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!