged to Germany, Holland, Luxembourg, Prussia, etc., but the Belgians got it after W.W. I and have hung onto it. Our guide was just great, although he only spoke French. He took us on a long (18 kilometer) walk while explaining about all the flora and fauna. The area is mostly a gigantic peat bog that has been used over the years for peat production, pasture, growing cranberries and, in the case of the Germans, growing trees. The area is now (slowly) being returned to its original state as a peat bog. The peat there is in some cases as deep as 7 meters, and since peat (which is made of decomposed and decomposing moss) accumulates at the rate of 1 millimeter per year, that means this process has been going on for at least 7,000 years. Give it another couple of million years and maybe it will turn into coal. Our hike started on wide paths that are evidently used as cross country ski trails. While there were no skiers around, the trails themselves still had several inches of snow and ice on them, and were very slippery and pretty tough going. We certainly could have used our YakTraxs, which we had cleverly left in Brussels. After a bit of that we went into the peat bog itself, walking much of the time on narrow “boardwalks” which were just above ground/water level. Most of the bog itself is covered with big tussocks of grass about 2 feet high and 3 or 4 inches apart. The tussocks themselves aren’t stiff enough to support your weight, and the spaces in between the tussocks are filled with about 4 inches of water. This makes walking very difficult…you sort of lurch from tussock to tussock, falling into the water at every step. I remember scrambling though terrain exactly like this 33 years ago, and it was exhausting. I was glad for the boardwalks…they made walking a lot easier. However, there were plenty of places where there were no boardwalks, just grass, and since a peat bog is in essence one big sponge, every time you took a step on grass the water squirted up around your feet. Where there weren’t tussocks of grass or regular grass, there was mud. Lots of it, generally on slopes that were made delightfully slippery by the mud. By the end of the day everyone was wet and muddy. Interestingly enough, part of the reclamation project that is going on there now is to remove a bunch of drains and restore the water to its previous levels. It is hard to think of this place getting any wetter, but that’s what they have in mind. We started our walk at 1PM and ended a little after 6 PM, when the sun was starting to set. Progress was slow after we had gotten about half way, partly because the going got tougher and partly because André, who was recovering from a series of operations, had to stop from time to time to rest. No one seemed to mind except for the guide, who was concerned that he had taken us on too long a hike. One interesting thing was that of our group, Marc, who firmly believes that exercise is bad for you, seemed to be one of the strongest hikers in the group. He was always in the lead, wearing his trench coat and his Belgian army boots, and never seemed in the slightest tired. It was truly a glorious hike. Interesting, very beautiful in a peat bog-like way, and it was a nice day for hiking…cool and somewhat misty from time to time, but no rain. We went back to the gîte, rested briefly, and then went to Spa for dinner at a very nice restaurant called Le Grand Maur (I was told that this means “Moor,” as in someone from North Africa, but perhaps it also means “moor,” as in a heath or a bog. A French play on words?). Since there were 12 of us, we had a private dining room. Our meal was excellent, the room was great, and our waiter appeared to be 14. Everyone wanted to adopt him. That happens with people who were graduate students 33 years ago. The highlight of the dinner for me, other than wines specifically chosen for each of our individual courses by a sommelier, was that Marc and B. had quite a violent dispute over the importance of preserving/learning/speaking the Dutch language. Marc made the point that there were more people who spoke Dutch than all the people who spoke all the Scandinavian languages combined. Marc was as animated as I have ever seen him, pounding on the table for emphasis. Clearly a nerve had been touched. However most of the argument was lost on our end of the table, since neither Claire or Jacques or I, who were at that end of the table, understood a word they were saying. The others paid no attention.
1 March, Sunday:
We started the day with brunch…omelettes with bacon, yogurt, boudin blanc, boudin noir, thinly sliced smoked ham, smoked trout, paté, bread, toast, rolls, 22 kinds of cheese, juice, jam, chocopasta, peanut butter, green salad, fruit salad, milk, tea and coffee. Then we drove to Limbourg, stopping on the way to visit the “Barrage de la Gileppe,” a big dam built to supply power and water to the wool industry in Verviers. The dam was quite impressive, and featured a 70 foot high observation tower which, this being Belgium, housed a cafeteria. The parking lot was full…apparently it is a Belgian tradition to visit this dam. Most of our group remembered being taken here in school groups. Since we were a group of historians (actually nine current or former medieval historians, one civil engineer, one psychiatrist and one former financier), we of course knew that the great Belgian historian Henri Pirenne gave his first public address at the dedication of this dam when he was 14 years old, and his audience was the King of Belgium. Apparently the King asked for a copy of the speech, but young Henri refused to give it to him. From there we went on to Limbourg, a lovely little medieval town perched right on the top of a hill with a big church (closed for renovations). The town center is made up of a whole bunch of very old buildings (I saw one with a date of 1671) grouped around a rectangular “place,” and the main street is about half cobblestones and half potholes (to keep people from speeding, I suppose). We walked around for a while, and then since there appeared to be no cafés open in Limbourg, drove to Verviers for a beer. For once we skipped lunch, since our brunch seemed adequate. After the beer, most of our group drove back to Gent or Antwerp. Marc and Thérèse and Beagle and I were staying at the gîte for one more night, so we walked around Verviers and visited a museum dedicated to the wool industry. Verviers used to be a very prosperous wool processing/weaving city, right up until the 1950s and 1960s, but the industry died quickly after that. Today there are only two places in Verviers that make cloth. One makes fabric for the top of pool tables and the other makes some other sort of highly specialized cloth. The museum had exhibits showing how the wool was washed, processed, etc. and turned into cloth. It was interesting for this group of medieval historians, who spend a lot of time studying the economics and politics of the cloth industry, to see how this is actually done. One interesting tidbit was that before they had soaps that could clean wool, they used human urine, which apparently contains lots of ammonia, which is good for cleaning wool. A man would go around the town every morning collecting urine from the local households, for which they got paid. Part of his job was to taste each “deposit” of urine to make sure that it contained enough ammonia…i.e. to make sure that the local citizenry weren’t diluting the urine they were selling him with water. After being educated about wool, we drove back to the gîte, took showers, and went out to dinner in a little town called Solwaster at a restaurant called Le Vinâve. It was excellent, and featured local produce, etc. We even had a Belgian wine.
2 March, Monday:
We got up early today, straightened out the gîte, and drove back to Brussels. We got caught in a big demonstration of some sort right as we were coming into Brussels…there were a lot of people with banners and orange jackets walking down the street and chanting unintelligible slogans. That slowed us down a bit. I was supposed to be going to ULB for a tour that was being led by Claire, but I never made it. I waited for about a half hour for a bus that takes you right to ULB, and normally runs all the time, but it never came…perhaps the demonstration affected the busses as well. Subsequently I discovered that there is a big postal strike going on…it started on Friday and is supposed to last until Thursday, so perhaps that’s what caused the disruption. In any event, it has disrupted our supply of DVDs from DVDPost, who are unsure of what to do about the strike. The man I spoke to at DVDPost said that they had no idea where all their DVDs were, whether any would be delivered this week or next, etc. He was sympathetic but didn’t appear to be overly troubled. I guess the post office shuts down all the time.
3 March, Tuesday:
A nice blue sky day here, temperature in the mid 40s. There appears to be a blizzard going on in New York, and the financial world is continuing its meltdown. I checked into the Belgian postal strike. It appears that postal workers in Belgium have gone on strike, protesting wages, working conditions, privatization, post office closings and potential future job losses. The postal union claims that everyone has gone on strike, and management claims that half the mail was delivered on Monday and 80% of post offices were open, albeit with only one employee. This being Belgium, things are more complicated than they seem on the surface. I discovered that one of the complaints of the postal workers is that Danish Post, owned by the Danish government, bought 25% of Belgium Post about three years ago and is now selling it to CVC Partners, a Luxembourg based buyout firm, at a €200,000,000 profit. Sometimes the mix of socialism and capitalism produces interesting results. In the interim, we are getting no mail and are enriching FedEx, who we hope is not on strike. We went to gym tonight. There appears to be a rapid turnover of the people who use the gym, leading us to believe that most people who stay in this furnished apartment complex are only here for a short time. The smelly man who spoke in some Slavic tongue has gone. So has the Italian man with spaghetti strap t-shirts and a huge mane of hair that flopped all over the place whenever he did anything. He sported a Charles Atlas-like upper body and Woody Allenesque legs and did nothing but free weights. Two burly men, one of whom has tattoos all over his arms, who speak some bizarre language, replaced them. Beagle was convinced that they were speaking some Scandinavian dialect, but after listening closely I determined that it was English. Tonight, the gym was populated by two women who had with them a little boy who appeared to be about four years old, and a 9 month old who was asleep in his stroller. They were all very cute, but they took up a lot of room, and the women seemed to spend more time talking on their cell phones than working out.
I diligently studied French today, and then had a class with Aurélie. Aurélie says that we need to practice speaking more. I agree. I know, or at least have studied, most of the rules, and it is more a matter of practice since (a) there are a million exceptions to every rule and (b) the French have a dozen different ways of saying anything, and hate repeating a word or a phrase. Plus if there is an easy and straightforward way of saying something and a convoluted and flowery and complex way of saying the same thing, the French will go for the latter every time. And they are very critical of you don’t say it correctly. There was a YouTube clip of President Sarkozy circulating the other day. He was talking about the forces of resistance to his policies having “the power to say no” and “not having the power to say yes,” and these two things counterbalancing each other, with the result that nothing gets done. The French found this hilarious, since how could you have two similar forces counterbalance each other, and how could you call the lack of power a power, etc.? They kept saying that they couldn’t understand what he was talking about. The clip came from a TV show where everyone was laughing at a clip of Sarkozy making a speech. I have to admit that Sarko’s formulation was a little inelegant, but I understood the point he was trying to make. It sounded to me like George Bush on a good day. And what would the French make of Rumsfeld with his” known unknowns” and “unknown unknowns?” In any event, Beagle and I have promised to practice our “indirect discourse” this week…you know, “He said that…” We thought we’d start with Obama’s speech to Congress. It will give us a chance to read the speech and practice our French.
26 February, Thursday:
A fair bit of yesterday and today was spent on American Rivers business. We are trying to figure out the slate of officers for the coming year, etc. This has been made more complicated because (a) the man who was Vice-Chair, my presumed successor the year after this one, has left the Board because he has been appointed Assistant Secretary of the Interior and (b) two logical candidates to replace him have flatly refused, and a third logical candidate is in the middle of business and personal crises so he is unavailable. It looks like I will have to stay on for an extra year, extending the normal 3 year term to 4. I feel like Guiliani. Or Bloomberg. To cheer myself up I went to a very fancy cooking store on Avenue Louise to buy a knife sharpener, because all of our knives are impossibly dull. I’m sure there must be dozens of stores nearby where you can buy stuff like that, but this was the only one I have seen since we’ve been in Brussels. And let me tell you, it is the Tiffany of cooking stores. I had neglected to look up the French word for knife sharpener before I left our apartment, but I figured that this would be a good chance to practice my French. It was. After much struggling and pantomime and the like, the salesman led me to the section where they had “aiguiseurs.” Ah ha! That’s how you say it! Now I know. Having gotten that far, I figured I’d better buy one of the things, but was a little shocked when the first model he showed me cost €106 ($135). I choked and asked if he didn’t have anything cheaper, and he showed me the €76 model. We finally got down to a €41 model, the cheapest he had, which I bought. I figured that considering I’d had a French lesson and had also bought an aiguiseur that I could take home to NYC with me, that wasn’t so bad…although the same thing at Zabars would probably cost $15. So now we have sharp knives.
27 February, Friday:
Thérèse had a wonderful idea. It is a long-standing tradition of the Medieval History Department at the University of Gent that graduate students go on occasional weekend trips together, led or at least accompanied by faculty members. In 1976 we were invited on one of those trips, a hiking trip in the Ardennes. I remember sleeping in a freezing cold barn, taking cold showers, and being introduced to chocopasta. It seemed pretty disgusting to me…eating chocolate paste smeared on bread for breakfast…but it actually tasted pretty good after a cold shower. And besides, as the Belgians pointed out to me, Americans eat peanut paste smeared on bread, so who were we to talk. In any event, Thérèse’s idea was to have a reunion of the same group 33 years later. She rented a gîte in Hockai, a little town near Spa (Spa is famous for its drinking water, its casino and thermal baths, etc. When you go to a health spa in the US, that’s where the term “spa” comes from). 12 people ended up being able to make it, coming from Gent, Antwerp and Brussels. There was Marc and Thérèse, André and Ghislaine, Eric and B (Birgit), Philippe and Leen, Claire and Jacques and Beagle and me. We all arrived in Hockai on Friday afternoon and spent the first hour with everybody trying to remember if they had actually been on that original trip, and trying to remember each other. Since we were all 33 years older, that was not an easy job. Luckily, Philippe had brought a photo album with pictures of the actual event, so we were able to confirm, and in most cases sharpen, our memories. The only people who hadn’t been on the original trip were Claire and Jacques who were relatively new friends. They were the last to arrive, and before they turned up Thérèse and Marc explained to the rest of the group that neither of them spoke Dutch or English, or at least not much. The others, all Flemish, could forgive the lack of English, but were horrified that they didn’t speak Dutch. Somebody asked, “Aren’t they Belgians?” But everybody liked them when they arrived, and we spent the rest of the weekend speaking a mélange of French, Dutch and English. Most conversations started in French but quickly moved to Dutch, and then occasionally veered into English. By the end of the weekend everybody seemed to understand everyone else, and everyone turned out to speak something other than his or her primary language…not necessarily well, but adequately. What was interesting to me was that most of the Flemish speakers didn’t have very good French…I had always assumed that most Flemish speakers also had good French but just didn’t like to used it, as a matter of principle. Not true, as it turns out. Our gîte was large and well equipped, and we settled down to a simple dinner of wine and cheese, which Marc and Thérèse had brought. Some simple dinner. We must have had 20 different kinds of cheese, all bought from a cheese store in Gent that makes its own cheese, plus bread, rolls, champagne and several different wines.
28 February, Saturday:
Today everyone staggered out of bed, had a big breakfast, and took a short walk through the town of Hockai. It is evidently a cross-country skiing center, because there were several ski rental places and lots of trails, but other than clumps here and there, the snow was pretty much gone. We then had a quick lunch and drove to the Hautes Fagnes, a big (4,500 acre) natural preserve, where we were to meet a guide. According to the dictionary, Hautes Fagnes means “high mud,” but a more accurate translation might be “high bog.” This is an area that is pretty flat, but is the highest part of Belgium. It is right on the border with Germany, and in the past at various times belonged to Germany, Holland, Luxembourg, Prussia, etc., but the Belgians got it after W.W. I and have hung onto it. Our guide was just great, although he only spoke French. He took us on a long (18 kilometer) walk while explaining about all the flora and fauna. The area is mostly a gigantic peat bog that has been used over the years for peat production, pasture, growing cranberries and, in the case of the Germans, growing trees. The area is now (slowly) being returned to its original state as a peat bog. The peat there is in some cases as deep as 7 meters, and since peat (which is made of decomposed and decomposing moss) accumulates at the rate of 1 millimeter per year, that means this process has been going on for at least 7,000 years. Give it another couple of million years and maybe it will turn into coal. Our hike started on wide paths that are evidently used as cross country ski trails. While there were no skiers around, the trails themselves still had several inches of snow and ice on them, and were very slippery and pretty tough going. We certainly could have used our YakTraxs, which we had cleverly left in Brussels. After a bit of that we went into the peat bog itself, walking much of the time on narrow “boardwalks” which were just above ground/water level. Most of the bog itself is covered with big tussocks of grass about 2 feet high and 3 or 4 inches apart. The tussocks themselves aren’t stiff enough to support your weight, and the spaces in between the tussocks are filled with about 4 inches of water. This makes walking very difficult…you sort of lurch from tussock to tussock, falling into the water at every step. I remember scrambling though terrain exactly like this 33 years ago, and it was exhausting. I was glad for the boardwalks…they made walking a lot easier. However, there were plenty of places where there were no boardwalks, just grass, and since a peat bog is in essence one big sponge, every time you took a step on grass the water squirted up around your feet. Where there weren’t tussocks of grass or regular grass, there was mud. Lots of it, generally on slopes that were made delightfully slippery by the mud. By the end of the day everyone was wet and muddy. Interestingly enough, part of the reclamation project that is going on there now is to remove a bunch of drains and restore the water to its previous levels. It is hard to think of this place getting any wetter, but that’s what they have in mind. We started our walk at 1PM and ended a little after 6 PM, when the sun was starting to set. Progress was slow after we had gotten about half way, partly because the going got tougher and partly because André, who was recovering from a series of operations, had to stop from time to time to rest. No one seemed to mind except for the guide, who was concerned that he had taken us on too long a hike. One interesting thing was that of our group, Marc, who firmly believes that exercise is bad for you, seemed to be one of the strongest hikers in the group. He was always in the lead, wearing his trench coat and his Belgian army boots, and never seemed in the slightest tired. It was truly a glorious hike. Interesting, very beautiful in a peat bog-like way, and it was a nice day for hiking…cool and somewhat misty from time to time, but no rain. We went back to the gîte, rested briefly, and then went to Spa for dinner at a very nice restaurant called Le Grand Maur (I was told that this means “Moor,” as in someone from North Africa, but perhaps it also means “moor,” as in a heath or a bog. A French play on words?). Since there were 12 of us, we had a private dining room. Our meal was excellent, the room was great, and our waiter appeared to be 14. Everyone wanted to adopt him. That happens with people who were graduate students 33 years ago. The highlight of the dinner for me, other than wines specifically chosen for each of our individual courses by a sommelier, was that Marc and B. had quite a violent dispute over the importance of preserving/learning/speaking the Dutch language. Marc made the point that there were more people who spoke Dutch than all the people who spoke all the Scandinavian languages combined. Marc was as animated as I have ever seen him, pounding on the table for emphasis. Clearly a nerve had been touched. However most of the argument was lost on our end of the table, since neither Claire or Jacques or I, who were at that end of the table, understood a word they were saying. The others paid no attention.
1 March, Sunday:
We started the day with brunch…omelettes with bacon, yogurt, boudin blanc, boudin noir, thinly sliced smoked ham, smoked trout, paté, bread, toast, rolls, 22 kinds of cheese, juice, jam, chocopasta, peanut butter, green salad, fruit salad, milk, tea and coffee. Then we drove to Limbourg, stopping on the way to visit the “Barrage de la Gileppe,” a big dam built to supply power and water to the wool industry in Verviers. The dam was quite impressive, and featured a 70 foot high observation tower which, this being Belgium, housed a cafeteria. The parking lot was full…apparently it is a Belgian tradition to visit this dam. Most of our group remembered being taken here in school groups. Since we were a group of historians (actually nine current or former medieval historians, one civil engineer, one psychiatrist and one former financier), we of course knew that the great Belgian historian Henri Pirenne gave his first public address at the dedication of this dam when he was 14 years old, and his audience was the King of Belgium. Apparently the King asked for a copy of the speech, but young Henri refused to give it to him. From there we went on to Limbourg, a lovely little medieval town perched right on the top of a hill with a big church (closed for renovations). The town center is made up of a whole bunch of very old buildings (I saw one with a date of 1671) grouped around a rectangular “place,” and the main street is about half cobblestones and half potholes (to keep people from speeding, I suppose). We walked around for a while, and then since there appeared to be no cafés open in Limbourg, drove to Verviers for a beer. For once we skipped lunch, since our brunch seemed adequate. After the beer, most of our group drove back to Gent or Antwerp. Marc and Thérèse and Beagle and I were staying at the gîte for one more night, so we walked around Verviers and visited a museum dedicated to the wool industry. Verviers used to be a very prosperous wool processing/weaving city, right up until the 1950s and 1960s, but the industry died quickly after that. Today there are only two places in Verviers that make cloth. One makes fabric for the top of pool tables and the other makes some other sort of highly specialized cloth. The museum had exhibits showing how the wool was washed, processed, etc. and turned into cloth. It was interesting for this group of medieval historians, who spend a lot of time studying the economics and politics of the cloth industry, to see how this is actually done. One interesting tidbit was that before they had soaps that could clean wool, they used human urine, which apparently contains lots of ammonia, which is good for cleaning wool. A man would go around the town every morning collecting urine from the local households, for which they got paid. Part of his job was to taste each “deposit” of urine to make sure that it contained enough ammonia…i.e. to make sure that the local citizenry weren’t diluting the urine they were selling him with water. After being educated about wool, we drove back to the gîte, took showers, and went out to dinner in a little town called Solwaster at a restaurant called Le Vinâve. It was excellent, and featured local produce, etc. We even had a Belgian wine.
2 March, Monday:
We got up early today, straightened out the gîte, and drove back to Brussels. We got caught in a big demonstration of some sort right as we were coming into Brussels…there were a lot of people with banners and orange jackets walking down the street and chanting unintelligible slogans. That slowed us down a bit. I was supposed to be going to ULB for a tour that was being led by Claire, but I never made it. I waited for about a half hour for a bus that takes you right to ULB, and normally runs all the time, but it never came…perhaps the demonstration affected the busses as well. Subsequently I discovered that there is a big postal strike going on…it started on Friday and is supposed to last until Thursday, so perhaps that’s what caused the disruption. In any event, it has disrupted our supply of DVDs from DVDPost, who are unsure of what to do about the strike. The man I spoke to at DVDPost said that they had no idea where all their DVDs were, whether any would be delivered this week or next, etc. He was sympathetic but didn’t appear to be overly troubled. I guess the post office shuts down all the time.
3 March, Tuesday:
A nice blue sky day here, temperature in the mid 40s. There appears to be a blizzard going on in New York, and the financial world is continuing its meltdown. I checked into the Belgian postal strike. It appears that postal workers in Belgium have gone on strike, protesting wages, working conditions, privatization, post office closings and potential future job losses. The postal union claims that everyone has gone on strike, and management claims that half the mail was delivered on Monday and 80% of post offices were open, albeit with only one employee. This being Belgium, things are more complicated than they seem on the surface. I discovered that one of the complaints of the postal workers is that Danish Post, owned by the Danish government, bought 25% of Belgium Post about three years ago and is now selling it to CVC Partners, a Luxembourg based buyout firm, at a €200,000,000 profit. Sometimes the mix of socialism and capitalism produces interesting results. In the interim, we are getting no mail and are enriching FedEx, who we hope is not on strike. We went to gym tonight. There appears to be a rapid turnover of the people who use the gym, leading us to believe that most people who stay in this furnished apartment complex are only here for a short time. The smelly man who spoke in some Slavic tongue has gone. So has the Italian man with spaghetti strap t-shirts and a huge mane of hair that flopped all over the place whenever he did anything. He sported a Charles Atlas-like upper body and Woody Allenesque legs and did nothing but free weights. Two burly men, one of whom has tattoos all over his arms, who speak some bizarre language, replaced them. Beagle was convinced that they were speaking some Scandinavian dialect, but after listening closely I determined that it was English. Tonight, the gym was populated by two women who had with them a little boy who appeared to be about four years old, and a 9 month old who was asleep in his stroller. They were all very cute, but they took up a lot of room, and the women seemed to spend more time talking on their cell phones than working out.
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