Week 16 - In which I am sick again but recover, we and the rest of Brussels visit an exhibition, and I buy underwear

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.