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!