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.