Reflections on a Year in Belgium

As of August 20, I'll have been in Brussels for a year (that sure went fast!), and Belgium being a country most people will only pass through on a train going somewhere else, I feel I should take a moment to share my impressions of the country with all of you, and perhaps entice a few of you to give the country a chance.


First of all, can you find Belgium on a map? See it up at the top there between France, Germany and the Netherlands? I bet at least one of you just learned something new. :) Partly because of its location, Belgium has three official languages - French (spoken in the southern part, known as Wallonia), Flemish (a variant of Dutch, spoken in Flanders, the northern half), and German (spoken in tiny pockets in the south near Germany). The two halves of Belgium have a long-standing rivalry, so much so that they periodically talk of splitting up. Brussels, the capital, is its own special region and is officially bilingual (French/Flemish), but in reality most people speak French most of the time. Everyone here seems to speak a minimum of three languages, though, including English, which makes us dumb Americans look, well, really dumb.

Brussels itself is famous for being the capital of the European Union and home to the headquarters of NATO, but did you know that it's also the birthplace of the Art Nouveau architectural movement, surrealist painter Rene Magritte, and actress Audrey Hepburn? Belgium is also the home of many of the world's most beloved comics - did you know that Tintin and the Smurfs are both Belgian? These facts seem almost incongruous at first, when you find that Belgian people are a bit cold and closed off, but then you find out that they have a very strange and ultimately endearing sense of humor, and all of a sudden the weird artistic movements start to make sense.

I mean, the most famous icon of Brussels is a tiny 17th century statue of a little boy peeing into a fountain! And not only that, but when foreign dignitaries come visit, they commonly will bring as a gift a costume in which to dress up this Mannekin Piss. The boy has a rotating schedule of over 600 costumes that he wears, ranging from Santa Claus to soccer player.






Actually, Belgian fountains are the most imaginative I've seen anywhere. To go along with the famous Mannekin Piss, there's also a (much less tasteful) Jeanneke Piss, which is the female version, and also a dog, though sadly he doesn't actually piss. There are also spitting statues, and, our personal favorite, a statue of Neptune accompanied by several mermaids. It was not turned on when we passed by, but I'm sure you can imagine what it will look like in action.




And then there are the Belgian festivals. I already told you about the famous Mardi Gras festival in Binche, where men have for centuries dressed up as stereotyped Incas with giant ostrich-feather headdresses and paraded through town playing drums and lobbing blood oranges as hard as possible at the crowd. There's also a Cat Parade in the town of Ypres every three years where people dressed as cats and large floats are paraded through town, culminating in stuffed cats being thrown out of a tower. This originated centuries ago, when REAL cats were thrown out of the belfry tower by the town jester, though apparently the reason for this has been lost. Sadly, I'll have to wait till 2009 to see this spectacle.


We also recently attended Ommegang, a recreation of a 1549 celebration of Emperor Charles V's visit to Brussels, which (this time) culminated in a laser light show, pyrotechnics and battling stilt walkers. The list of weird festivals goes on and on (you can see a few here) - from throwing onions to cross dressing, the Belgians seem to use these occasions to let loose, which I suppose is necessary when you are so reserved all the time!

And then there's the food. While traditional Belgian food is not so vegetarian friendly (they are famous for moules frites - mussels and fries), they do have what many consider to be the best beer in the world. Everyone I have met here who came here not drinking beer is now drinking it, including D. and me. They have any kind of beer you could want - most popular are those flavored with cherries, raspberries or peach, but there are many other fruit flavors, honey beer, traditional beers made by monks, beers made by spontaneous fermentation (meaning yeast comes from the air naturally rather than being added), dark beers, light beers, beers with lots of alcohol... it's quite impressive.

And the waffles: Brussels waffles, what you know as Belgian waffles, and Liege waffles, which are smaller and have whole sugar cubes baked into the batter. The Liege ones are best with warm chocolate syrup on them. Speaking of chocolate, Belgians take that seriously. It's some of the best chocolate in the world, and much of it is still handmade in traditional ways. And lastly the fries. They are double fried - meaning fried once, removed, then fried again - and I promise they are the best fries you've ever tasted. And there is usually a choice of at least 15 different sauces to put on them. It's awfully easy to gain weight here!

Anyway, if what you want is New York City (as I do), this is not it. I definitely don't want to live here forever - it's a bit too quiet for me and the weather is awful most of the time - but it's a great place to visit for a while, and I'm sure would be a great place to raise a family. Beautiful architecture, great food, funny and strange culture and traditions - it's worth doing more than seeing it out the window of the train.

But soon enough I'll be escaping the rain (it's July and people are still wearing winter coats outside - it actually hailed yesterday!) in Italy for the rest of the summer. I'll let you know how that goes when I get back in the end of August. Hope you all make the most of your summer, too! And as always, please keep in touch!

Kim

Pictures from China

(Clicking on any photo will enlarge it.)

Hi, everyone!

The big news from here is that I've finally finished the website from my trip to China last summer, so you can see all my pictures here:

http://www.damienvicq.com/kim/China/home.html

If you find any problems with the page, please let me know so I can fix them. I've tried to fix them all, but I'm sure I missed a few.

It was wonderful to see many of you in November/December! I had a lovely three-week trip to California and New York City, and I tried to catch as many of you who lived nearby as possible. Laura and Kathy and I made bagels from scratch (they were good!), I ate as much Mexican food and sushi as possible, and I stocked up on a few hard-to-find-in-Belgium items.

Since then, I've been wandering around Europe a little bit. Hamburg was a very nice city with several cute Christmas markets. My family and I enjoyed the Gluhwein and roasted chestnuts, plus the SWAT teams of Santas climbing all the buildings (the picture is actually from Brussels, but these were all over Hamburg, too). Much of Hamburg was bombed during the World Wars, including one church whose huge bells were knocked down during WWII. They were left where they fell as a monument to peace that I found especially moving.

The Christmas dinner I cooked for 8 people turned out ok, and both families got along. I also had my first very own Christmas tree, which was a lot of fun. For New Year's Damien and I went to the Algarve, the southern coast of Portugal, and we loved it. It was very relaxed, beautiful and warm. We had some time at the beach, saw quaint and beautiful little towns, many birds, and salt marshes, played with Portuguese water dogs, and drank wonderful porto. A return to Portugal is definitely in our future.

Last weekend I had my first ski trip ever - and I actually fell much less than I thought I would. So it turns out skiing is kind of fun - that was a nice surprise. Though my knees are killing me (even still a little), so any of you ski experts out there, if you can tell me how to avoid that next time, I'd appreciate it. We went to Chamrousse, a ski resort near Grenoble, in the French Alps, and the scenery was gorgeous. And we lucked out and found a hotel that made vegetarian dinners for me, so I got to try the Alpine specialties (lots of strong cheese!), and they almost didn't show too obviously that they thought I was an alien from some far away planet with no animals on it.

So we are taking good advantage of our central location here in Europe. We have plans for trips to London, Paris, Athens, Cinqueterre, and Ljubljana over the next few months, and I'll try to have some pictures for you from some of those places. In any case, I'm getting a great geography lesson (though I'm aided tremendously by hours of playing Where in Europe is Carmen San Diego - the first exposure to Ljubljana for a lot of people, I'm guessing!).

And I'll be back home in June - I've officially bought the plane tickets - June 4-12 in New York and June 12-22 in California. And the offer stands as always for anyone interested in visiting, you are welcome any time in Brussels - free place to stay and free tour guide. The weather's a bit grey right now, but it's going to be lovely here in the spring.

Keep in touch!
Kim

Life in Brussels

Brussels, Belgium

Finally what you might call "settled" in Brussels, it's time for another update on my adventures. I had a whirlwind three days in New York City, during which time I got two more courses of antibiotics to try for my mysterious Chinese illness. After that, Ernie (my dog) and I flew to Paris via Detroit, a major detour because it turns out it's nearly impossible to fly internationally with a dog. Customs in France didn't even blink at us, and D. met us at the airport and drove us to Brussels.

We spent the first few weeks at a temporary residence that was in a very "ethnic" neighborhood - we picked it because it was the only one in Brussels that took dogs. After several days recovering and both courses of antibiotics, I finally kicked what has been most likely identified as a weird form of pneumonia, though I guess I'll never know exactly what I had or how much damage I did to my lungs. We got to know some of the neighborhoods and ultimately picked a great, sunny, 2-BR apartment with a huge terrace in Ixelles, a section of Brussels south of the center that is home to lots of students, artsy types and immigrants. It's a cute neighborhood with lots of character and diversity, nice parks and fantastic markets. We then started to learn about Belgian bureaucracy.

Not only do you have to register your lease with the government, but you have to register yourself with the police, which is followed by a home visit to make sure you actually live in your house (tax reasons, apparently). Even tourists are supposed to register with the police if you are staying over 3 days, but I doubt anyone ever does. And I thought I had left scary Chinese-style Big Brother behind... We tried to get a phone installed - we were granted an appointment SIX WEEKS after the day we requested it. Electricity required some strange paper that of course we didn't have when they came to turn it on, and the list keeps on going and going. Things don't work, no one answers their phone, things get done at a snail's pace. Very frustrating when you are trying to move into an apartment but have no light or hot water or internet.

Meanwhile, I still have seen very little of what tourists think of as Brussels. Instead of all the famous monuments - the Grande Place, the statue of the peeing boy, the Atomium, etc - I have visited more furniture stores than I care to recount, including the biggest Ikea in Belgium, where D. and I spent many long hours. Actually we learned they have great food at Ikea, but when D. started suggesting we decorate the apartment with a yellow and blue theme, we knew we'd hit our Ikea limit... We even went all the way to France to look at a store there, brought back a desk chair that we left in the car in front of our hotel overnight, and woke up the next morning to find the car window shattered and the desk chair stolen. The police came to take the report looking awfully bored, and they told D. that he should speak with his work to find out where to live, cause he shouldn't be where we were. Anyway, our new neighborhood seems a lot nicer, luckily!

And the apartment has come together now - we have all the basic necessities like furniture and electricity, and Ernie has made himself at home in my new favorite chair. It's funny the things you miss, though - right now I'm dying for some Mexican food... or good sushi... or even a measuring cup that has cups and ounces on it. But we've found that here there's great Turkish, Greek, and Vietnamese food, excellent waffles and fries, and some great ice cream places. So even though I'm missing the diversity of the offerings at home, there's fun stuff to discover here as well.

D.'s job officially starts on the 16th, so in the meantime he is going to Paris every week to work there at a temporary job, leaving me working in Brussels all alone. So now that I've caught up on most of the work from this summer, I'm taking advantage of the last week he'll be away to go to Morocco. I'll be leaving Saturday and coming back the following Sunday - a bit of a short trip, but I've been dying to see Morocco and it's close by, so it seemed like a good opportunity.

I still haven't had a chance to get up my pictures from China, but I'll be working on that soon, hopefully. In the meantime, here's a map of my route, and below is a picture of D. and me in the Yellow Mountains.

Most of you should have received an email by now with my new contact information. If you want it and don't have it, just send me an email. I'm available on skype and through the local New York number I sent out, and the time difference here is 6 hours later than New York. It's always good to hear from people, as it's tough to be away from you all over here. And now that we have a nice futon and a couch, of course anyone is welcome to come visit. Heck, maybe if you come visit me, I'll actually finally go see the sights of Brussels.

In the meantime, watch for another update post-Morocco, and I'll be back in California November 18-26, and in New York Nov. 27-Dec. 4, so hopefully I'll get to see a few of you then.

Keep in touch!
Kim