It's Not All Bad

Although I absolutely love Christmas in Europe, I willingly admit that there are some advantages to being here in the States for the season. For one thing, stores are open when working people can shop. Maybe the biggest advantage I've noticed, though, is that I have choices. I went to Target to buy Christmas cards and felt like a kid in a candy shop. I ended up buying far more than we need, simply because there were so many to choose from. I also marveled at the selection of wrapping paper, bags, bows, ribbons, tags, and tissue - all of which were in limited supply and of limited selection at our PX (and way too expensive on the economy). So while I'm missing the German Christmas markets, at least I have Target!

Le Coin belge

Several weeks ago I mentioned I was getting ready to paint the kitchen, hoping that lightening the color (it was a medium blue) would brighten the eat-in part. While it's still dark in my corner (I sit at the end of the table by the window), I'm pleased nonetheless with the result. For the first time ever, I managed to keep my wall-meets-ceiling lines straight. I realized some time later that the tape worked so well because I was taping a flat ceiling. The ceilings in most of the rest of the house are textured, so the tape doesn't adhere well. Be that as it may, here's what we have:

Our new beer glass cabinet features most of our Belgian and German beer glasses, plus a few particularly pretty Polish pottery pieces. The picture above the cabinet is one of the canal near our house in Belgium. On the other wall you see are my speculoos molds. These wooden molds are still used all over Belgium to make delicious cookies. I haven't had much luck with my much smaller mold - at least with getting a distinctive design on my cookies - but the cookies themselves were pretty good.

Along with the beer glasses and the speculoos molds you also see a Belgian lace curtain on the lower half of the window. This is a very common effect in Belgium and in many other parts of Europe.

I've dubbed this part of the kitchen "le coin belge" - the Belgian corner. It helps with the nostalgia for the good ole days in Belgium.

Worth checking out

One of our semi-adopted daughters is in France now. She has the gig as a high school English language assistant that I had 33 years ago. She's even in the same general area. She's blogging her experiences, and we've added a link to her site, Étang. If you like good writing, you might want to check it out.

Advent

This is what last year's Advent wreath looked like. We got it at the German Christmas market at SHAPE. In case we neglected to tell you, Germans do Christmas up right. And the Germans at SHAPE are no exception. To make sure no one has to go without their Christmas market, they take over the high school cafeteria and transform it into a magical wonderland of yummy things to eat and drink and these hand-made wreaths, which the German ladies put together. These wreaths are so popular that people - us included - race to get there as soon as the market opens because they sell out so quickly.

This year - maybe because we spent Thanksgiving week in Texas - Advent crept up on me and I was totally unprepared. At some point in our movings - either before we went to Belgium or before we returned - I apparently dismantled our trusty old wreath that had, admittedly, seen far better days. So this is all I could dig up from the bowels of the basement:

Pretty sad, huh? I think I need to go back to Belgium...

And The Paint Goes On

When we left our house in February 2007 the painter was in the process of painting most of it off-white. The walls in our house in Hautrage were all white. We came home craving color. We were also very taken by the color schemes we saw in the Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna, where vivid reds and yellows were highlighted. So we decided to try our own little Schönbrunn combo in the dining room.

The pictures are a little fuzzy but you get the idea. The framed item on the wall to the left of the china cabinet is a piece of embroidery we picked up in Bratislava. I loved the colors and the craftsmanship. It was only later that I got so attached to our neighbors' goats, so it is purely coincidental that this is a picture of a goatherd and some of her charges.

This big baby is a depiction of the Doudou festival in an earlier century. We knew we wanted this to be the centerpiece of the dining room because it's a huge poster. Plus the Doudou is like the center of culture in Mons. On the right-hand wall are three plates and a tile, more souvenirs from our travels. I didn't go about selecting them with this color scheme in mind but they all match beautifully. That is probably not coincidental, since I just like red.

Since this is a holiday weekend for us, I'm set to tackle another painting job: the kitchen. This one won't turn out as dramatic. Our primary objective for this project is lightening the eat-in part of the kitchen, which, after our fabulously large, light and airy kitchen in Hautrage, is dark and small. I'll let you know how it turns out.

Life in Suburbia

Seen today strolling through our backyard: five deer, followed a few minutes later by three more.

When we went out to walk about 10 minutes later, six of them were grazing in a front yard down the street, unfazed by a dog being walked by.

Transitions

We've been back in the US for over three months now, and back at work for about 6 weeks. We've adjusted to some things quite well, like stores that stay open in the evening and on Sundays, although I do find myself wondering occasionally if a particular store - like David's barber, for instance - will be open on Monday. We love having reliable electrical service in our home, but, again, sometimes when we drive up to the house and haven't quite hit the garage door opener squarely and the door doesn't open, we both suck in our breath while thinking, "Oh crap, the power's out again" until we realize that that was a Belgian phenomenon. Still, we don't realize how much of life in Belgium we had internalized as normal until we are startled by the realization that normal is different here.

One transition that has been harder has been going back to work. Not just the getting up, getting dressed, and slogging through traffic part, but adjusting to a different job. It's not a new job, since it's one I did before going to Belgium, but I find that my experiences at SHAPE and working with the military have changed me in ways I'm not even really conscious of. Maybe I just like working with guys in uniform. Whatever...Without going into any detail, I'll just say that I'm still looking for what excited me about this job in the past.

On the home front, we had another light-bulb moment this weekend. Sarah was off having a girls' weekend with friends so we found ourselves home alone in our house for the first time since coming back. Between the gorgeous fall weather - temperatures which resemble those of summer in Belgium - and the knowledge that it was just the two of us (oh boy, we can eat in front of the TV!), we realized that maybe some (or a lot) of what we liked so much about our life in Hautrage was not so much being in Belgium but just being empty-nesters. After all, we'd had little empty nest time between Sarah's departure for college in fall 2006 and our departure for Belgium in February 2007 - and in those few months we'd had kitchen/bath remodelers crawling all over the house. So while we're happy to have our little girl here until she can get her own apartment, we are definitely looking forward to the peace and quiet and uncluttered living that comes with having raised your kids and seen them go out on their own.

Lessons

This doesn't really have anything to do with our big Belgian adventure, so if that's all that interests you, you can stop reading now.

Lately I find myself worshiping and hearing homilies through the prism of our nephew Emmett's battle with cancer. Last week in North Carolina we heard about healing from a priest who had been diagnosed three years earlier with terminal bone cancer. While he didn't say that he was cancer free, he was indeed still here three years later, thankful for the power of the prayer offered by his friends and relatives.

Today in my home church in Columbia one of our favorite preachers - in the sense of one we like to hear preach - encouraged us to engage in persistent, passionate, and purposeful prayer. He led us through the following three utterances:

- My persistent prayer will be answered;

- My passionate prayer will be answered;

- My purposeful prayer will be answered.

Perhaps my mind is striving to see a connection between these two church experiences, a connection that speaks strongly to me of hope. I want to interpret this hope as God speaking to me about Emmett. As Emmett prepares to participate in a new treatment trial, I hope that this hope and he are connected, and not just in my mind.

She forgot the best part

We drove our new diesel VW on its first extended trip: 52 mpg. That's 4.5 kg/hectare in metric.

Rediscovering Scenic America

If any of you are still checking our blog after our two-month hiatus, here's for you:

Last week we drove out to a farm in rural Howard County to pick up a whole bunch of green beans to freeze. We drove through some beautiful rolling hills featuring farms, valleys, streams, and winding little roads that Esmerelda the GPS would have loved. The scenery reminded me of some of the areas near our Belgian village that we had grown to love, and I felt like I had my little piece of Belgium right here in HoCo, complete with cows and horses and sheep (no goats though).

Later in the week we drove through the Shenandoah Valley down to the mountains of North Carolina through miles and miles of farmland, forested mountainsides, and deep valleys with clear streams. If I tried, I could make myself think Germany. I didn't need to, though, because I was OK with this being our country and our scenery. I thought about what Europeans must see - besides magnificent autumn leaves - when they drive through the Shenandoah: a vastness that speaks of the incredible size of our country, the fact that we drove for 8-9 hours and never left the Eastern part of the US. How do Belgians and Luxemburgers even process a country of that magnitude?

Back to those leaves: between Thursday, when we went South, and Monday, when we returned north, there had been a lot of change: lots of orange and yellow with some red sprinkled in. It was gorgeous.

Culture clash

People have asked what differences we're noticing between our lives in Belgium and our lives here in the States. We've talked about the traffic. That's one. But an even bigger difference is between the coffee cultures. Europeans drink coffee often but in small amounts, especially in Mediterranean countries. France and Italy are the Med countries I'm familiar with, and folks there have a 1-oz coffee several times in the morning, once or twice in the afternoon, and after every meal, often instead of dessert. Actually, if you drink it like they do--short with a couple of sugars--it makes a really nice, light dessert on its own. In Belgium and The Netherlands, they drink a slightly weaker coffee, somewhere between expresso and American coffee, about 4 or 5 oz at a time. And the only time they'll drink out of paper is when they go to Starbucks, which does exist over yonder.

What we've noticed about our compatriots since coming home is that we tend to like our coffee like we like everything else: big. The smallest cup we've found is at Dunkin' Donuts, where a small is 10 oz. Most places it's 14 oz. And try to find find someone who'll serve you in a ceramic cup. Yeah, Starbucks will do it…if the two cups they own aren't already in use…but they sometimes seem puzzled by the request. And they don't heat the cups for the expresso, which means you're drinking it lukewarm. Sorry if it makes me a Eurofag or something, but it's nice to sit at a table, have someone take your order, and bring it to you in a proper cup, on a saucer, with a cookie on the side. And yes, I also like my beer in a glass, not out of the bottle.

I think it has to do with the basic reasons the two sides drink coffee. Europeans tend to do it to slow down and take a break, while us Americans tend to want it so that we can speed up and accomplish something. Neither side's right or wrong. I guess that's just the way it is.

By Special Request

The recently assembled work bench. The gray pieces to the left are part of a shelf I still need to put together. The Belgian movers broke it down, I guess to make it fit in the crate.

Picnic gone bad?

I didn't brew a lick while we were in Belgium. I looked at all those great beers (tax free for Shapians at the GB on post, no less) and decided it just wasn't worth the trouble. So when I unpacked my brewing equipment a day or two ago, it hadn't been used in almost 4 years. Now, faithful readers of this column may remember that the ladybugs in our neighborhood had sorta over fulfilled their quota. A bunch of 'em even stowed away in this plastic tube and made the journey to America. Unfortunately, none of them thought to bring provisions.

Extra points for anyone who understands the picnic reference.

An All-American Moment

We stopped at a Popeye's for lunch today. A lady named Deepak took our order, turned around, and shouted it back into the kitchen…in Spanish. I love America.

Hi, my name's David

And I'm a procrastinator. Many, many years ago Rita gave me a pretty nice woodworking bench. It has sat in the basement in its box ever since, waiting patiently for me to assemble it. It even went into storage--in the box--during our time in Belgium. I finally put it together this morning. It took about 30 minutes.

Not exactly nonaggression

Let me start by saying that Belgian drivers have plenty of flaws. I liked driving there in some ways, but not in others. They tend to tailgate a lot, even at crazy high speeds. But in general I feel more pressure on the roads here in the Balto-Wash Corridor. I was thinking that, even with the tailgating there, the style of driving here was more aggressive. But I've decided that that's not exactly it. Corridorians are not so much aggressive as competitive. It's like a big contest in which you lose points for letting someone in front of you or being passed or leaving a hole unfilled. Relax, people. I'm driving this slow because there's a line of cars in front of me that stretches to the Capitol steps. Getting ahead of me gains you nothing. Well, I mean except points in this game I'm obviously losing.

Bike vs. electric car

I've been watching lots of Tour de France coverage. Have you seen the ad in which Lance Armstrong is doing a training ride behind the Nissan Leaf electric car? He says that for the first time ever he doesn't have to smell exhaust. Sounds great. Except…any professional on a training ride would need at least two Nissan Leafs (Leaves?), whose range is about 100 miles (160 km). For a professional in training 100 miles is a warmup. Nice try, Nissan advertising dudes.

Strangers in our own land

Coming home after several years overseas is, in some ways, like going to a foreign country. While a lot is familiar, other things have changed. For example, do you realize how busy TV is anymore? It seems like no matter what the program, there is so much going on on the screen that you can barely watch the show: ads, web links, promos for upcoming shows, stats, more ads. I guess it's that multitasking thing I keep reading about.

Signing off from Belgium

I feel like I should post once more from Belgium, and tonight is my last chance. Tomorrow afternoon we move to the fancy Sheraton at the airport. Fancy hotel means of course that you have to pay for everything, including wireless, and we're too cheap to do that, so this is it. It's hard to believe that our 3 and almost-a-half years are over and that this is our last night in the Mons area. We knew this day would come, but not that it would come so quickly. While we're naturally sad about leaving all that we've become so accustomed to here, we're trying to approach it as another phase in our big adventure. We worked in such proximity to each other that we have actually been sharing a desk for the past few days. And we're still married. So that bodes well for the the next phase of our life. We'll see what that holds for us. It will include lots more friends and family, that's for sure. We look forward to that.

Talk to you on the other side.

Those French!

As many of you know, today is French National Day. The French contingent at SHAPE celebrated by offering a glass of champagne to everyone who passed through the cafeteria.

Organist humor

We went to an organ concert at the collegiate church of St. Waudru Sunday evening. The organist announced that if we heard trumpets in any of the pieces, we could rest assured that they had not added any new pipes to the organ. It would just be the sound of vuvuzelas outside the church as people got warmed up for the World Cup finals. And we all went, "Hahahahaha!"

The Cup final was a big deal. Even though it's been years since Belgium made it to the tournament, there are lots of folks of Spanish extraction here, and it is truly a big worldwide event (outside North America). Oh, and they still kinda remember the Dutch as their former overlords. Several big screen TVs on the Grand'Place, crowds so think you couldn't get through, and lots of horn honkin' and vuvuzela blowin' when it was all over. We felt very close to the action at our hotel just yards from the action.

In transition again

Despite a not very promising start, the movers finished up today, and we are now back where we started: in the Infotel in downtown Mons. The temps have dropped to the mid 80s outside, but not in our unairconditioned 3rd floor room. I can see by the clock in the belfry that it's 10:20 pm.

I mentioned the movers. On day 1 of a 2-day move, the packout crew arrived at 9 am. One guy. At 1 pm two more showed up. The next day, two guys arrived. Just after noon, a second pair came with the truck. They loaded seven crates in about 5 hours. I sent them away with a eight-pack of Jupe, which is what we call Jupiler, the local favorite pilsner. It's brewed by AB-Inbev, the folks who bought Anheuser Busch. Even the driver had one. I wasn't wild about the idea, but he did. I even said, "Yours will be for tonight at home." He said, "Aw, just one." I've drunk beer on a hot sweaty job before. In the heat, it feels like it's not even affecting you. And you don't have to pee.

David

How 'bout them refs?

We're sitting here watching the Belgian coverage of Mexico-Argentina, and the half-time analysts are about to come to blows over the use of instant replay. The discussion was provoked by Argentina's first goal, scored by a player who was clearly offside. The only thing that kept the analysts from each other's throats was the commercial break.

Thumpelina

Some of you have heard me complain about my wandering washing machine. I had the appliance guy out three times to "fix" it; the last time he said there was nothing more he could do. He even went so far as to imply that it was my fault because I was putting too much laundry in it.

Yesterday I washed two bath towels, two washcloths, a hand towel, and a bath mat in one load. The machine was pretty much full. It usually stands against the wall where the hoses are attached. This is where it ended up after 51 minutes (that's on rapid) of vigorous washing and rinsing and spinning. It stopped walking only because it ran up against the laundry baskets against the wall.

Thumpelina goes back to the Army in a few weeks. She'll go to another home, where another somebody will develop the same love/hate relationship with her. I will go back to my gigondo US washer where I can wash a set of queen-sized sheets and towels for two in one load. In 20 minutes, no less!

We're back in Belgium

What? You say you didn't know we were gone? That would be because we forgot to tell anyone. But you can check out the photos here.

Belgian lumberjacks

In Europe they have domesticated the forests. Whereas we're still largely hunter-gatherers, chopping down wild free-roaming herds of tree, the Europeans raise them in pastures. For 3 years we've had one of these domesticated tree flocks across the street from our house. It's a lovely copse of poplars, and we've enjoyed hearing the wind in the leaves and seeing the sun rise through the trees.We got home yesterday to discover that they had started logging it. It is a crop after all, but we had hoped it wouldn't go to the slaughterhouse while we were still here. Our landlord had announced that he was trying to buy the lot and log it off to make a "prairie." (He seems to hate trees. He cut down the big oak under which we dined in nice weather.) So we don't know if it's him doing it or the original owners, but either way our woods are going.
In a sense, it's making it easier to leave. Everything seems to be changing, so we're going back to where things never change: suburban America.

I took this shot at 10:27 PM tonight. It's going to be hard to return to the southern latitudes.

Three degrees of preparation

The bachelor's hood seems to be a recent addition to academic regalia. Rita and I were both like, "Hey, we didn't git wun of dem when we grajiated!" For Sarah's commencement our girls organized a family academic procession: left to right, Rachel, master's from Ohio University; Sarah, bachelor's from Randolph-Macon College; and Becky, master's from the University of Texas. Becky and Sarah received their degrees 8 days apart. Rachel is an old master.

Driving Us Cuckoo

The cuckoos are back.

They call in the morning. They call during the day. They call at night. On and on and on.

Wouldn't you think they'd get just a little tired?

Truth be told, though, hearing the cuckoos is one thing I'll miss when we move back to suburbia next month.

Parents of young children, beware!

When you raise your children on rock and roll, this is the result. Photo taken by Uncle Mickey at Rachel and Stephan's wedding reception, the swingingest party this reporter has ever had the privilege to attend. With apologies to John Wesley, may they always sing their love lustily and with a good courage.

We made it!

With Sarah's graduation from Randolph-Macon on Saturday, we have seen all three girls through college and have survived the experience! Not that we ever doubted we would; it just seemed like a long, long road when they were itty-bitty and we were struggling with balancing work and family life, along with worries about day care, school holidays, illnesses, and making sure each girl got to her various activities.

Now our girls are all more or less happy and well-adjusted, and we thank God that despite our mistakes, they turned out to be such fine young women. Chapeau, les filles!

If I wudda knew

If I'd known this was going to turn out so well, I'd have kept filming. As it was, it was totally by chance that I filmed a few seconds of driving under Charles de Gaulle airport on our way to southwestern France a couple of weeks ago. I know: it just looks like a tunnel. But there are runways and airplanes over our head!

See? But the plane on the runway didn't turn out half as well.

Marketing a seed

I don't know why, but this stuff fascinates me. This, dear readers, is the plant that produces what you know as canola oil. It's English name is rapeseed, which is hard to market of course, so the Canadians decided to call it canola, an abbreviation for Canadian oil, low acid. This particular field is outside Tours, in France's Loire Valley (slogan - "It's not just about the wine and the châteaux anymore"). driving through central France and much of Germany, you see vast fields of yellow when it's blooming in the spring. It's gorgeous. Years ago, when I asked a Frenchman what it was, he said that it was commonly referred to as mustard. Turns out it is related to mustard. And to turnips and to broccoli.

The Frozen Saints

Before the Vatican traded 'em in on different models, 11, 12, and 13 May were the feast days of Saints Mamertus, Pancras, and Servatius. Because northern Europeans noticed that there was often a cold snap around this time, the three are referred to as the Ice Saints and implored for protection against late freezes. The French call them les saints de glace, and, Vatican revisionists notwithstanding, modern Belgians are still aware of the folk wisdom and will not put out tender plants until after what they refer to as les saints de gel. Our morning drive time radio announcers were talking about them the other day, as they announced three days of icy temps and rain. It was about 40F yesterday and 42 today. Tomorrow, though, for Saint Servatius' day it's supposed to get all the way up in the low 50s. I plan to go to work in shorts and flipflops.

Noteworthy is that Servatius was the 4th century bishop of the Roman town of Tongeren (Tongres in French), which is now in eastern Belgium and is famous for its weekly antique market. That's where we got the monks bench.

Lies they tell us about Europe - installment 4

In honor of yesterday's 65th anniversary of V-E Day, we offer another installment of "Lies they tell us about Europe."

Be careful calling from Europe. It's very expensive!

Lie. As told by Ma Bell. It's cheap to call from Europe to the States. If, of course, you think that totally free qualifies as cheap. With Belgacom (the former state monopoly and still biggest telecomms provider in Belgium), you can pay a one-time fee of €5 and call any one foreign country of your choice for free on nights, weekends, and Belgian holidays up to a couple thousand minutes a month. Even if you call outside these hours, each call, no matter how long it lasts, is one euro. Even before such deals, it was cheap. In 1998 Rita and I made a series of transatlantic business calls from France--using a hotel phone no less!--and it worked out to a couple of bucks. So forget the rumors. It's cheap.

Unless of course we've never called you from over here. Then it's prohibitively expensive. So don't expect to hear from us anytime soon.

Not quite clear on the concept

We just got back from a week in the Dordogne, a part of France we didn't know at all before this trip. It's part of Aquitaine, which was English territory until the Hundred Years War. We noticed that almost every village had a sister city…in France. That's not normally the way it works, but there may be a reason. Most of the sister cities were villages in Alsace and Lorraine. A lot of people either fled from or were forced out of those two provinces at the beginning of WW II and wound up in the Dordogne, so I guess finding a sister city over yonder was a way of keeping folks close to their roots. Besides, the rest of France considers them kind of foreign anyways.

SHAPE fashion report

I've mentioned before that some nations at SHAPE don't seem to have regulation footwear for their female troops, at least not when they're wearing something besides cammies. And today we saw the most extreme example yet. We were in line behind a young Slovak Air Force Captain who was wearing blue suede boots with very, very, very pointy toes, stiletto heels, and a silver filigree fan design on the heel. They matched her uniform great, but they weren't exactly the sensible shoes American or Canadian or British lady officers have to wear with their class A uniforms. They did look nice, though.

Biker nation

I've been talking a lot about cycling lately, but it's the season. (The Flèche Wallonne is tomorrow!) But this post is about ordinary cyclists.

Belgians are very much at ease on their bikes. I imagine the Dutch and the Danes are too, but I don't live there, so I'm not writing about them. It starts at an early age. Last summer I was crossing the canal bridge near our house and saw a young teenaged girl and her little brother who had stopped to watch something go by on the canal. When they were done, they got back on their bikes and headed out. She pedaled a few feet then sat up and let go of the handlebars. I think she was eating candy or an ice cream. She rode down the bridge sidewalk, shifted off the sidewalk into the street, rode 50 meters, hit a cobblestone intersection, turned and headed down a side street. All without hands.

And her mother probably would not have warned that she could put her eye out doing that.

We assume that Goons Quad is the band we hear practicing in the warehouse down by the canal every Thursday evening. They are, ummm, improving. Somebody in the band must know enough English to make jokes. Or maybe not.

The warehouse is owned by "the junk man." That's what we call him because his yard on the other side of the canal is full of junk and because he sells used appliances and furniture. He's at the same number Left Bank of the Canal as our house number on our street, and people are forever showing up at our door saying things like, "We're here to pick up the washing machine," or "Are you the guy with the table?" We have to point them to the correct street.

So we were relieved to see the second sign for the Goons Quad concert. Otherwise, people might have been showing up at our door at 2 AM wanting to see a concert.

Unless they don't connect the Goons Quad with the Goonsquad.

Paris-Roubaix

Again with the cycling.

Sunday I went to see Paris-Roubaix, a race first held in 1896. Roubaix (pronounced roo-bay) is between Lille and the Belgian border. This race's schtick is cobblestones. There are 27 or 28 (depending on the year) sections of cobbles that together make up roughly a fifth of the course. And they haven't done anything to fix these spots up either. The section you see here is in exceptionally good condition, but it breaks down at the far end. All the cobbled bits have huge ruts and dips and holes, producing many spectacular crashes and lots of flat tires and busted wheels. Think of NASCAR run on gravel roads. Adding to the excitement is that most of these sections are so narrow that the team car can't get to you if you have trouble. If you're important, like the team leader, one of your unimportant grunt teammates (les domestiques in French) will take his wheel off and mount it on your bike for you. We actually saw two guys doing this on the TV coverage. The teams also send guys on foot with spare wheels down the narrow sections, and fans stand around holding wheels, just in case their hero breaks down in front of them.

So anyways, a couple thousand of my closest friends and I went to one of the more famous sections of cobbles: the Trouée d'Arenberg. The third stage of this year's Tour de France will finish here. The cobbles are rated from one to five stars for degree of awfulness. Arenberg is one of three five-star sections. If you're interested in seeing the scenery, the crowd, and a couple of bad action shots, check out my photos.

Incidentally, Belgium totally rocks this race with 53 wins out of 109.

Weirdest walk ever

Rita and I took a walk this afternoon, as usual. But that's where the usual ended. First there was the cute little kid and mom (yes, they were both cute--in fact she was so blond pony-tailed soccer girl cute that we thought she was an American) who were walking past the sheep pen, and for some ovine reason all the sheep decided they would start bleating and run over there to see the kid. Then a couple kilometers later, we saw this little runt lamb we've been tracking for a couple of weeks (we think we first saw him only hours after he was born) who had somehow gotten through the fence and was running back and forth trying to get back in where Mommy was. We stopped at my poultry lady's place to ask if they were her sheep. I know she has sheep because we'd talked about them before, but these weren't hers. She assured us the little fellow would eventually find his way back in. "Finding holes in the fence is their specialty," was the way she put it. Okay, next I kept going while Rita peeled off to go home, and all the goats at the house up the street had wandered outside their fence and all decided to follow me. A couple of teenaged boys on a scooter rode by and yelled, "Hey, he's stealing the goats!" Whitey, Momma, Buttspot, and Gert gave up fairly quickly, but Daddy followed me for several hundred meters, bleating and shoving his head against the back of my leg. I think he just wanted attention. Then while I was watching an empty barge pass a laden barge in the large (which means "the wide" in French, not "the big"), this enormous Newfoundland (I know: Is there any other kind?) who had been swimming in the canal (gag!) ran up to me and jumped on me. After that I made it home without much incident.

Spring our way

We hear it was 85 degrees on the East Coast today. It was 55 here, and we were happy to have it. And there are no bugs yet. We ate outside for the first time this year, and for the first time on our new deck. Our landlord finally replaced the old one, which I liked to call "the amazing exploding deck," with a new one in teak and granite. On the down side, he removed a gorgeous old oak tree that used to shade our al fresco dinners because, "It makes a lot of leaves."

Another sign of spring here in Belgium: the sun didn't go down until 8:30 PM. It wasn't totally dark until about 9:30. We will miss that.

Invasion of the Ladybugs!

They're everywhere, they're everywhere! In the bedroom, on the floor, on the walls, on our clothes. OK, not swarms of them. But enough that it requires getting out the vacuum to clean up the carcasses when they inevitably move on to ladybug heaven. They manage to come in through the closed French doors in our bedroom, which is apparently their favorite place, since when it's sunny, we get afternoon sun.

We kind of like having the little critters around. At least during the day. Not so crazy about it at night when things flutter or crawl past our faces ... It could be worse though: at least we're not talking some nasty Florida bug.

The Boucherie

This one is for Kirsten: today we drove past one of the butcher shops in Tertre and noticed this sign: "Cheval danois de premier choix." It made us laugh. No old nags for our butcher shop, no siree!

Wildlife

I saw an ermine last weekend. Rita and I were on our way to the commissary. The ermine ran across the road and into a field, so I suppose it may have been its way to the ermine commissary. Rita didn't see it because I was so flabbergasted I couldn't get a word out in time. I have seen ermine stoles in paintings but never a live ermine in its white winter coat. It's interesting that even around here, where it doesn't snow much, they turn white in the winter. And it was really white! I don't know how it stays that clean, because it had rained every day for 10 days and all the fields are either mud or muddy water.

The Wild West

West Luxembourg that is. Earlier this week the police in Luxembourg City surprised some thieves in the act at a jewelry store. The thieves fled, by car, into Belgium. The cops either did or did not ask permission to pursue them into Belgium, depending on which version of the story you hear, but pursue them into Belgium they did. Then the thieves either had a blowout or got a tire shot out, again depending on your version, jumped out of the car, and fled on foot. It's pretty well agreed that the police wounded one of the perpetrators, though they may not have had permission to discharge their weapons in Belgium, and first reports in the early morning used the marvelously ambiguous term "neutralized" for what the police did to the guy. It means he was taken out of action some way some how. An investigation has been started to clear up the confusion, hopefully before Albert II, King of the Belgians, is forced to declare war on the Grand Duke Henri, who happens to be his nephew. Film at 11.

The French supermarket chain Carrefour announced Tuesday it was closing 21 stores and laying off some 1600 people in Belgium. The grocery store GB is part of the Carrefour family. And our GB on SHAPE is one of 5 stores in Wallonia slated to close by June. This is pretty disturbing news to those of us who shop there regularly - and to those of you who benefit regularly from the benefits of our shopping there. No more tax-free beer, chocolate, or speculoos.

I suspect there is some kind of agreement between SHAPE and the Belgian government to provide us with tax-free shopping but have little hope that if that is the case, a contract can be arranged with a new grocery store and the new tenant take possession of the space in anything less than 6 months, if even that quickly. Change happens at glacial speed on SHAPE. Correction: good change happens at glacial speed; bad change seems to move much more quickly.

We don't know when the GB will close definitively but it may be sooner than June. Rumors are flying that it will close as of 1 March. The employees have been on strike for 2 days. We heard the store would open back up tomorrow, but Carrefour employees have called for a general strike Saturday, with some stores closed starting tomorrow. So we may have shopped our last in our favorite place to shop.

Curling

As we've mentioned before, we get most of our US TV fix from AFN, which has to take what the networks give it, because it doesn't pay for it. As a result, there's absolutely no Olympics coverage but curling on during European prime time, since those of you with honest jobs in the US are at work then and not watching TV. So we watch French TV on our Belgian cable. It's as francocentric as US coverage is US centered, but since France has some good athletes in some interesting sports, we see stuff. We saw Bode Miller win gold, for example. Live. Oh, I'm sorry. Maybe you didn't know that because NBC was saving it to show next Friday.

Doing it wrong - first impressions

We just got back from 4 days in England, which was our first experience with driving on the left. My first experience, I should say. Rita declined to have anything to do with it. It wasn't as bad as I expected, maybe because what I expected was death in a giant fireball. Low expectations triumph again. As others had assured me, it wasn't too bad on divided highways. Rita had to remind me a couple of times that the right lane was the fast lane, not the slow lane, but other than that it went okay. The traffic circles were a little weird because you go through them clockwise instead of "anticlockwise," as you do in the driving-on-the-right world. What really took some getting used to, though, was meeting oncoming traffic on two-lane roads. It was okay as long as you were behind another car and felt protected, but the first few times you meet someone all by yourself, it's just…wrong.

In case you're in the area

Just saw a commercial on AFN for the annual best sapper competition to be held at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, in late April. Who knew?

Problem solved

Rita wrote recently about all the potholes that have formed as a result of the snow and the cold. Well, on the autoroute they have now "fixed" the problem by lowering the speed limit from 120 to 90 (75 to 55 mph) and putting up signs warning that there are potholes. No need to spend money on silly repairs when you've got this kind of brilliance at work.

Snow envy

We hear the mid-Atlantic is expecting another big snowfall today/tomorrow. This makes what - 50 inches or so for the year? I am so, so jealous. Or as a colleague put it, snow jealous. Yes, we've had our little snowfalls in Belgium this year, but nothing on the scale of one of those great big ole storms coming up from the south, full of moisture, that dump about 20 inches. No one here rushes to the grocery store to stock up on milk and toilet paper. Funny the things you miss.

Nid de poule

That's French for pothole. Which we're seeing a lot of these days, especially on the autoroute, due to the unusually cold winter. Big stretches of the middle lane are almost undriveable because of the round holes created where the 2-inch top layer of asphalt has disappeared. (Especially on the stretch between St-Ghislain and the R5,where the right hand lane has been closed for some mysterious reason for over a year, forcing the trucks to drive in the middle lane.)

Belgian roads are notoriously ill cared for. You can do some serious damage to your alignment on them. We joke, only we're not really kidding, that Strassenschaeden ("damaged road surface" in Germany) equates to "a really good road" in Belgium. That's how bad it is: what's considered a bad road in Germany is like freshly paved to us.

More from Berlin

One of the things we did on our recent trip to Berlin was go to the Loxx model train exhibit. I'd seen video of this and thought it was fascinating. I don't remember how many kilometers of track they've laid but it's a lot. They've basically recreated Berlin in miniature.


This is obviously not a scene from downtown Berlin, but you get an idea of the amount of detail that's gone into creating this exhibit.


This was one of David's favorite parts of the exhibit.

All in all, it was pretty cool. But pretty expensive too. Museums are not cheap in Berlin.

Who's here?

We had an after-work office get-together tonight in a part of the SHAPE Club we had never been to before. One wall was hung with personalized pewter beer mugs. There was SACEUR's mug, his deputy's, the chief of staff's, and one for each of the NMRs (national military representatives). They were almost all still hanging there, meaning they were unused. Conspicuously out, and therefore in service, were the mugs of the Czech and the Slovak NMRs.

It's funny if you know what great beer-drinking nations the components of the former Czechoslovakia are.

Better late than never, I guess.

We went to Berlin over the recent long weekend and did something we had never done before in all our travels: we took a walking tour. It was cold as a Norwegian well digger's… It was really cold, and there were about 4 inches of snow, which the Germans are only slightly more adept at clearing than the Belgians, and we near 'bout froze our feet standing in it listening to history lectures. But the lectures were interesting and good, and our guide was knowledgeable, and the group was congenial, and we saw the old city and heard cool stories, and we got a discount with the Berlin Welcome Card.

So now that we've been to a dozen or so cities and are nearing the end of the Big Belgian Adventure, we've decide this is the way to go.

Chrismas is over

Back in early December we watched the workmen set up the gigantic Christmas tree in front of the main building at SHAPE. It took a crane and a lot of men (a lot of supervisors...).

Yesterday we noticed them removing the lights.

Today we saw them take the tree down. This was a majestic beauty from the town of Malmedy over in eastern Belgium. And they unceremoniously chopped at it until it fell and then they began cutting the branches off so they could haul them away. We left before the trunk was completely nude. It was sad, not just for the wasted tree but because this was our last Christmas in Belgium.

Not Just No Longer Fun But Downright Hard

We put three girls and a fiance on three planes this past weekend.

Anyone who has tried to fly to the US from outside the US since the Christmas Day event has experienced the new procedures, which Brussels National is implementing with vigor: only one carry-on item is allowed because of secondary screening of all carry-ons for all passengers to the US.

We watched while passenger after passenger approached the Delta pre-check-in counter and expressed dismay and incredulity at being told their computer bag or purse had to be stuffed into their carry-on, or the extra bag would have to be checked - at 50 euros a bag. That's euros, not dollars, since these passengers are departing from a euro zone country. In the US they catch a break: it's only 50 dollars.

Delta seems to be taking advantage of the heightened security measures. It would be reasonable - and customer-friendly - for an airline to allow passengers returning from the Christmas holidays to check that extra bag for free. They carried on on the way over; what are they supposed to do - leave all that extra stuff behind?

I am not looking forward to my next flying-to-America experience. They've just made it too hard.

Talk about inflation!

The postage rates went up today while we were conducting a transaction! We had done two packages, when the supervisor came out and told the clerk that they were changing the way they calculated postage. They were no longer to enter the zip code but a zone number. And guess what. It calculates a higher rate. Go figure. It was about 0800 back on the East Coast, so maybe that's when the new rates were supposed to take effect.

The clerk was Rich's wife. That's one of the goofy things about being at a small overseas post: all the ordinary working people--postal clerks, store clerks, etc--are family members of the people you work with. It's kind of fun. Doesn't keep them from insisting on seeing your ID on every visit, though.

And no, we did not have to recalculate the postage for the first two packages, so I guess when you look at it the right way, we got away with one. Or two.