25 March, Wednesday:
If you were to walk through our apartment, through our garden, through the next garden and through the building on the other side, you would come to a street called Champs-Elysées. This is not like the Champs-Elysées in Paris, which is a long, wide avenue which the Parisians think is the most beautiful avenue in the world, and which has some of the most expensive real estate in the world. The Champs-Elysées in Brussels is a different matter. It is a narrow street with narrow sidewalks that runs about three blocks, and if you follow it down the hill to the end, you get to some bottle recycling bins and the Delhaize supermarket, which we frequent. The street itself has a few nice buildings on it, but is generally grim. You have to watch where you step because a lot of people seem to use the sidewalks as a place to walk their dogs, and there is generally some broken glass on the sidewalks where some delinquent has broken a car window to rob what was inside. But if you look carefully you see that on the left-hand side, as you go down the hill, there is a big yellow house which, behind a high metal wall, has a huge garden. It is a little hard to say how big the garden is, because you can only see it if you peek through holes in the fence, or stand on a bench or something. But it surrounds the house on two sides, and I would say it is 1 - 2 acres in size. And on the other size of the street, also behind a wall, is another house with what looks like another nice garden. And down the hill a bit you can get a glimpse through a gate of a big free-standing house that overlooks what must be a huge garden, entirely surrounded by a very high concrete wall. It is hard to guess exactly how big this garden is…when you look at a map, it shows a big green space…but based on the layout of the streets and the fact that it completely occupies the space between two streets, all the way down to the Delhaize, I would say that it is at least 2 complete city blocks big, which is about 11 acres. And this is hidden from view in the middle of what appears to be a pretty grimy neighborhood in the middle of Brussels.
26 March, Thursday:
The weather here has developed a new pattern. In the morning it is rainy, or at least there are signs that it has rained during the night…the ground is wet, it is grey, etc. Then the sun comes out, and while it is cool and sometimes cloudy, the days are pretty nice. And it is now light until 7PM…and that will be later soon, since we go on daylight savings time this Sunday. I spent much of the day doing French exercises, and being frustrated by them. Part of my problem appears to be that my mind works (when it works) differently from a French person’s mind. An example: One of my chores was to write a description of what was going on in a comic strip. The comic strip depicted a man trying to unravel a bunch of rope or electrical cables that had become hopelessly snarled. He tries and tries, and is very frustrated, but in the end he succeeds, and is briefly very elated. But then he becomes despondent and unhappy. This is a French comic strip. The French think it is very funny. I couldn’t figure it out. I got the part about being frustrated by trying to untangle a tangle of rope/string/electrical cables. I understand that. I understand the elation when you are successful. But the despondency I couldn’t figure out. It was later explained to me that it was the unhappiness that follows success that was so funny. Apparently the French would rather be miserable than happy, and the man was unhappy after he untangled the wire because he suddenly realized that he had no more impossible challenges to face. My view is that you are frustrated when trying to untangle the wire, and then you are happy when you succeed. Then you are on to something else that is more interesting than untangling wire. The French see it differently. Ha Ha.
27 March, Friday:
Beagle had to get up at the crack of dawn today to go to a Pirenne colloquium (whatever that is) starting at 9 AM in Gent, where she was delivering the opening statement at 9:30 AM. I was offered the opportunity to get up at the crack of dawn as well and drive her to Gent and then hang around all day while the colloquium was going on. I declined and instead stayed in Brussels and had a 3-hour French lesson with Aurélie. I have decided that Aurélie is not a very good teacher, but we are sort of stuck with her. She loves to talk, so you have to remind her from time to time that we are paying for a lesson, not paying to listen to her talk. She also has a tendency to explain to you the 365 different ways of saying something…I simply can’t remember 365 ways of saying the same thing. What I want to do is to learn one way of saying something, and then learn one way of saying something else. Once I have learned one way of how to say a lot of things, then I’ll focus on learning how to say them differently. My objective is to be able to carry on a conversation, to be able to express myself in French, etc. I’ll deal with how elegantly I say things later. The exercise book that Aurélie gives us homework from is also, in my opinion, deficient. It simply gives you exercises to do without giving you any instruction in what you are supposed to be learning. This, needless to say, is frustrating, since after flailing away for a while doing exercises, you then go over them with Aurélie who points out all the mistakes you have made since you didn’t know the rule you were supposed to be learning, not to mention the 35 exceptions to that rule. I have another French grammar book that I use on my own, and Aurélie cheerfully admits that that book is much better as a teaching tool than hers. Yet she persists in using the other one. She claims that the French like variety! Today was a particularly frustrating class, for some reason. We were working on “indirect discourse” and “reported discourse,” and things like that…for example, when someone says to you “I just strangled my French teacher,” you would report that to someone else by saying “He told me that he had just strangled his French teacher.” Except you do that in French. I have had this lesson many times before, but it is always useful to review things like this, especially since my mind is a sieve. So there are rules about how you do this, including something called “concordance des temps.” These are rigid rules that must always be followed. I object to this in certain situations because it sometimes appears to me that there would be a better way of expressing it. For example, when someone says to you “I believe that wife-beating is bad,” you would “report” that by saying “He told me that he thought wife-beating was bad.” I would like to report that by saying “He told me that he thought wife-beating is bad.” By the way, this is a real example from today’s class…all the exercises you have in French involve people arguing, robbing or being robbed, being cheated at the store, loosing their job, etc. The French don’t have a positive or optimistic bone in their bodies. Aurélie kept slapping me down, saying that I had to follow the rule of “concordance des temps.” So I did, but then about halfway through that particular set of exercises she changed her mind, and then told me that while I should obey the rule and say things in a certain way, I could in fact say it the way I wanted, and that it all depended on the sense of the sentence. And that sometimes disobeying the rule was better. I wept with frustration at this point. Aurélie was very happy. The French like strife, argument and misery, so she had done her job. I threw her out and drove to Gent for a marvelous dinner with all the speakers at Beagle’s Pirenne colloquium. All the usual suspects were there, plus a few new faces. The dinner was at Het Pand, which is sort of like the University of Gent faculty club. We have eaten there several times, and each time I come away impressed. It is like eating in a starred restaurant. The food is excellent, beautifully presented, and well served in a beautiful space. And of course you have different wines matched with every course. Beagle says that the Columbia Faculty Club has improved a lot in recent years, and we have had some excellent meals at the President’s house, but Columbia still has a long way to go to match this. After dinner we drove back to Brussels, giving a ride to a German man and a French man who were staying at a hotel near our apartment, and to a very lively Belgian French-speaking woman who also lives nearby. She gave us the name of a restaurant in our neighborhood that is supposed to be great. As usual it is hidden away, down an alley that you’d never walk down at night unless you knew where you were going. We’ll check it out. It is open 7 days a week, including Sundays, which is unusual.
28 March, Saturday:
The Pirenne colloquium continued, today in Brussels. I guess that means the papers were in French, not Dutch. The colloquium went well, except one of the presenters, the nice German man we gave a ride home to last night, was apparently outraged that his presentation wasn’t received with enough respect by the Belgians. The Belgians were not impressed. Stunningly enough, there was no dinner afterwards. So Beagle and Thérèse and Marc decided they’d come back to our apartment and cook dinner. Thérèse was in charge of cooking. Beagle was her assistant. Marc and I were in charge of wine and cheese. We failed, because the cheese shop was closed when we got to it. We called Thérèse and Beagle, caught them at the grocery store, and settled down to watch the news, comfortable that we had done our best. Thérèse and Beagle came back from the supermarket with a wonderful dinner…smoked duck breast and roasted chèvre on toast rounds on salad, lieu noir (pollock) with spinach, and four different kinds of chees bought at the Delhaize supermarket. Why don’t we find that kind of stuff when we are there? Anyway, it was a great dinner with good wine (a sparking wine from the Lille wine fair, a white wine with the fish and a red with the cheese, both from Delhaize.
29 March, Sunday:
Daylight savings time started last night in Europe. So we celebrated by sleeping late, and then went to the market in Place Flagey to buy some food and plants. While there we noticed that there were a bunch of tents and a lot of people at the end of Place Flagey. So we went to see what was going on. It was a spring festival sponsored by the Socialist party, and while there didn’t appear to be a lot of political activity, there was food and drink everywhere…literally every kind of food and drink you could think of. I guess Belgian politicians know their audience. We went home and planned our day. Beagle wanted to take a walk, but I didn’t. So we compromised and took a walk. We started out in the direction of Parc Cinquentenaire, but veered off to Place Jourdan, which has a famous frites stand. On the way we ran into an older gentleman who claimed that he lived in Brussels but was lost in the whole EU complex. We helped him with some directions and he gave us candy. Somewhere in the back of my mind there is some warning bell that sounds when I talk about nice old gentlemen giving me candy, but I suspect that this was something different. Imagine the headlines…63 year old molested by 86 year old pervert! So we escaped that, and went in the direction of Place Jourdan. On the way we saw a 6 year old kicking a soccer ball back and forth with his older brother. The first time he kicked it, we thought it was cute, but perhaps an accident…he kicked it hard, and straight, and with great force…enough so that had you been in the way you would have been driven back. I would not have wished to be in the path of that ball. Then he did the same thing ten times. This kid was fantastic. A true rival to Graham. After watching this future Pélé or David Beckham for a bit, we continued to Place Jourdan where there was, in fact, the famous frites stand, which I had visited before. I was about to stand in line to get frites, but since there were 2 lines, and each was 30 people deep, and since Beagle refused to eat anything fried, we ended up in a café where we had a great lunch. I had spaghetti bolognaise and Beagle had salade niçoise. We left the café and walked to Parc Cinquentenaire, where we had been planning to visit the art museum. But since we had started late, by the time we got there it was about 30 minutes before closing time. So we gave up and walked home. On the way we saw a group of young men playing 4 to a side soccer in a “field” the size of a tennis court with wooden walls. It was very reminiscent of pickup basketball games in NYC. The game was very fast, and the players were very good…the key to the game was ball control, and they were good at it. We then walked towards home, through Square Ambiorix and Square Marie Louise, very pretty residential areas with huge EU buildings looming up behind them. On the way we also stopped at Filigranes, a bookstore that is open on Sunday. It is a great bookstore with very narrow aisles and lots of people. It has books in all sorts of languages…except Dutch. And this is officially a Dutch/French speaking country. Go figure.
30 March, Monday:
Today was another nice spring day. It was sunny and in the 50s. I did some French homework, went marketing, etc. and went to the post office to mail a package. The way it works at the post office is that when you enter you get a little slip of paper with a number on it from a machine. Eventually your number will pop up on a video screen, and it tells you on the screen which window to go to. It is a pretty efficient system, but the place was jammed, so I was prepared for a long wait. But an older man came up to me as I was getting my number from the machine and offered me his slip of paper, which had a much lower number on it than the one I had. I guess he had given up and was leaving. I thanked him and took his slip, and was pondering the ethics of using it to cut the line, when that number was called. Rather than upset the smoothly working post office system, I marched up to the window indicated on the screen, mailed my package and was out of there.
31 March, Tuesday:
Today was a day of conference calls and board meetings and not much else. 3 ½ hours for the Butler Funds and 1 ½ hour for IRRC. Those plus lunch and gym and a little French homework and the day was pretty much used up.
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