14 January, Wednesday:
Today was a day of little chores and dealing with Brussellian bureaucracy. I took some shirts to the laundry and asked them if they could fold the shirts rather than hanging them on hangers…easier to pack that way. They cheerfully complied, and charged me €3.80 a shirt…$5.00. I own shirts that cost less than that! No wonder I have taken to wearing my shirts for more than one day. Besides saving money it makes me feel more European, if you know what I mean. Once I had gotten over that shock, I went off to the notary to get my signature notarized on some legal documents. Same procedure as last time…push open the 3,000 pound iron doors, push a buzzer, get admitted into the inner sanctum, have a functionary stamp and seal and notate and do all that, wait for the great man to emerge from his inner sanctum and scribble his signature on the form, and pay them €15 for the entertainment. My brother Richard says he is a notary and would do it for free, but he wouldn’t be as entertaining. Then a stop at the bank to get some cash, mine having been depleted by trips to the notary and the cleaners. The Belgian banking system is interesting. Aside from being broke and beset with political scandals, just like ours, they have a funny way of doing things. When you go to a “cash point” at a bank there are plenty of machines that dispense cash, plus there are other machines whose function was, at least to me, obscure. But there are always people at those machines doing something that results in the machines spitting out a seemingly endless stream of little pieces of paper. As I mentioned in an earlier blog, Belgians don’t use checks anymore. Almost all transactions are done on line, saving time and all that paperwork. Indeed, in their zeal to save paper, Belgian banks don’t even seem to produce paper monthly bank statements. But every time you do a transaction, such as paying a bill on-line, there is an electronic record of the transaction. And the banks insist that you go to a cash point, stick your card in one of those mysterious machines, and it will then spit out, one at a time, little paper slips which memorialize on paper each electronic transaction you have made. If you don’t do this, after 3 months the bank will print out all those little slips and mail them to you, and charge you €5 for the privilege. That is why you see all those people at the cash point furiously printing out 3 months worth of transaction slips. What you are supposed to do with the little pieces of paper after you have gotten them is a mystery to everyone. Seems to me to defeat the whole purpose of electronic banking, but what do I know. After my banking expedition, I got a magazine and some food and went to the post office to wait to mail some stuff and buy stamps. I mailed 2 pretty much identical envelopes to the US. One cost €1.13, the other €6.28. No explanation other than a well-practiced shrug. Then I produced a sample Christmas card (I know, we’re late this year, for obvious reasons) and asked how much it would cost to send it to the US. The man told me that if I could use a different envelope, one that met some Belgian guideline about dimensions, it would cost a lot less, but this particular one would cost €3.18. He said that without consulting any manual, without weighing the envelope or anything. It seems that the Belgians like standards, and my envelope wasn’t standard. But then he told me I could put three €1 stamps on the envelope, and that would be fine. I asked about the missing €0.18. He smiled and shrugged. I guess individual clerks at Belgian post offices have a lot of leeway, but what about the people who are actually going to handle the envelopes themselves? We’ll see. If you don’t get a Christmas card, you’ll know why. So I bought stamps until I ran out of cash (the post office only takes cash or 2 special types of cash cards…the same ones you need to buy metro tickets. But at least in the metro you can just not pay, and no one cares, I suspect with the post office it is different).
15 January, Thursday:
Who was complaining about Belgian weather? It couldn’t have been me. Today started out dark, as usual, since the sun doesn’t come up until 8:40 AM these days. It was a bit foggy but relatively warm, and the fog rapidly cleared away and we had another beautiful day, with blue skies and sun. We had to go to Boisfort to see Claire’s dentist because Beagle was having tooth troubles. Boisfort, a part of Brussels and near the Forêt des Soignes, is very much a little village that seems to have been absorbed over the years into Brussels, but still has very much of a village feel, with a town center, etc. Very nice. Claire’s dentist was a very nice woman who immediately diagnosed Beagle’s problem and set to work on the first of what will be four visits to do a root canal. I waited in the waiting room and admired the view. A little while ago, when it was so icy outside that you couldn’t even walk on the sidewalks, Beagle went on the web, consulted her gear expert (William) and bought some Yaktrax from a Spanish mail order place that William knew about. Yaktrax are these things that you strap onto your boots to keep you from slipping on the ice. Not as aggressive and technical as crampons…more suited to city and country use. Beagle has a pair in Garrison, but she is terrified of slipping and falling and re-injuring her back, so she decided she needed a pair here. Me too. So this afternoon a very puzzled UPS man buzzed at our door. He had a package addressed to rez-de-chausée, 24 rue Souveraine, but with no addressee named. Seeing that it was a package from Spain, I figured that it was the Yaktrax and I was right. Good thing we now have them, since it has warmed up, the snow and ice have gone away, probably to reappear in 10 years. We were so pleased with the Yaktrax that we decided to go out to dinner instead of shopping and eating at home. We went to Volle Gas. It was great. The food is only OK, but the atmosphere and décor is wonderful. Lots of wood and brass and beer. Our waiter first thought we were English, and was shocked to discover that we were American. I must say, he was the only person we have run into here who, when finding out we were American, didn’t immediately start off on a long discourse about Obama, who they all think is wonderful. Our waiter told us he was Spanish, and throughout our dinner kept saying things in English to us that actually made sense, but weren’t exactly what an American would say. He reminded me of Manuel, the waiter in Fawlty Towers. Beagle had blanquette de poulet (with lots of vegetables) and I had a geuzue and Stoemp Royale (regular steomp with two sausages instead of one). My vegetables were in the stoemp. We were happy.
16 January, Friday:
There are no stop signs in Brussels. Brussels is a city of millions of intersections, probably because the current streets follow old cow paths, etc., and while there are traffic lights at some of the biggest intersections, there are no stop signs. The theory is, I guess, that if you are smart enough to drive a car, you are smart enough to stop at each and every intersection, or at least slow down and check to see if anyone is coming. When you reach an intersection, I believe that the car on the right has the right of way (priorité à droit). This creates some interesting situations when you arrive at a 4-way intersection, and find that there is a car coming from each of the 4 directions. Who has the right of way then? While you are trying to figure that out, the Belgian drivers will take advantage of you and zoom through the intersection. The key is not to hesitate if you have the right of way. If you do hesitate, even for a second, everyone figures you have given up your right of way and they charge into the intersection ahead of you. Even more interesting are the 5 and 6-way intersections, of which there are many, including ones that also have trams thrown in for good measure. Trams always have the right of way, and they insist on it. If a car is in the way of a tram, the car is supposed to get out of the way, even if that means the car backing into a busy intersection, which happens more often than you would think. I just figured this out about stop signs yesterday. Up until then I had figured that if I didn’t have a stop sign at an intersection, then the other people did, and I could zoom right through. Ooops! Good thing my reflexes still function! In addition to the absence of stop signs, there are other things that are different about Belgium. After her visit to the dentist yesterday, Beagle decided she had better sign up for Belgian health coverage, which is supposed to be very good. Since she has a post at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, in theory she can get onto their plan. There is an excellent universal health care program in Belgium, which everyone gets, so why Beagle has to sign up for it through ULB is beyond me…perhaps just because she has to prove that she is really working in Belgium and is entitled to it. When she went on-line to sign up this morning, she discovered that there are actually three different plans, or at least three different “avenues” for applying. The plans are “Catholique,” “Socialiste,” or “Neutre.” What do you suppose the differences are? Does the Catholic plan not pay for birth control? Does the Socialist plan give everybody the same treatment no matter what their illness is? And as for Neutre, I’m not sure I want to go there, even though that really means “neutral,” or “free” in the sense of the Université Libre de Bruxelles” (The Free University of Brussels). Imagine what Jon Stewart could do with this. What are you going to do with a totally non-religious country where everything is divided by religion, political party, and language?
17 January, Saturday:
Today started out rainy, but we felt like being outside so we got suited up in our raingear and drove to Terveuren, parked at the Musée Royal de l’Afrique Central, and walked in the museum’s park. It is quite splendid, with terraced gardens, sculpted bushes and hedges, huge fountains, reflecting pools, long rectangular lakes, wide allées and splendid vistas. Sort of like Versailles. Quite impressive, especially when you look up a long wide stretch of lawn, over a few fountains and up over several terraced gardens and see the museum itself, a gigantic structure, looming over everything. We then walked out of the park into the Forêt ds Soignes. At one point we walked about 5 – 6 kilometers along a very wide and very straight path/road with 100+ foot trees planted on either side of the road about every 10 yards. And when you came to an intersection the same was true of the road you crossed. Incredible. As you looked down these roads it seemed as if the lines of trees stretched out forever in straight lines. The forêt is clearly not “natural.” It is broken up into sections, and as you walk along you may find one section which is entirely made up of huge hardwood trees, while the section immediately next to it is all evergreens. Some sections have clearly been thinned, some have not, some have stands of new trees, some are older trees, etc., and there are signs of logging (or at least vigorous thinning) here and there. After about two hours of walking we ended up in the little town of Jezus-Eik (Jesus Oak) on the edge of the forêt and went to a brasserie to have lunch. This is a Dutch-speaking town in a Dutch-speaking part of Belgium. All the signs are in Dutch. There is a church there that was reconstructed sometime in the past 100 years after some disaster, and there are about 20 plaques with pictures and descriptions and explanations of the reconstruction. All in Dutch. But since this is Belgium, we were not at all surprised when we entered the brasserie and were greeted in French by the two waiters (who were, of course, Korean). The brasserie was very nice and buzzy and full of people having a nice Saturday lunch. 2/3 of them were speaking French. I had andouilletes and frites and Beagle had lentils with huge slabs of bacon (most of which she didn’t eat). We were warm and happy. After lunch it stopped raining and we walked back to our car. The sun was out so there were suddenly lots of people out walking their dogs and playing with kids. All in all, it was a nice day. 3 ½ hours of walking and 1 hour of eating. A nice balance!
18 January, Sunday:
It was raining again today. Beagle went off to a bookstore to buy some trash novels in French. I tried to watch the biathlon, but it just didn’t grab my interest so I paid bills, balanced my checkbook and did Christmas cards. Then I went to the bookstore (which of course has a café/restaurant), picked up Beagle, and we went for a walk. As we were walking down Toison d’Or, one of the main drags, I noticed a bunch of police cars and paddy wagons in front of a big office building which had big “Bloomberg” signs in the windows…presumably offices for Bloomberg the company, not Bloomberg the mayor. As we walked past, a bunch of policemen came out of the building with three young men in handcuffs and stuffed them into the paddy wagon. Hmm. They must have been hedge fund traders or Bernie Madoff associates or something. As we continued down the street, another young man wearing a “hoody” came hustling around a corner, took one look at the police and immediately turned around and walked briskly away in the other direction. Perhaps he was a lookout. We walked past the park Cinquantenaire and down Avenue Terveuren, which is very wide and very nice looking. The avenue is centered on Leopold II’s huge triumphal arch in the park, so when you turn around and look down the avenue, that is what you see looming up there. Very impressive. All the statues of Leopold II make it look like he was very tall, but I bet he was 5’2”.
19 January, Monday:
Things have slowed down here for the moment, so to do something different I decided a few days ago to stop shaving for a while. I had hopes of growing a nice “salt and pepper” beard…sort of going for the George Clooney look. That partially worked. The salt bit was fine, but there isn’t much pepper. Instead of George Clooney, I look more like the character in The Old Man and the Sea, and I don’t mean the fish. The beard is going to go before the outside world sees it.
20 January, Tuesday:
This was Obama day. Newspapers, magazines, TV, etc. are full of nothing but Obama. The Europeans think that we have finally come to our senses, and they are most taken by Obama. We watched everything on CNN, and while having to put up with several hours of Wolf Blitzer is probably worse than being waterboarded, I had to admit that I enjoyed the whole spectacle.
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
Week 10 - In which we are cold and eat cassoulet, witness a street crime, and visit the Royal Museum of Central Africa
7 January, Wednesday:
It was cold and grey outside today, again. The TV is full of stuff about polar air sweeping over Europe, etc. At least the skiing should be good. I took pity on the little birds that flit around in our garden and bought a bird feeder from the pet supply store at the end of the block. I filled it up and hung it on our tree, but so far the birds have ignored it. Perhaps they will discover it tomorrow. Feeling cold and sick of routine, tonight we went to a very small restaurant in our neighborhood, Le Coin des Artistes. It specializes in food from the south of France, especially cassoulet, and has an extensive wine list. The only problem was that the menu and the wine list were all on blackboards, none of which I could read from the table, so we had to get up and squint. The cassoulet sounded great on a cold evening, so we both had it. But first, Beagle asked for a small green salad. The waiter looked at her like she had three heads, and informed her that in this restaurant there was no such thing as any kind of salad. So we had calamari sautéed in you don’t want to know what. Suffice it to say that it was not healthy and it was not dietetic. Neither was the cassoulet. Both were wonderful. The restaurant was great. The chef looked like he had just rolled out of bed after a very hard night the night before (and the night before that and …), was unshaven and had a huge pot-belly. He was very nice, and a very good cook. The waiter was also nice, if a bit forgetful. But all our food eventually arrived, the clientele was mixed and interesting…some Belgians, some Italians, and a group of men of undetermined nationalities. And us. We will go back.
8 January, Thursday:
It is still cold outside, but a pretty nice day. The birds are studiously ignoring my bird feeder. Perhaps they are looking for cassoulet. The day was broken up by several American Rivers conference calls, plus a call from the alarm company in Garrison saying that there had been a low heat signal from the sensor in the dining room. Larry Downey of Downey Oil has been dispatched to see what the problem is…or if it is just a matter of turning the thermostats up a bit. According to the weather channel it is 36F in Garrison, versus 24F here in Brussels. We watched the original 1930 Der blaue Engle (the Blue Angel) tonight, with Marlene Dietrich. What a great movie. Very sad, but quite wonderful. You should get a copy and watch it.
9 January, Friday:
One chickadee found my birdfeeder. Then two. Then three. Tomorrow the world! Beagle is on the board of a new Dutch/Belgian journal called Jaarboek, and they had a meeting this afternoon. The dinner afterwards (of course there was a dinner afterwards. This is Belgium) was at Stekerlapatte, a restaurant I had been to before with Marc. Marc was unable to make the meeting, but the restaurant is very good so he came from Gent just for the dinner. The dinner had to be early, since several of the people on the editorial board of the journal were from Holland, and the last train back to Holland left at something like 9:30PM. This posed a problem, as restaurants in Brussels don’t believe in early dinners. Stekerlapatte is an exception in that it opens at 7PM, but even that was a little late for the Dutch. Finally Stekerlapatte was persuaded to open up, just for us, at 6:30 PM. While there, we asked one of the Dutch people whether it was true that all Dutchmen ate dinner at 6PM. He responded that he never ate dinner that early, and indeed considered a 6 PM dinnertime somewhat barbaric. He said that he always ate dinner at 6:30 PM. He subsequently confessed that he generally didn’t get home until 6PM, and it took him at least a half an hour to make dinner. In any event, dinner was great, and we got out of the restaurant at about 9 PM, just as it was starting to fill up. The Dutchmen ran off to catch their train, and we walked home. When I was originally looking for an apartment in Brussels, the agent I was working with told me that there was a lot of crime in Brussels. We haven’t seen much sign of it except for a car the other day, which had had its passenger window smashed in and the glove compartment obviously ransacked. But tonight on our way home, ironically near the Palais de Justice and next to the Louise Metro stop, we saw two men assault a SUV which was (I think) stopped at the intersection. They smashed in the passenger side window, reached into the car and pulled out a small suitcase or briefcase or something, all while there was screaming from within the car and with the driver trying to drive away without loosing his passenger out the window, dragging the robbers through the intersection. In the end, the robbers got the suitcase and ran down the entrance to the Metro station, and the SUV drove away without stopping. It all happened so fast that it was over before we even realized what was going on, and it happened about a block away from us so there was nothing we could do even if we had had the presence of mind to do something. Which presumably would have been to run in the other direction. As it was we continued plodding home.
10 January, Saturday:
This morning we went to the market at Place Flagey. In spite of the fact that it snowed last Monday and hasn’t snowed since, no one had bothered to clear the snow off Place Flagey, so there was about an inch of icy slush everywhere. It was impossible to move around without great risk of falling down, so we gave up and went to the Delhaise. The sidewalks going there were still very icy as well. I guess the sun does snow clearance in Brussels. It was sunny today, but only about 15 degrees, so nothing melted. We walked to the Musée des Beaux Arts and looked at their collection of “ancient” art, which is quite extensive and covers everything up until the 19th Century or something. Lots of Reubens, Breugel, etc. Very impressive, especially when they rang a bell and made an announcement (which sounded exactly like the announcement they make in the train station telling you what track a train is leaving from) saying that the museum was closing shortly and that we had to leave. I think that museum is shut more than it is open. On the way home we slipped on the ice, ate a waffle from a hole-in-the-wall shop that Vic had discovered (it was delicious), and observed that even on a narrow and crowded sidewalk, Belgians think nothing of stopping and talking to each other, even if they completely block the sidewalk. They wouldn’t get away with it in NYC. Sort of the same thing happens with cars. Chausseé d”Ixelles is a narrow street, with parking on only one side, so if a car tries to double-park, it effectively blocks all the traffic going in one direction, and even makes it hard for busses, etc. to get by going the other direction. Of course this doesn’t keep anyone from double-parking. If they are really considerate they double-park so their passenger side wheels are on the sidewalk. That at least shows that they tried, even though that technique blocks both pedestrian and vehicular traffic. Amazingly enough, no one blows their horn, no one yells, etc. But just try not stopping for a pedestrian who is perhaps thinking of crossing at one of those zebra crossings! Then all hell breaks loose. Once home, I foolishly tried to watch Saturday afternoon sports on TV. There were the usual offerings…Greek basketball, darts, horse jumping (do they have horse jumping contests every weekend, or do they just show the same contest weekend after weekend? I can’t tell), a program on giant pandas and their mating habits (which runs constantly…the program, not the mating habits. Those they appear to have a problem with), and the program on meerkats. That meerkat program must be the cheapest program on TV. It has been running for years! The only new offering, which appears to have replaced the regular cross-country ski race, was a biathlon contest…cross-country ski racing combined with target shooting. And people ask why my blog is so long! What else is a guy supposed to do at 5 PM on a dark Saturday afternoon?
11 January, Sunday:
Another lovely, sunny, cold, blue-sky day. This is really making up for the weather in the first month we were here. Today we went to Tervuren, a sort-of suburb about 15 kilometers from the center of Brussels (and officially Dutch-speaking). Although there is a tram that goes there, we drove. Much of the trip was on Avenue Tervuren, a wide road that runs straight from Park Cinquantenaire to Tervuren. Needless to say, the road was built by Leopold II to link his massive structures and park at Cinquantenaire with an equally impressive structure and park at Tervuren. The Avenue itself looked very prosperous, and as we got closer to Tervuren we saw a lot of really huge, seriously important houses. Tervuren is supposed to be one of the wealthiest parts of Brussels, and it looks it. We also drove past some parks, and it appeared that everyone in Brussels had decided that this was a great day to go sledding. I guess you don’t get many opportunities to take your kids sledding in Brussels…perhaps once a decade. In any event, there were hundreds of people sledding, skating, etc. In Tervuren we went to the Musée Royal de l’Afrique Central. This is what is at the end of Avenue Tervuren. It is housed in a gigantic building with gardens, fountains, a huge park, etc., and I believe extends into the Forêt de Soignes. Leopold II (him again) built the original structure in 1897 for the World’s Fair in Brussels. It was originally built as a museum of the Colonies, to show off Leopold II’s Congo Free State. That was a huge chunk of Africa (subsequently the Belgian Congo and now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) that Leopold II owned personally. Central Africa was little known in Europe in the 1870’s, but Leopold thought it had promise, so after Stanley found Livingstone in 1871, Leopold hired Stanley to explore the Congo, negotiate treaties with the natives, etc. At the end of this process, by methods foul and fair (mostly foul), Leopold ended up personally owning what he called the Congo Free State, which was dutifully recognized by the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885. Presumably the “Free” in the name refers to how much it cost Leopold, since the inhabitants of the Congo were by no means free. Leopold’s agents worked them brutally to extract as much of the Congo’s considerable riches as possible as rapidly as possible. Management techniques employed included mandatory labor (i.e.slavery), cutting off peoples’ hands when they didn’t produce enough or talked back, executing entire villages when they did not meet their production quotas for rubber, etc. This proved to be very lucrative for Leopold, and provided him with a lot of the money he used to build enormous buildings all around Brussels, including the Museum of the Colonies, which was also designed to entice industrialists to invest in the Congo. Among other things, the original Museum of the Colonies featured an African village that was inhabited by 60 Africans…presumably all volunteers…which enabled the gentry of Brussels to see how the other half lived. The museum proved to be a big success, and Leopold decided to make it (a) permanent and (b) bigger. The bigger version was started by Leopold but completed in 1910 by King Albert I. In the interim Leopold had pretty much looted and pillaged as much as he could from the Congo, so in 1908 he gave it to the Belgian nation, which was responsible for it until independence in 1960. What a guy! The museum itself was full of African artifacts, history, animals, etc….pretty much what you’d expect of that kind of museum. It was sort of dated, and some of the animals in the dioramas were pretty mangy, but they obviously had made an effort to do some updating with audio and video presentations, etc. The most interesting part was a relatively new section that purported to tell the unvarnished truth about the history of Belgium in the Congo. The history of the Belgians in the Congo is a pretty bloody and horrifying one (see Adam Hochfield’s “Leopold’s Ghost”), but for years the official line was that they had done nothing wrong and the tales of atrocities were just that. This exhibition was designed to tell the “real” story. It is presumably true that when the Belgian State was in charge, as opposed to Leopold, things were much better in the Congo. Many of our Belgian friends have friends and relatives who worked in the Congo and were dedicated to making things better, and it is also probably true that things were worse after independence than before. But the fact that there was forced labor into the 1950s tells me something. It is also true that nobody got any great humanitarian awards for their conduct as colonial powers, and that the whole subject is undoubtedly a very complex one, not given to simplistic generalizations. However, I thought that while the exhibit did mention, almost in passing, some of the atrocities, most of it seemed to me to be focused on what a wonderful place and rich (in terms of natural resources) the Congo was, what good things the Belgians had done in the Congo, and on how “complicated” the situation was. Plus it pointed out that the uranium that the US used in the atomic bombs that were dropped on Japan came from the Congo…as if to tell those self-righteous Americans not to be so quick with their criticisms. I was particularly taken by one video clip of a Belgian gentleman, who had lived in the Congo for many years, explaining that the relations between the whites and the blacks were actually very good, that there was no discrimination, etc. “We get along extremely well,” he said, “We even sometimes give them paid vacation when they have to go visit their families in the bush.” Hmmm. I think I have heard a version of that before.
12 January, Monday:
Today was fairly warm…about half the snow on the ground melted. Beagle had to give her Pirenne lecture again, this time at the French Academy. In English. The French Academy is the french counterpart to the Flemish Academy where we went to Marc’s investiture ceremony a while ago. As far as I can tell, these are two totally different academies, housed in the same building and having the same purposes but having different “personalities” and different staffs, and using different languages. The French Academy is supposedly stuffier than the Flemish Academy, although since I was told that by a Flemish academic, I’m taking that with a grain of salt. Even though Beagle’s lecture was at the French Academy, Marc was invited to attend. He was quite pleased to be invited because it is apparently quite rare for a Flamand to be invited to the French Academy. Plus there was a lunch beforehand. It was all too confusing for me, and I had heard the lecture before, so I stayed home and ate soup.
13 January, Tuesday:
What was I saying about the weather? Today it rained and was grey. All the snow is now gone. We got a note slipped in our mailbox announcing that there was going to be work done on a neighboring property and that on the 19th they would be laying a concrete slab. I assume this will involve the street being blocked by cement trucks and a machine pumping cement through a metal pipe up over the buildings and down into the courtyard/garden of the building involved…or at least that’s the way they seem to do it here. The note cheerfully informed us that this work (a) would involve a lot of noise, (b) would be done at night and (c) would go on all night long. Oh good. Something to look forward to.
It was cold and grey outside today, again. The TV is full of stuff about polar air sweeping over Europe, etc. At least the skiing should be good. I took pity on the little birds that flit around in our garden and bought a bird feeder from the pet supply store at the end of the block. I filled it up and hung it on our tree, but so far the birds have ignored it. Perhaps they will discover it tomorrow. Feeling cold and sick of routine, tonight we went to a very small restaurant in our neighborhood, Le Coin des Artistes. It specializes in food from the south of France, especially cassoulet, and has an extensive wine list. The only problem was that the menu and the wine list were all on blackboards, none of which I could read from the table, so we had to get up and squint. The cassoulet sounded great on a cold evening, so we both had it. But first, Beagle asked for a small green salad. The waiter looked at her like she had three heads, and informed her that in this restaurant there was no such thing as any kind of salad. So we had calamari sautéed in you don’t want to know what. Suffice it to say that it was not healthy and it was not dietetic. Neither was the cassoulet. Both were wonderful. The restaurant was great. The chef looked like he had just rolled out of bed after a very hard night the night before (and the night before that and …), was unshaven and had a huge pot-belly. He was very nice, and a very good cook. The waiter was also nice, if a bit forgetful. But all our food eventually arrived, the clientele was mixed and interesting…some Belgians, some Italians, and a group of men of undetermined nationalities. And us. We will go back.
8 January, Thursday:
It is still cold outside, but a pretty nice day. The birds are studiously ignoring my bird feeder. Perhaps they are looking for cassoulet. The day was broken up by several American Rivers conference calls, plus a call from the alarm company in Garrison saying that there had been a low heat signal from the sensor in the dining room. Larry Downey of Downey Oil has been dispatched to see what the problem is…or if it is just a matter of turning the thermostats up a bit. According to the weather channel it is 36F in Garrison, versus 24F here in Brussels. We watched the original 1930 Der blaue Engle (the Blue Angel) tonight, with Marlene Dietrich. What a great movie. Very sad, but quite wonderful. You should get a copy and watch it.
9 January, Friday:
One chickadee found my birdfeeder. Then two. Then three. Tomorrow the world! Beagle is on the board of a new Dutch/Belgian journal called Jaarboek, and they had a meeting this afternoon. The dinner afterwards (of course there was a dinner afterwards. This is Belgium) was at Stekerlapatte, a restaurant I had been to before with Marc. Marc was unable to make the meeting, but the restaurant is very good so he came from Gent just for the dinner. The dinner had to be early, since several of the people on the editorial board of the journal were from Holland, and the last train back to Holland left at something like 9:30PM. This posed a problem, as restaurants in Brussels don’t believe in early dinners. Stekerlapatte is an exception in that it opens at 7PM, but even that was a little late for the Dutch. Finally Stekerlapatte was persuaded to open up, just for us, at 6:30 PM. While there, we asked one of the Dutch people whether it was true that all Dutchmen ate dinner at 6PM. He responded that he never ate dinner that early, and indeed considered a 6 PM dinnertime somewhat barbaric. He said that he always ate dinner at 6:30 PM. He subsequently confessed that he generally didn’t get home until 6PM, and it took him at least a half an hour to make dinner. In any event, dinner was great, and we got out of the restaurant at about 9 PM, just as it was starting to fill up. The Dutchmen ran off to catch their train, and we walked home. When I was originally looking for an apartment in Brussels, the agent I was working with told me that there was a lot of crime in Brussels. We haven’t seen much sign of it except for a car the other day, which had had its passenger window smashed in and the glove compartment obviously ransacked. But tonight on our way home, ironically near the Palais de Justice and next to the Louise Metro stop, we saw two men assault a SUV which was (I think) stopped at the intersection. They smashed in the passenger side window, reached into the car and pulled out a small suitcase or briefcase or something, all while there was screaming from within the car and with the driver trying to drive away without loosing his passenger out the window, dragging the robbers through the intersection. In the end, the robbers got the suitcase and ran down the entrance to the Metro station, and the SUV drove away without stopping. It all happened so fast that it was over before we even realized what was going on, and it happened about a block away from us so there was nothing we could do even if we had had the presence of mind to do something. Which presumably would have been to run in the other direction. As it was we continued plodding home.
10 January, Saturday:
This morning we went to the market at Place Flagey. In spite of the fact that it snowed last Monday and hasn’t snowed since, no one had bothered to clear the snow off Place Flagey, so there was about an inch of icy slush everywhere. It was impossible to move around without great risk of falling down, so we gave up and went to the Delhaise. The sidewalks going there were still very icy as well. I guess the sun does snow clearance in Brussels. It was sunny today, but only about 15 degrees, so nothing melted. We walked to the Musée des Beaux Arts and looked at their collection of “ancient” art, which is quite extensive and covers everything up until the 19th Century or something. Lots of Reubens, Breugel, etc. Very impressive, especially when they rang a bell and made an announcement (which sounded exactly like the announcement they make in the train station telling you what track a train is leaving from) saying that the museum was closing shortly and that we had to leave. I think that museum is shut more than it is open. On the way home we slipped on the ice, ate a waffle from a hole-in-the-wall shop that Vic had discovered (it was delicious), and observed that even on a narrow and crowded sidewalk, Belgians think nothing of stopping and talking to each other, even if they completely block the sidewalk. They wouldn’t get away with it in NYC. Sort of the same thing happens with cars. Chausseé d”Ixelles is a narrow street, with parking on only one side, so if a car tries to double-park, it effectively blocks all the traffic going in one direction, and even makes it hard for busses, etc. to get by going the other direction. Of course this doesn’t keep anyone from double-parking. If they are really considerate they double-park so their passenger side wheels are on the sidewalk. That at least shows that they tried, even though that technique blocks both pedestrian and vehicular traffic. Amazingly enough, no one blows their horn, no one yells, etc. But just try not stopping for a pedestrian who is perhaps thinking of crossing at one of those zebra crossings! Then all hell breaks loose. Once home, I foolishly tried to watch Saturday afternoon sports on TV. There were the usual offerings…Greek basketball, darts, horse jumping (do they have horse jumping contests every weekend, or do they just show the same contest weekend after weekend? I can’t tell), a program on giant pandas and their mating habits (which runs constantly…the program, not the mating habits. Those they appear to have a problem with), and the program on meerkats. That meerkat program must be the cheapest program on TV. It has been running for years! The only new offering, which appears to have replaced the regular cross-country ski race, was a biathlon contest…cross-country ski racing combined with target shooting. And people ask why my blog is so long! What else is a guy supposed to do at 5 PM on a dark Saturday afternoon?
11 January, Sunday:
Another lovely, sunny, cold, blue-sky day. This is really making up for the weather in the first month we were here. Today we went to Tervuren, a sort-of suburb about 15 kilometers from the center of Brussels (and officially Dutch-speaking). Although there is a tram that goes there, we drove. Much of the trip was on Avenue Tervuren, a wide road that runs straight from Park Cinquantenaire to Tervuren. Needless to say, the road was built by Leopold II to link his massive structures and park at Cinquantenaire with an equally impressive structure and park at Tervuren. The Avenue itself looked very prosperous, and as we got closer to Tervuren we saw a lot of really huge, seriously important houses. Tervuren is supposed to be one of the wealthiest parts of Brussels, and it looks it. We also drove past some parks, and it appeared that everyone in Brussels had decided that this was a great day to go sledding. I guess you don’t get many opportunities to take your kids sledding in Brussels…perhaps once a decade. In any event, there were hundreds of people sledding, skating, etc. In Tervuren we went to the Musée Royal de l’Afrique Central. This is what is at the end of Avenue Tervuren. It is housed in a gigantic building with gardens, fountains, a huge park, etc., and I believe extends into the Forêt de Soignes. Leopold II (him again) built the original structure in 1897 for the World’s Fair in Brussels. It was originally built as a museum of the Colonies, to show off Leopold II’s Congo Free State. That was a huge chunk of Africa (subsequently the Belgian Congo and now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) that Leopold II owned personally. Central Africa was little known in Europe in the 1870’s, but Leopold thought it had promise, so after Stanley found Livingstone in 1871, Leopold hired Stanley to explore the Congo, negotiate treaties with the natives, etc. At the end of this process, by methods foul and fair (mostly foul), Leopold ended up personally owning what he called the Congo Free State, which was dutifully recognized by the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885. Presumably the “Free” in the name refers to how much it cost Leopold, since the inhabitants of the Congo were by no means free. Leopold’s agents worked them brutally to extract as much of the Congo’s considerable riches as possible as rapidly as possible. Management techniques employed included mandatory labor (i.e.slavery), cutting off peoples’ hands when they didn’t produce enough or talked back, executing entire villages when they did not meet their production quotas for rubber, etc. This proved to be very lucrative for Leopold, and provided him with a lot of the money he used to build enormous buildings all around Brussels, including the Museum of the Colonies, which was also designed to entice industrialists to invest in the Congo. Among other things, the original Museum of the Colonies featured an African village that was inhabited by 60 Africans…presumably all volunteers…which enabled the gentry of Brussels to see how the other half lived. The museum proved to be a big success, and Leopold decided to make it (a) permanent and (b) bigger. The bigger version was started by Leopold but completed in 1910 by King Albert I. In the interim Leopold had pretty much looted and pillaged as much as he could from the Congo, so in 1908 he gave it to the Belgian nation, which was responsible for it until independence in 1960. What a guy! The museum itself was full of African artifacts, history, animals, etc….pretty much what you’d expect of that kind of museum. It was sort of dated, and some of the animals in the dioramas were pretty mangy, but they obviously had made an effort to do some updating with audio and video presentations, etc. The most interesting part was a relatively new section that purported to tell the unvarnished truth about the history of Belgium in the Congo. The history of the Belgians in the Congo is a pretty bloody and horrifying one (see Adam Hochfield’s “Leopold’s Ghost”), but for years the official line was that they had done nothing wrong and the tales of atrocities were just that. This exhibition was designed to tell the “real” story. It is presumably true that when the Belgian State was in charge, as opposed to Leopold, things were much better in the Congo. Many of our Belgian friends have friends and relatives who worked in the Congo and were dedicated to making things better, and it is also probably true that things were worse after independence than before. But the fact that there was forced labor into the 1950s tells me something. It is also true that nobody got any great humanitarian awards for their conduct as colonial powers, and that the whole subject is undoubtedly a very complex one, not given to simplistic generalizations. However, I thought that while the exhibit did mention, almost in passing, some of the atrocities, most of it seemed to me to be focused on what a wonderful place and rich (in terms of natural resources) the Congo was, what good things the Belgians had done in the Congo, and on how “complicated” the situation was. Plus it pointed out that the uranium that the US used in the atomic bombs that were dropped on Japan came from the Congo…as if to tell those self-righteous Americans not to be so quick with their criticisms. I was particularly taken by one video clip of a Belgian gentleman, who had lived in the Congo for many years, explaining that the relations between the whites and the blacks were actually very good, that there was no discrimination, etc. “We get along extremely well,” he said, “We even sometimes give them paid vacation when they have to go visit their families in the bush.” Hmmm. I think I have heard a version of that before.
12 January, Monday:
Today was fairly warm…about half the snow on the ground melted. Beagle had to give her Pirenne lecture again, this time at the French Academy. In English. The French Academy is the french counterpart to the Flemish Academy where we went to Marc’s investiture ceremony a while ago. As far as I can tell, these are two totally different academies, housed in the same building and having the same purposes but having different “personalities” and different staffs, and using different languages. The French Academy is supposedly stuffier than the Flemish Academy, although since I was told that by a Flemish academic, I’m taking that with a grain of salt. Even though Beagle’s lecture was at the French Academy, Marc was invited to attend. He was quite pleased to be invited because it is apparently quite rare for a Flamand to be invited to the French Academy. Plus there was a lunch beforehand. It was all too confusing for me, and I had heard the lecture before, so I stayed home and ate soup.
13 January, Tuesday:
What was I saying about the weather? Today it rained and was grey. All the snow is now gone. We got a note slipped in our mailbox announcing that there was going to be work done on a neighboring property and that on the 19th they would be laying a concrete slab. I assume this will involve the street being blocked by cement trucks and a machine pumping cement through a metal pipe up over the buildings and down into the courtyard/garden of the building involved…or at least that’s the way they seem to do it here. The note cheerfully informed us that this work (a) would involve a lot of noise, (b) would be done at night and (c) would go on all night long. Oh good. Something to look forward to.
Wednesday, January 7, 2009
Week 9 - In which we encounter verglas, eat Bambi, visit Maastricht and freeze
31 December, Wednesday:
New Year’s Eve Day. We woke up to a misty, foggy, icy, cold day. We had planned to take a long hike, but were stymied by the fact that everything was covered with a thin layer of black ice which made it literally impossible to stand up on the sidewalks, much less walk anywhere. There was a little bit of car traffic, and the roads were a little less slippery than the sides of the road, but cars were sliding everywhere so walking on the side of the road didn’t seem to be such a good idea, and even walking on the sidewalks was out of the question because of the ice. The main roads were supposed to be treacherous, and the TV was full of stories about buses sliding off the road, cars crashing into trees, and salt-spreaders going backwards because it was too icy for them to go forward. We conceded defeat and read our books all morning. In the afternoon we ventured out again and it was a little better. We found a walkway along the river towards Comblain-au-pont, and we walked on that for a while until it got too slippery to continue. Going in the other direction we found a trail along the river that took us through some sort of holiday/trailer camp that was abandoned for the winter and then through the woods. The trail was both muddy and icy, and the scenery was not the best, but it was nice to be outside, and walking along the river was nice. There were tons of ducks in the river, and we saw one small bird, sort of quail-like in size and appearance, that was scooting along the surface of the river and dove when it saw us, and totally disappeared. We also saw what appeared to be signs of beavers. I thought all the beavers had been wiped out in Europe centuries ago (if indeed they had any in the first place). At about 7:30 PM we went downstairs for the fancy New Year’s Eve dinner we had been promised. Unlike the prior night, the bar was full, and there were even people spilling over into the small dining room for pre-dinner drinks. The crowd was a mixture of young and old couples, grandparents with their children and grandchildren, etc. A full house. We were told that nothing would happen until 8 PM, so we waited. At around 8 PM champagne was served, then some hors d’oeuvres with more champagne. At around
8:45 PM we were escorted into the big dining room, a lovely room right on the river. It was full. Then the real dinner started…5 or 6 courses, including 3 appetizers, 2 types of foie gras, a fish course, a meat course (which was “faon” or, as I discovered upon checking my dictionary, fawn. Oh my God, we ate Bambi!), etc., plus two lovely white wines, an extremely nice red wine, a lovely dessert served in big glasses, more champagne, etc. At some point we realized that this was going to go on until midnight, well past our usual 9:30 PM bedtime, but there was nothing we could do about it so we just went with the flow and enjoyed ourselves. At midnight an announcement was made, more champagne was poured, everyone stood up and cheered and kissed the appropriate people. The sound system had been playing Norah Jones all evening, but at this point the music changed and they played “We wish you a merry Christmas” at top volume. It was a suitable conclusion to the evening. We went to bed at 12:30 AM, the first New Year’s we had been awake at midnight for about 10 years.
1 January, Thursday:
New Year’s Day. Happy New Year! Today started out cold (low 20’s), misty and still icy, so we decided that instead of trying to hike on the ice, we’d drive to Maastricht, in Holland. The drive was not very long, but Edith (our GPS) made it more interesting by routing us right through some of the least appealing industrial and residential sections of Liege. Lucky thing it was New Year’s Day and there was no traffic. Going north from Liege toward Holland, we drove between the River Ourthe and railroad tracks through hilly countryside that was heavily industrialized and pretty unattractive. There were lots of factories and piles of dirt and rocks and scrap metal, plus a bunch of depressing and depressed-looking little towns and graffiti everywhere. Then suddenly we were in Holland. The only thing “official” thing that tells you that you are entering Holland is a sign, but suddenly the road gets better, everything becomes cleaner, the graffiti is gone, the land flattens out and becomes beautifully maintained agricultural land, etc. It was like driving from France into Switzerland. Maastricht itself is a lovely city. It is sparklingly clean and is full of nice looking old buildings (not a lot of really old ones, but a lot of stuff from the 17th & 18th centuries) pretty winding streets, lots of very fashionable shops, etc. Even the modern architecture looks nice. Clearly, Maastricht hired different architects from the ones they set loose in Brussels over the last 50 years! Most of the town was pretty deserted, except for the Market Square, which featured a bunch of the Dutch equivalent of skinheads, and the Central Square which was filled with a Christmas fair, complete with a huge (open) Ferris wheel, a merry-go-round, a skating rink, booths selling beer and wine and fried dough and waffles and frites, etc. Very little was open, but we looked at everything from the outside and went into several big churches which were quite lovely and had the advantage of being heated. After 5 minutes of standing directly over a large grate that was gushing heat out to warm the church, we got warm enough to go outside again. When we were too cold to stand it anymore we went in to a brasserie on the main square which looked empty from the outside, but was full inside. We had pea soup filled with ham and other good things, plus some smoked ham and sausage. That warmed us up. We walked around some more in the afternoon and came across the most incredible hotel/restaurant, a place called Kruisherenhotel. It is a hotel/restaurant/bar that has been created inside an old, presumably deconsecrated, monastery and church. You enter through a brass funnel sort of thing (kind of spooky), and then suddenly it opens up and you are inside this huge church with 60 foot vaulted ceilings and stained glass and the whole nine yards, plus a very fashionable looking lobby and bar and restaurant plonked down right in the middle of it, a glass elevator which rises up right in the middle, etc. Where the rooms are, I don’t know, but the part we saw was very dramatic. I’m sure the Crusaders, after whom the church was evidently named, would have been happy with it. All in all, Maastricht was a real hit. It might have been better if things had been open and if we had had a map and knew where we were going, but on the whole we were satisfied. Maastricht is in a tiny finger of Holland that sits between Belgium and Germany, and the theory is that because of that, Maastricht is a very international town in which everyone speaks 5 languages, including Dutch and German and French. Our experience was that everyone we ran across spoke Dutch and English, but no German or French. All the plaques on buildings (meant for tourists, presumably) telling you the historical significance of the building, etc., were in Dutch only, and the street signs were all in Dutch and in some Dutch-like language that Beagle couldn’t recognize. Hmmm. There is something going on here. About 10 years ago I remember that UBS and a bunch of other international banks invested a lot of money in setting up call centers in Maastricht that were designed to serve international customers throughout Europe…the theory was that everyone in Maastricht spoke Dutch and French and German and Italian and English, so it would be easy to hire up thousands of multilingual employees who could staff call centers serving all of Europe. That theory proved to have a flaw in it, as Alan Greenspan has become fond of saying. While there may be a lot of multilingual people in Maastricht, there weren’t enough of them willing to staff the call centers for a whole bunch of European banks, so as far as I know they all closed up shop. According to internal rumor, that little piece of flawed (or most likely not done at all) market research cost UBS something like $50 million, because UBS had bought a building and had proceeded to build the infrastructure for their call center before they thought about trying to hire people. When they tried to hire up the first hundred people and only 6 showed up for job interviews, the whole project got scrapped! I believe the person in charge of that project was promoted and put in charge of assessing risk for the bank. Tonight was the last night that our hotel was open before it started a two-month vacation, and we were worried that we would be the only people at dinner. That worry turned out to be misplaced. A whole new crowd was there, including several large families and everyone was as lively as the group the night before. Dinner started at 8:30 PM or so, and we managed to skulk out of the dining room at about 11 PM.
2 January, Friday:
The day started cold and snowy. We decided to drive to the ruins of an abbey on the way back to Brussels, and Edith guided us on a different road than the one we took to get to Comblain-la-tour. We had only been driving for a few hundred yards when the road left the narrow river valley we had been in and passed through a wide open landscape with huge fields stretching to the horizon, all sorts of very important looking manor houses, prosperous looking towns with nice house all made of stone, etc. Quite different from Comblain-la-tour itself! Now I know where all the people who were having New Year’s Eve dinner at the hotel came from. The abbey we visited, part way back to Brussels, was the Abbey de Villers, in Villers-la-ville. It was, or had been, a huge Cistercian monastery, with something like 100 monks and 300 or so “lay brothers,” and owned tens of thousands of acres of land all over Belgium. What is left now are ruins, but they are pretty impressive and include the walls, pillars, etc. of a huge church, lots of outbuildings, gardens, walls, etc. The monastery appears to have been in a bad neighborhood, because throughout its history this part of the world bounced back and forth between French and Dutch and who knows whose ownership, and the monastery seemed to get sacked with some regularity by one opposing force or another. In fact one of its most thorough sackings appears to have been at the hands of the Austrians, for Pete’s sake. But the best was last, in 1796, when the French were in charge and, in keeping with the French tradition of dealing with church property after the Revolution, the French government sold the abbey to a local building materials supplier who presumably sold off a lot of the stone and pillars and whatnot for the construction of houses and grist mills or whatever was in vogue at the time. However there was still a lot left, and sometime, presumably in the late 1800s or early 1900s, just to make a point, the railroad company built a railroad line that runs right through the abbey grounds on a big elevated trestle made of stone (presumably purchased from the building supply company who owned the abbey). It is sort of incongruous to see a little commuter train whisk in and out though the walls of the abbey, between some buildings, etc., but I guess that’s the way they do things in Europe.
3 January, Saturday:
Why is it that -5 degrees Celsius sounds (and feels) so much colder than 23 degrees Fahrenheit? It may be that when it is -5C in Brussels it is damper than when it is 23 degrees in New York, but I think there is the psychological effect of seeing a minus sign before the temperature. Anyway, it was cold today. Our major event was going to dinner at Claire Billen’s apartment. She and her husband Jacques live near the Université Libre de Bruxelles, where Claire is a professor. She is a colleague of Beagle’s and one of her “sponsors” while we are in Belgium. Marc and Thérèse were also at dinner. We discussed academic politics and concluded that while the academic systems of Belgium and the US are quite different, there is just as much academic politics in one place as the other, and just about as many counter-productive traditions and systems. Marc, being a fatalist, doesn’t accept the flaws in the Belgian system, but has resigned himself to taking advantage of it where he can! While interesting, I found this discussion, conducted entirely in French, less than riveting. I got the sense that Jacques agreed or, like me, that he had heard this discussion many times before. He is a doctor and a shrink of some sort, but it appears that his real love is old movies. After dinner we were invited into his “filmothèque,” a room in the apartment that has been converted into a film library and a screening room. He has what appears to be thousands of films in bookcases that line the walls from floor to ceiling, all catalogued by director, etc. We ended up borrowing 12…10 by Jean Renoir and 2 by Eric Rohmer.
4 January, Sunday:
Belgium appears to take the Christmas/New Year’s holidays seriously. Every day there appears to be less activity on the streets, and a lot of the stores and restaurants appear to have just given up and shut down for two weeks. We noticed the other day that the recycling containers near the Delhaise where we dispose of empty bottles are completely full and overflowing. These things are 6 ½ foot high covered bins with holes where you throw in empty bottles, and there are several of them in the same spot. They must hold thousands of bottles each, and I imagine that they are normally emptied every week or so, and generally they appear to be about ¼ full…at least normally when you peg a bottle in the bin there is a brief silence as it drops and then a satisfying crash as the bottle shatters into smithereens on the bottom. Now you can’t even stuff a bottle into the hole. A combination of festive celebrations and two weeks without being emptied has resulted in bottles in huge piles around them. DVDPost, the Belgian equivalent of NetFlix also seems to have taken a few weeks off. They were in business on 24 December, but since then they have been totally unresponsive. Perhaps someone should tell them that holiday/vacation times are often when people like to watch movies! Luckily we have Jean Renoir and Eric Rohmer films to watch while we wait for DVDPost to return from vacation. We went to the market at Place Flagey today, and noticed that there were about half as many vendors as normal. Again, it looks like everyone has just gone into hibernation for 2 weeks. Maybe things will be more active next week. Today was cold with the threat of snow, so we stayed inside for most of the day. I once again attempted to watch sports on TV. It was not a success. There is a station that was showing a Swiss ski-jumping meet, which seems to be the same meet that was playing last weekend and the weekend before that. Ditto for the French horse-jumping program on another channel. MSNBC was showing a seniors golf tournament which was about as exciting as watching the A&P truck unload (and for me, who actually enjoys watching golf on TV, that is quite a statement). The British sports TV channel, which in previous weeks had showed a bowls tournament and a snooker championship, had moved on to darts. CNN was showing Wolf Blitzer blovating about Gaza, and the rest of the 99 stations that we get were either showing brainless quiz shows or nature shows showing moose rutting and the like. I retreated to my book. Don’t these Europeans play football? Or rugby? Or something more interesting than darts?
5 January, Monday:
Have you ever heard of Toots Thielemans? Walter Prevenier told me about him a number of years ago, but the name never meant anything to me until I saw a documentary on him the other day. He is a Belgian jazz great, known for his guitar playing, his whistling, and, especially, his harmonica playing. His signature tune is Bluesette. He has played with George Shearing, Charlie “Bird” Parker, Miles Davis, Quincy Jones, Ella Fitzgerald, Johnny Mathis, Paul Simon, Billy Joel and just about everybody else. He was also supposed to have had a big influence on John Lennon and the Beatles. If the name still means nothing to you, think back and remember the version of Moon River played at the beginning of the movie “Breakfast at Tiffanys.” That was Toots. He also played on Midnight Cowboy and lots of other films. He is supposed to be the best jazz harmonica player of the 20th Century, and at 86 years old he is still going strong in the 21st. Just check out his Facebook page! I think he played a Christmas concert in Singapore this year. So if anyone ever tells you that the only world-class figures that Belgium ever produced were Henri Pirenne (a historian) and Johnny Halliday (a famous and long-lived rocker, actually born in Paris, but his father was Belgian), tell them about Toots.
We woke up today to find that there was about 2” of snow on the ground. Pretty unusual for Brussels, as evidenced by the fact that no one has snow shovels so none of the sidewalks got cleared. Beagle slipped and slid on her way back from PT and is now scouring the web to find crampons.
6 January, Tuesday:
Most of the snow has gone from the main roads, but the sidewalks are still slippery, our garden still is covered with snow, and it is -15 degrees Celsius outside (5 degrees Fahrenheit). Since none of the sidewalks have been shoveled, all the snow has been packed down and has turned into ice. The TV news is full of pictures of snow and icy roads. Great excitement. The last time it was this cold was years ago. The other news making the news is that France TV, which is government supported and has a bunch of channels, has made an enormous change. From now on “prime time” will start at 8:35 PM, right after the news, and there will be no advertising. Normally they show programs for a while, then have 5 or 10 minutes of advertising, then go back to the program, etc. A pretty silly system if you ask me, and one that is bound to cause much channel surfing when the advertising comes on, but that’s the way they do it. The move to having no commercials was a big deal…at least it was in France. There were governmental debates, interviews with the man on the street, etc., and everyone was very excited about the change, or at least that’s what France TV would have you think. So last night was the first night of this… Drum roll…One would think that they’d lead off with a really interesting program, but no. The first program was a documentary of some sort about two rather silly Frenchmen who were going on some sort of expedition in Africa, but the first part of the program consisted of following them around a bunch of sporting goods stores while they tried on all sorts of equipment that they’d never need in Africa; wet suits, scuba gear, down parkas, etc. Ha Ha. Plus they spent a lot of time running their hands over their jaws which sported a 3 day growth of beard which had clearly just been grown for this TV program. By the time they got to Africa we had moved on to a Jean Renoir film on DVD. The big excitement today was that we both got haircuts, at the same place, by the same person. I have more hair than Beagle, and needed more cut off, but my haircut cost €20 less than Beagle’s! It is great being a man!
New Year’s Eve Day. We woke up to a misty, foggy, icy, cold day. We had planned to take a long hike, but were stymied by the fact that everything was covered with a thin layer of black ice which made it literally impossible to stand up on the sidewalks, much less walk anywhere. There was a little bit of car traffic, and the roads were a little less slippery than the sides of the road, but cars were sliding everywhere so walking on the side of the road didn’t seem to be such a good idea, and even walking on the sidewalks was out of the question because of the ice. The main roads were supposed to be treacherous, and the TV was full of stories about buses sliding off the road, cars crashing into trees, and salt-spreaders going backwards because it was too icy for them to go forward. We conceded defeat and read our books all morning. In the afternoon we ventured out again and it was a little better. We found a walkway along the river towards Comblain-au-pont, and we walked on that for a while until it got too slippery to continue. Going in the other direction we found a trail along the river that took us through some sort of holiday/trailer camp that was abandoned for the winter and then through the woods. The trail was both muddy and icy, and the scenery was not the best, but it was nice to be outside, and walking along the river was nice. There were tons of ducks in the river, and we saw one small bird, sort of quail-like in size and appearance, that was scooting along the surface of the river and dove when it saw us, and totally disappeared. We also saw what appeared to be signs of beavers. I thought all the beavers had been wiped out in Europe centuries ago (if indeed they had any in the first place). At about 7:30 PM we went downstairs for the fancy New Year’s Eve dinner we had been promised. Unlike the prior night, the bar was full, and there were even people spilling over into the small dining room for pre-dinner drinks. The crowd was a mixture of young and old couples, grandparents with their children and grandchildren, etc. A full house. We were told that nothing would happen until 8 PM, so we waited. At around 8 PM champagne was served, then some hors d’oeuvres with more champagne. At around
8:45 PM we were escorted into the big dining room, a lovely room right on the river. It was full. Then the real dinner started…5 or 6 courses, including 3 appetizers, 2 types of foie gras, a fish course, a meat course (which was “faon” or, as I discovered upon checking my dictionary, fawn. Oh my God, we ate Bambi!), etc., plus two lovely white wines, an extremely nice red wine, a lovely dessert served in big glasses, more champagne, etc. At some point we realized that this was going to go on until midnight, well past our usual 9:30 PM bedtime, but there was nothing we could do about it so we just went with the flow and enjoyed ourselves. At midnight an announcement was made, more champagne was poured, everyone stood up and cheered and kissed the appropriate people. The sound system had been playing Norah Jones all evening, but at this point the music changed and they played “We wish you a merry Christmas” at top volume. It was a suitable conclusion to the evening. We went to bed at 12:30 AM, the first New Year’s we had been awake at midnight for about 10 years.
1 January, Thursday:
New Year’s Day. Happy New Year! Today started out cold (low 20’s), misty and still icy, so we decided that instead of trying to hike on the ice, we’d drive to Maastricht, in Holland. The drive was not very long, but Edith (our GPS) made it more interesting by routing us right through some of the least appealing industrial and residential sections of Liege. Lucky thing it was New Year’s Day and there was no traffic. Going north from Liege toward Holland, we drove between the River Ourthe and railroad tracks through hilly countryside that was heavily industrialized and pretty unattractive. There were lots of factories and piles of dirt and rocks and scrap metal, plus a bunch of depressing and depressed-looking little towns and graffiti everywhere. Then suddenly we were in Holland. The only thing “official” thing that tells you that you are entering Holland is a sign, but suddenly the road gets better, everything becomes cleaner, the graffiti is gone, the land flattens out and becomes beautifully maintained agricultural land, etc. It was like driving from France into Switzerland. Maastricht itself is a lovely city. It is sparklingly clean and is full of nice looking old buildings (not a lot of really old ones, but a lot of stuff from the 17th & 18th centuries) pretty winding streets, lots of very fashionable shops, etc. Even the modern architecture looks nice. Clearly, Maastricht hired different architects from the ones they set loose in Brussels over the last 50 years! Most of the town was pretty deserted, except for the Market Square, which featured a bunch of the Dutch equivalent of skinheads, and the Central Square which was filled with a Christmas fair, complete with a huge (open) Ferris wheel, a merry-go-round, a skating rink, booths selling beer and wine and fried dough and waffles and frites, etc. Very little was open, but we looked at everything from the outside and went into several big churches which were quite lovely and had the advantage of being heated. After 5 minutes of standing directly over a large grate that was gushing heat out to warm the church, we got warm enough to go outside again. When we were too cold to stand it anymore we went in to a brasserie on the main square which looked empty from the outside, but was full inside. We had pea soup filled with ham and other good things, plus some smoked ham and sausage. That warmed us up. We walked around some more in the afternoon and came across the most incredible hotel/restaurant, a place called Kruisherenhotel. It is a hotel/restaurant/bar that has been created inside an old, presumably deconsecrated, monastery and church. You enter through a brass funnel sort of thing (kind of spooky), and then suddenly it opens up and you are inside this huge church with 60 foot vaulted ceilings and stained glass and the whole nine yards, plus a very fashionable looking lobby and bar and restaurant plonked down right in the middle of it, a glass elevator which rises up right in the middle, etc. Where the rooms are, I don’t know, but the part we saw was very dramatic. I’m sure the Crusaders, after whom the church was evidently named, would have been happy with it. All in all, Maastricht was a real hit. It might have been better if things had been open and if we had had a map and knew where we were going, but on the whole we were satisfied. Maastricht is in a tiny finger of Holland that sits between Belgium and Germany, and the theory is that because of that, Maastricht is a very international town in which everyone speaks 5 languages, including Dutch and German and French. Our experience was that everyone we ran across spoke Dutch and English, but no German or French. All the plaques on buildings (meant for tourists, presumably) telling you the historical significance of the building, etc., were in Dutch only, and the street signs were all in Dutch and in some Dutch-like language that Beagle couldn’t recognize. Hmmm. There is something going on here. About 10 years ago I remember that UBS and a bunch of other international banks invested a lot of money in setting up call centers in Maastricht that were designed to serve international customers throughout Europe…the theory was that everyone in Maastricht spoke Dutch and French and German and Italian and English, so it would be easy to hire up thousands of multilingual employees who could staff call centers serving all of Europe. That theory proved to have a flaw in it, as Alan Greenspan has become fond of saying. While there may be a lot of multilingual people in Maastricht, there weren’t enough of them willing to staff the call centers for a whole bunch of European banks, so as far as I know they all closed up shop. According to internal rumor, that little piece of flawed (or most likely not done at all) market research cost UBS something like $50 million, because UBS had bought a building and had proceeded to build the infrastructure for their call center before they thought about trying to hire people. When they tried to hire up the first hundred people and only 6 showed up for job interviews, the whole project got scrapped! I believe the person in charge of that project was promoted and put in charge of assessing risk for the bank. Tonight was the last night that our hotel was open before it started a two-month vacation, and we were worried that we would be the only people at dinner. That worry turned out to be misplaced. A whole new crowd was there, including several large families and everyone was as lively as the group the night before. Dinner started at 8:30 PM or so, and we managed to skulk out of the dining room at about 11 PM.
2 January, Friday:
The day started cold and snowy. We decided to drive to the ruins of an abbey on the way back to Brussels, and Edith guided us on a different road than the one we took to get to Comblain-la-tour. We had only been driving for a few hundred yards when the road left the narrow river valley we had been in and passed through a wide open landscape with huge fields stretching to the horizon, all sorts of very important looking manor houses, prosperous looking towns with nice house all made of stone, etc. Quite different from Comblain-la-tour itself! Now I know where all the people who were having New Year’s Eve dinner at the hotel came from. The abbey we visited, part way back to Brussels, was the Abbey de Villers, in Villers-la-ville. It was, or had been, a huge Cistercian monastery, with something like 100 monks and 300 or so “lay brothers,” and owned tens of thousands of acres of land all over Belgium. What is left now are ruins, but they are pretty impressive and include the walls, pillars, etc. of a huge church, lots of outbuildings, gardens, walls, etc. The monastery appears to have been in a bad neighborhood, because throughout its history this part of the world bounced back and forth between French and Dutch and who knows whose ownership, and the monastery seemed to get sacked with some regularity by one opposing force or another. In fact one of its most thorough sackings appears to have been at the hands of the Austrians, for Pete’s sake. But the best was last, in 1796, when the French were in charge and, in keeping with the French tradition of dealing with church property after the Revolution, the French government sold the abbey to a local building materials supplier who presumably sold off a lot of the stone and pillars and whatnot for the construction of houses and grist mills or whatever was in vogue at the time. However there was still a lot left, and sometime, presumably in the late 1800s or early 1900s, just to make a point, the railroad company built a railroad line that runs right through the abbey grounds on a big elevated trestle made of stone (presumably purchased from the building supply company who owned the abbey). It is sort of incongruous to see a little commuter train whisk in and out though the walls of the abbey, between some buildings, etc., but I guess that’s the way they do things in Europe.
3 January, Saturday:
Why is it that -5 degrees Celsius sounds (and feels) so much colder than 23 degrees Fahrenheit? It may be that when it is -5C in Brussels it is damper than when it is 23 degrees in New York, but I think there is the psychological effect of seeing a minus sign before the temperature. Anyway, it was cold today. Our major event was going to dinner at Claire Billen’s apartment. She and her husband Jacques live near the Université Libre de Bruxelles, where Claire is a professor. She is a colleague of Beagle’s and one of her “sponsors” while we are in Belgium. Marc and Thérèse were also at dinner. We discussed academic politics and concluded that while the academic systems of Belgium and the US are quite different, there is just as much academic politics in one place as the other, and just about as many counter-productive traditions and systems. Marc, being a fatalist, doesn’t accept the flaws in the Belgian system, but has resigned himself to taking advantage of it where he can! While interesting, I found this discussion, conducted entirely in French, less than riveting. I got the sense that Jacques agreed or, like me, that he had heard this discussion many times before. He is a doctor and a shrink of some sort, but it appears that his real love is old movies. After dinner we were invited into his “filmothèque,” a room in the apartment that has been converted into a film library and a screening room. He has what appears to be thousands of films in bookcases that line the walls from floor to ceiling, all catalogued by director, etc. We ended up borrowing 12…10 by Jean Renoir and 2 by Eric Rohmer.
4 January, Sunday:
Belgium appears to take the Christmas/New Year’s holidays seriously. Every day there appears to be less activity on the streets, and a lot of the stores and restaurants appear to have just given up and shut down for two weeks. We noticed the other day that the recycling containers near the Delhaise where we dispose of empty bottles are completely full and overflowing. These things are 6 ½ foot high covered bins with holes where you throw in empty bottles, and there are several of them in the same spot. They must hold thousands of bottles each, and I imagine that they are normally emptied every week or so, and generally they appear to be about ¼ full…at least normally when you peg a bottle in the bin there is a brief silence as it drops and then a satisfying crash as the bottle shatters into smithereens on the bottom. Now you can’t even stuff a bottle into the hole. A combination of festive celebrations and two weeks without being emptied has resulted in bottles in huge piles around them. DVDPost, the Belgian equivalent of NetFlix also seems to have taken a few weeks off. They were in business on 24 December, but since then they have been totally unresponsive. Perhaps someone should tell them that holiday/vacation times are often when people like to watch movies! Luckily we have Jean Renoir and Eric Rohmer films to watch while we wait for DVDPost to return from vacation. We went to the market at Place Flagey today, and noticed that there were about half as many vendors as normal. Again, it looks like everyone has just gone into hibernation for 2 weeks. Maybe things will be more active next week. Today was cold with the threat of snow, so we stayed inside for most of the day. I once again attempted to watch sports on TV. It was not a success. There is a station that was showing a Swiss ski-jumping meet, which seems to be the same meet that was playing last weekend and the weekend before that. Ditto for the French horse-jumping program on another channel. MSNBC was showing a seniors golf tournament which was about as exciting as watching the A&P truck unload (and for me, who actually enjoys watching golf on TV, that is quite a statement). The British sports TV channel, which in previous weeks had showed a bowls tournament and a snooker championship, had moved on to darts. CNN was showing Wolf Blitzer blovating about Gaza, and the rest of the 99 stations that we get were either showing brainless quiz shows or nature shows showing moose rutting and the like. I retreated to my book. Don’t these Europeans play football? Or rugby? Or something more interesting than darts?
5 January, Monday:
Have you ever heard of Toots Thielemans? Walter Prevenier told me about him a number of years ago, but the name never meant anything to me until I saw a documentary on him the other day. He is a Belgian jazz great, known for his guitar playing, his whistling, and, especially, his harmonica playing. His signature tune is Bluesette. He has played with George Shearing, Charlie “Bird” Parker, Miles Davis, Quincy Jones, Ella Fitzgerald, Johnny Mathis, Paul Simon, Billy Joel and just about everybody else. He was also supposed to have had a big influence on John Lennon and the Beatles. If the name still means nothing to you, think back and remember the version of Moon River played at the beginning of the movie “Breakfast at Tiffanys.” That was Toots. He also played on Midnight Cowboy and lots of other films. He is supposed to be the best jazz harmonica player of the 20th Century, and at 86 years old he is still going strong in the 21st. Just check out his Facebook page! I think he played a Christmas concert in Singapore this year. So if anyone ever tells you that the only world-class figures that Belgium ever produced were Henri Pirenne (a historian) and Johnny Halliday (a famous and long-lived rocker, actually born in Paris, but his father was Belgian), tell them about Toots.
We woke up today to find that there was about 2” of snow on the ground. Pretty unusual for Brussels, as evidenced by the fact that no one has snow shovels so none of the sidewalks got cleared. Beagle slipped and slid on her way back from PT and is now scouring the web to find crampons.
6 January, Tuesday:
Most of the snow has gone from the main roads, but the sidewalks are still slippery, our garden still is covered with snow, and it is -15 degrees Celsius outside (5 degrees Fahrenheit). Since none of the sidewalks have been shoveled, all the snow has been packed down and has turned into ice. The TV news is full of pictures of snow and icy roads. Great excitement. The last time it was this cold was years ago. The other news making the news is that France TV, which is government supported and has a bunch of channels, has made an enormous change. From now on “prime time” will start at 8:35 PM, right after the news, and there will be no advertising. Normally they show programs for a while, then have 5 or 10 minutes of advertising, then go back to the program, etc. A pretty silly system if you ask me, and one that is bound to cause much channel surfing when the advertising comes on, but that’s the way they do it. The move to having no commercials was a big deal…at least it was in France. There were governmental debates, interviews with the man on the street, etc., and everyone was very excited about the change, or at least that’s what France TV would have you think. So last night was the first night of this… Drum roll…One would think that they’d lead off with a really interesting program, but no. The first program was a documentary of some sort about two rather silly Frenchmen who were going on some sort of expedition in Africa, but the first part of the program consisted of following them around a bunch of sporting goods stores while they tried on all sorts of equipment that they’d never need in Africa; wet suits, scuba gear, down parkas, etc. Ha Ha. Plus they spent a lot of time running their hands over their jaws which sported a 3 day growth of beard which had clearly just been grown for this TV program. By the time they got to Africa we had moved on to a Jean Renoir film on DVD. The big excitement today was that we both got haircuts, at the same place, by the same person. I have more hair than Beagle, and needed more cut off, but my haircut cost €20 less than Beagle’s! It is great being a man!
Friday, January 2, 2009
WEEK 8 - In which we celebrate Christmas, visit Marc & Thérèse in Gent, and go to Comblain-la-tour for New Year's
24 December, Wednesday:
Christmas Eve. The weather has changed. It is now dry, windy and cold, with blue skies. It is a welcome change from dark, wet and cold. Our Belgian friends tell us that in the winter here you have two choices…dark, wet and cold, or sunny with blue skies and colder. I’ll take the latter. We didn’t do much today except hang around and wait for the boys and Vic to get back from Amsterdam. They turned up mid-afternoon, napped and ate, not necessarily in that order. Apparently there is no food in Amsterdam. At about 8:30 PM we pulled ourselves together, put on collared shirts, and went to Aux Armes de Bruxelles for our fancy Christmas Eve dinner. We had a 9PM reservation, and didn’t get out of there until after midnight. The food was great, but the service was excruciatingly slow.
25 December, Thursday:
Christmas Day. Blue skies and cold. We got everybody up, had Christmas stockings and ate breakfast. Being a man of tradition, I had kippers and eggs. Everyone else complained about the smell of the kippers. I ignored them, felt solidarity with my family back in New Hampshire who were certainly going to have kippers for Christmas breakfast, and was happy. By executive fiat, Christmas presents were limited/non-existent, due to the difficulty in packing stuff up, etc., but Beagle did have a brain-wave the other day and ordered up used kimonos from a second-hand kimono place in Japan for the boys and Vic. There is apparently no market for used anything in Japan, so these were very cheap, and on the web you could check out a drawing of each kimono showing exactly where the flaws, tiny tears, rips, patches, etc. in each were. They arrived right before Christmas and came beautifully packed and wrapped. They were actually quite lovely, all silk, etc. Now all the boys have to do is figure out what to do with them. Vic has a different problem…hers is lovely, but is long enough for someone 6’6”. I didn’t think women were that tall in Japan. I guess you learn something every day. After breakfast we went for a tram ride and a walk in the Forêt de Soignes, walked through Watermael-Boisfort, took the tram back, then cooked our capon and had Christmas dinner at home. It was a very enjoyable day.
26 December, Friday:
We staggered out of bed and were greeted by another cold, clear day. After a certain amount of procrastination and useless preliminaries, we drove to Gent to see an exhibition of medieval Flemish tapestries at the Kunsthal Sint-Pietersabij (Saint Peter’s Abbey). It was absolutely splendid. They had dozens of huge rich, colorful tapestries displayed in a series of a dozen or so rooms. The exhibition was well laid-out, well lit, etc., and the audio guides provided a lot of background. After about an hour and a half of that we went to the Vooruit, which was the old headquarters of the Socialist party in Gent and is now a restaurant/beer hall and performance space. We drank beer and ate sandwiches, and then went for a walking tour of Gent. We had planned to go to see the Lamb of God altarpiece, but by the time we got there the church was closed…it being Christmas and all, and the Belgians taking their holidays seriously. We had a hot chocolate instead, since by then we were all frozen and needed to warm up. After a little more walking around we drove to Marc and Thérèse’s house for dinner, stopping to pick up flowers for Thérèse on the way. Simon, Marc and Thérèse’s son turned up, so there were 8 of us. And what a dinner it was! We had a series of hot and cold hors d’oeuvres, a wonderful salad with crevettes, eels, ham, etc., a delicious lamb course with green beans, potatoes and flageolets, 6 different kinds of cheese, dessert, and 5 different wines (Champagne, two different whites, two different reds) plus a variety of after-dinner drinks. I was abstemious and didn’t have the after dinner drinks. We arrived at Marc and Thérèse’s at about 6 PM and immediately sat down and started to eat. We finished at about midnight. We staggered to our car and drove back to Brussels.
27 December, Saturday:
Another very cold, blue-sky day. We went to the market at Place Flagey, brought our purchases home, went across town to the Palais de Justice and then took the elevator down to the Marolles to see the flea market at Place du Jeu de Balle. It really is extraordinary. This is clearly the place to furnish a house if you are a student or want an “ancestor portrait” or odd dishes or bad paintings or old shoelaces, or a 1960’s toaster, or anything else for that matter. After a bit of browsing people decided they were cold and tired of walking around, so we went back to our neighborhood and had a late lunch at La Regence. William had tartiflette (potatoes, bacon, cheese, onions, crème fraiche and white wine, all baked in a casserole). I had rabbit cooked in beer. The others had soup and sandwiches. Plus beer. It was very satisfactory. Lunch made everyone sleepy, so we went home and everybody napped. William got the prize for deepest slumber. We had a spaghetti dinner and went to bed.
28 December, Sunday:
The boys and Vic had a 10 AM flight back to Newark, so we got up early and I drove them to the airport. Early on Sunday morning there was no traffic (except for a horrendous wreck coming back into Brussels), so the round trip took less than an hour. When I got back, Beagle and I went shopping at Place Flagey. The cold (25 degrees F) seems to have kept the usually sturdy Belgians inside, since the market was not crowded. Or perhaps it was Christmas/New Year’s. After a quick lunch we went to the Musée d’Ixelles, which is right in our neighborhood on rue Jean Van Volsem. I must have met a dozen Belgians who, when they heard we were living in Ixelles, said “there is a really wonderful museum in Ixelles, it has a great collection, and I’ve never been there.” So we thought we’d give it a try. It was wonderful. It has a great collection of 19th and 20th century art, mostly French and Belgian (Magritte, Picasso, etc.), and has representatives of all the great “movements” of that era (surrealism, COBRA, etc.), has a huge collection of Toulouse-Lautrec posters, etc. Plus they had a special exhibition of paintings and drawings by famous writers (Victor Hugo, George Sand, Henry Miller, etc., etc.). All these writers who you never knew were also painters. Some of the stuff was not much more than doodling, but a lot of it was quite good and certainly interesting. It was quite unusual. A real find, and a place we will certainly return to, particularly with guests who like museums, have a limited tolerance for walking, and like 19th and 20th Century art.
29 December, Monday:
I looked it up. The Forêt de Soignes covers 4,380 hectares (10,824 acres). That is 13 times bigger than Central Park in New York City. The forêt used to be the source of charcoal for Brussels, but as far as I can tell, it is now used for hiking, walking, biking, horseback riding, etc., with some logging which really looks more like thinning than logging. It is pretty incredible to have a park that big practically in the middle of Brussels. Today, however, instead of going for a walk there, we took a walk from our apartment to the Cinquantenaire Park. To get there we walked by/through part of the EU complex. It is extraordinary…dozens of absolutely mammoth office buildings and the like, all designed as far as I can tell by architects with proto-fascist tendencies. It made my skin crawl, especially since everything was absolutely deserted, since we are in the Christmas/New Year’s holiday period when all the EU bureaucrats go home to their respective countries. It was like being on the set of a sci-fi movie. By the time we got to the Cinquantenaire Park we had pretty much had it with mammoth buildings, but there was more to come. The park was the site of the 1880 exposition celebrating the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Belgian nation, and to make up for the fact that Belgium is a pretty small and a pretty new nation, Leopold II, who had an over the top edifice complex anyway (see an earlier blog on the Palais de Justice) decided to pull out all the stops. When he was done, the Park featured several gigantic buildings which now house various museums including a military museum, an automobile museum, a museum of the heart featuring…you guessed it… hearts, a bunch of art/history museums, etc. all linked by enormous colonnades and a truly incredible triple triumphal arch topped by a sculpture of ancient warriors in chariots or something like that…the arch is so big that it is hard to see what is on top without a telescope. The guidebooks say that it started out as a single arch, but Leopold II wanted something bigger, so he tripled it. I am not positive, but to my eye it looks as if the Arch de Triumph in Paris would fit inside this thing with room to spare. That Leopold must have had an ego! As an indication of what has happened in Belgium since the 1880s, there is a note in the Michelin Green Guide that says that “for reasons of personnel,” not all of the rooms in the various museums in the Parc Cinquantenaire are always open. We went into the entry of the museum of automobiles to get warm, since it was very cold, but we did not go into the museum itself. I had already been there, and Beagle hates cars. On the way home we decided to avoid mammoth buildings, so we walked through Square Amblorix, Avenue Palmerston and Square Marie-Louise, which were very elegant and very nice, and then to the St-Josse-Ten-Noode area, which looked very lively and interesting. We think one of Walter’s daughters used to live in this area.
30 December, Tuesday:
Today we drove to Comblain-la-tour, a tiny town south of Liege on the river Ourthe (not to be confused with Comblain-au-pont, another tiny town at the confluence of the river Ourthe and the river Amblève, 4 kilometers downstream). We had booked a hotel there for 3 days over New Year’s. As we got close to Liege we kept seeing signs (permanent signs!) warning us of smog and the necessity to slow down. The smog was pretty bad, but got worse as we drove down the river valley towards Comblain-la-tour. It was a very narrow valley, with stone quarries everywhere (and a museum of stone, whatever that might be), and every house we passed seemed to have a wood fire going, since all the chimneys were pouring smoke into the air. That, coupled with ground fog, a very cold day, a river running through a narrow valley, etc. all combined to make vision difficult. However, we got to our hotel without incident, and while the town itself was not very interesting, the hotel was lovely, as it should be, being part of the Relais & Chateaux “group.” The hotel is called Hostellerie St. Roch, named after the patron saint of people suffering from the plague. There are dozens of statues, paintings, etc. around the hotel depicting St. Roch pulling his cloak back from his leg to show his buboes, the skin eruptions characteristic of the Black Death. There must be a reason, but I think I would have picked a different saint to name my hotel after. Our room was very nice, and very warm. Beagle immediately went around turning all the radiators down so she would have something to complain about later in the day. Even though it was late, the hotel made us exquisite sandwiches (made with a real French baguette!) and we went out for a hike, armed with directions in English provided by the hotel. The hike went along the river, then up steeply through woods out of the valley and into farmland, etc. The hike was nice, although we were clearly not in the most prosperous part of Belgium. We saw more mobile homes and holiday camps of trailers (now abandoned for the winter) than even in Vermont. The Vermonters would also be interested to know that in Belgium, farmers spread manure year-round, even when the ground is frozen. The sweet fragrance of manure, coupled with smoke from wood fires, brought tears of nostalgia to my eyes…or was it something else? The trail had clearly been used by many horseback riders, hikers, mountain bikers, etc., and had clearly been very wet and muddy several days ago, but was now completely frozen, which made walking an interesting challenge. Even more of a challenge were the directions, which contained such gems as “after follow the footpath between the prairies,” “pass the yellow metal buddy,” and “after there is a schistose talus recover the macadam road and follow it to the right. Keep on this road to the backing of the stream of the Boé.” This latter confused us. We had figured out the prairies, understood what a yellow metal buddy was when we ran into it, and thought we had passed something which we might have called schistose talus had we been geologists. We even thought we knew what the backing of a stream was. But turning right would have taken us in the wrong direction and ultimately into a riding school, and there was a hiking sign saying “Comblain-la-tour 4 Km” pointing back in the direction we had just come from. So we stopped and asked a couple of 13-year-old girls who were trying to start an ATV and a motorbike in a field near the riding school. They told us that we were in fact in Comblain-la-tour, but they had never heard of our hotel, even though it is the only hotel in town and is directly across the street from the train station. In any event, they told us that we could get to the train station by going left, not right, ignoring the sign pointing in the opposite direction. So we did, and we got back to the hotel just before dark. The proprietress of the hotel asked how our hike was, and we told her that it was lovely except that the directions in English needed a little work. We swiftly abandoned that line of conversation when she told us that she had personally translated and typed out the directions. Upon going to our room, Beagle announced that the room was too cold and readjusted all the radiators. We had a lovely, elegant dinner in a warm and elegant dining room. There were only 4 couples there for dinner; us, a Flemish couple, a Germanic-looking couple, and a Bulgarian couple with a baby. We were promised more activity tomorrow night when we move to a bigger dining room where there are supposed to be more people since it will be New Year’s Eve.
Christmas Eve. The weather has changed. It is now dry, windy and cold, with blue skies. It is a welcome change from dark, wet and cold. Our Belgian friends tell us that in the winter here you have two choices…dark, wet and cold, or sunny with blue skies and colder. I’ll take the latter. We didn’t do much today except hang around and wait for the boys and Vic to get back from Amsterdam. They turned up mid-afternoon, napped and ate, not necessarily in that order. Apparently there is no food in Amsterdam. At about 8:30 PM we pulled ourselves together, put on collared shirts, and went to Aux Armes de Bruxelles for our fancy Christmas Eve dinner. We had a 9PM reservation, and didn’t get out of there until after midnight. The food was great, but the service was excruciatingly slow.
25 December, Thursday:
Christmas Day. Blue skies and cold. We got everybody up, had Christmas stockings and ate breakfast. Being a man of tradition, I had kippers and eggs. Everyone else complained about the smell of the kippers. I ignored them, felt solidarity with my family back in New Hampshire who were certainly going to have kippers for Christmas breakfast, and was happy. By executive fiat, Christmas presents were limited/non-existent, due to the difficulty in packing stuff up, etc., but Beagle did have a brain-wave the other day and ordered up used kimonos from a second-hand kimono place in Japan for the boys and Vic. There is apparently no market for used anything in Japan, so these were very cheap, and on the web you could check out a drawing of each kimono showing exactly where the flaws, tiny tears, rips, patches, etc. in each were. They arrived right before Christmas and came beautifully packed and wrapped. They were actually quite lovely, all silk, etc. Now all the boys have to do is figure out what to do with them. Vic has a different problem…hers is lovely, but is long enough for someone 6’6”. I didn’t think women were that tall in Japan. I guess you learn something every day. After breakfast we went for a tram ride and a walk in the Forêt de Soignes, walked through Watermael-Boisfort, took the tram back, then cooked our capon and had Christmas dinner at home. It was a very enjoyable day.
26 December, Friday:
We staggered out of bed and were greeted by another cold, clear day. After a certain amount of procrastination and useless preliminaries, we drove to Gent to see an exhibition of medieval Flemish tapestries at the Kunsthal Sint-Pietersabij (Saint Peter’s Abbey). It was absolutely splendid. They had dozens of huge rich, colorful tapestries displayed in a series of a dozen or so rooms. The exhibition was well laid-out, well lit, etc., and the audio guides provided a lot of background. After about an hour and a half of that we went to the Vooruit, which was the old headquarters of the Socialist party in Gent and is now a restaurant/beer hall and performance space. We drank beer and ate sandwiches, and then went for a walking tour of Gent. We had planned to go to see the Lamb of God altarpiece, but by the time we got there the church was closed…it being Christmas and all, and the Belgians taking their holidays seriously. We had a hot chocolate instead, since by then we were all frozen and needed to warm up. After a little more walking around we drove to Marc and Thérèse’s house for dinner, stopping to pick up flowers for Thérèse on the way. Simon, Marc and Thérèse’s son turned up, so there were 8 of us. And what a dinner it was! We had a series of hot and cold hors d’oeuvres, a wonderful salad with crevettes, eels, ham, etc., a delicious lamb course with green beans, potatoes and flageolets, 6 different kinds of cheese, dessert, and 5 different wines (Champagne, two different whites, two different reds) plus a variety of after-dinner drinks. I was abstemious and didn’t have the after dinner drinks. We arrived at Marc and Thérèse’s at about 6 PM and immediately sat down and started to eat. We finished at about midnight. We staggered to our car and drove back to Brussels.
27 December, Saturday:
Another very cold, blue-sky day. We went to the market at Place Flagey, brought our purchases home, went across town to the Palais de Justice and then took the elevator down to the Marolles to see the flea market at Place du Jeu de Balle. It really is extraordinary. This is clearly the place to furnish a house if you are a student or want an “ancestor portrait” or odd dishes or bad paintings or old shoelaces, or a 1960’s toaster, or anything else for that matter. After a bit of browsing people decided they were cold and tired of walking around, so we went back to our neighborhood and had a late lunch at La Regence. William had tartiflette (potatoes, bacon, cheese, onions, crème fraiche and white wine, all baked in a casserole). I had rabbit cooked in beer. The others had soup and sandwiches. Plus beer. It was very satisfactory. Lunch made everyone sleepy, so we went home and everybody napped. William got the prize for deepest slumber. We had a spaghetti dinner and went to bed.
28 December, Sunday:
The boys and Vic had a 10 AM flight back to Newark, so we got up early and I drove them to the airport. Early on Sunday morning there was no traffic (except for a horrendous wreck coming back into Brussels), so the round trip took less than an hour. When I got back, Beagle and I went shopping at Place Flagey. The cold (25 degrees F) seems to have kept the usually sturdy Belgians inside, since the market was not crowded. Or perhaps it was Christmas/New Year’s. After a quick lunch we went to the Musée d’Ixelles, which is right in our neighborhood on rue Jean Van Volsem. I must have met a dozen Belgians who, when they heard we were living in Ixelles, said “there is a really wonderful museum in Ixelles, it has a great collection, and I’ve never been there.” So we thought we’d give it a try. It was wonderful. It has a great collection of 19th and 20th century art, mostly French and Belgian (Magritte, Picasso, etc.), and has representatives of all the great “movements” of that era (surrealism, COBRA, etc.), has a huge collection of Toulouse-Lautrec posters, etc. Plus they had a special exhibition of paintings and drawings by famous writers (Victor Hugo, George Sand, Henry Miller, etc., etc.). All these writers who you never knew were also painters. Some of the stuff was not much more than doodling, but a lot of it was quite good and certainly interesting. It was quite unusual. A real find, and a place we will certainly return to, particularly with guests who like museums, have a limited tolerance for walking, and like 19th and 20th Century art.
29 December, Monday:
I looked it up. The Forêt de Soignes covers 4,380 hectares (10,824 acres). That is 13 times bigger than Central Park in New York City. The forêt used to be the source of charcoal for Brussels, but as far as I can tell, it is now used for hiking, walking, biking, horseback riding, etc., with some logging which really looks more like thinning than logging. It is pretty incredible to have a park that big practically in the middle of Brussels. Today, however, instead of going for a walk there, we took a walk from our apartment to the Cinquantenaire Park. To get there we walked by/through part of the EU complex. It is extraordinary…dozens of absolutely mammoth office buildings and the like, all designed as far as I can tell by architects with proto-fascist tendencies. It made my skin crawl, especially since everything was absolutely deserted, since we are in the Christmas/New Year’s holiday period when all the EU bureaucrats go home to their respective countries. It was like being on the set of a sci-fi movie. By the time we got to the Cinquantenaire Park we had pretty much had it with mammoth buildings, but there was more to come. The park was the site of the 1880 exposition celebrating the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Belgian nation, and to make up for the fact that Belgium is a pretty small and a pretty new nation, Leopold II, who had an over the top edifice complex anyway (see an earlier blog on the Palais de Justice) decided to pull out all the stops. When he was done, the Park featured several gigantic buildings which now house various museums including a military museum, an automobile museum, a museum of the heart featuring…you guessed it… hearts, a bunch of art/history museums, etc. all linked by enormous colonnades and a truly incredible triple triumphal arch topped by a sculpture of ancient warriors in chariots or something like that…the arch is so big that it is hard to see what is on top without a telescope. The guidebooks say that it started out as a single arch, but Leopold II wanted something bigger, so he tripled it. I am not positive, but to my eye it looks as if the Arch de Triumph in Paris would fit inside this thing with room to spare. That Leopold must have had an ego! As an indication of what has happened in Belgium since the 1880s, there is a note in the Michelin Green Guide that says that “for reasons of personnel,” not all of the rooms in the various museums in the Parc Cinquantenaire are always open. We went into the entry of the museum of automobiles to get warm, since it was very cold, but we did not go into the museum itself. I had already been there, and Beagle hates cars. On the way home we decided to avoid mammoth buildings, so we walked through Square Amblorix, Avenue Palmerston and Square Marie-Louise, which were very elegant and very nice, and then to the St-Josse-Ten-Noode area, which looked very lively and interesting. We think one of Walter’s daughters used to live in this area.
30 December, Tuesday:
Today we drove to Comblain-la-tour, a tiny town south of Liege on the river Ourthe (not to be confused with Comblain-au-pont, another tiny town at the confluence of the river Ourthe and the river Amblève, 4 kilometers downstream). We had booked a hotel there for 3 days over New Year’s. As we got close to Liege we kept seeing signs (permanent signs!) warning us of smog and the necessity to slow down. The smog was pretty bad, but got worse as we drove down the river valley towards Comblain-la-tour. It was a very narrow valley, with stone quarries everywhere (and a museum of stone, whatever that might be), and every house we passed seemed to have a wood fire going, since all the chimneys were pouring smoke into the air. That, coupled with ground fog, a very cold day, a river running through a narrow valley, etc. all combined to make vision difficult. However, we got to our hotel without incident, and while the town itself was not very interesting, the hotel was lovely, as it should be, being part of the Relais & Chateaux “group.” The hotel is called Hostellerie St. Roch, named after the patron saint of people suffering from the plague. There are dozens of statues, paintings, etc. around the hotel depicting St. Roch pulling his cloak back from his leg to show his buboes, the skin eruptions characteristic of the Black Death. There must be a reason, but I think I would have picked a different saint to name my hotel after. Our room was very nice, and very warm. Beagle immediately went around turning all the radiators down so she would have something to complain about later in the day. Even though it was late, the hotel made us exquisite sandwiches (made with a real French baguette!) and we went out for a hike, armed with directions in English provided by the hotel. The hike went along the river, then up steeply through woods out of the valley and into farmland, etc. The hike was nice, although we were clearly not in the most prosperous part of Belgium. We saw more mobile homes and holiday camps of trailers (now abandoned for the winter) than even in Vermont. The Vermonters would also be interested to know that in Belgium, farmers spread manure year-round, even when the ground is frozen. The sweet fragrance of manure, coupled with smoke from wood fires, brought tears of nostalgia to my eyes…or was it something else? The trail had clearly been used by many horseback riders, hikers, mountain bikers, etc., and had clearly been very wet and muddy several days ago, but was now completely frozen, which made walking an interesting challenge. Even more of a challenge were the directions, which contained such gems as “after follow the footpath between the prairies,” “pass the yellow metal buddy,” and “after there is a schistose talus recover the macadam road and follow it to the right. Keep on this road to the backing of the stream of the Boé.” This latter confused us. We had figured out the prairies, understood what a yellow metal buddy was when we ran into it, and thought we had passed something which we might have called schistose talus had we been geologists. We even thought we knew what the backing of a stream was. But turning right would have taken us in the wrong direction and ultimately into a riding school, and there was a hiking sign saying “Comblain-la-tour 4 Km” pointing back in the direction we had just come from. So we stopped and asked a couple of 13-year-old girls who were trying to start an ATV and a motorbike in a field near the riding school. They told us that we were in fact in Comblain-la-tour, but they had never heard of our hotel, even though it is the only hotel in town and is directly across the street from the train station. In any event, they told us that we could get to the train station by going left, not right, ignoring the sign pointing in the opposite direction. So we did, and we got back to the hotel just before dark. The proprietress of the hotel asked how our hike was, and we told her that it was lovely except that the directions in English needed a little work. We swiftly abandoned that line of conversation when she told us that she had personally translated and typed out the directions. Upon going to our room, Beagle announced that the room was too cold and readjusted all the radiators. We had a lovely, elegant dinner in a warm and elegant dining room. There were only 4 couples there for dinner; us, a Flemish couple, a Germanic-looking couple, and a Bulgarian couple with a baby. We were promised more activity tomorrow night when we move to a bigger dining room where there are supposed to be more people since it will be New Year’s Eve.
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