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.
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