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.