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.