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.
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