The Crop Report

Last fall we got only one bale of hay out of this field. This time around we got three. The guy who owns this little field apparently has a whole bunch of tiny parcels scattered around the neighborhood because about four or five bits and pieces of land have been hayed this week.

What the...!?

I think it may be a recent addition to the repertory, but lately we've noticed that one of the songs played by the carillon in Saint-Ghislain is "Yankee Doodle." While it is a catchy tune, I'm not sure what the connection is. Maybe it has something to do with the Seven Years' War.

General Observations About Rome

David will get the pictures up eventually but here's some things we noticed about or in Rome:

- Scooters are to Rome what bicycles are to Amsterdam (except they're bigger). There also seems to be a helmet law. Given the way traffic moves in Rome, who would want to ride a scooter without one? (especially since David and Mick saw the remnants of a scooter at an accident scene being investigated by the police. Not a good sign.)

- Everything in Rome is built on a HUGE scale; buildings, fountains, and churches are grand and imposing. In fact, St. Peter's is so big it didn't even feel or look like a church. Eventually we found a Mass in progress but otherwise it just looks like a big museum.

- Priests and nuns abound in Rome, which is really no big surprise. Maybe a little surprising is that they seemed to move about the city in their clerical/nunnical garb, unlike here, where most of them blend in rather well. (But I guess in a city with that many religious, you blend in when you dress the part.)

- All those priests and nuns in religious dress have to shop somewhere. And guess what: Rome must be THE place to shop. We saw numerous stores selling chasubles and other priest gear - including some mighty fancy gold chalices and monstrances. I missed this particular window - I got stuck on some of the gold chalices - but there was even one store selling sweaters for nuns.

- And the best part: we didn't see or hear a single Russian! Amazing what a drop in the price of oil will do...

Ghent

Another of my very late posts. We spent Labor Day weekend in Ghent last year, and I never got around to showing you pictures. You can see them by clicking here.

Fleurie Again!

I feel much better now that I've got my flowers in.

We filled the window boxes and wheelbarrow weeks ago but due to travel and our schedules hadn't gotten the flowers for the front of the house. Saturday was the big flower market in Saint-Ghislain as part of the Ascension holiday festivities and I had been counting on finishing up my flower buying then. We were disappointed in the selection on offer so today after church I braved a trip to the big flower market in Mons. I say I "braved" it because it seems to have gotten much more crowded than it used to be and getting into the parking lot requires a lot of patience and finesse. But I got my impatiens (which are "impatience" in French) and got them in the ground today. They don't look like much yet but over the summer months they'll fill out and fill the space. Today I am a happy gardener.

Lies they tell us about Europe - installment 3

The trains run on time in Germany.

Lie. Pure and simple. On my first train trip through Germany I had 9 minutes to make a connection in Cologne. At the exact time my next train was supposed to be leaving, we were stopped dead a few hundred meters from the station waiting for who knows what. But it worked out okay because my connecting train was half an hour late leaving. To make up time, they skipped a station. Tough luck if you were waiting for the train there. But while we were standing on the platform in Cologne waiting, they did come around with free snacks and drinks to help us pass the wait.

Belgian trains, on the other hand, almost always run right on time, which is a little surprising if you know much about Belgium. The older stations have those clocks like we had in school back in the day, where the minute ticks backwards just a tiny bit before leaping forward to the next minute. In Belgium, the conductor blows his whistle on the backtick, the doors close, and the train pulls out as soon as the minute jumps forward.

Palm Sunday

Yeah, I'm running a little behind. I know we've been posting so infrequently that probably nobody but Donald is still reading, but we've been busy. So if you're lucky, maybe one day we'll tell you about Rome and why it took them more than a day to build it.

But until then, these are Rita's "palms." It's a sprig of box, as in boxwood. It's what the Belgians use instead of palms on Palm Sunday. It's scripturally accurate because Matthew just has folks cutting branches from the trees. They were probably palms, yeah, because that's what they had. Here we have box.

Meanwhile, at the Anglican service, we get palms already folded into crosses. And to think of all that time I spent learning how to make my own palm crosses. As Brother Bluto said, "Seven years of college down the drain!"

How small is small?

There are lots of way to measure the size of a country, and by most of them Belgium is pretty small. In area it's a little smaller than Maryland, but it may not look it because it doesn't have either the Chesapeake Bay or that bit that's about 4 feet wide. It has fewer than 11 million people, so it's only a little more populous that New York City--and a lot less populous than the New York metro area. But my favorite way to tell how small it is is the traffic reports. When they give the traffic, they give the traffic for the whole country at once. We always feel like we should understand more of what they're saying, since we speak French, but then we come to our senses and say, "Hey, we don't understand the traffic reports at home, and they're in English!"

That king…what a guy!

For a few weeks every spring the King of the Belgians (for such is his title) opens the royal greenhouses in Laken to the public. We went yesterday. At €2.50 a head it's a great deal. But how do you know it's really the king's greenhouse? Because it's got a crown on top, of course.

We went last year and never posted about it. This year, I'm offering some photos if you're interested.

Life in Belgium

Seen in the rest stop restaurant on the autoroute: two policemen having a beer.

Heard in the commissary at Chièvres air base: I drove all the way from Paris for hot dog buns, and you're out?