1 April, Wednesday:
Some April Fool’s Day. I picked up Beagle’s sister Jean at the train station this morning. She had just flown into Paris from DC, and is spending a few days with us in Brussels before she goes to Provence for a month. Our day was full, what with Jean’s arrival, 3 hours of French lessons with Aurélie, multiple conference calls for both Beagle and me, and an afternoon meeting for Beagle. Jean napped and made a few forays into the neighborhood. We thought about having dinner out, but ended up punting and having spaghetti at home.
2 April, Thursday:
Jean needed to revisit Brussels and it was a nice spring day so we walked to the Grand Place, had lunch at La Becasse…where the gueuze was wasted on Jean…, walked back along Avenue Louise and into Saint Gilles, visited the Horta House, and looked at lovely houses on rue Molière. There were even streets with trees in flower…very unusual for Brussels. By the time we got to Bois de la Cambre everyone was walked out, so we took a tram home. After a long bout of talking and foot rubbing (during which I absented myself), we went to Au Vieux Bruxelles and ate moules and frites for dinner. Everyone was happy and tired and we went to bed early.
3 April, Friday:
Today was a lovely spring/summer day. It was sunny, with temperatures in the 70s. We walked to the lakes near Place Flagey, then to the Abbaye de la Cambre, then along Avenue Roosevelt, and then into the Bois de la Cambre and the Forêt des Soignes. It was just wonderful. There were flowers everywhere, trees in bud and starting to turn green, etc. We left the forêt at Watermael-Boitsfort and went to our “usual” restaurant and had a lunch of pizza and beer sitting outside. We took the tram home, opened all the doors to our garden and enjoyed the weather. We had dinner at Les Brassins, a restaurant in our neighborhood on Kleienveldstraat/rue Keyenveld that was recently recommended to us. This was exactly as advertised. This turned out to be a great restaurant in the Belgian fashion with all sorts of typical Belgian food. Jean had tuna, Beagle and I had lapin à la kriek (rabbit cooked in cherry beer…you could choose one leg or two, and we both chose one), and we had frites, stoemp and boiled potatoes on the side. The restaurant has an extraordinarily broad beer list…maybe 30 different beers plus about a dozen beer “specials”… plus wine, etc. It was very informal, and not super expensive (at least I think so, but Jean paid), and it was a few doors down the street from the house where Audrey Hepburn was born. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Audrey Hepburn’s life story, she was born on this tiny, dingy street in Brussels in 1929. Her original name was Audrey Kathleen Ruston, and she was descended from, among others, King Edward III of England and the consort of Mary Queen of Scots, James Hepburn, 4th Earl of Bothwell, who was apparently also an ancestor of Katharine Hepburn. She was also a distant cousin of Humphrey Bogart and Prince Ranier III of Monaco, but then again, I am sure that I am related to Vlad the Impaler of Transylvania and Brittany Spears. Her father was a Nazi sympathizer and her mother was a fascist, and that seems to have caused family problems. Her parents got divorced in 1935 and her mother moved Audrey to Holland in 1939 to be safe from the Nazis. As we all know, this did not work out so well, since the Nazis arrived in Holland shortly after Audrey did. Audrey danced to raise money for the Resistance, and among her childhood memories were those of seeing her uncle and her cousin being executed by Germans for being members of the Resistance. While she was in Holland she assumed the name Edda van Heerrnstra so as not to have too English a sounding name. She moved to London in 1948 where, apparently, her film career took off. I hope she got to eat at Les Brassins before she left Brussels.
4 April, Saturday:
Today started out as cool and foggy. Jean had a 10:21 train from Gare de Midi to Avignon, so needless to say, she was ready to go at about 6AM. We were not so alert. Jean and I took the Metro to Gare de Midi, which perhaps was a mistake. They were inaugurating a new service on the Metro today…two new lines, much improved displays that tell you how long you have to wait for a train, better and more frequent schedules, etc. According to all the signs, on the weekends the metros should run every 5 minutes on the line we were taking. We waited for about 10 minutes and then, when the train came, it sat in the station for another 10 minutes, etc. Good thing we had allowed a lot of time for the Metro ride. A ride that should have taken 5 minutes took 30. I am not impressed with the new Metro. The same was true on the way back…and even more annoying was that after I had searched all over the place for one of those ticket “composting” machines I finally found one and managed to pay, but then heard an announcement that in honor of the inaguration of the “new” Metro, everyone could ride for free. Once I got back home we were free, but we couldn’t figure out what to do. So, since it was a grey and depressing day, we went to the movies…the first time since we have been in Brussels. We went around the corner (literally) to the Styxx, which is a tiny theatre with two screens and a seating capacity in each screening room of about 35 seats. We saw “Entre les murs,” which is distributed in the US under the title “The Class.” In good European fashion, they run about 8 movies at the theatre, but since there are only two screens, each of them has different viewing times…so if you want to see a particular movie, you have to go there at, say Saturday at 4:45 PM, when it is playing that day. The next day it will be at a different time, etc. Very confusing. We had to arrange our schedule so we could see this movie. But since it was a sort of grey and foggy day, that was fine. It was a great movie…more or less a documentary about a teacher and his class of mixed-race, mixed-culture junior high school students in the 20th arrondissement of Paris. How anyone is a high school teacher is beyond me.
5 April, Sunday:
Today started out being gray and unpromising, but it warmed up and turned into a real spring day. We did one of our standard walks and ended up in the Bois de la Cambre. Everyone in Brussels was there with their kids, all of whom were learning to ride bicycles except for the ones who were playing soccer or sleeping on the grass. It got pretty hot…into the 70s…and people were taking full advantage of it.
6 April, Monday:
Another day with an unpromising beginning that ended up being really nice. I went grocery shopping, did e-mail, etc., and then went to Filigranes and bought a guidebook for Lille, because we are going to be there next month with some British friends. Beagle went clothes shopping and…hold your breath…bought some black pants. I spent part of the afternoon reading my book in the garden. It was very pleasant, and the first time I had spent more than 2 minutes in the garden.
7 April, Tuesday:
On Wednesday we are going to be meeting our friends the Preveniers in a town called Dranouter, in West Flanders, so we had to reschedule our regular Wednesday French lesson for today. However, Aurélie called at about 8 AM to say that she couldn’t make it, that she had been stricken with a terrible case of the flu, that she had been vomiting all night, etc., etc. Hmmm. It does seem that Aurélie misses more classes than she makes. But no big deal. Instead of having a French lesson I read an excellent trashy book.
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