2011.04.07 Belgium

After a week in Switzerland with Steve, Maria, Anna, and Kate, we made the one-hour flight from Geneva to Brussels to spend some time with Pamela and Henry. We continued to have nice spring weather--cool, but mostly dry and sunny. Here are a few of the highlights of our visit.

Henry gave us several concerts. I originally uploaded a video of him playing Lightly Row and it worked for a couple of days. Lately it's come up with a message that it's unavailable, so I took it down. Click on this You Tube link to see it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuZvfar4T_4

Here's the still picture I took while he was playing.

This has been home to Pamela and Henry since 2002.

This is part of the garden wall.

Park Josephat, two blocks from home, offers scenery, sculpture, ducks and geese, a playground, woods, and open space. We spent an afternoon playing American baseball with Henry.

These are a relatively new addition to Brussels. Stations like this dot the city every few blocks. Once you subscribe, you can check out or return a bike at any station. No reservations are needed.

We arrived at the peak of cherry blossom season. Pamela's neighborhood, Schaerbeek, is known for the hundreds Japanese flowering cherry trees that line many of its streets. 

Other streets are lined with plane trees, which are cut back to this shape every fall. During the summer they will grow limbs several feet in length which are thick with large leaves. I got some interesting information on this from my friend Lynn in Ft. Collins after she saw this picture. Here it is: That is a process of "pollarding"  practiced for a long time in Europe.  It is a form of "coppicing" that has been done to make trees and shrubs bushy for hedges, to produce sticks for firewood and other uses, and also to keep street trees from getting too large. 

The nearby Tuesday market is where Bill, Henry, and I got courgette (zucchini) and tomato plants for Pamela's vegetable garden. By the time we left, the neighborhood cats had either broken or dug up most of them. In spite of the annual challenges offered by the cats and the slugs, they manage to get a lot of food from their garden.

We took Henry (wearing tan trousers) to fencing. He enjoys it and he's pretty good at it. He passed his level 1 exam last fall.

Henry puts the finishing touches on a chicken dish from a kids' cookbook he got for Christmas.

Bill, Henry, and I went to the Museum of Musical Instruments housed in the1898 Art Nouveau Old England building, a former department store.

The Museum of Musical Instruments houses over 1500 instruments. When we entered we received a set of headphones and instructions to stand in the numbered circle on the floor in front of each display. There were information sheets in each room in various languages. These provided brief written descriptions, while standing in the circles allowed us to hear the instruments through the headphones.

This plaza and clock are near the Central Rail Station, the Grand Place, and Beaux-Arts museum complex. We watched a couple of break dancers for awhile after visiting the Museum of Musical Instruments. For the next several days, we watched Henry's version of break dancing. He was fascinated by it.

The tower in the distance is the top of the City Hall in the Grand Place, viewed from the Beaux-Arts area.

This little truck was doing good business on the sunny spring day we were in the Beaux-Arts area. The ice cream sandwich was a potential mess, but Henry didn't lose a drop of it. Amazing!

Bill and I have a long-standing tradition of buying a waffle on the street every time we come to Brussels. You have no idea how tasty these are. They are made of dough, not batter, are rather heavy, and are laced with sugar crystals. No waffle I've eaten anywhere else can compare. But it's gotta come from a street vendor to be the authentic Woolley experience. 

Bill, Henry, and I visited the museums in the Japanese Pagoda and neighboring Chinese Pavilion. This is a view of the Japanese Pagoda from the Chinese Pavilion. Both were commissioned by King Leopold II at the turn of the last century. The halls of the Chinese Pavilion are Louis IV and Louis VI style and decorated with Chinese motifs, chinaware and silverware. The Japanese Pagoda was inspired by a construction Leopold saw at the Paris Exposition of 1900. He asked its architect Alexandre Marcel to build him a similar one here.  Leopold II is not the pride of Belgian history by a long shot, but Brussels, nonetheless, continues to preserve the material legacy he left.

This is the front of the Chinese Pavillion.

I couldn't stop taking pictures of these absolutely elaborate interiors. This is a bit of detail around the edge of the ceiling of one of the rooms in the Chinese Pavilion.

The main floor of the Chinese Pavilion was supposed to be a restaurant, but nobody ever came forward to open one here.

The stairways in the Japanese Pagoda are lined with elaborately framed stained glass and carved wood. 

The next tram stop from the Japanese Pagoda and Chinese Pavilion is the Atomium. Henry takes bike lessons here on Saturdays as there are great off-road paths. While he was on a ride, the rest of us went up in the Atomium to see the displays inside and the views of the city.

He ate all this after cleaning up a big dinner of meatballs at Restaurant Au Relais, a favorite neighborhood restaurant.

I took my camera on a Sunday afternoon walk through the Schaerbeek neighborhood where Pamela and Henry live. We were on our way to and from a small Art Nouveau restaurant on Ave. Louis Bertrand, La Buca Di Bacco, where we had a lovely dinner. We walked down Ave. Ernest Cambier and back through Parc Josephat. These are some random pictures from that afternoon.

Brussels is absolutely full of both Art Nouveou (pre-WW I, with lots of curves and flowery motifs) and Art Deco (Post-WW I, with more streamlined and geometric shapes) buildings, interiors, and furnishings. Restaurant La Buca Di Bacco, where we had Sunday dinner, is an example of Art Nouveau.

This is interior stained glass in Restaurant La Buca Di Bacco, which is a lovely restaurant in a tiny, quiet, intimate space tucked into Ave. Louis Bertrand.  Several pictures I took along that avenue are below.

 Continuing up Ave. Louis Bertrand, we eventually come back to Pamela's neighborhood Parc Josephat and her street, Ave. Ernest Cambier. This sign appears at one of the park entrances. It says something like "in your home, does he do it on your carpet?" Not cleaning up dog doo is an accepted practice. I have learned to keep one eye on the pavement when I walk anywhere. The authorities try, at least in the parks, but it's hard to change a culture.

Henry got a new bike last week and has been riding it practically everywhere we've been all week. Here we're entering the park after walking up Ave. Louis Bertrand.

I've wondered for the past eight years who Ernest Cambier was. This is his memorial, located on his namesake street, on which Pamela and Henry live. He was a Belgian pioneer who started the First Congo Railroad. He was born in 1844 and died in 1904. Now I know. 

And then we came home...to a back yard that looked like this on April 19.

The good news is that we will get to have spring all over again!

2011.03.28 Switzerland and Italy

We have just completed our second visit to Steve, Maria, Anna (9), and Kate (7) at their home in Switzerland. In October of 2010, we enjoyed gorgeous fall colors and clear cool weather. This time the flowering trees and spring flowers were at the height of their splendor, and the skies were mostly clear again. We had a bit of drizzle the day we were in Bern and one rainy morning that gave us an excuse to stay home and relax. The rest of the time we enjoyed sunshine and lovely views of Mont-Blanc and the French Alps across Lake Geneva. We spent some time in the area around Geneva on weekdays, but on Friday night Steve took us to the Piedmont  wine region of Italy for the weekend. We stayed in Alba for two nights, which allowed us to walk around in several villages, tour two wineries, and, of course, do  some tasting.

This house and neighborhood, complete with the family's own furnishings and toys, is perfect. Both generations have made friends--as they do wherever they land.

Bill and I took the train to Bern one day and walked around in the old city on a peninsula formed by the river Aare. This picture shows the Zytglogge (Bernese German for "TimeBell"), a medieval clock tower with moving puppets, and the city's medieval covered shopping promenades. We were glad for these covered arcades, since it rained lightly for much of the time we were there.

Since the 16th Century, Bern has had a bear pit. We walked to it, but the four resident bears were not out. While we didn't see the bears, we did see some great views of the city and its bridges from the bear pit.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNacdVUM4ig

We returned from Bern in time to go to Kate's first grade spring concert. She was SO excited--as were we! The quality of this video is not great as we were sitting near the back of the auditorium, but it was such fun I just had to include it. Kate is in the second row from the back, third from right,  concentrating hard in spite of the two antsy little boys on her right. It would not upload here, so you need to click the link above to see it. It's sure to brighten your day!

Here's a happy Kate with her mom and sister after a successful concert.

 

This is the 1939 art deco League of Nations building, which is now a part of the United Nations complex in Geneva. In 1968 Bill did research in the archives here for his dissertation on Poland and the League of Nations between the two World Wars.

This newer United Nations building had not yet been built when we were here in 1968.

Here we are in one of the meeting rooms in the old building.

This is a view of the 1939 building from the newer building.

Across the street from the United Nations is the International Headquarters of the Red Cross / Red Crescent.  After our tour of the UN, we visited the museum here as well as a special exhibit on the intertwining lives of founders Henry Dunant and Gustav Moynier. While both were moved to humanitarian action, they differed on how to accomplish it and their friendship dissolved as they competed and Dunant suffered financial difficulties. Dunant is widely considered the founder of the Red Cross, but Moynier, who was its president for forty years, isolated Dunant. They never reconciled.

We ate lunch outside under these canopies in the courtyard of the Red Cross / Red Crescent International Headquarters.

These striking statues stand at the museum entrance.

We accompanied Maria when she picked Anna and Kate up at school. Kate took us into her classroom to meet her teacher and see some projects.

We saw acres and acres of grape vines and fruit trees, all carefully pruned and trained. These are fruit trees, but Maria didn't know whether they were apples or pears as they had not yet started to bud or leaf out.

Our trip to Italy started with a beautiful journey through French Alps, with amazing views like this one on the approach to Chamonix.

This statue and the flags stand at the entrance to the Mont-Blanc Tunnel on the French side.  The tunnel, which links Chamonix, France, and Courmayeur, Italy, is 7.2 miles long and took from 1957 to 1965 to build.

Bill and Steve are walking from our Hotel Savona in Alba to the Saturday market, where Steve wanted to find the cheese vendor from whom he'd bought Parmesan off a huge wheel when they were here with Maria's folks.

Steve buys his cheese.

Steve made appointments in advance that allowed us to visit the cellars of two Barbaresco wineries. Favio of the Andrea Oberto Winery gave us a very nice tour. Working for Diageo for several years gave Steve a good working knowledge of the business, and both he and Bill study wines as a hobby. 

Maria knew that her great grandfather had emigrated from the Piedmont region. You can just imagine how exciting it was to discover during her parents' visit that Bernardo Antonio Vittone was a great 18th Century architect. We saw two of his churches, one in Alba and one in Bra. As a young architect he had also done a restoration and remodeling of the municipal building in Bra. This is the altar in his church in Bra, Saint Claire.

This is the outside of Saint Claire Church in Bra. Both the exterior and interior designs of the Vittone churches in Alba and Bra are very similar to one another.

This is a typical view of the countryside in the Piedmont area of Italy--acres and acres of grapes. The best known wines from the region are Barolo and Barbaresco, which are made from the Nebbiolo grape. We can attest to the fact that these grapes make very drinkable wine!

Here are a couple of happy guys at the Marchesi di Gresy winery, where we enjoyed a tour and tasting conducted by Australian-bornCellar Master Jeff Chilcott. We were joined by five lively Russians from St. Petersburg who were on a wine tour.

The photo doesn't do justice to the steepness of this hill, but let's just say I'm glad I don't have to bike up this grade!

Before returning to Switzerland on Sunday, we indulged Steve in another of his hobbies, Napoleon, by visiting the Marengo Battle Museum and Napoleon's Headquarters. We lifted these muskets, which are unbelievably heavy.

Bill and Steve both got to pose in this hat.

Here's Napoleon himself outside the Marengo Battlefield Museum.

Napoleon established his headquarters here at Torre Garofoli. It took us awhile to find it as you need to follow a maze of country roads to get here from the museum.

We saw several tiny chapels alongside the roads.

On the drive between Italy and France we saw many towers perched on tops of steep hills.

Back in Switzerland, we took a train trip to Morges. This is Grand-Rue pedestrian shopping area there.

This is the Chateau at Morges.

And this is the Chateau at Nyon, the city nearest Steve and Maria with shopping and a railroad station.

From Nyon, one can see Lake Geneva and mountains in France from the town.

I am fascinated with the way Europeans prune back trees each fall. They come back lush and lovely in the summer.

Anna and I biked to a nearby marina on Lake Geneva to feed the ducks and swan.

Swans, we have learned, are not as friendly as they look. I got a serious hissss when the bread wasn't coming fast enough.

They don't need people throwing bread; they can find what they need by doing this. 

Anna took this picture o me at the Crans Marina.