You know you're in Europe when...

there's a smoking area right outside the gym.

A rare sight

For those of you not following the NCAA men's basketball tournament (those of you who hate freedom), my alma mater, Davidson College, is having quite a run. As a 10 seed they have now beaten seventh-seeded Gonzaga, second seed Georgetown, and third-seeded Wisconsin, the last a veritable spanking. The last time Davidson went the round of eight was 1969, before even I was a student, which was not quite the stone age but was before the cordless phone. Heck, it was even before you could own your own phone. Richard Nixon had just been inaugurated! I know this streak can--and probably will--end abruptly and that when it does the world will not shudder, but as my friend Dave used to say when the O's were winning (talk about ancient history!), it certainly does make for pleasant background music.

6:45 AM

It's 0645 Easter Monday and we're getting ready to go to work, watching the snow come down. It's sticking and it's beautiful.

We miss snow.

Dreaming of a white Easter

The weather has been decidedly unspring-like this week. It's varied from cold, wet and windy to cold, hail and wet and windy to cold, sleet and windy to, today, cold with mixed rain and snow. I had planned to wear a skirt or suit to church tonight but am now rethinking that, as I look at the big, fat wet snowdrops plopping on the window. This is unusual weather, even for Belgium.

France and America - BFFs

The flags of the 26 member nations of NATO are displayed in front of SHAPE in a specific order: host nation Belgium in the middle, the rest counterclockwise, alphabetically, in French. This means that France and the United States--la France et les États-Unis--are always right beside each other. Oh, the irony!

Incidentally, Rita and I have finally figured out how to post as our individual selves; so from now on, you should be able to tell which one of us is writing what. She's Polish pottery girl, below.

Polish pottery and the GPS

Friday a friend and I embarked on a trip to buy Polish pottery at a shop a friend of hers owns in the Netherlands. I didn't know where the friend's shop was but knew we were spending the night in Valkenburg, which was recommended to us as a picturesque little town. So we set the GPS for Valkenburg and set out on our merry way. When "Jane" told us to go towards Brussels, instead of Liege (where our instincts told us we should be heading), we thought Jane was just taking us around the Brussels ring. So we kept going. Past the Brussels airport we were soon heading toward Antwerp. A little voice was telling me that Antwerp wasn't REALLY the direction we wanted to go in, but Jane seemed pretty sure that's where we wanted to go. After going around the Antwerp ring and seeing signs for Rotterdam I was definitely sure we didn't want to go in that direction, despite Jane's insistence. So we doubled back to Antwerp, hit the ring again, and followed the signs for Liege. Jane took that in stride and then proceeded to direct us away from Liege - again. On our third swing through the Antwerp ring road we stopped at a rest stop, bought a map, and rather rudely silenced Jane. By this time we'd been on the road for two and a half hours and were still two hours away from our destination - on a trip that should have taken a total of two hours. We made our way east across Belgium and eventually crossed into the Netherlands where we should have been all along.

Turns out there are two Valkenburgs, one of them on the coast, which was where Jane was trying to take us. The other one is just a few kilometers from Maastricht, which is just a few kilometers over the border from Belgium on the east. Our Valkenburg was indeed a cute little town. And I got some cool Polish pottery from my friend's friend's store!

A piece of Belgiana

We get these in our mailbox. It's the announcement of a death, with wake and funeral schedules. M. Marinx was born and died here in our little village. His brother is married to a Lhoir. One of her family was killed in the Great War and has his name carved on the memorial in the Grand' Place and a street named after him. The funeral director, from the next village over, appears to be related to another young man who fell in that war. And that's just recent history around here.

Learning on the fly...and under pressure

Our smoke alarm went off tonight. I guess some olive oil dripped off the pizza I was cooking, so there was a little smoke. Not really a lot of smoke for our kitchen, but I guess fire alarms have different standards. We've never had to mess with this whole house alarm thing, so we had no idea what to do. (WIth the alarm, Donald. We knew what to do with the pizza.) But by punching keys wildly I managed to figure out a combination of keystrokes that shut it up, proving once again that dumb luck beats careful reasoning every time. (The secret is to stay away from the keys that have an obvious function, like being the 3 key.) I had to punch the new supersecret accidental code at every alarm panel, but it eventually got quiet. For 2 minutes. Then it started again. I ran around to all the keypads and entered Dad's supersecret combo of nonsense again. It stopped again. For 2 minutes. Meanwhile we had opened some windows and doors hoping to clear the air and give it no reason to squawk, but none of that seemed to be doing any good. Finally, after about five iterations, we realized we had to actually do something to make it stop for good (never let it be said that we're totally without analytic skills). Rita (yay, Mom!) remembered having seen a manual in the pile o' docs we got when we moved in, and in there was "How to turn off your fire alarm." It worked.

At least we don't have a sprinkler system.

Hey, that's us!

We saw this piece in the treasury in Vienna. It has a surprising local (for us connection). Each plaque is a coat of arms, and several of them were from our neck of the woods, places like Le Rœulx, Chimay, and Havré. We were pretty excited. I don't imagine there are many visitors that go through and actually recognize the names.

It's a small world, even in Hainaut

Those of you (Mother, Sarah, B, Rachel and Steve, Emmett) who have been with us to the Concordia, our local watering hole (it's not very local and better than a hole), may remember the perky, dark-haired, young woman who always waited on us. Last night we went to try out a couscous place we had spotted earlier in the day in Dour, but it was complet (full). So we went four doors down the square to an Italian restaurant, and lo and behold our waitress was the same gal. Turns out she had just started working there the night before. So we were both newbies. Even though Rita claims that Italian is the official cuisine of Europe, this was, I think, the best one we've found yet: "small family place, good food," as Abe Vigoda said. I had a fine saltimbocca, and Rita some mighty tasty ravioli. So it's fun to have rediscovered our waitress and a good restaurant.