Our new neighbors

We live on Kortrijkstraat, the main road into Zwevegem, and for a small town, it is actually pretty busy. Cars and trucks rumble and zoom past all day. People zip by on bikes, motor by on scooters, and walk by as well. The relatively “urban” setting, though, does not preclude suddenly running across a yard full of sheep. In our case, out back near the garage, our landlord keep chickens. Our new neighbors:

Bon Jour

On our third day in Belgium, Travis and I decided to visit the French-speaking city of Brussels. All of our guidebooks are still either in the mail, or on a boat somewhere between the Panama Canal and here, slated to arrive in mid-October, so we decided to just wing it.

Luckily, the company car we have been loaned has the most amazing navigation system! We found the Grote Markt on the menu of historic places, it calculated our route and gave us verbal directions all the way there.
“Next, you will turn right on Koningslplein,” She says, in a calm voice not unlike the computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
“In three hundred meters, turn right on Koningsplein.”
“Turn Right.”

It’s amazing, really. Without her, we would have probably ended up in France. So we squeezed the car into what looked like a no parking zone (“They did it first!” protested Travis, gesturing to the other cars) and set off to have an adventure in Brussels.

Obviously, we couldn’t park right IN the Grote Markt, but from where we left the car we had a very general idea of what direction to go. We walked up a block, and there on the corner, were three Japanese tourists taking pictures of a small fountain of a little boy peeing. We had happened upon one of the historical monuments I had most wanted to see, the Mannekin Pis, completely by accident. Call me serendipity, yes.

From there we followed several signs to the Grote Markt, considered one of the most beautiful squares in Europe. We did not get up at 1:30AM on Sunday, but it was still pretty early when we arrived, so the square was mostly empty. I had seen pictures of the buildings online, but the actual experience…well, stunning is the adjective that comes to mind. Travis took a 360 degree short film, which might give a little bit more of an idea of the scale than flat, 2 dimensional pictures.

The helpful city of Brussels has posted maps of the city on various street corners, leading us on a walk through the Parc de Bruxelles, and past a lot of beautiful buildings that reminded us how nice it would have been to have our guide book.

I was getting hungry, so we decided to sample the national dish, Moules et Frites, (mussels and chips) at a French café less than a block from the Grote Markt (aka de Grand Place in French). The café offered menus in French, Dutch, and English, but the waiter really only understood in French. Several confused exchanges later, we each sampled a beer while we waited for our meal. I tried the Rodenbach, and Travis had a triple-something while we tried to decipher our paper placemats, which were in French.

My best high-school-French guess is that the placemat advised us to eat our mussels informally, because it is difficult to eat them with your fork in your left hand, and a knife in your right hand in the manner that most Europeans use their cutlery. No problem! Americans are great at eating informally! We shared a huge bucket of steamed mussels, a plate of frites, and a bowl of French onion soup, and the entire bill came to a little less than 30€. Absolutely delicious! Travis and I practiced saying Merci and a few other French words to the waiter, who bore our accent with practiced despair.

By this point, the streets were thronged with tourists and vendors selling snacks from carts. On our way back to the car, we bought deux waffles avec chocolat, s’il vous plaît from a waffle cart, completing our calorie consumption for the next few days. I think the thing that surprised me the most was how much graffiti and trash we saw. Brussels was nice to visit, but I am glad we are going to be living in Gent.

By any other name

In French, it’s called Gand, in English Ghent, and in Dutch, Gent. Either way, it is the third-largest city in Belgium, and capitol of the province of Oost-Vlaanderen. I had a vague memory of the Treaty of Ghent being signed there, which a quick look at the Wikipedia informs me ended the war of 1812. On Saturday morning Travis and I woke up refreshed and ready to go at 1:30AM local time, having not quite adjusted our inner clocks. We watched some local television (You haven’t seen the 1976 classic film adaptation of Stephen King’s novel Carrie until you have seen in dubbed in German) and generally waited around until it was a reasonable hour to travel there.

Most of Travis’ co-workers live in Gent, which is more cosmopolitan that the Kortrijk-Zwevegem area where we are staying right now. When we move into our own place, that is where we will look for an apartment. It’s only about a half-hour drive away, and when we arrived the streets were still empty and damp from the early morning rain. The center of Gent has the most amazing gothic medieval architecture. Think tall, pointed stone arches that draw your eye skyward towards heaven (looming over treacherous cobbled streets that will snag your sexy European boots if you aren’t careful).

We spent hours walking around through tiny, winding streets that lead us past one café, boutique, and chocolatier after another. We stopped in at the local library, lingered near picturesque canals, and visited Saint Bavo Cathedral (aka Sint Baafskathedral in Dutch). Sint Baaf was a Roman Catholic Saint who, as far as I can tell, after a dissolute youth, gave away all of his riches to build an abbey, while he himself lived as a recluse in a hollow tree. In his memory, they built the largest, most elaborate church in town. Now, there are all sorts of old things literally crammed into the church in the alcoves. They have a painting by Peter Paul Rubens, and most famously, the alter triptych by Hubert and Jan Van Eyke, Adoration of the Mystic Lamb.

Possibly the most triumphant moment, though, for Travis and I, was figuring out a work of art of a more humble variety. We were practicing our Dutch by trying to translate the signs we ran across. “Honden in park moeten op een leiband zijn”. Hmmm. “Dogs in park must be on a leash” we hazarded. “Bibliotheek” Aha, the library! There were also a lot of brightly colored signs advertising concerts, raves, and other events for us to practice on. Then we came across a bright yellow and blue sign in a shop window, somewhat similar to the party posters. It had two cartoon characters with their hands in the air and…little dots arcing from their crotch area towards little puddles on the ground. “Wild Plassen, 60€”. Travis and I both stood there in a state of complete mystification.
“Plassen means piss,” Travis remembered.
“Wild pissing!?” I realized. “If you get caught peeing outside, the fee is 60 Euros!?”
In a city where most of the public bathrooms charge .30€, it pays to keep a pocketful of change!

So now for the really important stuff: what sort of shoes are the women wearing?

I’ll get to the shoes in a minute; first, I ought to mention the time difference. Belgium is nine hours ahead of San Diego, so we devised a careful strategy to adjust as quickly as possible. Wednesday night, before our flight on Thursday, Travis and I got huge cups of coffee and stayed up to 1AM. Although we theoretically got four hours of sleep, when we stumbled out of bed at 5AM I felt like I had been up all night.

So by the time we got to Atlanta, GA at 3PM local time, I couldn’t figure out what time it was in San Diego or Europe, but I knew we were at the right gate for our international flight because everyone was speaking French. The next flight was eight and a half hours, with a dinner (pasta, not bad) and a breakfast (croissant and a piece of fruit), and a nice long bit in between where we could sleep. Travis and I ate our food, took a Tylenol PM, and settled in with our pillows and blankets for a good, long nap.

Was it the flight attendant who asked us if we wanted a drink just after we closed our eyes? Was it the two frat boys behind us who raided the drinks cart after lights out and got drunk and churlish? Travis’s breathing had already smoothed out into his sleep patterns, there I was, awake and bored. I spent most of the night reading, snatching an hour or so of sleep.

We touched down at 8:30AM local time on Friday, and started our day!

The driver met us with a sign that said “Mr & Mrs Wirdleharth” after we had gotten through immigration and retrieved our bags. The scenery between Brussels and Zwevegem is very green and lush compared to San Diego, and it was exciting to see the charming little farm houses, signs in Dutch reminding drivers that children smaller than 135 cm must be in a car seat, and all of the tiny little cars they drive here! I love little cars! I had heard of most of the makes before, like Citroen, Renault, and Peugeot, but “Opel” was new to me.

If you go to my Myspace, I have posted a video Travis took of our new place (Look for the link under the picture, it says "view my pics videos"). It was fun dragging in all of our bags, and then getting nosy and opening all of the cupboards. We have all of the necessary furniture, bedding and towels, a few pots and pans, dishes, glasses, silverware, an electric kettle, and, oddly enough, an egg cooker with instructions in 13 languages. Who could live without an egg cooker, right?

So on our first day in Belgium, Travis took me to the town next door, Kortrijk, and showed me around. Cobbled streets! Canals! Chocolatiers on every corner! Through the haze of sleep deprivation it was like having stepped into some sort of beautiful fantasy world. In this world, people can park their bikes in front of a shop without locking it up. There is a little store just for cheese, one for fruit, and one for fish. Others are filled with every kind of bread and pastry you can imagine, with an aroma wafting out that is completely beyond description. In the big central square, crowds of people sit in cafes sipping coffee out of fairy-sized cups and eating elf-sized cookies. At any moment I expected the natives to break out into song and start dancing in the streets.

With great interest, I looked around to see what sort of clothes and shoes the women were wearing. Without exception, I don’t think I saw a single woman wearing sneakers. High heeled shoes, high heeled sandals, and let me tell you, some seriously sexy high heeled boots, yes. Based on some scientific observation of the shop windows, most of those boots cost somewhere between 100 and 300 Euros (1 Euro = $1.30 American dollars). At that price, I would freaking SLEEP in those boots.

Tomorrow: Our trip to Gent.

Judi's New Haircut

This is Judi's new haircut. She had it done at "Diesel" on Adams Ave. near the Ken. I approve.

I took it at Lestat's, which is an established and fairly well known cafe on Adams Ave. They have WIFI, so we'e been drinking a lot of coffee as we use the internet here.

Brugges

(I am back in the US for short time now, this post is retroactive)

I made an unscheduled trip to Bruges last night. One of my coworkers who visited China last week brought two employees from that location to BTC. The visitors had grown tired of Western food, and so Jan told them he’d take them to a well known Chinese restaurant in Bruges, and invited me along. He lives in the direction of that city, and the four of us headed to pick his wife up on the way. (Note: Ghent is not the “Venice of the North” as I said earlier, Bruges actually is, despite the fact Ghent has far more canals.)

That part of the trip was educational in and of itself. Despite being on the way to Bruges, Jan lives far out in the country, and we used rural roads to get there. For a region renown for being flat as a pancake, the roads here sure are curvy in some places, and this particular route was hardly ever straight, and had about twenty roundabouts in it. I think we were on “Sillystrawstraat”. Judi, add Bonine to your pre-move shopping list.

To make things more interesting, I learned for the first time (both by having it explained to me, and empirically first hand) that there are more pigs in Belgium than people (of which there are ten million). Now apparently this particular area of Flanders is quite heavy with the pig production, and it made me glad we are only cow heavy in the Valley because even a few dozen pigs per field made the entire area smell quite- agrarian. We arrived in what was probably the porcine capital of the Universe to pick up his wife at a ceramics furnace (adjacent to a corn field), who loaded her art pieces into the trunk of the car and filled the last bit of space in the back seat. The day was actually quite hot, and the car very stuffy, and the air very musty, so when we set back upon Rue de Sillystraw the Chinese people and myself began to turn green.

We drove for something like half an hour to “see the country”, before we arrived in another town to drop the art pieces off at a studio. Jan and his wife got out of the car, and took the articles in the trunk into the building. The three of us in the car just sort of tried not to breathe too much, and sat in the uncomfortable stew that the car had become. After a few minutes, Jan came back out and said “my wife wants to know if you’d like to come in and take a look at the amateur art”. Ever heard of a Chinese fire drill?

The art show was pretty neat, and most of the work was actually quite good. In the amateur class they covered several different media, including sculpture, drawing, and painting. From there we got back in the car, and drove out of the country into Bruges. Getting back in the car wasn’t so bad, as the pig smell had dissipated and we had cooled off. On the highway it only takes about twenty minutes to get to Bruges, but I was happy to have seen the scenic route despite olfactory concerns.

Bruges is very nice, and is considered the most scenic city in Belgium. Indeed it is, partly because the many Belgian wars passed the city over leaving it almost untouched, and also because the local government seems to have invested significantly in the image of the city. It does have all of the trappings of a “tourist spot”, the most common criticism of the locale, but it isn’t anything one wouldn’t see in such a place anywhere else (hyper programmed zoning, souvenir shops, overly-“Belgian” merchandise). Still, there are many nice looking restaurants in the city, and it continues to maintain its moat and a few canals which are all buffered by huge trees and green space. The waterways are full of swans and other fowl, and as one might expect boat rides are available to see the scenic parks and historic buildings that abut the waterways. There is a major beginnery there, and a historic seminary for training Catholic priests that is still in operation, pulling in students from all over the world.