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)
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