Bastogne

Saturday Mickey and I visited the Battle of the Bulge battlefield--or part of it. The thing was huge. You may have read that somewhere. In fact, our guide pointed that out as a feature of mechanized warfare: battlefields are bigger than they used to be--much bigger. Our "guide" was the commander of the unit Rita and I work in. He is a historian who has studied this battle extensively, and he served in the 101st Airborne, which was the US unit that defended the surrounded town of Bastogne, Belgium.

We stopped first at Elsenborn Ridge, where US forces really started to stop the attack. It diverted the German thrust aimed at Liège to the south and constricted the northern shoulder of the advance, basically keeping the bulge a bulge, instead of letting it become the second overrunning of Belgium that Hitler hoped for. This is a monument to the 26th of the 1st--the US 1st Infantry Division, 26th Regiment, which dug in and fought along a ridge line part of which you can see low on the horizon.

Next on the itinerary was a piece of the Siegfried line. These are the "dragon's teeth" tank traps that marked the German border. A two-lane highway runs along the border. Walk across the road, and you're in Belgium.

Third stop was a copse of woods where an isolated recon platoon (maybe that's redundant) fought a battle against a German battalion. As we traveled the battlefield, it started to become clear that the German advance was slowed to no small degree by individual actions by US units of various sizes that were outmanned and outgunned. But not outfought.

The positions from this action are still there--a little eroded, but still there. You could spot the machine gun pits and the foxholes the riflemen dug.

This is the view they had of the German battalion coming at them, only it was covered with snow.

And the little memorial to the men who fought here. It's in some farmer's back yard. A hand-lettered sign on the road points you to it. The farmer has left a corner of his yard for people to park in.

A slightly bigger memorial on which to end. This was erected at the point where the German attack on Bastogne stopped. They got no further. In the center is a stone inscribed, Liberatoribus Americanis populus Belgicus memor. The Belgian people remember the American liberators.

Nice Suits!

Summer tiiiiiiime

and the livin' is eeeeeeeeeeasy.

We went off summer time last night, so for the next week, we are only 5 hours ahead of the East Coast and 6 hours ahead of Austin. Gotta go change some more clocks.

Europe Without Borders

Last night we went to a concert in Lille, France, which is about 45 minutes from our house. Every time we've gone to or through France in this direction on the autoroute, we've had to slow down to 10 kilometers an hour as we passed through the choke point that used to be the customs and border control area. In fact, we've actually seen cars being pulled over there, despite the fact that Belgium and France are both in the Schengen Zone. Last night, as we approached the border, we entered a road construction zone. Lo and behold, the left-over border control and customs police shacks have disappeared, and the road is being repaved in two normal-sized lanes with no nothing to slow you down as you cross over into France.

It's about dang time. France and Belgium were among the original signatories to the 1985 Schengen Agreement, which provided for the removal of border controls between participating countries. Ok, according to Wikipedia, it's the "gradual" removal of border controls.

Twenty-four years is pretty gradual.

Get your fresh rabbits right here!

Rita didn't mention this in her posting on the new piece of furniture, but we stayed in Liège while we were doing all that shopping last weekend. Liège bills itself as having the "longest Sunday market in all of Europe." It certainly felt like it. It took forever to go from one end to the other, but of course we were rocking back and forth or standing still much of the time. So I mapped it out when we got home, and it runs for about 1.5 km along the Meuse River. The first photo shows just the beginning. Once you get over how big it is, though, there are surprisingly few different things for sale. Don't get me wrong! There are lots of stalls selling lots of things, but a lot of them sell the same thing as the 20 guys you've already inched past. The basic categories are clothing, food, and housewares. And the clothing breaks downs into socks or stockings, jeans, jackets, boots, boots, or boots. Or boots.

Even this guy selling…ummm, really fresh poultry (and rabbits, which Europeans tend to consider almost poultry) was not unique. There were lots of places selling food to eat right there. Not this one, but Vietnamese, Chinese, Italian (of course), and regular Belgian fry shacks.

Speaking of fry shacks, I noticed a linguistic difference between Mons and Liège. A few years ago the French-language authorities here in Belgium tried to get everyone to give up some of their Belgicisms and switch to "pure" French words. It was a failure. The only change that stuck was friterie, which replaced the old word friture. My theory is that that's because friture is too close to the Flemish word for a fry shack: frituur. But I noticed that the Liègeois still use friture.

So what is a friterie or a friture…or a frituur? It's a little stand with a bunch of oil vats where they make the world's best french fries and greasiest food. They offer a variety of processed meat products, little brochettes of meat, and meat-like patties, all of which are cooked by being dropped in the fryer. I once had one made of bacon. Yes, doctor, I ate deep-fried bacon. But don't worry. I washed it down with plenty of beer.

What happens when

Unlike rolling stones, tile roofs gather a lot of moss. Ours was no exception. So our landlord decided it was time to clean the roof. He hired some guys, and this machine showed up in our yard.

We wondered what would happen when they wanted to move it into the back yard, since the gate in the fence isn't all that wide and the spiral stairs leading to the annex (our separate upstairs storage room) are relatively close to the opening. We came home from work one day to find out they had removed a couple sections of fence.

Now, for those of you who have never been to or lived in Europe, you have to understand how important fences are. Europeans are very private about their property. Every yard is delineated by a fence, often to afford absolute privacy. The fence says, "This is my personal domain and don't even think about violating my space, not even with your eyes." So imagine our chagrin on seeing this:



Yes, our fence is kaput. OK, it was falling down before The Invasion of the Great Machine, but now we've got it propped up on both sides trying to maintain a semblance of privacy and security until the landlord (hopefully) replaces it.

And the roof? Well, it's been de-mossed but whatever solution they used to clean the tiles left a nasty residue on our roof windows. I managed to get one mostly clean yesterday and left the others for another day. I'm not a very good Belgian Hausfrau, I fear.

We succumbed

Or maybe a better title would be: We found what we wanted!

Last spring we went to Tongeren, Belgium, for the Sunday morning antique/flea market. We were disappointed because we didn't see much antique furniture, but by the end of the morning we had decided what we wanted. We made a couple trips to the local Troc, a store that sells what could be considered somebody else's junk, but still didn't see what we were looking for: a wall-mounted coat rack, a monk's bench or a trunk, and maybe a square table for the kitchen.

Since we had today off for Columbus day, we decided to make a weekend of it by combining visits to Sint-Truiden - another antiques area - Tongeren, and Sankt Vith, where there's a big furniture company that caters to Americans from Germany and Belgium. Saturday we visited several dealers in the Sint-Truiden area and saw some beautiful furniture but not exactly what we were looking for, although we were really tempted by a small table with extension leaves that we think must have been incredibly cheap despite its great condition and Louis-the-something style. We then moved on to Sankt Vith (traveling from the Flemish-speaking Sint-Truiden to the German-speaking area of Belgium), where we realized once again why we didn't buy any furniture there the first time we visited: it's new, pretty, and sturdy but incredibly expensive.

So Sunday morning we headed for Tongeren, not expecting much after our last experience there. And we found the mother lode. Fortunately we didn't buy the first thing we saw but kept looking. And we ended up with a monk's bench, in what appears to be perfect condition, made in England in the early 1900's.

This particular bench has a feature we really liked.

Bench:


Swivel the top and you have a table!


It's an awesome piece of furniture. We can't believe we have something so nice.

Oh yeah, we found that coat rack we wanted too. We're not going to hang it here, though, because we're done making holes. Gotta think about starting to patch those buggers one of these days in preparation for our (reluctant) return to the States.