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.
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