18 March, Wednesday:
Beagle has a student, Jeun Joh, who she thinks is brilliant and who has just arrived in Brussels for a year of study/research. Being Korean, he is naturally working on medieval Europe. Beagle decided she should have a lunch party to introduce him to some of the “young people” in the Brussels and Gent history mafia. So I was dispatched to buy bread and cakes and quiches and wine etc. and help organize the apartment to host the group. Unfortunately (well…one could debate that), we only have 8 chairs and only enough room at the table for 8 people, and since I made the 9th person, it was my job to take everyone’s coat, give them a glass of wine, and then slope off to parts unknown. So I went to L’Ultime Atom (a play on words…say Ultime Atom twice quickly) , a local brasserie, and had a salad. After my lunch I was joined by our French teacher, Aurélie, and had a 3-hour French lesson. L’Ultime Atom is pretty big, and is supposedly a very trendy place, and can be quite crowded, but in the middle of the afternoon it is pretty quiet. Aurélie and I monopolized a table, spread papers all over it, and had our class. I was there from 1 PM until 5 PM, and everyone seemed to think that was perfectly normal. The waiters didn’t even bother to come by and try to persuade us to order anything. All of the time that I was there, there was also a group of about 8 men in a back room reserved for smokers, smoking and talking up a storm, and I don’t think they even bought anything except perhaps a few coffees. No one cared. Beagle informed me that the lunch was a big success, and dinner tonight was leftover quiche. Pretty good if I do say so myself.
19 March, Thursday:
Today was another bright sunny day. Love this Belgian weather! Today was also a day for cultural experiences. I had to go to the post office, and while there I witnessed a huge fight between a client and the staff. The client, a man, North African by appearance and with a very thick accent, was vigorously protesting something, and the members of the staff were equally vigorously rejecting his claims. I never could figure out what they were arguing about…perhaps I should take a French class focused on terms to use during an argument…but everyone was very excited and seemed to be having a good time. All the clients took sides, and from time to time the staff would summon reinforcements from the back room. All this slowed down the service a bit, but I got my package mailed and snuck out before I got in the middle of whatever it was. At gym we seem to have had another changing of the guard. There are three Italian women who are there most evenings, and they spend their time monopolizing the aerobic machines, darting from one to another and talking non-stop, very loudly. There is also a very quiet Italian man who sits on a machine, does a few repetitions of some exercises, and then wanders around looking at himself mournfully in the mirrors. And I don’t mean just admiring his physique as he walks by. This guy goes right up close to a mirror and examines his face at great length and in great detail, rubbing his beard, which is sort of one of those Yasser Arafat numbers. After about 30 minutes of this, he leaves. Perhaps he was expecting something else.
20 March, Friday:
Beagle had to teach another “master class” this afternoon in Brussels. She was quite confused about it. The norm is that after this type of event, there is a dinner to which Beagle is invited. I generally tag along. But there was been no discussion of a dinner after this afternoon’s class. Perhaps because Marc was not there…he was in France. Beagle didn’t know what to do. I stayed home, spent an hour or so on a conference call and watched some men pollarding two big trees in the next garden. They had done this to the tree in our garden last November, but these were much bigger trees…I’d say 40 feet tall. They clambered up them using long ladders and chopped off virtually every piece of growth that is less than about 3 inches in diameter. This left the trees looking like skeletons, not to mention a huge pile of branches on the ground. I hope they knew what they were doing. The theory is that the tree will sprout new branches where the old ones were cut off, so it will have lots of leaves, etc., but it will never get too tall. We’ll see. The tree in our garden shows no sign of sprouting anything. While I was watching men at work and having conference calls, Beagle was teaching her master class. She says that it was not a great success because the students appeared to have done none of the reading she had assigned them. I gather that the day was saved because our friends Walter Prevenier and Peter Stabel were there, and they carried the discussion. Amazingly, there was no dinner afterwards. Beagle was in shock. Luckily we still had leftover quiche.
21 March, Saturday:
Today was a lovely day, so we walked to Parc de Wolvendael and Parc Brugmann, which in Ixelles (or perhaps Uccle) and are fairly close to us. They are nice small parks. Then we walked along Avenue Moliere, which is a very elegant residential street…very wide, and unusually for Brussels, the houses have small yards in front of them, which makes a huge difference in how the street looks. On the way back, I stopped and got a haircut. This morning I had read an article in the NY Times about the latest thing in women’s fashion in Paris, which is hot pants worn over black tights. This trend appears to have spread to Brussels, because there were several very well turned out young women wearing exactly that. Plus everything else in black. I felt a little dowdy, wearing blue jeans and a very ratty and frayed LLBean work shirt, but I got a good haircut anyway. Then I went home to watch the finals of the 6 Nations Rugby tournament, a match between Wales and Ireland. If Wales won by 13 points, they would win the match and the tournament. If Ireland won, it would win not only the match and the tournament but also the “Grand Slam.” Whatever the Grand Slam is, it is apparently a big deal. The Irish had only won it once before, 61 years ago. So there was a lot at stake and it was a very good game. Wales took the lead with a field goal with 5 minutes to go, and the TV commentators pretty much conceded the match then. But Ireland went ahead with 2 minutes to go by scoring its own field goal. And then Wales had a penalty kick from 48 meters with no time left, and it just fell short. Very exciting. After the game all the players seemed to be in good spirits and shook each others’ hands, but they all looked like they had been in a prize fight or a car wreck…covered with blood, eyes swollen shut, etc. What a game. I saw part of the match while at gym, where the Italian women were holding court. With the TV blaring the rugby match, and the aerobic machines all occupied and making a huge racket, the Italian women kept up a constant stream of conversation, at top volume, shouting back and forth to each other across the gym. Two vaguely Swedish looking people were also in the gym, and after wincing every time the Italian women shouted, they finally left.
22 March, Sunday:
This is getting boring. Another lovely day. Bright sunshine, temperature in the 50’s, etc. We walked to Parc de Forest and Duden Parc, two parks which are sort of connected in the Forest district, a part of town that we had never visited before. The parks, which together are over 100 acres in size, are surrounded on three sides by apartment buildings and houses, some of them gorgeous Art Deco type houses from the early 1900s. One of them had a 15 -20 foot diameter window as its “focal point” on the parlor floor, and was quite striking. The fourth side of the parks is sort of an industrial zone, and the parks slope rather steeply down to that. The parks themselves are very hilly, and have big areas of lawn that were full of people playing games and taking in the sun, as well as heavily wooded areas. The whole neighborhood reminded me a lot of Riverside Park in the 1970s…it is quite nice, but obviously was once much more elegant (indeed, Duden Parc used to be a private estate and was given to the Belgian state years ago), and is now showing signs of very heavy use and no maintenance for years. They need a Riverside Park Conservatory for these places! After walking through the parks we went home, changed, and drove to dinner in Gent-Mariakerke at Wim and An Blockmans’ house. We were treated with a visit by their daughter Leen and her 6 year old son Felix, a very cute and extremely energetic little boy, and I made friends with Maiko, a very nice Jack Russell terrier who sat on my lap. Felix had to go home to bed, so we had dinner with An and Wim, people we have known for years. An claims to have a collection of all of our Christmas cards for the past 28 years! We exchanged all sorts of family and academic gossip, had a great dinner, and then drove back to Brussels. Sunday night traffic going back into Brussels is supposed to be horrible, but we were late enough so that we missed it all.
23 March, Monday:
Brussels is an interesting city. The streets are generally quite dirty, although it is hard to tell where all the dirt comes from. The sidewalks are full of holes, missing paving blocks, etc., and there is dog poop everywhere. The streets themselves are also dirty, since there is no way for the street sweepers to clean the streets underneath parked cars, and since there is no system for leaving one side of the street empty so the street sweepers can do their job. The houses themselves are a mix of styles. As you walk down a street, every house looks different, some simple, some ornate, and from many different periods. Belgium was incredibly rich in the late 1800s and early 1900s, with a lot of the money coming from the Congo, and there were a lot of very lovely houses built then in the Art Nouveau and Art Deco styles. Then, I suspect in the 1960s, there were a lot of fairly low-rise apartment buildings built that are pretty awful. But the sidewalks tend to be narrow, the streets tend to be dirty and busy, the buildings themselves tend to be dirty, and generally the only way to get a look at the façade of a building is from the other side of the street. So as you wander around Brussels, except in the Grand Place and areas like that which have been meticulously cleaned and gilded and restored, you tend to ignore some of the lovely facades and get the impression that it is sort of a grim city. What you don’t realize, however, is that behind those dirty facades there is generally a large and quite lovely garden. Walking down the Avenue Charleroi the other day, a very busy, dirty street, I peeked through an open doorway and saw that there was an enormous park behind the buildings…all green and lovely, and totally bidden from the view of anyone on the street. Sort of like the French, it seems as if the Belgians present a drab architectural exterior to the street, and reserve the lovely parts for private view. It is like our apartment. We are on a long block, on a street that is narrow, with very narrow sidewalks (one person at a time, please) that are uneven and broken up, and with dirty and generally unappetizing facades facing the street. But inside, each house has a fairly large private garden, and the gardens stretch pretty much the length of the block. Interesting.
24 March, Tuesday:
The weather has changed, and it is now cool and rainy, as predicted by the weatherman. But the sun keeps breaking out, the days are getting dramatically longer, and it is warmer. Daffodils and crocuses are everywhere in the parks, forsythia is blooming and stuff is greening up. Spring is here.
Saturday, March 28, 2009
Friday, March 20, 2009
Week 19 - In which we tour Belgium with Jane, stopping for lunch as we go, visit places where we lived when we were students, and eat waterzooi
11 March, Wednesday:
Jane and I went to the musical instruments museum today. It is a wonderful place. It is in a fantastic art deco building (in every sense of the word) made out of glass and iron, dating from the early 1900’s. It is called the “Old England Building,” which is in big letters high up on the front of the building. I guess it must have been a store of some sort when it was first built. Now it houses a very extensive collection of musical instruments from all over the world. As you wander through the collection, spread over 5 floors, the headsets they provide you play music made by the instruments in the exhibit in front of you. It is interesting to see how the same sort of instruments were invented separately in many different parts of the world at more or less the same time. In addition to the museum, there is also, in true Belgian fashion, a restaurant on the 6th floor. We will try it. The afternoon was spent in French lessons with Aurélie and conference calls. Jane, in her new incarnation as “Jane Freeman, Consultant,” has to spend a lot of time on conference calls. I try hard to keep up with her. Jane uses Skype, which enables her to make free telephone calls using her computer anywhere in the world (except for Belgium, where they try to charge her VAT). She wears a headset while she does it, so she looks really professional…like an air traffic controller or, dare I say it, a consultant. I will have to sign up for Skype and get a headset. We went to a restaurant called Flaneries Gourmandes for dinner. It is very small (only about 10 tables), the service was great, the hospitality was wonderful, etc. They had reserved a special table for 3 for us, but unfortunately it was right next to a table of about a half dozen women who were celebrating something…loudly. Beagle wanted to move. I thought that was bad form, but relented and asked the Maitre d’hotel if we could move. He said we could move if we wanted, but he recommended against it, as the table we had our eye on was situated so that every time the door opened, a blast of cold air would hit the people at that table. So we stayed put, and as the restaurant filled up the women next door either got quieter, or their racket was absorbed in the general noise level of the restaurant, or something. The dinner itself was interesting…all sorts of inventive (and sometimes odd) mixtures of flavors and textures, etc., all very inventively presented. There was a lot of “foam of seaweed and coulis of asparagus spears” and stuff like that. It all looked gorgeous on the plate, and was interesting to taste, but when we compared notes we found that we all agreed that although it was very interesting, it just didn’t taste that extraordinary. Ah well, another dining adventure. Maybe we caught it on a bad night.
12 March, Thursday:
Our plan for today was to go to Louvain-la-Neuve, where Jane had spent a year as a graduate student, spend a few minutes and then go to Leuven (Louvain, in French), perhaps for lunch, and then go to Bruges for the afternoon. We got off to a slow start, as everyone seemed to have a lot of computer work to do. Since we didn’t leave the apartment until noon, we figured that our schedule might have to be changed. Perhaps we would skip Leuven. So off we went to Louvain-la-Neuve, which is an interesting place. In the ‘60s, when students were generally up in arms about lots of things (hence the term “revolting students”), in Leuven, an old Belgian university town, the students at the Catholic University of Louvain were having language riots…Dutch speakers versus French speakers. As a result of this, the Belgian government decided to create an entirely new university, complete with its own town. The Dutch speaking part of the university was left in Leuven, and in 1968 the French speaking part of the university was moved to this new town, imaginatively named Louvain-la-Neuve (new Leuven). Since this was going to be the first new town created in Belgium since Charleroi was founded in 1666, the Belgians decided to try something new. The center of town, and indeed most of the town, is completely vehicle free (except for bicycles). There are huge car parks and underground garages on the outskirts of town, the train station is underground, etc. The town itself is a maze of curving streets, open plazas, hills, lakes, university buildings, apartment buildings, dozens of restaurants, cafés, and fast food places, etc., with everything covered in one form of brick or another. We got there at around lunch time, and the streets were full of students, most on foot but some on bikes, and all of them eating sandwiches. Amazingly enough, there were virtually no trees or bushes of plants or grass or anything living. Bizarre. It looked and felt a lot like a movie set for some science fiction movie about life in the future. It was impressive, but not very pretty and sort of bleak. The fact that it was drizzling didn’t help much. Jane had spent an academic year here back in the ‘70s, when the town was much smaller and was still mostly a construction site, so it was hard for her to get her bearings, but after much map consulting we finally found what we decided was the apartment she had lived in and took an appropriate number of pictures. We then returned to the town center and after much indecision realized that it was too late to go to Leuven for lunch, so we randomly picked an inexpensive café and had a very satisfactory, and fairly late, lunch. By this time it was too late to do much of anything else, so we gave up on Bruges and drove back to Brussels and went to the Horta museum. This was originally the home and office of Victor Horta, a famous Belgian architect who worked in the Art Deco style. It was really interesting and in many ways spectacular…the architecture, the construction techniques, the “style” of the house, and just seeing how a rich and famous architect lived in the 1920’s. I highly recommend it if you find yourself in Brussels with a few hours to kill. We went back home and had leeks gratinée with ham….except that Beagle forgot to add the ham. No one minded.
13 March, Friday:
The daffodil in our garden has burst into bloom. Spring is coming fast to Brussels. Today we had lunch at the Music Museum (not bad, but not great) and went shopping for baby clothes at Le Petit Bateau. Jane’s niece (?) is having a baby, and that gave us an excuse to go to a baby store. Everyone was happy, including me, who generally hates to shop. After spending too much time there we went to the Musée Van Buuren, which is a house that was owned by some rich Belgian patrons of the arts. It was interesting, once again, to wander through a house that had been lived in by rich Belgian patrons of the arts in the ‘20s. There was also a great garden, which I missed because I had to run back for a conference call. Jane and Beagle did visit the gardens, and got lost in the maze. Jane managed to lead Beagle out of the maze in enough time to get home for her conference call. We went to gym, and then went to the restaurant Saint-Boniface, in our neighborhood. It was excellent, as usual. A real find. It has a great atmosphere, great service, nice décor and fabulous food. No wonder it makes all the guidebooks.
14 March, Saturday:
Jane and I went grocery shopping in the morning, and then we all drove to Tervuren, parked at the Africa museum and went for a walk in the park. This was a great idea, except for the fact that it was raining lightly. We walked for an hour or so to the town of Jesus-Eik and had lunch at a brasserie we had visited before. The lunch was very satisfactory, and by the time we left it had more or less stopped raining. Either that or we had gotten used to it. We went back home and I watched two rugby matches; Italy vs. Wales, which was not a very well played match which Wales won…barely, and Scotland vs. Ireland, which Ireland won, after having been behind during the first half. I continue to be impressed by what an incredibly fast and violent game rugby is. I am looking forward to the finals of this “6 Nations Tournament,” which should be next weekend. Inspired by Thérèse, we had jambonneau and sauerkraut for dinner.
15 March, Sunday:
We finally made it to Bruges today. It was a gorgeous spring day, with flowers everywhere, and Bruges is pretty much as it was 33 years ago. There is a huge parking garage on the outskirts of town, next to the train station, where you are encouraged to leave your car. After an abortive attempt to find some place to park closer to the center of town, we parked there and walked into town. Bruges is lovely…well preserved, or at least very well recreated, with canals, cobblestone streets, pretty buildings, etc. We walked around and found the building where Beagle lived 33 summers ago…what had been a rundown building housing College of Europe students is now a 4 star hotel. Then we visited a museum (that had once been a hospital), saw some paintings by Hans Memling, and had a very satisfactory lunch. On our return to Brussels we were all too tired to do anything about dinner, so we went to La Roue d’Or, a classic Belgian brasserie near the Grand Place, which is not only a good restaurant but is also open on Sundays and is open late. Jane had been talking about Waterzooi all week, so she had that. Waterzooi is a specialty of Gent and is generally called Gentse Waterzooi or Waterzooi gantoise, depending on whether you speak Dutch or French. The literal translation of waterzooi from the Dutch is “watery mess,” but it is hardly that. It is a sort of stew with cream and butter and vegetables and either chicken or fish. It was originally a fish dish, but the story is that the water around Gent got so polluted that they stopped using fish and substituted chicken. It is also a dish that was supposedly made out of tough chicken, or spoiled chicken. In any event, Jane liked it a lot. It was as good as she remembered. It reminded me of fricasseed chicken, which I ate a lot of as a kid. Beagle had sole and I had veal kidneys. It was a great meal…not fancy, but probably the best we’ve had in Brussels.
16 March, Monday:
Beagle had to attend the opening of the “Henri Pirenne Year” at the University of Gent, so Jane and I drove her to Gent and let her perform her academic duties while we had a tour of Gent. We had planned to go to the tapestry exhibit, which Beagle and I had seen before but agreed was worth seeing again, but it was closed on Monday. So we saw the “Ghent Altarpiece,” a polyptych painting made up of 24 compartmented scenes that was started by Hubert van Eyck and finished after Hubert’s death by his younger brother Jan van Eyck in 1432. It is quite spectacular. The painting is in the cathedral, and when you enter you have to pay an admission fee that entitles you to an audio guide that provides you with a seemingly endless description of each one of the 24 panels. After about an hour of this, Jane and I felt educated enough and went in search of napkin and lace stores and lunch. Fortunately all the interesting stores were closed, since it was Monday. After inspecting and rejecting about a dozen restaurants, and almost settling on an outdoor café on a canal where we would have been able to inhale the second hand smoke from the other patrons and be serenaded by jackhammers from a construction site which was between us and the canal, we finally found a modest restaurant which had the advantage of being totally empty. Being in Gent, we of course both had Gantse Waterzooi. It was excellent. Just as we ordered our lunch, Beagle called. Her ceremony had ended early, so she grabbed something to eat at the reception and then came to meet us. We did some more sightseeing, guided by Beagle, who knows Gent pretty well, and then returned to Brussels. No one had much of an appetite for dinner, which was a good thing, since by the time we got around to shopping for dinner, everything was closed. So we had spaghetti and went to bed.
17 March, Tuesday:
I took Jane to the airport this morning. We left at around 7:30 AM, expecting that the trip would take about 20 minutes, which is what it has taken the other times I have done it. Not on a Tuesday morning, evidently. The traffic going out of Brussels was terrible, but we made it to the airport in plenty of time, especially since Jane’s plane was an hour late in taking off. Going back to our apartment was much worse. It took me over an hour, a lot of which was spent just sitting in gridlocked traffic in the middle of a tunnel. If this is what the traffic is normally like on a weekday morning in Brussels, then it is a mystery to me why anyone would drive to work. That was my excitement for the day, other than going to gym and doing some shopping for a party Beagle is giving tomorrow. I also went for a walk, because it was another great day. When I looked at the long-range weather forecast for the time that Jane was going to be in Brussels, it was pretty depressing…rain was predicted for every day. In fact, the weather has been mostly gorgeous except for 1 day. Lots of sun, temperatures in the low 50s, etc. Our Belgian friends tell us not to get used to it. They say that it will revert to cold and wet before long. But we are convinced that spring is here. There are flowers everywhere, the forsythia are coming out, and the days are dramatically longer.
Jane and I went to the musical instruments museum today. It is a wonderful place. It is in a fantastic art deco building (in every sense of the word) made out of glass and iron, dating from the early 1900’s. It is called the “Old England Building,” which is in big letters high up on the front of the building. I guess it must have been a store of some sort when it was first built. Now it houses a very extensive collection of musical instruments from all over the world. As you wander through the collection, spread over 5 floors, the headsets they provide you play music made by the instruments in the exhibit in front of you. It is interesting to see how the same sort of instruments were invented separately in many different parts of the world at more or less the same time. In addition to the museum, there is also, in true Belgian fashion, a restaurant on the 6th floor. We will try it. The afternoon was spent in French lessons with Aurélie and conference calls. Jane, in her new incarnation as “Jane Freeman, Consultant,” has to spend a lot of time on conference calls. I try hard to keep up with her. Jane uses Skype, which enables her to make free telephone calls using her computer anywhere in the world (except for Belgium, where they try to charge her VAT). She wears a headset while she does it, so she looks really professional…like an air traffic controller or, dare I say it, a consultant. I will have to sign up for Skype and get a headset. We went to a restaurant called Flaneries Gourmandes for dinner. It is very small (only about 10 tables), the service was great, the hospitality was wonderful, etc. They had reserved a special table for 3 for us, but unfortunately it was right next to a table of about a half dozen women who were celebrating something…loudly. Beagle wanted to move. I thought that was bad form, but relented and asked the Maitre d’hotel if we could move. He said we could move if we wanted, but he recommended against it, as the table we had our eye on was situated so that every time the door opened, a blast of cold air would hit the people at that table. So we stayed put, and as the restaurant filled up the women next door either got quieter, or their racket was absorbed in the general noise level of the restaurant, or something. The dinner itself was interesting…all sorts of inventive (and sometimes odd) mixtures of flavors and textures, etc., all very inventively presented. There was a lot of “foam of seaweed and coulis of asparagus spears” and stuff like that. It all looked gorgeous on the plate, and was interesting to taste, but when we compared notes we found that we all agreed that although it was very interesting, it just didn’t taste that extraordinary. Ah well, another dining adventure. Maybe we caught it on a bad night.
12 March, Thursday:
Our plan for today was to go to Louvain-la-Neuve, where Jane had spent a year as a graduate student, spend a few minutes and then go to Leuven (Louvain, in French), perhaps for lunch, and then go to Bruges for the afternoon. We got off to a slow start, as everyone seemed to have a lot of computer work to do. Since we didn’t leave the apartment until noon, we figured that our schedule might have to be changed. Perhaps we would skip Leuven. So off we went to Louvain-la-Neuve, which is an interesting place. In the ‘60s, when students were generally up in arms about lots of things (hence the term “revolting students”), in Leuven, an old Belgian university town, the students at the Catholic University of Louvain were having language riots…Dutch speakers versus French speakers. As a result of this, the Belgian government decided to create an entirely new university, complete with its own town. The Dutch speaking part of the university was left in Leuven, and in 1968 the French speaking part of the university was moved to this new town, imaginatively named Louvain-la-Neuve (new Leuven). Since this was going to be the first new town created in Belgium since Charleroi was founded in 1666, the Belgians decided to try something new. The center of town, and indeed most of the town, is completely vehicle free (except for bicycles). There are huge car parks and underground garages on the outskirts of town, the train station is underground, etc. The town itself is a maze of curving streets, open plazas, hills, lakes, university buildings, apartment buildings, dozens of restaurants, cafés, and fast food places, etc., with everything covered in one form of brick or another. We got there at around lunch time, and the streets were full of students, most on foot but some on bikes, and all of them eating sandwiches. Amazingly enough, there were virtually no trees or bushes of plants or grass or anything living. Bizarre. It looked and felt a lot like a movie set for some science fiction movie about life in the future. It was impressive, but not very pretty and sort of bleak. The fact that it was drizzling didn’t help much. Jane had spent an academic year here back in the ‘70s, when the town was much smaller and was still mostly a construction site, so it was hard for her to get her bearings, but after much map consulting we finally found what we decided was the apartment she had lived in and took an appropriate number of pictures. We then returned to the town center and after much indecision realized that it was too late to go to Leuven for lunch, so we randomly picked an inexpensive café and had a very satisfactory, and fairly late, lunch. By this time it was too late to do much of anything else, so we gave up on Bruges and drove back to Brussels and went to the Horta museum. This was originally the home and office of Victor Horta, a famous Belgian architect who worked in the Art Deco style. It was really interesting and in many ways spectacular…the architecture, the construction techniques, the “style” of the house, and just seeing how a rich and famous architect lived in the 1920’s. I highly recommend it if you find yourself in Brussels with a few hours to kill. We went back home and had leeks gratinée with ham….except that Beagle forgot to add the ham. No one minded.
13 March, Friday:
The daffodil in our garden has burst into bloom. Spring is coming fast to Brussels. Today we had lunch at the Music Museum (not bad, but not great) and went shopping for baby clothes at Le Petit Bateau. Jane’s niece (?) is having a baby, and that gave us an excuse to go to a baby store. Everyone was happy, including me, who generally hates to shop. After spending too much time there we went to the Musée Van Buuren, which is a house that was owned by some rich Belgian patrons of the arts. It was interesting, once again, to wander through a house that had been lived in by rich Belgian patrons of the arts in the ‘20s. There was also a great garden, which I missed because I had to run back for a conference call. Jane and Beagle did visit the gardens, and got lost in the maze. Jane managed to lead Beagle out of the maze in enough time to get home for her conference call. We went to gym, and then went to the restaurant Saint-Boniface, in our neighborhood. It was excellent, as usual. A real find. It has a great atmosphere, great service, nice décor and fabulous food. No wonder it makes all the guidebooks.
14 March, Saturday:
Jane and I went grocery shopping in the morning, and then we all drove to Tervuren, parked at the Africa museum and went for a walk in the park. This was a great idea, except for the fact that it was raining lightly. We walked for an hour or so to the town of Jesus-Eik and had lunch at a brasserie we had visited before. The lunch was very satisfactory, and by the time we left it had more or less stopped raining. Either that or we had gotten used to it. We went back home and I watched two rugby matches; Italy vs. Wales, which was not a very well played match which Wales won…barely, and Scotland vs. Ireland, which Ireland won, after having been behind during the first half. I continue to be impressed by what an incredibly fast and violent game rugby is. I am looking forward to the finals of this “6 Nations Tournament,” which should be next weekend. Inspired by Thérèse, we had jambonneau and sauerkraut for dinner.
15 March, Sunday:
We finally made it to Bruges today. It was a gorgeous spring day, with flowers everywhere, and Bruges is pretty much as it was 33 years ago. There is a huge parking garage on the outskirts of town, next to the train station, where you are encouraged to leave your car. After an abortive attempt to find some place to park closer to the center of town, we parked there and walked into town. Bruges is lovely…well preserved, or at least very well recreated, with canals, cobblestone streets, pretty buildings, etc. We walked around and found the building where Beagle lived 33 summers ago…what had been a rundown building housing College of Europe students is now a 4 star hotel. Then we visited a museum (that had once been a hospital), saw some paintings by Hans Memling, and had a very satisfactory lunch. On our return to Brussels we were all too tired to do anything about dinner, so we went to La Roue d’Or, a classic Belgian brasserie near the Grand Place, which is not only a good restaurant but is also open on Sundays and is open late. Jane had been talking about Waterzooi all week, so she had that. Waterzooi is a specialty of Gent and is generally called Gentse Waterzooi or Waterzooi gantoise, depending on whether you speak Dutch or French. The literal translation of waterzooi from the Dutch is “watery mess,” but it is hardly that. It is a sort of stew with cream and butter and vegetables and either chicken or fish. It was originally a fish dish, but the story is that the water around Gent got so polluted that they stopped using fish and substituted chicken. It is also a dish that was supposedly made out of tough chicken, or spoiled chicken. In any event, Jane liked it a lot. It was as good as she remembered. It reminded me of fricasseed chicken, which I ate a lot of as a kid. Beagle had sole and I had veal kidneys. It was a great meal…not fancy, but probably the best we’ve had in Brussels.
16 March, Monday:
Beagle had to attend the opening of the “Henri Pirenne Year” at the University of Gent, so Jane and I drove her to Gent and let her perform her academic duties while we had a tour of Gent. We had planned to go to the tapestry exhibit, which Beagle and I had seen before but agreed was worth seeing again, but it was closed on Monday. So we saw the “Ghent Altarpiece,” a polyptych painting made up of 24 compartmented scenes that was started by Hubert van Eyck and finished after Hubert’s death by his younger brother Jan van Eyck in 1432. It is quite spectacular. The painting is in the cathedral, and when you enter you have to pay an admission fee that entitles you to an audio guide that provides you with a seemingly endless description of each one of the 24 panels. After about an hour of this, Jane and I felt educated enough and went in search of napkin and lace stores and lunch. Fortunately all the interesting stores were closed, since it was Monday. After inspecting and rejecting about a dozen restaurants, and almost settling on an outdoor café on a canal where we would have been able to inhale the second hand smoke from the other patrons and be serenaded by jackhammers from a construction site which was between us and the canal, we finally found a modest restaurant which had the advantage of being totally empty. Being in Gent, we of course both had Gantse Waterzooi. It was excellent. Just as we ordered our lunch, Beagle called. Her ceremony had ended early, so she grabbed something to eat at the reception and then came to meet us. We did some more sightseeing, guided by Beagle, who knows Gent pretty well, and then returned to Brussels. No one had much of an appetite for dinner, which was a good thing, since by the time we got around to shopping for dinner, everything was closed. So we had spaghetti and went to bed.
17 March, Tuesday:
I took Jane to the airport this morning. We left at around 7:30 AM, expecting that the trip would take about 20 minutes, which is what it has taken the other times I have done it. Not on a Tuesday morning, evidently. The traffic going out of Brussels was terrible, but we made it to the airport in plenty of time, especially since Jane’s plane was an hour late in taking off. Going back to our apartment was much worse. It took me over an hour, a lot of which was spent just sitting in gridlocked traffic in the middle of a tunnel. If this is what the traffic is normally like on a weekday morning in Brussels, then it is a mystery to me why anyone would drive to work. That was my excitement for the day, other than going to gym and doing some shopping for a party Beagle is giving tomorrow. I also went for a walk, because it was another great day. When I looked at the long-range weather forecast for the time that Jane was going to be in Brussels, it was pretty depressing…rain was predicted for every day. In fact, the weather has been mostly gorgeous except for 1 day. Lots of sun, temperatures in the low 50s, etc. Our Belgian friends tell us not to get used to it. They say that it will revert to cold and wet before long. But we are convinced that spring is here. There are flowers everywhere, the forsythia are coming out, and the days are dramatically longer.
Week 18 - In which we discover Parc Tenbosch and look at real estate, have dinner at Marc and Thérèse's, and greet Jane, who brings Spring with her
4 March, Wednesday:
The postal strike is over. I know that because we got a whole bunch of mail, most of which had been mailed over a week ago. It was pretty rotten outside so I spent the day catching up on mail, having a French class with Aurélie, and being on conference calls with American Rivers.
5 March, Thursday:
Today was a lovely day. It was almost warm, and there were blue skies and sunshine. I had seen an article in the New York Times about a house on a park that was for sale, and just out of curiosity I went to see the park. It is Parc Tenbosch, and while it is on the other side of Avenue Louise from us, it is still in the commune of Ixelles. It is a gem of a park, about 2 1/2 acres in size, sort of hilly, with lots of winding paths, children’s playgrounds, a small “sports field” for older kids, lots of benches, small ponds (supposedly with turtles in the summer), and all beautifully landscaped and maintained. There were some daffodils in bloom as well as crocuses, snowdrops, etc. Very spring like and lovely, and in a very quiet neighborhood with a lot of very nice looking houses, some of them on a street called rue Americaine. Makes our neighborhood look like a dump! Beagle was out being treated to lunch by a Dutch colleague, but I was so enthusiastic about the park that when she came back we walked there again.
6 March, Friday:
There is a daffodil in our garden which is close to being in bloom…at least you can see the bud which will turn into a flower. There are also a bunch of other green things poking up, presumably daffodils as well. Spring is coming. Our garden is now regularly visited by pigeons and some kind of black bird with a colored beak that is also a ground feeder. That is because at about 4:30 every afternoon a bunch of chickadees arrive and start feeding at my birdfeeder (it is the kind that only small birds can use). The chickadees are very discriminating, and they root around in the birdseed looking for the stuff they like, knocking the stuff they don’t like onto the ground. The pigeons and the black birds have learned this, and they wait for the chickadees to arrive and happily feed on the leftovers. The weather was supposed to be horrible today, but it turned out to be another nice day. Beagle had to return a book to the library at ULB (Université Libre de Bruxelles), and we used that as an excuse to take a walk. We walked to Place Flagey, past the Etangs d’Ixelles, through the Abbey de la Cambre, and along Avenue Franklin Roosevelt to ULB. Avenue Franklin Roosevelt is a very wide street with very grand houses on both sides, and on one side the houses back up to the Bois de la Cambre. On our walk to Parc Tenbosch yesterday we went by a bunch of embassies and missions for places like Bosnia and Herzegovina. On the Avenue Franklin Roosevelt there were embassies for places like Venezuela and Iran and Syria. You get the idea. ULB has two campuses, and the one housing the History Department is the smaller campus. A lot of the buildings were constructed after W.W. I by Herbert Hoover (The “Great Engineer”), who was in charge of US post-war aid to Europe, and he tried to make the campus look like a US college campus, complete with pseudo-gothic architecture, etc. So part of the campus looks like the University of Iowa or something, but the newer part has a mélange of more modern architectural styles, and as ULB has grown it has also spilled out across Avenue Franklin Roosevelt into some of the grand houses there. The campus has very much of a college feel to it, with dozens of students in jeans wandering around and earnestly discussing whatever it is that students earnestly discuss.
7 March, Saturday:
Another day in which the weather was supposed to be horrible, but turned out to be nice. We were going to go to Gent to a museum before having dinner at Marc and Thérèse’s, but we stayed in Brussels and went shopping, walked down Avenue Louise to the Abbey de la Cambre, to the Parc de la Cambre, ULB, etc. Then we drove to Gent for dinner. Claire and Jacques were there, having spent the afternoon in a splendid exhibition of Flemish tapestries. Walter and Frieda were there as well, and we had, as usual at Marc and Thérèse’s, a spectacular dinner. We had three different hors d’oeuvres, including a tiny pot of soup that contained something which was ultimately identified, after much discussion, as “razor clams” in English. There was some confusion as to what was the Dutch name for a razor clam. In any event, the soup was wonderful. This was followed, of course, by a spectacular dinner featuring a number of wines, including a really nice 1990 red wine, and ended with a 30 year old sherry. The dinner ended at midnight, and we got back to Brussels at about 1 AM. Good thing I have nothing to do tomorrow.
8 March, Sunday:
Whoops! I did have something to do. Our friend Jane arrived on a 7:40 AM plane, so I had to get up at 6:30 to go to the airport to get her. We got home, had breakfast, and then everybody had a nap. Figuring that it was a bad idea to sleep all day, and since it was a nice day, we roused Jane and went for a walk. We walked to Parc Tenbosch (where there were daffodils), then to the Park de la Cambre, then to Avenue Roosevelt and ULB. We ended up at Place Flagey and had a hot chocolate. We had decided to eat out, and purposely went out early to Au Vieux Bruxelles, since the last few times we had tried to go there on the weekend it was jammed and we couldn’t get in. For some reason, tonight it was only about half full, and stayed that way the whole time we were there. We had moules frites, beef carbonnade, porc à la something or other and drank beer. Nice. Jane has decided that she likes gueuze. Me too.
9 March, Monday:
We had a walking tour of Brussels today with Jane. We went across town, through the Grand Place, bought cookies, went to Place Sainte Catherine, looked at fish restaurants and a great cheese store, had lunch at Le Pain Quotidien, bought all sorts of cheese from the cheese store (the only one we have found in Brussels) that is run by a man who speaks native English (plus, of course, French and Dutch). The only negative part of our outing was that at one point as we were walking down the street, a truck driver lost his grip on the back door of a delivery truck and it swung out and smacked Jane in the face. Being a hardy sort, Jane shrugged this off and we continued on our walk. The truck driver was “vraiment désolé” and Jane has a lump above her eye, but it could have been much worse. We went home, Jane and I went shopping while Beagle was at a session with her PT, and we had dinner.
10 March, Tuesday:
Beagle and Jane went to a Beagle’s regular Feldenkrais class today. Jane thought it was great. I stayed home, for fear of being kidnapped by the Feldenkrais cult. In payment I suffered through a huge racket as several men used jackhammers to drill through the walls just outside our apartment. They ended up, after much noise and about 30 cigarette breaks, exposing all sorts of pipes that are on the other side of our bathroom wall. I have no idea of what problem they were investigating, but assume it is something serious, since the noise made it impossible to think and the pipes are now totally exposed. We will see what tomorrow brings. Jane went shopping after Feldenkrais and had a 2 hour conference call. Beagle had a meeting with her student Jun (a brilliant Korean man who is studying European medieval history and is living in Brussels for the year). I had an American Rivers conference call, which reminded me of how lucky we were to have such a great CEO of American Rivers. Rebecca Wodder, our CEO, is the kind of person who never comes to you with a problem. She comes to you telling you that she had identified a problem and had implemented a solution. We are very lucky, although the current financial situation is a killer. Not only are we having to abandon our plans for expansion, we are having to scale back in a very dramatic and painful fashion.
The postal strike is over. I know that because we got a whole bunch of mail, most of which had been mailed over a week ago. It was pretty rotten outside so I spent the day catching up on mail, having a French class with Aurélie, and being on conference calls with American Rivers.
5 March, Thursday:
Today was a lovely day. It was almost warm, and there were blue skies and sunshine. I had seen an article in the New York Times about a house on a park that was for sale, and just out of curiosity I went to see the park. It is Parc Tenbosch, and while it is on the other side of Avenue Louise from us, it is still in the commune of Ixelles. It is a gem of a park, about 2 1/2 acres in size, sort of hilly, with lots of winding paths, children’s playgrounds, a small “sports field” for older kids, lots of benches, small ponds (supposedly with turtles in the summer), and all beautifully landscaped and maintained. There were some daffodils in bloom as well as crocuses, snowdrops, etc. Very spring like and lovely, and in a very quiet neighborhood with a lot of very nice looking houses, some of them on a street called rue Americaine. Makes our neighborhood look like a dump! Beagle was out being treated to lunch by a Dutch colleague, but I was so enthusiastic about the park that when she came back we walked there again.
6 March, Friday:
There is a daffodil in our garden which is close to being in bloom…at least you can see the bud which will turn into a flower. There are also a bunch of other green things poking up, presumably daffodils as well. Spring is coming. Our garden is now regularly visited by pigeons and some kind of black bird with a colored beak that is also a ground feeder. That is because at about 4:30 every afternoon a bunch of chickadees arrive and start feeding at my birdfeeder (it is the kind that only small birds can use). The chickadees are very discriminating, and they root around in the birdseed looking for the stuff they like, knocking the stuff they don’t like onto the ground. The pigeons and the black birds have learned this, and they wait for the chickadees to arrive and happily feed on the leftovers. The weather was supposed to be horrible today, but it turned out to be another nice day. Beagle had to return a book to the library at ULB (Université Libre de Bruxelles), and we used that as an excuse to take a walk. We walked to Place Flagey, past the Etangs d’Ixelles, through the Abbey de la Cambre, and along Avenue Franklin Roosevelt to ULB. Avenue Franklin Roosevelt is a very wide street with very grand houses on both sides, and on one side the houses back up to the Bois de la Cambre. On our walk to Parc Tenbosch yesterday we went by a bunch of embassies and missions for places like Bosnia and Herzegovina. On the Avenue Franklin Roosevelt there were embassies for places like Venezuela and Iran and Syria. You get the idea. ULB has two campuses, and the one housing the History Department is the smaller campus. A lot of the buildings were constructed after W.W. I by Herbert Hoover (The “Great Engineer”), who was in charge of US post-war aid to Europe, and he tried to make the campus look like a US college campus, complete with pseudo-gothic architecture, etc. So part of the campus looks like the University of Iowa or something, but the newer part has a mélange of more modern architectural styles, and as ULB has grown it has also spilled out across Avenue Franklin Roosevelt into some of the grand houses there. The campus has very much of a college feel to it, with dozens of students in jeans wandering around and earnestly discussing whatever it is that students earnestly discuss.
7 March, Saturday:
Another day in which the weather was supposed to be horrible, but turned out to be nice. We were going to go to Gent to a museum before having dinner at Marc and Thérèse’s, but we stayed in Brussels and went shopping, walked down Avenue Louise to the Abbey de la Cambre, to the Parc de la Cambre, ULB, etc. Then we drove to Gent for dinner. Claire and Jacques were there, having spent the afternoon in a splendid exhibition of Flemish tapestries. Walter and Frieda were there as well, and we had, as usual at Marc and Thérèse’s, a spectacular dinner. We had three different hors d’oeuvres, including a tiny pot of soup that contained something which was ultimately identified, after much discussion, as “razor clams” in English. There was some confusion as to what was the Dutch name for a razor clam. In any event, the soup was wonderful. This was followed, of course, by a spectacular dinner featuring a number of wines, including a really nice 1990 red wine, and ended with a 30 year old sherry. The dinner ended at midnight, and we got back to Brussels at about 1 AM. Good thing I have nothing to do tomorrow.
8 March, Sunday:
Whoops! I did have something to do. Our friend Jane arrived on a 7:40 AM plane, so I had to get up at 6:30 to go to the airport to get her. We got home, had breakfast, and then everybody had a nap. Figuring that it was a bad idea to sleep all day, and since it was a nice day, we roused Jane and went for a walk. We walked to Parc Tenbosch (where there were daffodils), then to the Park de la Cambre, then to Avenue Roosevelt and ULB. We ended up at Place Flagey and had a hot chocolate. We had decided to eat out, and purposely went out early to Au Vieux Bruxelles, since the last few times we had tried to go there on the weekend it was jammed and we couldn’t get in. For some reason, tonight it was only about half full, and stayed that way the whole time we were there. We had moules frites, beef carbonnade, porc à la something or other and drank beer. Nice. Jane has decided that she likes gueuze. Me too.
9 March, Monday:
We had a walking tour of Brussels today with Jane. We went across town, through the Grand Place, bought cookies, went to Place Sainte Catherine, looked at fish restaurants and a great cheese store, had lunch at Le Pain Quotidien, bought all sorts of cheese from the cheese store (the only one we have found in Brussels) that is run by a man who speaks native English (plus, of course, French and Dutch). The only negative part of our outing was that at one point as we were walking down the street, a truck driver lost his grip on the back door of a delivery truck and it swung out and smacked Jane in the face. Being a hardy sort, Jane shrugged this off and we continued on our walk. The truck driver was “vraiment désolé” and Jane has a lump above her eye, but it could have been much worse. We went home, Jane and I went shopping while Beagle was at a session with her PT, and we had dinner.
10 March, Tuesday:
Beagle and Jane went to a Beagle’s regular Feldenkrais class today. Jane thought it was great. I stayed home, for fear of being kidnapped by the Feldenkrais cult. In payment I suffered through a huge racket as several men used jackhammers to drill through the walls just outside our apartment. They ended up, after much noise and about 30 cigarette breaks, exposing all sorts of pipes that are on the other side of our bathroom wall. I have no idea of what problem they were investigating, but assume it is something serious, since the noise made it impossible to think and the pipes are now totally exposed. We will see what tomorrow brings. Jane went shopping after Feldenkrais and had a 2 hour conference call. Beagle had a meeting with her student Jun (a brilliant Korean man who is studying European medieval history and is living in Brussels for the year). I had an American Rivers conference call, which reminded me of how lucky we were to have such a great CEO of American Rivers. Rebecca Wodder, our CEO, is the kind of person who never comes to you with a problem. She comes to you telling you that she had identified a problem and had implemented a solution. We are very lucky, although the current financial situation is a killer. Not only are we having to abandon our plans for expansion, we are having to scale back in a very dramatic and painful fashion.
Wednesday, March 4, 2009
Week 17 - In which I buy an aiguiseur, Thérèse has a wonderful idea, and we go hiking in a peat bog
25 February, Wednesday:
I diligently studied French today, and then had a class with Aurélie. Aurélie says that we need to practice speaking more. I agree. I know, or at least have studied, most of the rules, and it is more a matter of practice since (a) there are a million exceptions to every rule and (b) the French have a dozen different ways of saying anything, and hate repeating a word or a phrase. Plus if there is an easy and straightforward way of saying something and a convoluted and flowery and complex way of saying the same thing, the French will go for the latter every time. And they are very critical of you don’t say it correctly. There was a YouTube clip of President Sarkozy circulating the other day. He was talking about the forces of resistance to his policies having “the power to say no” and “not having the power to say yes,” and these two things counterbalancing each other, with the result that nothing gets done. The French found this hilarious, since how could you have two similar forces counterbalance each other, and how could you call the lack of power a power, etc.? They kept saying that they couldn’t understand what he was talking about. The clip came from a TV show where everyone was laughing at a clip of Sarkozy making a speech. I have to admit that Sarko’s formulation was a little inelegant, but I understood the point he was trying to make. It sounded to me like George Bush on a good day. And what would the French make of Rumsfeld with his” known unknowns” and “unknown unknowns?” In any event, Beagle and I have promised to practice our “indirect discourse” this week…you know, “He said that…” We thought we’d start with Obama’s speech to Congress. It will give us a chance to read the speech and practice our French.
26 February, Thursday:
A fair bit of yesterday and today was spent on American Rivers business. We are trying to figure out the slate of officers for the coming year, etc. This has been made more complicated because (a) the man who was Vice-Chair, my presumed successor the year after this one, has left the Board because he has been appointed Assistant Secretary of the Interior and (b) two logical candidates to replace him have flatly refused, and a third logical candidate is in the middle of business and personal crises so he is unavailable. It looks like I will have to stay on for an extra year, extending the normal 3 year term to 4. I feel like Guiliani. Or Bloomberg. To cheer myself up I went to a very fancy cooking store on Avenue Louise to buy a knife sharpener, because all of our knives are impossibly dull. I’m sure there must be dozens of stores nearby where you can buy stuff like that, but this was the only one I have seen since we’ve been in Brussels. And let me tell you, it is the Tiffany of cooking stores. I had neglected to look up the French word for knife sharpener before I left our apartment, but I figured that this would be a good chance to practice my French. It was. After much struggling and pantomime and the like, the salesman led me to the section where they had “aiguiseurs.” Ah ha! That’s how you say it! Now I know. Having gotten that far, I figured I’d better buy one of the things, but was a little shocked when the first model he showed me cost €106 ($135). I choked and asked if he didn’t have anything cheaper, and he showed me the €76 model. We finally got down to a €41 model, the cheapest he had, which I bought. I figured that considering I’d had a French lesson and had also bought an aiguiseur that I could take home to NYC with me, that wasn’t so bad…although the same thing at Zabars would probably cost $15. So now we have sharp knives.
27 February, Friday:
Thérèse had a wonderful idea. It is a long-standing tradition of the Medieval History Department at the University of Gent that graduate students go on occasional weekend trips together, led or at least accompanied by faculty members. In 1976 we were invited on one of those trips, a hiking trip in the Ardennes. I remember sleeping in a freezing cold barn, taking cold showers, and being introduced to chocopasta. It seemed pretty disgusting to me…eating chocolate paste smeared on bread for breakfast…but it actually tasted pretty good after a cold shower. And besides, as the Belgians pointed out to me, Americans eat peanut paste smeared on bread, so who were we to talk. In any event, Thérèse’s idea was to have a reunion of the same group 33 years later. She rented a gîte in Hockai, a little town near Spa (Spa is famous for its drinking water, its casino and thermal baths, etc. When you go to a health spa in the US, that’s where the term “spa” comes from). 12 people ended up being able to make it, coming from Gent, Antwerp and Brussels. There was Marc and Thérèse, André and Ghislaine, Eric and B (Birgit), Philippe and Leen, Claire and Jacques and Beagle and me. We all arrived in Hockai on Friday afternoon and spent the first hour with everybody trying to remember if they had actually been on that original trip, and trying to remember each other. Since we were all 33 years older, that was not an easy job. Luckily, Philippe had brought a photo album with pictures of the actual event, so we were able to confirm, and in most cases sharpen, our memories. The only people who hadn’t been on the original trip were Claire and Jacques who were relatively new friends. They were the last to arrive, and before they turned up Thérèse and Marc explained to the rest of the group that neither of them spoke Dutch or English, or at least not much. The others, all Flemish, could forgive the lack of English, but were horrified that they didn’t speak Dutch. Somebody asked, “Aren’t they Belgians?” But everybody liked them when they arrived, and we spent the rest of the weekend speaking a mélange of French, Dutch and English. Most conversations started in French but quickly moved to Dutch, and then occasionally veered into English. By the end of the weekend everybody seemed to understand everyone else, and everyone turned out to speak something other than his or her primary language…not necessarily well, but adequately. What was interesting to me was that most of the Flemish speakers didn’t have very good French…I had always assumed that most Flemish speakers also had good French but just didn’t like to used it, as a matter of principle. Not true, as it turns out. Our gîte was large and well equipped, and we settled down to a simple dinner of wine and cheese, which Marc and Thérèse had brought. Some simple dinner. We must have had 20 different kinds of cheese, all bought from a cheese store in Gent that makes its own cheese, plus bread, rolls, champagne and several different wines.
28 February, Saturday:
Today everyone staggered out of bed, had a big breakfast, and took a short walk through the town of Hockai. It is evidently a cross-country skiing center, because there were several ski rental places and lots of trails, but other than clumps here and there, the snow was pretty much gone. We then had a quick lunch and drove to the Hautes Fagnes, a big (4,500 acre) natural preserve, where we were to meet a guide. According to the dictionary, Hautes Fagnes means “high mud,” but a more accurate translation might be “high bog.” This is an area that is pretty flat, but is the highest part of Belgium. It is right on the border with Germany, and in the past at various times belonged to Germany, Holland, Luxembourg, Prussia, etc., but the Belgians got it after W.W. I and have hung onto it. Our guide was just great, although he only spoke French. He took us on a long (18 kilometer) walk while explaining about all the flora and fauna. The area is mostly a gigantic peat bog that has been used over the years for peat production, pasture, growing cranberries and, in the case of the Germans, growing trees. The area is now (slowly) being returned to its original state as a peat bog. The peat there is in some cases as deep as 7 meters, and since peat (which is made of decomposed and decomposing moss) accumulates at the rate of 1 millimeter per year, that means this process has been going on for at least 7,000 years. Give it another couple of million years and maybe it will turn into coal. Our hike started on wide paths that are evidently used as cross country ski trails. While there were no skiers around, the trails themselves still had several inches of snow and ice on them, and were very slippery and pretty tough going. We certainly could have used our YakTraxs, which we had cleverly left in Brussels. After a bit of that we went into the peat bog itself, walking much of the time on narrow “boardwalks” which were just above ground/water level. Most of the bog itself is covered with big tussocks of grass about 2 feet high and 3 or 4 inches apart. The tussocks themselves aren’t stiff enough to support your weight, and the spaces in between the tussocks are filled with about 4 inches of water. This makes walking very difficult…you sort of lurch from tussock to tussock, falling into the water at every step. I remember scrambling though terrain exactly like this 33 years ago, and it was exhausting. I was glad for the boardwalks…they made walking a lot easier. However, there were plenty of places where there were no boardwalks, just grass, and since a peat bog is in essence one big sponge, every time you took a step on grass the water squirted up around your feet. Where there weren’t tussocks of grass or regular grass, there was mud. Lots of it, generally on slopes that were made delightfully slippery by the mud. By the end of the day everyone was wet and muddy. Interestingly enough, part of the reclamation project that is going on there now is to remove a bunch of drains and restore the water to its previous levels. It is hard to think of this place getting any wetter, but that’s what they have in mind. We started our walk at 1PM and ended a little after 6 PM, when the sun was starting to set. Progress was slow after we had gotten about half way, partly because the going got tougher and partly because André, who was recovering from a series of operations, had to stop from time to time to rest. No one seemed to mind except for the guide, who was concerned that he had taken us on too long a hike. One interesting thing was that of our group, Marc, who firmly believes that exercise is bad for you, seemed to be one of the strongest hikers in the group. He was always in the lead, wearing his trench coat and his Belgian army boots, and never seemed in the slightest tired. It was truly a glorious hike. Interesting, very beautiful in a peat bog-like way, and it was a nice day for hiking…cool and somewhat misty from time to time, but no rain. We went back to the gîte, rested briefly, and then went to Spa for dinner at a very nice restaurant called Le Grand Maur (I was told that this means “Moor,” as in someone from North Africa, but perhaps it also means “moor,” as in a heath or a bog. A French play on words?). Since there were 12 of us, we had a private dining room. Our meal was excellent, the room was great, and our waiter appeared to be 14. Everyone wanted to adopt him. That happens with people who were graduate students 33 years ago. The highlight of the dinner for me, other than wines specifically chosen for each of our individual courses by a sommelier, was that Marc and B. had quite a violent dispute over the importance of preserving/learning/speaking the Dutch language. Marc made the point that there were more people who spoke Dutch than all the people who spoke all the Scandinavian languages combined. Marc was as animated as I have ever seen him, pounding on the table for emphasis. Clearly a nerve had been touched. However most of the argument was lost on our end of the table, since neither Claire or Jacques or I, who were at that end of the table, understood a word they were saying. The others paid no attention.
1 March, Sunday:
We started the day with brunch…omelettes with bacon, yogurt, boudin blanc, boudin noir, thinly sliced smoked ham, smoked trout, paté, bread, toast, rolls, 22 kinds of cheese, juice, jam, chocopasta, peanut butter, green salad, fruit salad, milk, tea and coffee. Then we drove to Limbourg, stopping on the way to visit the “Barrage de la Gileppe,” a big dam built to supply power and water to the wool industry in Verviers. The dam was quite impressive, and featured a 70 foot high observation tower which, this being Belgium, housed a cafeteria. The parking lot was full…apparently it is a Belgian tradition to visit this dam. Most of our group remembered being taken here in school groups. Since we were a group of historians (actually nine current or former medieval historians, one civil engineer, one psychiatrist and one former financier), we of course knew that the great Belgian historian Henri Pirenne gave his first public address at the dedication of this dam when he was 14 years old, and his audience was the King of Belgium. Apparently the King asked for a copy of the speech, but young Henri refused to give it to him. From there we went on to Limbourg, a lovely little medieval town perched right on the top of a hill with a big church (closed for renovations). The town center is made up of a whole bunch of very old buildings (I saw one with a date of 1671) grouped around a rectangular “place,” and the main street is about half cobblestones and half potholes (to keep people from speeding, I suppose). We walked around for a while, and then since there appeared to be no cafés open in Limbourg, drove to Verviers for a beer. For once we skipped lunch, since our brunch seemed adequate. After the beer, most of our group drove back to Gent or Antwerp. Marc and Thérèse and Beagle and I were staying at the gîte for one more night, so we walked around Verviers and visited a museum dedicated to the wool industry. Verviers used to be a very prosperous wool processing/weaving city, right up until the 1950s and 1960s, but the industry died quickly after that. Today there are only two places in Verviers that make cloth. One makes fabric for the top of pool tables and the other makes some other sort of highly specialized cloth. The museum had exhibits showing how the wool was washed, processed, etc. and turned into cloth. It was interesting for this group of medieval historians, who spend a lot of time studying the economics and politics of the cloth industry, to see how this is actually done. One interesting tidbit was that before they had soaps that could clean wool, they used human urine, which apparently contains lots of ammonia, which is good for cleaning wool. A man would go around the town every morning collecting urine from the local households, for which they got paid. Part of his job was to taste each “deposit” of urine to make sure that it contained enough ammonia…i.e. to make sure that the local citizenry weren’t diluting the urine they were selling him with water. After being educated about wool, we drove back to the gîte, took showers, and went out to dinner in a little town called Solwaster at a restaurant called Le Vinâve. It was excellent, and featured local produce, etc. We even had a Belgian wine.
2 March, Monday:
We got up early today, straightened out the gîte, and drove back to Brussels. We got caught in a big demonstration of some sort right as we were coming into Brussels…there were a lot of people with banners and orange jackets walking down the street and chanting unintelligible slogans. That slowed us down a bit. I was supposed to be going to ULB for a tour that was being led by Claire, but I never made it. I waited for about a half hour for a bus that takes you right to ULB, and normally runs all the time, but it never came…perhaps the demonstration affected the busses as well. Subsequently I discovered that there is a big postal strike going on…it started on Friday and is supposed to last until Thursday, so perhaps that’s what caused the disruption. In any event, it has disrupted our supply of DVDs from DVDPost, who are unsure of what to do about the strike. The man I spoke to at DVDPost said that they had no idea where all their DVDs were, whether any would be delivered this week or next, etc. He was sympathetic but didn’t appear to be overly troubled. I guess the post office shuts down all the time.
3 March, Tuesday:
A nice blue sky day here, temperature in the mid 40s. There appears to be a blizzard going on in New York, and the financial world is continuing its meltdown. I checked into the Belgian postal strike. It appears that postal workers in Belgium have gone on strike, protesting wages, working conditions, privatization, post office closings and potential future job losses. The postal union claims that everyone has gone on strike, and management claims that half the mail was delivered on Monday and 80% of post offices were open, albeit with only one employee. This being Belgium, things are more complicated than they seem on the surface. I discovered that one of the complaints of the postal workers is that Danish Post, owned by the Danish government, bought 25% of Belgium Post about three years ago and is now selling it to CVC Partners, a Luxembourg based buyout firm, at a €200,000,000 profit. Sometimes the mix of socialism and capitalism produces interesting results. In the interim, we are getting no mail and are enriching FedEx, who we hope is not on strike. We went to gym tonight. There appears to be a rapid turnover of the people who use the gym, leading us to believe that most people who stay in this furnished apartment complex are only here for a short time. The smelly man who spoke in some Slavic tongue has gone. So has the Italian man with spaghetti strap t-shirts and a huge mane of hair that flopped all over the place whenever he did anything. He sported a Charles Atlas-like upper body and Woody Allenesque legs and did nothing but free weights. Two burly men, one of whom has tattoos all over his arms, who speak some bizarre language, replaced them. Beagle was convinced that they were speaking some Scandinavian dialect, but after listening closely I determined that it was English. Tonight, the gym was populated by two women who had with them a little boy who appeared to be about four years old, and a 9 month old who was asleep in his stroller. They were all very cute, but they took up a lot of room, and the women seemed to spend more time talking on their cell phones than working out.
I diligently studied French today, and then had a class with Aurélie. Aurélie says that we need to practice speaking more. I agree. I know, or at least have studied, most of the rules, and it is more a matter of practice since (a) there are a million exceptions to every rule and (b) the French have a dozen different ways of saying anything, and hate repeating a word or a phrase. Plus if there is an easy and straightforward way of saying something and a convoluted and flowery and complex way of saying the same thing, the French will go for the latter every time. And they are very critical of you don’t say it correctly. There was a YouTube clip of President Sarkozy circulating the other day. He was talking about the forces of resistance to his policies having “the power to say no” and “not having the power to say yes,” and these two things counterbalancing each other, with the result that nothing gets done. The French found this hilarious, since how could you have two similar forces counterbalance each other, and how could you call the lack of power a power, etc.? They kept saying that they couldn’t understand what he was talking about. The clip came from a TV show where everyone was laughing at a clip of Sarkozy making a speech. I have to admit that Sarko’s formulation was a little inelegant, but I understood the point he was trying to make. It sounded to me like George Bush on a good day. And what would the French make of Rumsfeld with his” known unknowns” and “unknown unknowns?” In any event, Beagle and I have promised to practice our “indirect discourse” this week…you know, “He said that…” We thought we’d start with Obama’s speech to Congress. It will give us a chance to read the speech and practice our French.
26 February, Thursday:
A fair bit of yesterday and today was spent on American Rivers business. We are trying to figure out the slate of officers for the coming year, etc. This has been made more complicated because (a) the man who was Vice-Chair, my presumed successor the year after this one, has left the Board because he has been appointed Assistant Secretary of the Interior and (b) two logical candidates to replace him have flatly refused, and a third logical candidate is in the middle of business and personal crises so he is unavailable. It looks like I will have to stay on for an extra year, extending the normal 3 year term to 4. I feel like Guiliani. Or Bloomberg. To cheer myself up I went to a very fancy cooking store on Avenue Louise to buy a knife sharpener, because all of our knives are impossibly dull. I’m sure there must be dozens of stores nearby where you can buy stuff like that, but this was the only one I have seen since we’ve been in Brussels. And let me tell you, it is the Tiffany of cooking stores. I had neglected to look up the French word for knife sharpener before I left our apartment, but I figured that this would be a good chance to practice my French. It was. After much struggling and pantomime and the like, the salesman led me to the section where they had “aiguiseurs.” Ah ha! That’s how you say it! Now I know. Having gotten that far, I figured I’d better buy one of the things, but was a little shocked when the first model he showed me cost €106 ($135). I choked and asked if he didn’t have anything cheaper, and he showed me the €76 model. We finally got down to a €41 model, the cheapest he had, which I bought. I figured that considering I’d had a French lesson and had also bought an aiguiseur that I could take home to NYC with me, that wasn’t so bad…although the same thing at Zabars would probably cost $15. So now we have sharp knives.
27 February, Friday:
Thérèse had a wonderful idea. It is a long-standing tradition of the Medieval History Department at the University of Gent that graduate students go on occasional weekend trips together, led or at least accompanied by faculty members. In 1976 we were invited on one of those trips, a hiking trip in the Ardennes. I remember sleeping in a freezing cold barn, taking cold showers, and being introduced to chocopasta. It seemed pretty disgusting to me…eating chocolate paste smeared on bread for breakfast…but it actually tasted pretty good after a cold shower. And besides, as the Belgians pointed out to me, Americans eat peanut paste smeared on bread, so who were we to talk. In any event, Thérèse’s idea was to have a reunion of the same group 33 years later. She rented a gîte in Hockai, a little town near Spa (Spa is famous for its drinking water, its casino and thermal baths, etc. When you go to a health spa in the US, that’s where the term “spa” comes from). 12 people ended up being able to make it, coming from Gent, Antwerp and Brussels. There was Marc and Thérèse, André and Ghislaine, Eric and B (Birgit), Philippe and Leen, Claire and Jacques and Beagle and me. We all arrived in Hockai on Friday afternoon and spent the first hour with everybody trying to remember if they had actually been on that original trip, and trying to remember each other. Since we were all 33 years older, that was not an easy job. Luckily, Philippe had brought a photo album with pictures of the actual event, so we were able to confirm, and in most cases sharpen, our memories. The only people who hadn’t been on the original trip were Claire and Jacques who were relatively new friends. They were the last to arrive, and before they turned up Thérèse and Marc explained to the rest of the group that neither of them spoke Dutch or English, or at least not much. The others, all Flemish, could forgive the lack of English, but were horrified that they didn’t speak Dutch. Somebody asked, “Aren’t they Belgians?” But everybody liked them when they arrived, and we spent the rest of the weekend speaking a mélange of French, Dutch and English. Most conversations started in French but quickly moved to Dutch, and then occasionally veered into English. By the end of the weekend everybody seemed to understand everyone else, and everyone turned out to speak something other than his or her primary language…not necessarily well, but adequately. What was interesting to me was that most of the Flemish speakers didn’t have very good French…I had always assumed that most Flemish speakers also had good French but just didn’t like to used it, as a matter of principle. Not true, as it turns out. Our gîte was large and well equipped, and we settled down to a simple dinner of wine and cheese, which Marc and Thérèse had brought. Some simple dinner. We must have had 20 different kinds of cheese, all bought from a cheese store in Gent that makes its own cheese, plus bread, rolls, champagne and several different wines.
28 February, Saturday:
Today everyone staggered out of bed, had a big breakfast, and took a short walk through the town of Hockai. It is evidently a cross-country skiing center, because there were several ski rental places and lots of trails, but other than clumps here and there, the snow was pretty much gone. We then had a quick lunch and drove to the Hautes Fagnes, a big (4,500 acre) natural preserve, where we were to meet a guide. According to the dictionary, Hautes Fagnes means “high mud,” but a more accurate translation might be “high bog.” This is an area that is pretty flat, but is the highest part of Belgium. It is right on the border with Germany, and in the past at various times belonged to Germany, Holland, Luxembourg, Prussia, etc., but the Belgians got it after W.W. I and have hung onto it. Our guide was just great, although he only spoke French. He took us on a long (18 kilometer) walk while explaining about all the flora and fauna. The area is mostly a gigantic peat bog that has been used over the years for peat production, pasture, growing cranberries and, in the case of the Germans, growing trees. The area is now (slowly) being returned to its original state as a peat bog. The peat there is in some cases as deep as 7 meters, and since peat (which is made of decomposed and decomposing moss) accumulates at the rate of 1 millimeter per year, that means this process has been going on for at least 7,000 years. Give it another couple of million years and maybe it will turn into coal. Our hike started on wide paths that are evidently used as cross country ski trails. While there were no skiers around, the trails themselves still had several inches of snow and ice on them, and were very slippery and pretty tough going. We certainly could have used our YakTraxs, which we had cleverly left in Brussels. After a bit of that we went into the peat bog itself, walking much of the time on narrow “boardwalks” which were just above ground/water level. Most of the bog itself is covered with big tussocks of grass about 2 feet high and 3 or 4 inches apart. The tussocks themselves aren’t stiff enough to support your weight, and the spaces in between the tussocks are filled with about 4 inches of water. This makes walking very difficult…you sort of lurch from tussock to tussock, falling into the water at every step. I remember scrambling though terrain exactly like this 33 years ago, and it was exhausting. I was glad for the boardwalks…they made walking a lot easier. However, there were plenty of places where there were no boardwalks, just grass, and since a peat bog is in essence one big sponge, every time you took a step on grass the water squirted up around your feet. Where there weren’t tussocks of grass or regular grass, there was mud. Lots of it, generally on slopes that were made delightfully slippery by the mud. By the end of the day everyone was wet and muddy. Interestingly enough, part of the reclamation project that is going on there now is to remove a bunch of drains and restore the water to its previous levels. It is hard to think of this place getting any wetter, but that’s what they have in mind. We started our walk at 1PM and ended a little after 6 PM, when the sun was starting to set. Progress was slow after we had gotten about half way, partly because the going got tougher and partly because André, who was recovering from a series of operations, had to stop from time to time to rest. No one seemed to mind except for the guide, who was concerned that he had taken us on too long a hike. One interesting thing was that of our group, Marc, who firmly believes that exercise is bad for you, seemed to be one of the strongest hikers in the group. He was always in the lead, wearing his trench coat and his Belgian army boots, and never seemed in the slightest tired. It was truly a glorious hike. Interesting, very beautiful in a peat bog-like way, and it was a nice day for hiking…cool and somewhat misty from time to time, but no rain. We went back to the gîte, rested briefly, and then went to Spa for dinner at a very nice restaurant called Le Grand Maur (I was told that this means “Moor,” as in someone from North Africa, but perhaps it also means “moor,” as in a heath or a bog. A French play on words?). Since there were 12 of us, we had a private dining room. Our meal was excellent, the room was great, and our waiter appeared to be 14. Everyone wanted to adopt him. That happens with people who were graduate students 33 years ago. The highlight of the dinner for me, other than wines specifically chosen for each of our individual courses by a sommelier, was that Marc and B. had quite a violent dispute over the importance of preserving/learning/speaking the Dutch language. Marc made the point that there were more people who spoke Dutch than all the people who spoke all the Scandinavian languages combined. Marc was as animated as I have ever seen him, pounding on the table for emphasis. Clearly a nerve had been touched. However most of the argument was lost on our end of the table, since neither Claire or Jacques or I, who were at that end of the table, understood a word they were saying. The others paid no attention.
1 March, Sunday:
We started the day with brunch…omelettes with bacon, yogurt, boudin blanc, boudin noir, thinly sliced smoked ham, smoked trout, paté, bread, toast, rolls, 22 kinds of cheese, juice, jam, chocopasta, peanut butter, green salad, fruit salad, milk, tea and coffee. Then we drove to Limbourg, stopping on the way to visit the “Barrage de la Gileppe,” a big dam built to supply power and water to the wool industry in Verviers. The dam was quite impressive, and featured a 70 foot high observation tower which, this being Belgium, housed a cafeteria. The parking lot was full…apparently it is a Belgian tradition to visit this dam. Most of our group remembered being taken here in school groups. Since we were a group of historians (actually nine current or former medieval historians, one civil engineer, one psychiatrist and one former financier), we of course knew that the great Belgian historian Henri Pirenne gave his first public address at the dedication of this dam when he was 14 years old, and his audience was the King of Belgium. Apparently the King asked for a copy of the speech, but young Henri refused to give it to him. From there we went on to Limbourg, a lovely little medieval town perched right on the top of a hill with a big church (closed for renovations). The town center is made up of a whole bunch of very old buildings (I saw one with a date of 1671) grouped around a rectangular “place,” and the main street is about half cobblestones and half potholes (to keep people from speeding, I suppose). We walked around for a while, and then since there appeared to be no cafés open in Limbourg, drove to Verviers for a beer. For once we skipped lunch, since our brunch seemed adequate. After the beer, most of our group drove back to Gent or Antwerp. Marc and Thérèse and Beagle and I were staying at the gîte for one more night, so we walked around Verviers and visited a museum dedicated to the wool industry. Verviers used to be a very prosperous wool processing/weaving city, right up until the 1950s and 1960s, but the industry died quickly after that. Today there are only two places in Verviers that make cloth. One makes fabric for the top of pool tables and the other makes some other sort of highly specialized cloth. The museum had exhibits showing how the wool was washed, processed, etc. and turned into cloth. It was interesting for this group of medieval historians, who spend a lot of time studying the economics and politics of the cloth industry, to see how this is actually done. One interesting tidbit was that before they had soaps that could clean wool, they used human urine, which apparently contains lots of ammonia, which is good for cleaning wool. A man would go around the town every morning collecting urine from the local households, for which they got paid. Part of his job was to taste each “deposit” of urine to make sure that it contained enough ammonia…i.e. to make sure that the local citizenry weren’t diluting the urine they were selling him with water. After being educated about wool, we drove back to the gîte, took showers, and went out to dinner in a little town called Solwaster at a restaurant called Le Vinâve. It was excellent, and featured local produce, etc. We even had a Belgian wine.
2 March, Monday:
We got up early today, straightened out the gîte, and drove back to Brussels. We got caught in a big demonstration of some sort right as we were coming into Brussels…there were a lot of people with banners and orange jackets walking down the street and chanting unintelligible slogans. That slowed us down a bit. I was supposed to be going to ULB for a tour that was being led by Claire, but I never made it. I waited for about a half hour for a bus that takes you right to ULB, and normally runs all the time, but it never came…perhaps the demonstration affected the busses as well. Subsequently I discovered that there is a big postal strike going on…it started on Friday and is supposed to last until Thursday, so perhaps that’s what caused the disruption. In any event, it has disrupted our supply of DVDs from DVDPost, who are unsure of what to do about the strike. The man I spoke to at DVDPost said that they had no idea where all their DVDs were, whether any would be delivered this week or next, etc. He was sympathetic but didn’t appear to be overly troubled. I guess the post office shuts down all the time.
3 March, Tuesday:
A nice blue sky day here, temperature in the mid 40s. There appears to be a blizzard going on in New York, and the financial world is continuing its meltdown. I checked into the Belgian postal strike. It appears that postal workers in Belgium have gone on strike, protesting wages, working conditions, privatization, post office closings and potential future job losses. The postal union claims that everyone has gone on strike, and management claims that half the mail was delivered on Monday and 80% of post offices were open, albeit with only one employee. This being Belgium, things are more complicated than they seem on the surface. I discovered that one of the complaints of the postal workers is that Danish Post, owned by the Danish government, bought 25% of Belgium Post about three years ago and is now selling it to CVC Partners, a Luxembourg based buyout firm, at a €200,000,000 profit. Sometimes the mix of socialism and capitalism produces interesting results. In the interim, we are getting no mail and are enriching FedEx, who we hope is not on strike. We went to gym tonight. There appears to be a rapid turnover of the people who use the gym, leading us to believe that most people who stay in this furnished apartment complex are only here for a short time. The smelly man who spoke in some Slavic tongue has gone. So has the Italian man with spaghetti strap t-shirts and a huge mane of hair that flopped all over the place whenever he did anything. He sported a Charles Atlas-like upper body and Woody Allenesque legs and did nothing but free weights. Two burly men, one of whom has tattoos all over his arms, who speak some bizarre language, replaced them. Beagle was convinced that they were speaking some Scandinavian dialect, but after listening closely I determined that it was English. Tonight, the gym was populated by two women who had with them a little boy who appeared to be about four years old, and a 9 month old who was asleep in his stroller. They were all very cute, but they took up a lot of room, and the women seemed to spend more time talking on their cell phones than working out.
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