18 February, Wednesday:
I gave up on the rice pudding diet too soon. I had been feeling just fine, but yesterday after lunch my stomach started complaining. French class with Aurélie was sort of a blur, and gym was an interesting experience. I sat down for dinner, but didn’t get beyond looking at the food. I retired to bed with what appears to be a repeat of my earlier illness, and spent much of today, Wednesday, in bed. My innards weren’t doing their Mount Krakatoa imitation, but I felt like I had been run over by a large truck. I was somewhat better by evening, due mostly to a helping of rice pudding that I somehow managed to choke down this afternoon, and I even had dinner…poached eggs. I went to bed early and slept like a baby.
19 February, Thursday:
I am returning to health…again. This morning I drove Beagle to the dentist to get the final touches on her root canal/new crown. Then we made a shopping expedition to the Delhaise. I had to replenish my stock of rice pudding, which had gotten dangerously low. That did it for me. I was supposed to be going with Beagle to get a haircut, but I took a nap instead.
20 February, Friday:
We had French class this afternoon, and I spent much of the morning working on the subjunctive. For those of you who are not familiar with the French subjunctive, let me assure you that it was invented by Cardinal Richelieu or the Spanish Inquisition, at the very least. What a fiendish tense. Half the time it follows rules, but the rest of the time it is just one exception after another. Mostly you just have to know when to use it, and when to use something else. You will use it in one sentence and then, in another sentence using almost exactly the same words, you won’t…it is all a matter of the “sense” of the sentence. General DeGaulle must be laughing in his tomb. French class itself was OK. Aurélie apologized again for missing class the other week. Her excuse for missing that class was that her grandmother had died suddenly, and she had to go to the funeral. She claims that she left Beagle a message on her cell phone, but Beagle denies receiving any such message, and having heard this excuse from many students, Beagle is skeptical. On the other hand, Beagle hasn’t figured out how to retrieve messages on her cell phone. Hmm. It seemed to me that there was no percentage in pursuing this one, so I sat through the class and went to gym.
21 February, Saturday:
Today I once again declared myself cured. Just in case, we went shopping and bought more rice pudding. Since it was a nice day, we then took the #94 tram to the end, to the Hermann Debroux metro stop, and took about a 2 hour walk in the forêt des Soignes. We ended up at Watermael-Boitsfort again and went to our “regular” Italian restaurant for lunch. They have a very complicated system there. If you get there early enough, say before 2PM, you can have a full lunch, with a tablecloth and breadsticks and the whole deal. If you get there much after that, they apologize profusely, but tell you that the kitchen is closed and that all you can have is a gargantuan dish of ravioli, spaghetti bolognaise, penne with cheese, or something else equally cheesy. From experience, I can tell you that one plate of spaghetti bolognaise at this restaurant is enough for two people. However, the last time we went there we arrived at about 3 PM and they told us that they were very sorry, but their stoved was broken and they couldn’t serve us spaghetti bolognaise. All they could serve us was pizza. So we had that, and it was a great success. Today we got there at about 2 PM and they told us that we had to hurry up and order because their pizza chef was about to turn off his pizza oven and go home. Since pizza was what we wanted, we ordered quickly. But a nice old couple who came in 2 minutes after we did were told that all they could have was ravioli, penne with cheese or spaghetti bolognaise. They ate their ravioli, we ate our pizza, and we were all happy. We took the tram home, bought bread, and excused ourselves from gym since we had walked for two hours. We watched a DVD of “The Last Metro,” which Beagle says we had seen before (except for the last few minutes). I remembered none of it except for one scene, and even Beagle had to admit that none of it seemed familiar.
22 February, Sunday:
Today was, as predicted, wet and gloomy. The BOZAR, the “Palais des Beaux-Arts” in the middle of Brussels, has a new exhibition called “From Van Dyck to Bellotto – Splendor in The Court of Savoy,” so we decided to go. It being a wet and gloomy Sunday, so did everyone else. The place was packed. There were large groups with guides who took up a lot of room and discussed the paintings at the top of their lungs, in Flemish and French. There were large groups of school children that followed their teachers around, and sat in large clumps on the floor while their teachers talked some about the paintings and art in general, and handed out all sorts of artistic aids. It is a great idea to have children exposed to art, and there were even all sorts of explanations posted on the walls at child-height so children could read them (it took me a while to figure that out…for the longest time I was stooping over trying to read the damn things), but the idea of school groups in a museum on a Sunday seems a little odd to me. In addition to the guided tours for children and adults, there were also hundreds of people like us, trying to stay dry. The exhibition was interesting, but badly lit and strangely hung. The lighting was generally dim and was set up so that it glared off the surfaces of the painting. You had to position yourself so you could avoid the worst of the glare and actually see the paintings, and of course so did everyone else…which meant that everyone was trying to jam into the same 4 foot square space from which you could see the paintings. Plus the labels that tell who the artist was and what the title of the painting was were sort of randomly distributed…sometimes on the left, sometimes on the right, and generally there would be a group of them referring to all the paintings on one wall, so you had to keep walking from label to painting and back to label again. But it was an interesting exhibition, and was better than watching horse jumping on TV.
23 February, Monday:
You wouldn’t know it to look at him walking down the street, but underneath his Hercule Poirot-like exterior, the average Belgian man is dressed like a porn star. I came to this conclusion this afternoon as I was shopping for underwear. It’s not that my underwear isn’t just fine…I have had most of it since college so it is just getting broken in. However, several t-shirts have somehow become shoe-shining rags, and some of my boxer shorts have developed holes in strategic (or unstrategic, depending on your point of view) places. Besides, it was wet and dark out and I needed something to do. So off I went to the “men’s lingerie” department of INNO, a big department store nearby. Just the name of the department should have been a tip-off. The department was divided into about 25 separate underwear “boutiques,” each for a different designer…but they all carried the same thing…various designs of what the boys used to call tighty-whiteys,” all in black, and all looking like they were props for a porn show. Rather than being strictly functional, as I like my underwear to be, they all looked very uncomfortable and as if they had specifically been designed to draw attention to what the pitchman on late night cable TV coyly calls “that certain portion of the male anatomy.” All that is missing are big arrows saying “here it is!” Who wears this stuff? Surely not those conservative-looking Belgian businessmen with sweaters stretched over their substantial stomachs who trudge down Chaussée d’Ixelles after lunch at La Régence, happily burping and brushing cassoulet out of their moustaches. But someone must buy it, because there was rack after rack of this stuff, all in black…and not only was there a lot of it, but it was also staggeringly expensive. Underpants for €50? T-shirts for €35? You have got to be kidding me. I finally located a small and well-hidden section that carried “American style” underwear, in white, made by a German company. This was half the price of the other designer-label stuff, although it was still twice what it would cost to buy the same thing at Land’s End. At least it didn’t have those stupid designer logos all over it. Contrary to what I said above, my theory is that real Belgians don’t buy this stuff. They couldn’t. They must inherit their underwear or something. I just find it impossible to envisage any of the Belgian men you see walking down the street wearing one of those black g-string things that Ralph Lauren was peddling. No way.
24 February, Tuesday:
Nothing much going on today. Mostly I studied French, did French exercises, read a French novel, and watched French TV. You’d think with all this French I’d actually be getting better. But no. Part of the problem is that I don’t have that many interactions with French speaking people. Going to the super market doesn’t really do much to polish my French, and when we are in a social situation most of the conversation is in English because the Dutch speakers don’t want to speak French, even though they can.
Friday, February 27, 2009
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
Week 15 - In which we visit the emergency room, have dinner in Gent, go to Rouen and eat squashed duck, and eat shellfish...and eat shellfish...
11 February, Wednesday:
All humans have a “flight or fight” response to certain threats (real or just perceived). We inherited this response from our ancestors who needed it when they were roaming the primitive savannahs or whatever. The general idea is that when they were startled or threatened in some way, their adrenal gland would pump out a great whacking dose of adrenaline which would get them ready to either flee or stick around and fight whatever was about to try to eat them. Modern humans still have this response. Sometimes it comes in times of real threat, or stress, and sometimes the adrenal gland just goes nuts and squirts out a dose of adrenaline for no particular reason, or for old times sake, or whatever. This appears to be the case with Beagle. Every once in a while, for no apparent reason, her adrenal gland squirts out a dose of adrenaline, which makes her blood pressure go through the roof. This makes everyone very anxious, and her doctors get very excited about getting her blood pressure down. What they have recently finally figured out is that to get her blood pressure down, the thing to do is to give her a great whacking dose of Valium or something like that to counteract the great whacking dose of adrenaline that her adrenal gland has just produced. This seems to work just fine. It takes a little while, but everything goes back to normal. So yesterday and today, in response to nothing in particular, her adrenal gland did its stuff and her blood pressure duly went through the roof. She tried calling her doctor, but couldn’t reach him, so we trundled off to Saint Peter’s hospital, which is within walking distance. It was an interesting experience. The hospital is in Marolles, a very poor part of Brussels with a big immigrant population. In the US, this kind of hospital would be mobbed with poor people getting primary care in the emergency room. Not here. I guess since everyone has medical care, they actually can get primary medical care from their doctor, not in the emergency room. In any event, the emergency room was almost empty. And at one point, when I held a door open for a couple of Asian women, they thanked me in English…they must have been tourists. We saw a series of doctors who all listened to Beagle’s description of the problem, took EKGs, chest X-Rays, etc., and after much consultation gave her a great whacking dose of Valium or its Belgian equivalent. This worked and we went home. However, unlike New York, where her doctor gives her one of these pills at a time, the Belgian doctors gave her a prescription for 40. Personally, I have had enough of doctors. I have completely recovered from my recent illness, helped a great deal by the fact that I have recently gone on the “rice pudding diet.” My new book on the subject will be coming out soon, but take it from me, it works. And it tastes great.
12 February, Thursday:
Today Beagle had to teach a “master class” in Antwerp. She asked if I wanted to drive her from Brussels to Antwerp, and then drive her from Antwerp to Gent for a dinner, and then from Gent back to Brussels. I decided that this “prince consort” stuff had gone too far, so I declined. Instead I stayed home, paid bills, went to gym, etc., and then took a train to Gent. This proved harder than expected. If you go on-line and ask to see the schedules for the trains from Brussels to Gent, they show dozens. But when you are at the station and look on the departure board for trains to Gent, there are very few. However I found a train that the departure board said was going to Gent, and went to the indicated track and waited. While waiting, I looked at the paper schedules posted there and discovered that while my train did indeed go to Gent, it stopped at about a dozen places first and took an hour. The reason it was listed on the departure board as going to Gent was that its last stop was Gent. I found another train that was going to Bruges, which stopped first at Gent, and that only took 30 minutes. So I took it, and only arrived about 30 minutes late for dinner. I was somewhat surprised that people seemed to be concerned that something had happened to me…apparently Beagle and others had tried calling me dozens of times and couldn’t get through. It subsequently turned out that Proximus, the main Belgian wireless phone network, had experienced a complete systems failure, and the whole system was totally non-operational for several hours. The dinner, at Peter Stabel’s house, was great. Lots of hilarity, great food, etc. There were some old friends there, including An and Guido, some new people, and a bunch of students. Peter is a colleague of Beagle’s who teaches at Antwerp but, of course, lives in Gent (conveniently close to the train station). We stayed too late and caught the last train back to Brussels from Gent with Claire.
13 February, Friday:
This morning we drove to Rouen, in Normandy in France, to meet Marc and Thérèse. This was a 3+ hour trip. We started late and wasted some time trying to find some place to have lunch en route, and ended up meeting Marc and Therese at a café in the middle of Rouen. We walked around a little and tried to visit the Beaux Arts museum, but the dragon who was guarding the entrance told us that we didn’t have enough time to see everything in the Beaux Arts museum and that we should go to the Ceramics museum instead. So we did. It was actually pretty good. It has a great collection of faience. We declined to visit the museum of ironwork, which apparently has a great collection of keys and hinges and other things made out of iron. We did, however, visit the site where Joan of Arc was burned to death, which now sports a big cross and lot of Joan of Arc memorabilia and monuments including a modern building which looks like it had a Polynesian architect, and a bustling outdoor market. That was the best part. After the museum we went to the bed and breakfast where we had booked rooms. It was on a hill overlooking the city, an easy walk from the city center, and like most of the houses in that neighborhood was totally invisible from the street…it was behind tall stone walls, and to get to it you had to walk up a long, narrow passage between two high walls. Inside the walls was a huge garden, a lovely house, etc., all with lovely views of the cathedral and the city, etc. The place is called Clos Jouvenet (named after a famous painter from Rouen) on rue Hyacinthe Langois (Hyacinthe used to be a French male name) and was fabulous. The woman who ran it was Belgian and as a teenager had been an exchange student in Huntington, West Virginia. She couldn’t have been nicer, the rooms were great, and the breakfasts were fabulous. Plus it cost about half of what a hotel would have cost. After we checked in we had about 15 minutes to get ready for dinner, since Marc had booked a table at a restaurant near the train station. He was anxious to get there since he and I had pre-ordered duck a la Rouennaise, a famous Rouennaise tradition. That is prepared by at least partially cooking a duck, removing the meat from the breast and the legs, putting everything else in a big silver press (sort of like a small wine press) and then cranking the handle of the press and squashing the stuff in the press until blood and other savory juices run out. That juice is then used as a base for a sauce that is spread over the duck meat that had been cooked some more. It was not the best duck I ever had, but the process was interesting and I have a certificate saying that we ate the 203,262nd Caneton Rouennais served at that restaurant.
14 February, Saturday:
We spent much of the morning walking around Rouen. It is a lovely city with lots of pedestrian-only streets and lots of medieval buildings…half-timbered (à colombard) buildings leaning in all directions at alarming angles. An Allied air raid shortly before D-Day did a lot of damage to Rouen, but some things have been restored, and a lot of very old stuff escaped damage, such as a quite spectacular building around a courtyard that housed a plague cemetery. The cathedral is just gorgeous, with a lovely lacey spire that is the tallest in France. We went into the Beaux Arts museum that, notwithstanding the dragon at the gate, was very nice. It has a very good collection of art from the ancient up until the impressionists, many of whom did a lot of painting in Rouen. We ate lunch in the museum and then, since it was a nice day, drove out of Rouen to visit the ruins of Chateau Gaillard. It was built by Richard the LionHeart in 1196 to protect his Norman lands. It is on a bluff overlooking the Seine and the site is quite spectacular, although most of the Chateau itself is in ruins or has been carted away. Based on the literature available at the site, it appears that it wasn’t a great defensive success since it appears to have been sacked multiple times, including by local builders who used it as a source of stone. On the way back we visited the ruins of an abbey and visited a small church that was supposed to have a lovely statue of Mary Magdalene. When we got to the church a priest (at least he said he was a priest) greeted us saying that the statue was now in Toulouse and that we had to hurry because he had six other churches to take care of and he was just about to close this one. However, he turned out to be Belgian, so we gave him the opportunity to speak Flemish and that made him happy. He gave us brochures about the church and then hustled us out. We made another detour on the way back to Rouen and parked on a spot with a view over a cliff of the entire city, and then went back to get ready for dinner. After making all sorts of comments about my beard, Beagle finally delivered the clincher when she told me that not only did it make me look like a homeless person but that it also made me look 15 years older. The beard was gone by dinnertime. There may be pictures available. Since it was Valentine’s Day, all of the restaurants were fully booked, but Marc had made a reservation at a very nice restaurant (Les Petits Parapluies) where we all had the Valentine’s Day menu, which was excellent, and then retreated to bed. Rouen is a lovely city, and is well worth visiting. The food was excellent, and even though it was the middle of February, there were signs of spring.
15 February, Sunday:
Today we got up relatively early, had a sumptuous breakfast, checked out of our B&B, and drove to the ruins of an abbey in Jumièges. Once again, a very impressive site…the ruins were in a big park with gardens, etc. Even with most of the original buildings gone, there was a lot left, and you got a real sense of what it was like. In good French tradition, after the Revolution the property was confiscated by the state and many of the buildings were torn down for building material, but at least they didn’t put a railroad line through this one. We went on from Jumièges to Etretat, a little fishing village on the sea. The town is on a relatively small, very rocky (small fist-sized rocks, not boulders) beach with huge chalk cliffs on either side. Over the centuries the sea has worn holes in the cliffs so there are natural arches in the cliffs on either side of the town, with one “leg” of each arch plunging into the sea. Apparently a lot of impressionists painted these cliffs, with the result that the town became famous and then became one of the first beach/summer resorts on this coast. It also achieved some renown when in 1927 two French W.W.I aviation heroes attempted to make the first non-stop Paris to New York flight in their biplane “The White Bird.” They were last seen passing over Etretat. Today, on a cold, windy February day, the town was jammed. We had to park at a parking lot about a half-mile outside of town. I’d hate to see this place in the summer. But we were determined to get there, since we had lunch reservations. Our lunch, naturally enough, was at a seafood restaurant where we had the biggest shellfish lunch I have ever eaten. We had 4 huge platters of shellfish stacked one on top of another on a sort of multi-tiered trellis. We had oysters, langoustines, lobsters, two kinds of shrimp, two kinds of crab, two kinds of snails, etc. etc. We ate happily for about 2 ½ hours and then gave up. Marc was looking forward to cheese and desert, but the rest of us voted for coffee. After walking up and down the boardwalk for a while (where there was a plaque commemorating an English/US hospital in W.W.I and the liberation of the town by the Americans in 1944), we got into our cars and drove home…Marc and Therese to Gent, us to Brussels. It was about a 3½ hour drive. It was a long day. After swearing that we would never eat again, we had some soup and went to bed.
16 February. Monday:
I drove Beagle to the dentist this morning, where she is having a crown fitted after having had a root canal. Fun. She had a luncheon engagement after that, but I stayed home and tried to continue digesting yesterday’s lunch. When she came back we went shopping, went to gym and had dinner. Not much else going on. One cheery note…on our way back from the dentist we came across a group of city employees busily planting a ton of pansies and other spring flowers in the middle of a traffic circle. Spring is coming to Europe!
17 February, Tuesday:
The Belgian economy must be going in the tank. Today was rainy and gloomy, so to amuse myself I decided to take a trip to the post office to mail some stuff. As usual, I brought water, some reading material, etc., and prepared myself for a long wait and a productive afternoon of people watching. Imagine my surprise when I found the post office almost empty. Before I could even finish addressing one of my packages, my number was called and I found a sweet post office lady, who evidently had all the time in the world, waiting to serve me. What a shock! Not as much of a shock as what it cost me to mail my packages, but still a shock! Aurélie finally showed up today for a French class. I wasn’t feeling well and had a hard time concentrating…or at least that was the excuse I gave for messing up on the subjunctive.
All humans have a “flight or fight” response to certain threats (real or just perceived). We inherited this response from our ancestors who needed it when they were roaming the primitive savannahs or whatever. The general idea is that when they were startled or threatened in some way, their adrenal gland would pump out a great whacking dose of adrenaline which would get them ready to either flee or stick around and fight whatever was about to try to eat them. Modern humans still have this response. Sometimes it comes in times of real threat, or stress, and sometimes the adrenal gland just goes nuts and squirts out a dose of adrenaline for no particular reason, or for old times sake, or whatever. This appears to be the case with Beagle. Every once in a while, for no apparent reason, her adrenal gland squirts out a dose of adrenaline, which makes her blood pressure go through the roof. This makes everyone very anxious, and her doctors get very excited about getting her blood pressure down. What they have recently finally figured out is that to get her blood pressure down, the thing to do is to give her a great whacking dose of Valium or something like that to counteract the great whacking dose of adrenaline that her adrenal gland has just produced. This seems to work just fine. It takes a little while, but everything goes back to normal. So yesterday and today, in response to nothing in particular, her adrenal gland did its stuff and her blood pressure duly went through the roof. She tried calling her doctor, but couldn’t reach him, so we trundled off to Saint Peter’s hospital, which is within walking distance. It was an interesting experience. The hospital is in Marolles, a very poor part of Brussels with a big immigrant population. In the US, this kind of hospital would be mobbed with poor people getting primary care in the emergency room. Not here. I guess since everyone has medical care, they actually can get primary medical care from their doctor, not in the emergency room. In any event, the emergency room was almost empty. And at one point, when I held a door open for a couple of Asian women, they thanked me in English…they must have been tourists. We saw a series of doctors who all listened to Beagle’s description of the problem, took EKGs, chest X-Rays, etc., and after much consultation gave her a great whacking dose of Valium or its Belgian equivalent. This worked and we went home. However, unlike New York, where her doctor gives her one of these pills at a time, the Belgian doctors gave her a prescription for 40. Personally, I have had enough of doctors. I have completely recovered from my recent illness, helped a great deal by the fact that I have recently gone on the “rice pudding diet.” My new book on the subject will be coming out soon, but take it from me, it works. And it tastes great.
12 February, Thursday:
Today Beagle had to teach a “master class” in Antwerp. She asked if I wanted to drive her from Brussels to Antwerp, and then drive her from Antwerp to Gent for a dinner, and then from Gent back to Brussels. I decided that this “prince consort” stuff had gone too far, so I declined. Instead I stayed home, paid bills, went to gym, etc., and then took a train to Gent. This proved harder than expected. If you go on-line and ask to see the schedules for the trains from Brussels to Gent, they show dozens. But when you are at the station and look on the departure board for trains to Gent, there are very few. However I found a train that the departure board said was going to Gent, and went to the indicated track and waited. While waiting, I looked at the paper schedules posted there and discovered that while my train did indeed go to Gent, it stopped at about a dozen places first and took an hour. The reason it was listed on the departure board as going to Gent was that its last stop was Gent. I found another train that was going to Bruges, which stopped first at Gent, and that only took 30 minutes. So I took it, and only arrived about 30 minutes late for dinner. I was somewhat surprised that people seemed to be concerned that something had happened to me…apparently Beagle and others had tried calling me dozens of times and couldn’t get through. It subsequently turned out that Proximus, the main Belgian wireless phone network, had experienced a complete systems failure, and the whole system was totally non-operational for several hours. The dinner, at Peter Stabel’s house, was great. Lots of hilarity, great food, etc. There were some old friends there, including An and Guido, some new people, and a bunch of students. Peter is a colleague of Beagle’s who teaches at Antwerp but, of course, lives in Gent (conveniently close to the train station). We stayed too late and caught the last train back to Brussels from Gent with Claire.
13 February, Friday:
This morning we drove to Rouen, in Normandy in France, to meet Marc and Thérèse. This was a 3+ hour trip. We started late and wasted some time trying to find some place to have lunch en route, and ended up meeting Marc and Therese at a café in the middle of Rouen. We walked around a little and tried to visit the Beaux Arts museum, but the dragon who was guarding the entrance told us that we didn’t have enough time to see everything in the Beaux Arts museum and that we should go to the Ceramics museum instead. So we did. It was actually pretty good. It has a great collection of faience. We declined to visit the museum of ironwork, which apparently has a great collection of keys and hinges and other things made out of iron. We did, however, visit the site where Joan of Arc was burned to death, which now sports a big cross and lot of Joan of Arc memorabilia and monuments including a modern building which looks like it had a Polynesian architect, and a bustling outdoor market. That was the best part. After the museum we went to the bed and breakfast where we had booked rooms. It was on a hill overlooking the city, an easy walk from the city center, and like most of the houses in that neighborhood was totally invisible from the street…it was behind tall stone walls, and to get to it you had to walk up a long, narrow passage between two high walls. Inside the walls was a huge garden, a lovely house, etc., all with lovely views of the cathedral and the city, etc. The place is called Clos Jouvenet (named after a famous painter from Rouen) on rue Hyacinthe Langois (Hyacinthe used to be a French male name) and was fabulous. The woman who ran it was Belgian and as a teenager had been an exchange student in Huntington, West Virginia. She couldn’t have been nicer, the rooms were great, and the breakfasts were fabulous. Plus it cost about half of what a hotel would have cost. After we checked in we had about 15 minutes to get ready for dinner, since Marc had booked a table at a restaurant near the train station. He was anxious to get there since he and I had pre-ordered duck a la Rouennaise, a famous Rouennaise tradition. That is prepared by at least partially cooking a duck, removing the meat from the breast and the legs, putting everything else in a big silver press (sort of like a small wine press) and then cranking the handle of the press and squashing the stuff in the press until blood and other savory juices run out. That juice is then used as a base for a sauce that is spread over the duck meat that had been cooked some more. It was not the best duck I ever had, but the process was interesting and I have a certificate saying that we ate the 203,262nd Caneton Rouennais served at that restaurant.
14 February, Saturday:
We spent much of the morning walking around Rouen. It is a lovely city with lots of pedestrian-only streets and lots of medieval buildings…half-timbered (à colombard) buildings leaning in all directions at alarming angles. An Allied air raid shortly before D-Day did a lot of damage to Rouen, but some things have been restored, and a lot of very old stuff escaped damage, such as a quite spectacular building around a courtyard that housed a plague cemetery. The cathedral is just gorgeous, with a lovely lacey spire that is the tallest in France. We went into the Beaux Arts museum that, notwithstanding the dragon at the gate, was very nice. It has a very good collection of art from the ancient up until the impressionists, many of whom did a lot of painting in Rouen. We ate lunch in the museum and then, since it was a nice day, drove out of Rouen to visit the ruins of Chateau Gaillard. It was built by Richard the LionHeart in 1196 to protect his Norman lands. It is on a bluff overlooking the Seine and the site is quite spectacular, although most of the Chateau itself is in ruins or has been carted away. Based on the literature available at the site, it appears that it wasn’t a great defensive success since it appears to have been sacked multiple times, including by local builders who used it as a source of stone. On the way back we visited the ruins of an abbey and visited a small church that was supposed to have a lovely statue of Mary Magdalene. When we got to the church a priest (at least he said he was a priest) greeted us saying that the statue was now in Toulouse and that we had to hurry because he had six other churches to take care of and he was just about to close this one. However, he turned out to be Belgian, so we gave him the opportunity to speak Flemish and that made him happy. He gave us brochures about the church and then hustled us out. We made another detour on the way back to Rouen and parked on a spot with a view over a cliff of the entire city, and then went back to get ready for dinner. After making all sorts of comments about my beard, Beagle finally delivered the clincher when she told me that not only did it make me look like a homeless person but that it also made me look 15 years older. The beard was gone by dinnertime. There may be pictures available. Since it was Valentine’s Day, all of the restaurants were fully booked, but Marc had made a reservation at a very nice restaurant (Les Petits Parapluies) where we all had the Valentine’s Day menu, which was excellent, and then retreated to bed. Rouen is a lovely city, and is well worth visiting. The food was excellent, and even though it was the middle of February, there were signs of spring.
15 February, Sunday:
Today we got up relatively early, had a sumptuous breakfast, checked out of our B&B, and drove to the ruins of an abbey in Jumièges. Once again, a very impressive site…the ruins were in a big park with gardens, etc. Even with most of the original buildings gone, there was a lot left, and you got a real sense of what it was like. In good French tradition, after the Revolution the property was confiscated by the state and many of the buildings were torn down for building material, but at least they didn’t put a railroad line through this one. We went on from Jumièges to Etretat, a little fishing village on the sea. The town is on a relatively small, very rocky (small fist-sized rocks, not boulders) beach with huge chalk cliffs on either side. Over the centuries the sea has worn holes in the cliffs so there are natural arches in the cliffs on either side of the town, with one “leg” of each arch plunging into the sea. Apparently a lot of impressionists painted these cliffs, with the result that the town became famous and then became one of the first beach/summer resorts on this coast. It also achieved some renown when in 1927 two French W.W.I aviation heroes attempted to make the first non-stop Paris to New York flight in their biplane “The White Bird.” They were last seen passing over Etretat. Today, on a cold, windy February day, the town was jammed. We had to park at a parking lot about a half-mile outside of town. I’d hate to see this place in the summer. But we were determined to get there, since we had lunch reservations. Our lunch, naturally enough, was at a seafood restaurant where we had the biggest shellfish lunch I have ever eaten. We had 4 huge platters of shellfish stacked one on top of another on a sort of multi-tiered trellis. We had oysters, langoustines, lobsters, two kinds of shrimp, two kinds of crab, two kinds of snails, etc. etc. We ate happily for about 2 ½ hours and then gave up. Marc was looking forward to cheese and desert, but the rest of us voted for coffee. After walking up and down the boardwalk for a while (where there was a plaque commemorating an English/US hospital in W.W.I and the liberation of the town by the Americans in 1944), we got into our cars and drove home…Marc and Therese to Gent, us to Brussels. It was about a 3½ hour drive. It was a long day. After swearing that we would never eat again, we had some soup and went to bed.
16 February. Monday:
I drove Beagle to the dentist this morning, where she is having a crown fitted after having had a root canal. Fun. She had a luncheon engagement after that, but I stayed home and tried to continue digesting yesterday’s lunch. When she came back we went shopping, went to gym and had dinner. Not much else going on. One cheery note…on our way back from the dentist we came across a group of city employees busily planting a ton of pansies and other spring flowers in the middle of a traffic circle. Spring is coming to Europe!
17 February, Tuesday:
The Belgian economy must be going in the tank. Today was rainy and gloomy, so to amuse myself I decided to take a trip to the post office to mail some stuff. As usual, I brought water, some reading material, etc., and prepared myself for a long wait and a productive afternoon of people watching. Imagine my surprise when I found the post office almost empty. Before I could even finish addressing one of my packages, my number was called and I found a sweet post office lady, who evidently had all the time in the world, waiting to serve me. What a shock! Not as much of a shock as what it cost me to mail my packages, but still a shock! Aurélie finally showed up today for a French class. I wasn’t feeling well and had a hard time concentrating…or at least that was the excuse I gave for messing up on the subjunctive.
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
Week 14 - A boring week in which our trip to Paris is cancelled, I am sick but return to health, and I watch rugby
4 February, Wednesday:
A recovery day. We were supposed to be going to Paris today to spend some time with our friends Eric and Dana B. Baines and Wally…but Dana B. (who was coming to Paris as a birthday surprise for Eric) was in Toronto, also sick in bed, so our trip was postponed for a day. I bounded out of bed at a reasonable hour and had a hearty breakfast. Then I went back to bed until 6PM. Then I got up, did some e-mail, paid some bills, had a few poached eggs and went back to bed.
5 February, Thursday:
Our Paris trip has been cancelled. Dana B. Baines is still sick and is not coming, Eric is under the weather, and I am deemed to be too diseased to be pleasant company. Too bad. I was looking forward to it. I bounded out of bed again, had another hearty breakfast, and stayed up until about noon, when I took a 3 hour nap.
6 February, Friday:
Today was more of the same. I stayed home all day and read some, but mostly slept. My get up and go has got up and went.
7 February, Saturday:
This was a major day of recovery. I hardly took any naps, and indeed went to the market at Place Flagey and to the Delhaise supermarket…the first time outside since Monday. For some reason the market was twice as big as normal. There were lots of plants, which must mean that spring is coming. Admittedly, that jaunt completely wiped me out, but at least I didn’t spend the day in bed. There is a big “six nation” rugby tournament that started today (England, Wales, Ireland, Scotland, France, and Italy. What happened to the other nations of Europe, I don’t know. Perhaps the Germans don’t play rugby) and incredibly, it was on TV. I watched England beat Italy…both teams played badly, but Italy played worse. Then I watched Ireland beat France. That was a much better match. A higher quality of play, and either team could have won. This is really a tough sport. Makes football look like a game for wimps. Half the players are bleeding profusely by halftime, and when someone is injured, the game just goes on while they are stretched out on the field with medical people attending to them. The active players just try to avoid running over the ones who are on the ground, writhing in pain. More matches tomorrow. We watched a documentary on the Knights Templar. Sort of confusing, in that one of the principal people they interviewed was a descendant of Pope Clement…and I had always thought that Roman Catholic priests, not to mention popes, swore a vow of celibacy. Oh well. Compared to that revelation, the fact that the Knights Templar was a society of gay Christian warriors hardly seemed surprising.
8 February, Sunday:
I woke up this morning feeling good for a change. We went for a walk down to the Etangs d’Ixelles (the lakes near Place Flagey), walked through the Abbey of La Cambre. I guess it was once a real abbey, and perhaps is one again today, but in the late 1800s in a fit of anti-religious fervor it was turned into the Royal Belgian Military Academy. I guess after WWI it went back to being an abbey. We walked back along Avenue Louise, bought bread at Place Stephanie and went home. That did me in for the day. I collapsed and watched rugby again. It was Wales against Scotland this time. Wales is the defending champion, and was clearly the class act of the matches I’ve watched so far. They beat Scotland easily, although Scotland really came to life in the last 10 minutes of the match. This is a really fast moving, violent sport. For some reason the rules about injuries seemed to be different today than for yesterday’s games…today, when someone was knocked unconscious or was on all fours vomiting on the field, they tended to have an injury time out and sent all sorts of medical people and golf carts with stretchers out onto the field. Or perhaps it was just that the vomiting frequently happened when there were unconscious people scattered around and that the game only stops because of unconsciousness. There were a few times when the “color” announcer would sort of chuckle and say something like “I see that Smith is over there retching his guts out…must be nerves, ho ho.” The amazing thing is that several times players were really knocked out cold…no faking like in soccer…you could see them just go limp when they got a knee in the head or something and drop to the ground like a sack of potatoes. Then, after a few minutes of unconsciousness followed by a few minutes of staggering around the field looking totally disoriented, they would rejoin the game, never having actually left the field. I’m not sure of the rules of the game, but I believe that there can only be 15 players from each team on the field at a time (and fewer if a team is penalized) and there can only be only 7 substitutions per game. Once a player has left the game, he cannot re-enter the game (except, apparently, in cases of extreme bleeding…a player who is bleeding profusely can leave the game temporarily to get his wounds tended to). So there is a premium placed on people who can continue playing for 80 minutes even though they have been knocked silly. Some of the players are quite big, and some appear to be quite small. Some of the bigger guys have quite spectacular cauliflower ears. All appear to be tough and strong with amazing endurance and high levels of pain tolerance. Quite a sport. For some reason it is enormously popular in France, although it is not the kind of sport I would normally associate with the French. And to be fair, I think that the Welch and Scots and Irish and Brits only allow Italy and France to play because they need a few more teams to play against.
9 February, Monday:
Another false start. I got out of bed, had breakfast and felt fine. Then I went back to bed until noon. This has got to stop.
10 February, Tuesday:
There are 4 apartments in our building, including ours. We are on the ground floor and the first floor. The other apartments are on the second and third floors (3rd and 4th, in American terminology). The mailboxes of two of them now sport “Rep Suede” stickers, which I take to mean that they have been rented by the Swedish Government. We ran into one of the Swedes tonight in the hallway. His name, improbably, is Sven. He practically wore a sweater with reindeer on it. He is here for a year, and is living in the apartment on the top floor. We were on the way to gym, and he was on the way to his apartment. Sven said that he got his exercise by climbing up to his apartment. It looked to me as if he could use a few sessions on the elliptical machine as well. I was going to gym because I had decided that I was sick of being sick, and thus had declared today my day of returning to health. It seems to have worked out well. Other than loosing a few kilos, I am back to normal. And oh yes, I have given the beard a new try. As they say in French, I decided to “laisser pousser la barbe” while I was ill. We’ll see. Beagle is encouraging me, but she doesn’t think she’ll like it. I am going to try it for a few weeks, send out photos, and then shave it off. We also had French class scheduled today with Aurelie, but for some reason she failed to show up…and this is after many confirming e-mails, etc. Aurelie has so far bailed out of 3 out of 4 scheduled French classes. A better system has to be found. (Sorry about the lack of accents…for some reason Word decided today to crash every time I try to put an accent on a letter)
A recovery day. We were supposed to be going to Paris today to spend some time with our friends Eric and Dana B. Baines and Wally…but Dana B. (who was coming to Paris as a birthday surprise for Eric) was in Toronto, also sick in bed, so our trip was postponed for a day. I bounded out of bed at a reasonable hour and had a hearty breakfast. Then I went back to bed until 6PM. Then I got up, did some e-mail, paid some bills, had a few poached eggs and went back to bed.
5 February, Thursday:
Our Paris trip has been cancelled. Dana B. Baines is still sick and is not coming, Eric is under the weather, and I am deemed to be too diseased to be pleasant company. Too bad. I was looking forward to it. I bounded out of bed again, had another hearty breakfast, and stayed up until about noon, when I took a 3 hour nap.
6 February, Friday:
Today was more of the same. I stayed home all day and read some, but mostly slept. My get up and go has got up and went.
7 February, Saturday:
This was a major day of recovery. I hardly took any naps, and indeed went to the market at Place Flagey and to the Delhaise supermarket…the first time outside since Monday. For some reason the market was twice as big as normal. There were lots of plants, which must mean that spring is coming. Admittedly, that jaunt completely wiped me out, but at least I didn’t spend the day in bed. There is a big “six nation” rugby tournament that started today (England, Wales, Ireland, Scotland, France, and Italy. What happened to the other nations of Europe, I don’t know. Perhaps the Germans don’t play rugby) and incredibly, it was on TV. I watched England beat Italy…both teams played badly, but Italy played worse. Then I watched Ireland beat France. That was a much better match. A higher quality of play, and either team could have won. This is really a tough sport. Makes football look like a game for wimps. Half the players are bleeding profusely by halftime, and when someone is injured, the game just goes on while they are stretched out on the field with medical people attending to them. The active players just try to avoid running over the ones who are on the ground, writhing in pain. More matches tomorrow. We watched a documentary on the Knights Templar. Sort of confusing, in that one of the principal people they interviewed was a descendant of Pope Clement…and I had always thought that Roman Catholic priests, not to mention popes, swore a vow of celibacy. Oh well. Compared to that revelation, the fact that the Knights Templar was a society of gay Christian warriors hardly seemed surprising.
8 February, Sunday:
I woke up this morning feeling good for a change. We went for a walk down to the Etangs d’Ixelles (the lakes near Place Flagey), walked through the Abbey of La Cambre. I guess it was once a real abbey, and perhaps is one again today, but in the late 1800s in a fit of anti-religious fervor it was turned into the Royal Belgian Military Academy. I guess after WWI it went back to being an abbey. We walked back along Avenue Louise, bought bread at Place Stephanie and went home. That did me in for the day. I collapsed and watched rugby again. It was Wales against Scotland this time. Wales is the defending champion, and was clearly the class act of the matches I’ve watched so far. They beat Scotland easily, although Scotland really came to life in the last 10 minutes of the match. This is a really fast moving, violent sport. For some reason the rules about injuries seemed to be different today than for yesterday’s games…today, when someone was knocked unconscious or was on all fours vomiting on the field, they tended to have an injury time out and sent all sorts of medical people and golf carts with stretchers out onto the field. Or perhaps it was just that the vomiting frequently happened when there were unconscious people scattered around and that the game only stops because of unconsciousness. There were a few times when the “color” announcer would sort of chuckle and say something like “I see that Smith is over there retching his guts out…must be nerves, ho ho.” The amazing thing is that several times players were really knocked out cold…no faking like in soccer…you could see them just go limp when they got a knee in the head or something and drop to the ground like a sack of potatoes. Then, after a few minutes of unconsciousness followed by a few minutes of staggering around the field looking totally disoriented, they would rejoin the game, never having actually left the field. I’m not sure of the rules of the game, but I believe that there can only be 15 players from each team on the field at a time (and fewer if a team is penalized) and there can only be only 7 substitutions per game. Once a player has left the game, he cannot re-enter the game (except, apparently, in cases of extreme bleeding…a player who is bleeding profusely can leave the game temporarily to get his wounds tended to). So there is a premium placed on people who can continue playing for 80 minutes even though they have been knocked silly. Some of the players are quite big, and some appear to be quite small. Some of the bigger guys have quite spectacular cauliflower ears. All appear to be tough and strong with amazing endurance and high levels of pain tolerance. Quite a sport. For some reason it is enormously popular in France, although it is not the kind of sport I would normally associate with the French. And to be fair, I think that the Welch and Scots and Irish and Brits only allow Italy and France to play because they need a few more teams to play against.
9 February, Monday:
Another false start. I got out of bed, had breakfast and felt fine. Then I went back to bed until noon. This has got to stop.
10 February, Tuesday:
There are 4 apartments in our building, including ours. We are on the ground floor and the first floor. The other apartments are on the second and third floors (3rd and 4th, in American terminology). The mailboxes of two of them now sport “Rep Suede” stickers, which I take to mean that they have been rented by the Swedish Government. We ran into one of the Swedes tonight in the hallway. His name, improbably, is Sven. He practically wore a sweater with reindeer on it. He is here for a year, and is living in the apartment on the top floor. We were on the way to gym, and he was on the way to his apartment. Sven said that he got his exercise by climbing up to his apartment. It looked to me as if he could use a few sessions on the elliptical machine as well. I was going to gym because I had decided that I was sick of being sick, and thus had declared today my day of returning to health. It seems to have worked out well. Other than loosing a few kilos, I am back to normal. And oh yes, I have given the beard a new try. As they say in French, I decided to “laisser pousser la barbe” while I was ill. We’ll see. Beagle is encouraging me, but she doesn’t think she’ll like it. I am going to try it for a few weeks, send out photos, and then shave it off. We also had French class scheduled today with Aurelie, but for some reason she failed to show up…and this is after many confirming e-mails, etc. Aurelie has so far bailed out of 3 out of 4 scheduled French classes. A better system has to be found. (Sorry about the lack of accents…for some reason Word decided today to crash every time I try to put an accent on a letter)
Thursday, February 5, 2009
Week 13 - In which I hobnob with bigwigs in DC, spend time with William, have the trip from Hell back to Brussels and get the flu
28 January, Wednesday:
Today was a travel day. I took a Virgin flight to DC, arrived late in the afternoon, had an early dinner, and went to bed. I am staying in a new “boutique” hotel very close to American Rivers’ offices. As far as I can tell, “boutique” means a décor featuring lots of brown and beige fabrics, artistic touches like a gas fire in the lobby, a circular shower stall, and very artistic lighting which was very nice to look at but actually provided almost no light. The corridors feature dark brown carpets and walls, and such dim light that you practically need a flashlight to read the room numbers. I stumble around in my room, trying to find a light bright enough to read the buttons on the TV remote. Oh well. It is convenient and we got a good deal.
29 January, Thursday:
It was Beagle’s birthday today. It would be easier to call her and wish her happy birthday if (a) she knew how to answer the phone in our apartment, (b) if she carried her European cell phone with her and/or (c) if she could hear her US cell phone when it was ringing. Today was a day of American Rivers committee meetings, pre-Board meeting meetings, an orientation session for new Board members, and a dinner with new Board members. Dinner was in a very fancy Italian restaurant featuring a swarm of waiters who gave us a huge menu, told us about all sorts of special offerings, and told us that in addition to that, we could order anything we wanted. No matter what anyone ordered, it all seemed to come bathed in some sort of red sauce. Not my favorite.
30 January, Friday:
More committee meetings this morning, and the actual Board meeting started at noon. Usual stuff. We had dinner in a big and very nice room at Clyde’s of Chinatown (a former American Rivers’ board member owns Clyde’s, and she hosts us). We were honoring our Vice-Chair, a very nice man named David Hayes, who has just been named Deputy Secretary of the Interior, a position he also held in the Clinton Administration. He had wanted to be Secretary of the Interior, but he made the mistake of being an early and devoted backer of Hillary, so the guy with the big hat (Ken Salazar) got that job. On my left at dinner was Bruce Babbitt, former Governor of Arizona and former Secretary of the Interior under Clinton. On my right were Mark Shields, the columnist and TV commentator, and his wife Anne, who is an American Rivers Board member. Across the table were David Hayes and his wife. Plus Rebecca Wodder, the President of American Rivers, and Jeff Mount, a new director who is a professor at UC Davis. It was an interesting conversation. Lots of inside politics, lots of discussion of personalities, etc., but not all that much that you hadn’t read in the newspapers. I was told that David Brooks (Mark Shields’ conservative counterpoint on PBS) is a nice guy who is very intelligent, respects intelligence, and therefore has been distressed by the Republican party’s anti-intellectual bent, in particular as it has been embodied in Bush. He is conservative, but while from time to time he has views that it would seem hard for an intelligent person to support, in general he is pretty reasonable. However, every once in a while he expresses views that are not considered to be conservative enough, and then he gets taken to the woodshed and given what for by the powers that be in the Republican party who remind him that he is supposed to be representing a conservative viewpoint. In his next few columns/TV appearances, he tends to take a more conservative position! Bruce Babbitt is a nice guy with a good sense of humor, and someone who likes to kid people and doesn’t mind being kidded himself. But he also has a well-developed ego, and even though he has been out of politics for quite some time, he still sees himself as a political power, and makes sure that you understand that! All in all it was an interesting evening.
31 January, Saturday:
Our Board meeting continued, starting at 8 AM. After the meeting we went to the National Museum of the American Indian for a ceremony. One of our Board members is a guy named Ray Gardner, who is the Chief of the Chinook Nation. He had carved a traditional Chinook canoe paddle and was giving it to the museum. There was quite a moving ceremony where ancestors were invoked, etc. and the paddle was handed over. One interesting part was hearing about the history of the Chinook Nation, which consists of 5 tribes. The Chinooks welcomed Lewis and Clark when they got to the West Coast in 1805-1806, and helped them keep from starving. At some point in the sorry history of the federal government’s dealing with Native Americans, the Chinooks were decertified as a “recognized” tribe…supposedly on the theory that there were none of them left. This came as a surprise to the surviving Chinooks, who felt pretty much alive. Federal recognition of a tribe apparently has all sorts of financial consequences, as well as emotional ones. After years of battling, the Chinooks got federal recognition in 2001, but in 2002 the federal government rescinded that recognition. There are hopes that the new administration will be more sympathetic. After the ceremony, I wandered around the museum for a while, and then walked back to my hotel, and then met William for dinner. We had a nice dinner in a very Washington type of restaurant. It was very good, with an interesting wine and beer list, and a quite imaginative menu…tripe, etc. Sort of what you’d expect in a bistro in Brussels, not DC. But the restaurant was just off the lobby of a “Courtyard by Marriot” and a sign on the door said they were closing at 10 PM. On Saturday night. Washington is an interesting city. Perhaps with Obama in charge things will be different, but I did note that on Saturday night at 10PM, the streets on the way back to my hotel the streets were deserted.
1 February, Sunday:
I got up at a reasonable hour and went out for breakfast. I walked for about 4 blocks and saw no one except for some homeless people at a church. And this is a reasonably residential neighborhood…at least there are dozens of buildings advertising apartments for sale and rent. Perhaps they’re all empty. After breakfast I packed and checked out and then walked to 6th and E to meet William. He gave me a tour of his “chambers” and of the courtroom, which is some sort of federal historic site. It was quite impressive. Like the Supreme Court. We then walked on the Mall for a while, returned to Chinatown for lunch (Japanese), and then walked from one end of the Mall to the other and back again. It was a lovely day…very warm, but there was still ice in the reflecting pools, etc. We went into the National Botanical Gardens (or something like that…near the Capitol, anyway), with a tropical jungle inside, and then went to the Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. We went into the museum to use the bathroom after visiting the sculpture garden, but stayed to look at some of the museum exhibits. This was neat. Sculptures by Louise Borgeois (gigantic metal spiders), Rodin, Giacometti, Magritte, etc., and paintings by all sorts of people. Quite a collection. We were impressed. We then walked back to my hotel, retrieved my bags, stuffed them full of peanut butter for Beagle and I got a taxi to the airport. It was nice to see William, even though he walked my legs off. I had a flight to London, and was then going to go directly from Heathrow to Saint Pancras Station in London to catch a Eurostar train for Brussels. My plane left on time and was only partly full, and once we took off the seat next to me was vacant, so I had high hopes for an easy trip back to Brussels. That turned out to be wrong.
2 February, Monday:
This turned out to be the trip from hell. Shortly after takeoff, the pilot informed us that although the weather in London was bad, he expected that we’d land early. That sounded good, because I only had a little less than 3 hours between our expected arrival time in London and the departure time of my Eurostar train for Brussels. I thought that might be a little tight, but with an on-time arrival I figured I would have no problems. Intimations of disaster were felt when, against my better judgment, I ate the dinner they served me on the plane. Within seconds of finishing, my stomach was sending off distress signals. I figured that it was just a spot of food poisoning and that I would soon recover. Then I discovered why my seatmate had moved…a large metal box that was bolted to the floor mostly filled the space underneath the seat next to me, leaving no legroom. So I twisted and squirmed through the entire flight, trying to get comfortable. I never did. As we got closer to London I started feeling worse and worse, and the pilot started making dire predictions. He said that the weather in London was quite nasty, and that there was about an inch of snow. That might, he said, cause us a delay of over an hour and a half. Then he reduced that to an hour, then 30 minutes. Then an hour again. The pilot kept telling us not to worry because we had enough fuel to get to Cardiff if necessary. That was reassuring. It’s sort of like flying from NYC to Chicago and being told you have enough fuel to get to Wilkes-Barre. Cardiff? You mean the one in Wales? Does it even have an airport? And what do you do once you have been lucky enough to land there? Then, suddenly, something must have happened because the pilot announced we were landing, which we did in a cloud of snow and zero visibility. Heathrow was a winter wonderland. Snow everywhere, and not a snowplow to be seen. There was what looked to be about 3” of snow, and absolutely nothing had been plowed. It took us quite a while to get to our gate because, as the pilot said, it was quite slippery out there. Apparently he knew what he was talking about, because shortly after we landed, another plane slid off the runway and they closed the airport entirely. But we made it to our gate, only 45 minutes late. Not bad, thought I, there is still a chance of catching that train. But then we had about a 30 minute wait on the plane because the jetway was full of snow and they had to clean it out before we could disembark. I have no idea how they cleaned it out, since there are evidently no snow shovels in England, but somehow they managed. Judging from the looks of the ground crew standing around blowing on their fingers, I suspect they used their bare hands. I survived the normal Bataan death march from the plane to immigration, a standard ritual designed to separate out the weak from the fit to make sure than none of the former made it into Britain, and smiled sweetly at the immigration officer who laughed at me when I told him I was trying to catch a 10AM Eurostar. He knew more than I did, because after a 30 minute wait at the baggage claim, a Virgin Air spokesman appeared and told us that the little baggage truck which had been hauling the baggage wagons from the plane to the terminal had gotten stuck in the snow, and that they were going to have to transfer our bags from the plane to the terminal one wagon at a time. Since I had checked in early, that meant that my bag was among the first to be loaded onto the plane and thus among the last to appear on the baggage carousel…and to think that in my Master of the Universe days I had a rule of never checking baggage! Feeling weaker by the moment, and with my baggage feeling heavier, I lurched through the terminal towards the Heathrow Express, a train that takes you to Paddington Station in London in 15 minutes. None of the ticket vending machines were operating, and the woman at the information/ticket booth announced that no Heathrow Express trains were running and that she wouldn’t sell any tickets. At this point, I resigned myself to a longer than planned stay in London, and just joined the docile mob standing on the platform hoping that something would happen. After a flurry of announcements, some automated, some made by a real human, all contradictory, it became clear that the next Heathrow Express train would turn up sometime in the spring. Then, magically, a train appeared. This, it turned out, was not a “Heathrow Express,” which would take us directly to Paddington. It was instead a “Heathrow Connect” which would take us to Paddington while making a few other stops on the way. We all got on, and the train proceeded without delay to just outside of Paddington where it stopped for 45 minutes because of “traffic congestion” entering Paddington. About every 5 minutes there was an automated announcement telling us all to have our tickets ready for the agent to collect, but since no one had bought a ticket, the ticket agent had the good sense to stay locked in his little closet. Needless to say everyone on the train was using their cell phones all the time, so within a few minutes I had overheard that London was essentially paralyzed. No busses were running. Only half of the tube lines seemed to be running, and service was sporadic on those that were operating. And, of course, there were no snow plows or shovels in London, so the streets and sidewalks were a mess. Having learned this, I was happy to only have to wait 45 minutes in the taxi line to get a cab from Paddington to Saint Pancras. By observing the amount of snow on taxi roofs, I would guess that London had gotten between 2” and 6” of snow, depending on what part of the city you were in. By the time I got to Saint Pancras I had missed my original train by a good 2 – 3 hours, and Saint Pancras, needless to say, was a zoo. The Eurostar trains were running normally, but everyone had missed their train. So I had another 45 minute wait in line to get my ticket changed. Miraculously enough I was able to get on the next train for Brussels, and they honored my existing no-exchanges, no-modification ticket with not even a blink. The Eurostar trip itself was a non-event, except for a long stop on either side of the Channel Tunnel to deal with unspecified “technical issues.” That only cost us 35 minutes, nothing compared to the other delays of the day. I was happy to get back to Brussels, unpacked Beagle’s peanut butter, and took a nap. Beagle had to go to something at the Academy with Marc and Thérèse, so while they did that I snoozed, took a shower and made myself presentable, and then met them at Saint-Boniface for dinner. That did not prove to be a success. I made it part way through a green salad and then had to leave. The flu had struck.
3 February, Tuesday:
A sick day. I stayed in bed all day while my stomach did a good impression of Mount Krakatoa in full eruption. If the body is normally 95% water, I must be down to 35%. What a way to loose weight.
Today was a travel day. I took a Virgin flight to DC, arrived late in the afternoon, had an early dinner, and went to bed. I am staying in a new “boutique” hotel very close to American Rivers’ offices. As far as I can tell, “boutique” means a décor featuring lots of brown and beige fabrics, artistic touches like a gas fire in the lobby, a circular shower stall, and very artistic lighting which was very nice to look at but actually provided almost no light. The corridors feature dark brown carpets and walls, and such dim light that you practically need a flashlight to read the room numbers. I stumble around in my room, trying to find a light bright enough to read the buttons on the TV remote. Oh well. It is convenient and we got a good deal.
29 January, Thursday:
It was Beagle’s birthday today. It would be easier to call her and wish her happy birthday if (a) she knew how to answer the phone in our apartment, (b) if she carried her European cell phone with her and/or (c) if she could hear her US cell phone when it was ringing. Today was a day of American Rivers committee meetings, pre-Board meeting meetings, an orientation session for new Board members, and a dinner with new Board members. Dinner was in a very fancy Italian restaurant featuring a swarm of waiters who gave us a huge menu, told us about all sorts of special offerings, and told us that in addition to that, we could order anything we wanted. No matter what anyone ordered, it all seemed to come bathed in some sort of red sauce. Not my favorite.
30 January, Friday:
More committee meetings this morning, and the actual Board meeting started at noon. Usual stuff. We had dinner in a big and very nice room at Clyde’s of Chinatown (a former American Rivers’ board member owns Clyde’s, and she hosts us). We were honoring our Vice-Chair, a very nice man named David Hayes, who has just been named Deputy Secretary of the Interior, a position he also held in the Clinton Administration. He had wanted to be Secretary of the Interior, but he made the mistake of being an early and devoted backer of Hillary, so the guy with the big hat (Ken Salazar) got that job. On my left at dinner was Bruce Babbitt, former Governor of Arizona and former Secretary of the Interior under Clinton. On my right were Mark Shields, the columnist and TV commentator, and his wife Anne, who is an American Rivers Board member. Across the table were David Hayes and his wife. Plus Rebecca Wodder, the President of American Rivers, and Jeff Mount, a new director who is a professor at UC Davis. It was an interesting conversation. Lots of inside politics, lots of discussion of personalities, etc., but not all that much that you hadn’t read in the newspapers. I was told that David Brooks (Mark Shields’ conservative counterpoint on PBS) is a nice guy who is very intelligent, respects intelligence, and therefore has been distressed by the Republican party’s anti-intellectual bent, in particular as it has been embodied in Bush. He is conservative, but while from time to time he has views that it would seem hard for an intelligent person to support, in general he is pretty reasonable. However, every once in a while he expresses views that are not considered to be conservative enough, and then he gets taken to the woodshed and given what for by the powers that be in the Republican party who remind him that he is supposed to be representing a conservative viewpoint. In his next few columns/TV appearances, he tends to take a more conservative position! Bruce Babbitt is a nice guy with a good sense of humor, and someone who likes to kid people and doesn’t mind being kidded himself. But he also has a well-developed ego, and even though he has been out of politics for quite some time, he still sees himself as a political power, and makes sure that you understand that! All in all it was an interesting evening.
31 January, Saturday:
Our Board meeting continued, starting at 8 AM. After the meeting we went to the National Museum of the American Indian for a ceremony. One of our Board members is a guy named Ray Gardner, who is the Chief of the Chinook Nation. He had carved a traditional Chinook canoe paddle and was giving it to the museum. There was quite a moving ceremony where ancestors were invoked, etc. and the paddle was handed over. One interesting part was hearing about the history of the Chinook Nation, which consists of 5 tribes. The Chinooks welcomed Lewis and Clark when they got to the West Coast in 1805-1806, and helped them keep from starving. At some point in the sorry history of the federal government’s dealing with Native Americans, the Chinooks were decertified as a “recognized” tribe…supposedly on the theory that there were none of them left. This came as a surprise to the surviving Chinooks, who felt pretty much alive. Federal recognition of a tribe apparently has all sorts of financial consequences, as well as emotional ones. After years of battling, the Chinooks got federal recognition in 2001, but in 2002 the federal government rescinded that recognition. There are hopes that the new administration will be more sympathetic. After the ceremony, I wandered around the museum for a while, and then walked back to my hotel, and then met William for dinner. We had a nice dinner in a very Washington type of restaurant. It was very good, with an interesting wine and beer list, and a quite imaginative menu…tripe, etc. Sort of what you’d expect in a bistro in Brussels, not DC. But the restaurant was just off the lobby of a “Courtyard by Marriot” and a sign on the door said they were closing at 10 PM. On Saturday night. Washington is an interesting city. Perhaps with Obama in charge things will be different, but I did note that on Saturday night at 10PM, the streets on the way back to my hotel the streets were deserted.
1 February, Sunday:
I got up at a reasonable hour and went out for breakfast. I walked for about 4 blocks and saw no one except for some homeless people at a church. And this is a reasonably residential neighborhood…at least there are dozens of buildings advertising apartments for sale and rent. Perhaps they’re all empty. After breakfast I packed and checked out and then walked to 6th and E to meet William. He gave me a tour of his “chambers” and of the courtroom, which is some sort of federal historic site. It was quite impressive. Like the Supreme Court. We then walked on the Mall for a while, returned to Chinatown for lunch (Japanese), and then walked from one end of the Mall to the other and back again. It was a lovely day…very warm, but there was still ice in the reflecting pools, etc. We went into the National Botanical Gardens (or something like that…near the Capitol, anyway), with a tropical jungle inside, and then went to the Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. We went into the museum to use the bathroom after visiting the sculpture garden, but stayed to look at some of the museum exhibits. This was neat. Sculptures by Louise Borgeois (gigantic metal spiders), Rodin, Giacometti, Magritte, etc., and paintings by all sorts of people. Quite a collection. We were impressed. We then walked back to my hotel, retrieved my bags, stuffed them full of peanut butter for Beagle and I got a taxi to the airport. It was nice to see William, even though he walked my legs off. I had a flight to London, and was then going to go directly from Heathrow to Saint Pancras Station in London to catch a Eurostar train for Brussels. My plane left on time and was only partly full, and once we took off the seat next to me was vacant, so I had high hopes for an easy trip back to Brussels. That turned out to be wrong.
2 February, Monday:
This turned out to be the trip from hell. Shortly after takeoff, the pilot informed us that although the weather in London was bad, he expected that we’d land early. That sounded good, because I only had a little less than 3 hours between our expected arrival time in London and the departure time of my Eurostar train for Brussels. I thought that might be a little tight, but with an on-time arrival I figured I would have no problems. Intimations of disaster were felt when, against my better judgment, I ate the dinner they served me on the plane. Within seconds of finishing, my stomach was sending off distress signals. I figured that it was just a spot of food poisoning and that I would soon recover. Then I discovered why my seatmate had moved…a large metal box that was bolted to the floor mostly filled the space underneath the seat next to me, leaving no legroom. So I twisted and squirmed through the entire flight, trying to get comfortable. I never did. As we got closer to London I started feeling worse and worse, and the pilot started making dire predictions. He said that the weather in London was quite nasty, and that there was about an inch of snow. That might, he said, cause us a delay of over an hour and a half. Then he reduced that to an hour, then 30 minutes. Then an hour again. The pilot kept telling us not to worry because we had enough fuel to get to Cardiff if necessary. That was reassuring. It’s sort of like flying from NYC to Chicago and being told you have enough fuel to get to Wilkes-Barre. Cardiff? You mean the one in Wales? Does it even have an airport? And what do you do once you have been lucky enough to land there? Then, suddenly, something must have happened because the pilot announced we were landing, which we did in a cloud of snow and zero visibility. Heathrow was a winter wonderland. Snow everywhere, and not a snowplow to be seen. There was what looked to be about 3” of snow, and absolutely nothing had been plowed. It took us quite a while to get to our gate because, as the pilot said, it was quite slippery out there. Apparently he knew what he was talking about, because shortly after we landed, another plane slid off the runway and they closed the airport entirely. But we made it to our gate, only 45 minutes late. Not bad, thought I, there is still a chance of catching that train. But then we had about a 30 minute wait on the plane because the jetway was full of snow and they had to clean it out before we could disembark. I have no idea how they cleaned it out, since there are evidently no snow shovels in England, but somehow they managed. Judging from the looks of the ground crew standing around blowing on their fingers, I suspect they used their bare hands. I survived the normal Bataan death march from the plane to immigration, a standard ritual designed to separate out the weak from the fit to make sure than none of the former made it into Britain, and smiled sweetly at the immigration officer who laughed at me when I told him I was trying to catch a 10AM Eurostar. He knew more than I did, because after a 30 minute wait at the baggage claim, a Virgin Air spokesman appeared and told us that the little baggage truck which had been hauling the baggage wagons from the plane to the terminal had gotten stuck in the snow, and that they were going to have to transfer our bags from the plane to the terminal one wagon at a time. Since I had checked in early, that meant that my bag was among the first to be loaded onto the plane and thus among the last to appear on the baggage carousel…and to think that in my Master of the Universe days I had a rule of never checking baggage! Feeling weaker by the moment, and with my baggage feeling heavier, I lurched through the terminal towards the Heathrow Express, a train that takes you to Paddington Station in London in 15 minutes. None of the ticket vending machines were operating, and the woman at the information/ticket booth announced that no Heathrow Express trains were running and that she wouldn’t sell any tickets. At this point, I resigned myself to a longer than planned stay in London, and just joined the docile mob standing on the platform hoping that something would happen. After a flurry of announcements, some automated, some made by a real human, all contradictory, it became clear that the next Heathrow Express train would turn up sometime in the spring. Then, magically, a train appeared. This, it turned out, was not a “Heathrow Express,” which would take us directly to Paddington. It was instead a “Heathrow Connect” which would take us to Paddington while making a few other stops on the way. We all got on, and the train proceeded without delay to just outside of Paddington where it stopped for 45 minutes because of “traffic congestion” entering Paddington. About every 5 minutes there was an automated announcement telling us all to have our tickets ready for the agent to collect, but since no one had bought a ticket, the ticket agent had the good sense to stay locked in his little closet. Needless to say everyone on the train was using their cell phones all the time, so within a few minutes I had overheard that London was essentially paralyzed. No busses were running. Only half of the tube lines seemed to be running, and service was sporadic on those that were operating. And, of course, there were no snow plows or shovels in London, so the streets and sidewalks were a mess. Having learned this, I was happy to only have to wait 45 minutes in the taxi line to get a cab from Paddington to Saint Pancras. By observing the amount of snow on taxi roofs, I would guess that London had gotten between 2” and 6” of snow, depending on what part of the city you were in. By the time I got to Saint Pancras I had missed my original train by a good 2 – 3 hours, and Saint Pancras, needless to say, was a zoo. The Eurostar trains were running normally, but everyone had missed their train. So I had another 45 minute wait in line to get my ticket changed. Miraculously enough I was able to get on the next train for Brussels, and they honored my existing no-exchanges, no-modification ticket with not even a blink. The Eurostar trip itself was a non-event, except for a long stop on either side of the Channel Tunnel to deal with unspecified “technical issues.” That only cost us 35 minutes, nothing compared to the other delays of the day. I was happy to get back to Brussels, unpacked Beagle’s peanut butter, and took a nap. Beagle had to go to something at the Academy with Marc and Thérèse, so while they did that I snoozed, took a shower and made myself presentable, and then met them at Saint-Boniface for dinner. That did not prove to be a success. I made it part way through a green salad and then had to leave. The flu had struck.
3 February, Tuesday:
A sick day. I stayed in bed all day while my stomach did a good impression of Mount Krakatoa in full eruption. If the body is normally 95% water, I must be down to 35%. What a way to loose weight.
Sunday, February 1, 2009
Week 12 - In which Chirac is mauled by his dog, I go to the Magritte Museum, we go to 2 dinner parties and I go to Washington
21 January, Wednesday:
Belgians really believe that chocolate is a health food, and they eat a lot of it. Our supermarket has an entire aisle dedicated to chocolate. In the dried cereal section, about half of the cereals are chocolate, or have chocolate in them. There is even a chocolate version of Special K! As far as I can tell, Belgians start the day with chocolate at breakfast and go on from there. But, as a friend of ours said, at least they don’t eat mashed peanuts on bread! The news of the day is that former President Chirac of France was attacked and “savaged” so badly by his wife’s white Maltese dog that he had to be taken to the hospital. According to Madame Chirac, the dog is clinically depressed and is being medicated. I guess going from life as top dog in the Elysée Palace to an apartment in Paris without much to do is depressing. And think how the dog must feel.
22 January, Thursday:
Beagle had to give a paper at a seminar in Lille. She offered me the opportunity of driving her there, sitting around for a few hours and driving her back to Brussels, but I declined. She took the train and I stayed home. I had planned to walk to the Magritte Museum, a nice long walk, but decided against it because the weather was foul…cold, windy and raining. Instead I took the metro, and I’m glad I did. There is a new Magritte Museum opening up in the middle of Brussels this summer, but the existing museum is in Jette, well to the north of the center of town. I knew I was in the boondocks when the metro started to run above ground, and when I got out, the look and the feel of the place was exactly like that of Queens…street after street of small 3-storey houses with a few big avenues full of 4-storey houses and shops. The museum itself is in a small house that Magritte and his wife and dog lived in from 1930 until 1954, when he finally started making some money. There was a tiny sign on the door that said “Musée Magritte” and another sign that told me to ring the bell twice. I did, and waited a while. Then a young woman arrived, ushered me into the house and gave me instructions on how the museum was laid out. The ground floor of the house is the apartment he rented and lived in, and that was preserved pretty much as it had been in the 1950’s, with furniture, etc. Plus a stuffed dog on the bed. The apartment was tiny, with a small living room, a bedroom, a small dining room/studio, a tiny kitchen and a tiny bathroom. To get from the living room to the dining room, you had to walk through the bedroom, etc. There was also a small garden and a “studio” at the end of the garden that Magritte evidently never used. He liked working in the dining room, which was warm, and keeping an eye on his wife. The upper floors of the house, which were occupied by other tenants in Magritte’s day, had been turned into an exposition of things from Magritte’s life and work…paintings, drawings, a lot of photographs, letters, pamphlets, etc. To get there you had to put on little booties (to protect the floor) and go up a narrow staircase that appears in some of Magritte’s paintings. The exhibition was more or less in chronological order and was quite interesting. The young lady had given me a couple of laminated sheets that explained what was in each room and in each display case, which helped a lot. There were a bunch of photographs of Magritte, and interestingly enough for an avant garde artist living in poverty in a tiny apartment in a tenement in a depressed suburb of Brussels, he was always dressed in a suit and tie with a hat, looking like a prosperous Brussels merchant. The young lady told me that I could also go to the top floor of the house to look in a room that had been used in Magritte’s day for storage and which now was used for, well, storage of some of his things, including his tuba. I went to take a look, and sure enough there was a tuba and some other stuff. There were also 3 other young ladies crammed into two tiny little offices banging away on computers. I have no idea what they were doing. There were only 3 visitors to the museum while I was there, including me, so they couldn’t have been counting the day’s receipts. Beagle says that it is almost impossible to get permission to use copies of Magritte’s work in books, etc., so perhaps they were busy with copyright matters. Who knows? I went home in the wind and the rain and Beagle arrived shortly thereafter from Lille. Having no food in the house, we went out to dinner at Saint-Boniface, a French restaurant in our neighborhood that we wanted to try. It was excellent…perhaps the best all around dining experience we have had so far in Brussels. The restaurant is Lyonnais in style, specializing in cassoulet, tripe, etc. Beagle had Lyonnais sausage with lentils (I almost fell off my chair when she ordered this, but she claimed she wanted the lentils) and I had duck with carrot stoemp. Both were excellent.
23 January, Friday:
We had finished our French classes before Christmas, but were concerned that we weren’t getting enough French practice, so we got in touch with Aurélie, our teacher from the French school to see if she would be willing to give us private lessons. She was, and although there were a few delays (she got sick for a week, her upstairs neighbor’s bathtub overflowed and flooded her apartment, etc.), we started our new regime today with a 3-hour class, which Beagle and I split. The class went pretty well…there was not much difference between this class and the ones we had at the school, except for the fact that she comes to us instead of the other way around and the class is less expensive. Hmmm.
24 January, Saturday:
For once our day started reasonably early. We had breakfast, got the #94 tram to the end at the Herrmann-Debroux metro stop, on the border between Auderghem and Watermael-Boistfort, and took a long walk in the forêt des Soignes. The only unusual thing about the walk was that we kept hearing almost continuous noise of police sirens in the distance. What that was all about, we never discovered. After a couple hours of walking we ended up in the village of Watermael-Boitsfort, split a pizza and took the tram home. We had been invited to dinner by Steven Blockmans and his girlfriend, Dana Vackova. Steven is the son of some Belgian friends…he has visited us in NYC several times, most recently with Dana in the fall of 2007. They live in Saint-Gilles, quite close to where we lived when we were in Brussels in 2002/2003, but are hopefully moving to Auderghem this summer, very close to where our walk started this morning. The dinner was fabulous, we behaved ourselves and had a good time.
25 January, Sunday:
Another dinner tonight, this time at our old friends Walter and Frieda Prevenier’s, in Sint-Martens Latem, just outside of Gent. They had assembled an interesting group…some people we knew (including a guy named Jim Murray from Kalamazoo who happened to be in the neighborhood), but several we had never met before, including a man from the University of Gent who has taught classes at Columbia in the summer. And I thought we knew everyone from the University of Gent! One really nice man was in the bread business…his company makes ingredients that bread-baking companies put in their bread. I had never thought of the bread business as a scientific/chemical undertaking, but I guess it is. He had just come back from China and Japan, and was in the US at McDonald’s University (yes, the hamburger people) during the US elections. The dinner was wonderful, as usual with Walter and Frieda. Excellent food and all sorts of wines, several chosen to match peoples’ birth years…1961, 1973, etc. Walter regretted that he didn’t have any 1945 left. We had drunk all of that at a previous dinner celebrating my birthday! The dinner started promptly at 7 PM and lasted until midnight. We drove back to Brussels with no incident other than the fact that at one point we passed an accident that appeared to have just happened, with cars spread all over the road. Fortunately it looked as if no one had been hurt…not the norm for late night accidents on highways in Belgium.
26 January, Monday:
This morning Beagle had an appointment with her Belgian dentist for the 2nd of 4 appointments for a root canal. Yuck. I drove her to her appointment and read the New Yorker while the dentist accomplished in one session what it normally takes a US dentist 3 appointments to do. The other excitement was that Beagle had a student from the US drop by for advice on a job talk, etc., and we started planning for a 2-day trip to Paris next week. I have to leave tomorrow to go to Washington for a board meeting, and return on Monday of next week, just in time to go to Paris for 2 days where we’ll meet up with some old friends of Beagle’s from Georgetown…Eric Margolis and Wally Niendorf. Eric, in addition to being a Canadian drug magnate (as in vitamin pills and various totally legal vitamin supplements) and political correspondent and author and political pundit (he is on CNN all the time due to his expertise on India, Pakistan, the Balkans, Osama Bin Laden, and the Maginot Line, etc.) is very entertaining. It should be fun, since we will be celebrating the birthdays of Beagle, Eric and Wally. To make it even better, the lovely Dana B. Baines, Eric’s former long-term girlfriend and new wife, has managed to arrange a free apartment for us to stay in while we are in Paris. Dana B. somehow has clout with a company that owns a lot of fancy Paris apartments, and she has gotten us a free apartment for our visit to Paris.
27 January, Tuesday:
This afternoon I took the Eurostar to London on the first leg of a trip to Washington DC for an American Rivers board meeting. Stayed in my “usual” hotel (cheap but perfectly nice, and patronized by me and flight crews from lots of Asian airlines), had a few beers at the Windsor Castle and an early dinner.
Belgians really believe that chocolate is a health food, and they eat a lot of it. Our supermarket has an entire aisle dedicated to chocolate. In the dried cereal section, about half of the cereals are chocolate, or have chocolate in them. There is even a chocolate version of Special K! As far as I can tell, Belgians start the day with chocolate at breakfast and go on from there. But, as a friend of ours said, at least they don’t eat mashed peanuts on bread! The news of the day is that former President Chirac of France was attacked and “savaged” so badly by his wife’s white Maltese dog that he had to be taken to the hospital. According to Madame Chirac, the dog is clinically depressed and is being medicated. I guess going from life as top dog in the Elysée Palace to an apartment in Paris without much to do is depressing. And think how the dog must feel.
22 January, Thursday:
Beagle had to give a paper at a seminar in Lille. She offered me the opportunity of driving her there, sitting around for a few hours and driving her back to Brussels, but I declined. She took the train and I stayed home. I had planned to walk to the Magritte Museum, a nice long walk, but decided against it because the weather was foul…cold, windy and raining. Instead I took the metro, and I’m glad I did. There is a new Magritte Museum opening up in the middle of Brussels this summer, but the existing museum is in Jette, well to the north of the center of town. I knew I was in the boondocks when the metro started to run above ground, and when I got out, the look and the feel of the place was exactly like that of Queens…street after street of small 3-storey houses with a few big avenues full of 4-storey houses and shops. The museum itself is in a small house that Magritte and his wife and dog lived in from 1930 until 1954, when he finally started making some money. There was a tiny sign on the door that said “Musée Magritte” and another sign that told me to ring the bell twice. I did, and waited a while. Then a young woman arrived, ushered me into the house and gave me instructions on how the museum was laid out. The ground floor of the house is the apartment he rented and lived in, and that was preserved pretty much as it had been in the 1950’s, with furniture, etc. Plus a stuffed dog on the bed. The apartment was tiny, with a small living room, a bedroom, a small dining room/studio, a tiny kitchen and a tiny bathroom. To get from the living room to the dining room, you had to walk through the bedroom, etc. There was also a small garden and a “studio” at the end of the garden that Magritte evidently never used. He liked working in the dining room, which was warm, and keeping an eye on his wife. The upper floors of the house, which were occupied by other tenants in Magritte’s day, had been turned into an exposition of things from Magritte’s life and work…paintings, drawings, a lot of photographs, letters, pamphlets, etc. To get there you had to put on little booties (to protect the floor) and go up a narrow staircase that appears in some of Magritte’s paintings. The exhibition was more or less in chronological order and was quite interesting. The young lady had given me a couple of laminated sheets that explained what was in each room and in each display case, which helped a lot. There were a bunch of photographs of Magritte, and interestingly enough for an avant garde artist living in poverty in a tiny apartment in a tenement in a depressed suburb of Brussels, he was always dressed in a suit and tie with a hat, looking like a prosperous Brussels merchant. The young lady told me that I could also go to the top floor of the house to look in a room that had been used in Magritte’s day for storage and which now was used for, well, storage of some of his things, including his tuba. I went to take a look, and sure enough there was a tuba and some other stuff. There were also 3 other young ladies crammed into two tiny little offices banging away on computers. I have no idea what they were doing. There were only 3 visitors to the museum while I was there, including me, so they couldn’t have been counting the day’s receipts. Beagle says that it is almost impossible to get permission to use copies of Magritte’s work in books, etc., so perhaps they were busy with copyright matters. Who knows? I went home in the wind and the rain and Beagle arrived shortly thereafter from Lille. Having no food in the house, we went out to dinner at Saint-Boniface, a French restaurant in our neighborhood that we wanted to try. It was excellent…perhaps the best all around dining experience we have had so far in Brussels. The restaurant is Lyonnais in style, specializing in cassoulet, tripe, etc. Beagle had Lyonnais sausage with lentils (I almost fell off my chair when she ordered this, but she claimed she wanted the lentils) and I had duck with carrot stoemp. Both were excellent.
23 January, Friday:
We had finished our French classes before Christmas, but were concerned that we weren’t getting enough French practice, so we got in touch with Aurélie, our teacher from the French school to see if she would be willing to give us private lessons. She was, and although there were a few delays (she got sick for a week, her upstairs neighbor’s bathtub overflowed and flooded her apartment, etc.), we started our new regime today with a 3-hour class, which Beagle and I split. The class went pretty well…there was not much difference between this class and the ones we had at the school, except for the fact that she comes to us instead of the other way around and the class is less expensive. Hmmm.
24 January, Saturday:
For once our day started reasonably early. We had breakfast, got the #94 tram to the end at the Herrmann-Debroux metro stop, on the border between Auderghem and Watermael-Boistfort, and took a long walk in the forêt des Soignes. The only unusual thing about the walk was that we kept hearing almost continuous noise of police sirens in the distance. What that was all about, we never discovered. After a couple hours of walking we ended up in the village of Watermael-Boitsfort, split a pizza and took the tram home. We had been invited to dinner by Steven Blockmans and his girlfriend, Dana Vackova. Steven is the son of some Belgian friends…he has visited us in NYC several times, most recently with Dana in the fall of 2007. They live in Saint-Gilles, quite close to where we lived when we were in Brussels in 2002/2003, but are hopefully moving to Auderghem this summer, very close to where our walk started this morning. The dinner was fabulous, we behaved ourselves and had a good time.
25 January, Sunday:
Another dinner tonight, this time at our old friends Walter and Frieda Prevenier’s, in Sint-Martens Latem, just outside of Gent. They had assembled an interesting group…some people we knew (including a guy named Jim Murray from Kalamazoo who happened to be in the neighborhood), but several we had never met before, including a man from the University of Gent who has taught classes at Columbia in the summer. And I thought we knew everyone from the University of Gent! One really nice man was in the bread business…his company makes ingredients that bread-baking companies put in their bread. I had never thought of the bread business as a scientific/chemical undertaking, but I guess it is. He had just come back from China and Japan, and was in the US at McDonald’s University (yes, the hamburger people) during the US elections. The dinner was wonderful, as usual with Walter and Frieda. Excellent food and all sorts of wines, several chosen to match peoples’ birth years…1961, 1973, etc. Walter regretted that he didn’t have any 1945 left. We had drunk all of that at a previous dinner celebrating my birthday! The dinner started promptly at 7 PM and lasted until midnight. We drove back to Brussels with no incident other than the fact that at one point we passed an accident that appeared to have just happened, with cars spread all over the road. Fortunately it looked as if no one had been hurt…not the norm for late night accidents on highways in Belgium.
26 January, Monday:
This morning Beagle had an appointment with her Belgian dentist for the 2nd of 4 appointments for a root canal. Yuck. I drove her to her appointment and read the New Yorker while the dentist accomplished in one session what it normally takes a US dentist 3 appointments to do. The other excitement was that Beagle had a student from the US drop by for advice on a job talk, etc., and we started planning for a 2-day trip to Paris next week. I have to leave tomorrow to go to Washington for a board meeting, and return on Monday of next week, just in time to go to Paris for 2 days where we’ll meet up with some old friends of Beagle’s from Georgetown…Eric Margolis and Wally Niendorf. Eric, in addition to being a Canadian drug magnate (as in vitamin pills and various totally legal vitamin supplements) and political correspondent and author and political pundit (he is on CNN all the time due to his expertise on India, Pakistan, the Balkans, Osama Bin Laden, and the Maginot Line, etc.) is very entertaining. It should be fun, since we will be celebrating the birthdays of Beagle, Eric and Wally. To make it even better, the lovely Dana B. Baines, Eric’s former long-term girlfriend and new wife, has managed to arrange a free apartment for us to stay in while we are in Paris. Dana B. somehow has clout with a company that owns a lot of fancy Paris apartments, and she has gotten us a free apartment for our visit to Paris.
27 January, Tuesday:
This afternoon I took the Eurostar to London on the first leg of a trip to Washington DC for an American Rivers board meeting. Stayed in my “usual” hotel (cheap but perfectly nice, and patronized by me and flight crews from lots of Asian airlines), had a few beers at the Windsor Castle and an early dinner.
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