Week 20 - In which I am banished from the house, we find 4 new parks, I watch rugby and spring arrives

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.