belgianwaffle

Belgium

Plucky Little Belgium


Posted in: Belgium, Middle Child, Twins

Since Daniel acquired glasses, we have been spending a lot of time and money in the opticians. I’m glad it’s a nice one near home. Mostly we are served by the owner’s daughter, an efficient pleasant woman about my age. The other night, I went in to get Daniel’s glasses repaired (he and Michael had tugged them apart at the creche, it’s nice to think of them having fun) and her father was there. He was dealing with some other people and I settled down to wait, conscious all the same that Mr. Waffle was at home with three cranky children who needed dinner and bed. Finally, it was my turn.

Me: Hello, I wonder could you fix these glasses, I think you have a file on us.

Him: That’s not a Belgian accent.

Me: Er, no, it’s not, I’m from Ireland.

Him (heavily accented): Ireland, Ireland, then we can speak English.

Me (proferring deformed glasses): Mmm. Yes, if you like.

Him: Do you know Hertfordshire?

Me: Um, no, never been, I’m afraid.

Him: My father was in England during the war.

Me: The first world war?

Him (misunderstanding, I think): How old do you think I am?

Me: Um, the second world war?

Him (at cross-purposes): He died in the war.

Me: I’m sorry to hear that. In England?

Him (baffled): No, he was in England in the first world war; when he was 13.

Me (not wanting to be unsympathetic but feeling we are getting nowhere and also conscious of my loving husband and children, home alone): I see, well, I wonder, have you got a file on us?

Him (not to be deterred): He learnt to be an optician and then set up in Dendermonde when he came back.

Me: Oh Dendermonde.

Him: No, in England.

Me: Yes, I see.

Him: He died in the second world war.

Me: I’m very sorry to hear it.

Him: Yes, I was only 10.

Me (mind reprehensibly fixed on the glasses): That must have been very difficult for you.

Him: Yes, he was betrayed.

Me (surprised): By whom?

Him: He joined the résistance straight away immediately and he was betrayed by [not clear, some local perhaps]. They ask me why I do not live in Dendermonde but I know they are traitors and I can smell corruption and racism. Though, his daughter [I think the daughter of the man who betrayed his father] is a very nice woman.

Me (genuinely interested and having put the glasses to the back of my mind): How did your father die?

Him (producing formal black bordered mortuary card showing a handsome midddle-aged man): My father was taken away by the Germans and died of typhus in the camps in March 1945. I went to see him once in prison in Ghent before he was taken away. It was a hard time, the English were very good to us, an English Major and his daughter, she is an old woman now, June, but she is godmother to my daughter.

Pause.

Him: I think we’ll have to send those glasses away to be fixed.

I forget how much these things are just below the surface in Belgium where two world wars were fought. Coming from a country that was neutral in the second world war and where (aside from Northern Ireland which is a long way from Cork and, after all, another country), the last major conflict occurred over 80 years ago, I have never, in living memory, lost a relative except to illness, accident or old age. Sometimes I forget how very fortunate that makes me.

Delightful


Posted in: Belgium, Princess

They have scabies in school. Scabies?! The school doctor has examined the Princess and declared her scabies free, but for how long we ask ourselves.

Grumpy


Posted in: Belgium

On Sunday, my loving husband minded the sick children leaving me to attend mass alone, something I haven’t done in years.  This gave me the leisure and the high moral ground to criticise others.  Usually I am too busy being mortified by my progeny.

I went to Notre Dame au Sablon where the nice beggar kindly asked after the children and sent the ill mites his regards.  The church is having work done on most of the nave and is cut off at the transept by enormous, ugly chipboard panels.  It makes the church tiny with one entrance rather than relatively large with two.  As I sat there near the door a constant stream of people came in to look around ignoring the large sign in four languages asking them not to do so during mass.

They looked around, they took photos, a family ensconced themselves in the row behind me and looked at their map.  An elderly man sitting beside them put out his hand to shake hands for the sign of peace and they were baffled but gamely shook hands with all and sundry. 

Would it kill them all to wait until mass was over?

Hurrah!


Posted in: Belgium, Family, Work

Yesterday evening at 6.00, I had to take the train to England. At 3.00 with two sick children (welcome to the Leper House) who were responding well to paracetemol and one hyper girl who hadn’t been out in days, we decided that we needed to get out, but where? 

I found this very nifty website which lists all the museums in Brussels by various search criteria including by theme and by area. On Rue Paul Spaak no 7, is the Fondation Raymond Leblanc. It is five minutes from the station and it is a comic museum. Well worth a visit we felt.

As we circled around the exceptionally dodgy area (you know, adjacent train and bus station, drunks, louts, nervous visitors scurrying in the opposite direction) looking for parking we would have been sure that we were in the wrong place had it not been for a large neon Tintin and Snowy on the roof of one of the buildings.

We parked the car and navigated the children round the various hazards and made our way to no. 7. All around were closed, barred shops, internet and cheap telephone shops, money transfer places and suddenly there was a very swish comic shop but it looked closed. Beside it was an open door to what looked like a smart residential building in a very spartan style, maybe 1940s. Closer inspection revealed that this was the Fondation building. We went in, it was deserted. We pushed the button for the lift. It didn’t come. We stood there alone, baffled. I went back and checked the front door. There was a small postcard pinned up. It advised climbing by foot to the second floor. We all clumped up the spiral staircase of the beautiful empty building.

On the second floor, a pug dog emerged to greet us. The Princess fell upon him, the boys nervously asked to be lifted up. A chic young woman emerged and swooped up the dog and smiled graciously upon us. Her equally chic colleague positioned herself behind the blond wood desk, reassured us that we were in the right place, lamented the quality of the quartier and sold us two adult entry tickets (children free) for the princely sum of 6 euros. Did we know the history of the place, we did not. This building is, I think, still a working publishing house, it was there that the Tintin magazine was made for many years and it was also the home of the Belvision studio which made animated films. 

The museum consists of various comic strips, information about the publishing house and various other bits and pieces that I, alas, didn’t get a lot of time to examine because, the piece de resistance, or at least as far as my family was concerned, was a miniature working cinema with plush red seats which we had to ourselves. It was showing Asterix and Cleopatra which I think was originally made there in that very building. The seats had names on the back (Herge,) and I think they must have been original because the plush velvet was faded in places. We were all entranced. Mr. Waffle and I wandered about the exhibits outside a little bit but mostly we stayed and watched.

At about 4.45, I suggested that I would go and get my luggage from the car and come back and give him the key (you will recall that I have lost my car key and refuse to fork out for a new one as I know it is somewhere in the house) before going to the station. I went and got my luggage and came back. I stayed until about 5.15 and decided that I’d better trot along to the train. I left them all entranced with the film and indifferent to my departure (a delightful contrast to the howlfest that ensued last time I went away overnight).

Off to queue for the train, passport, baggage control, then my mobile started ringing. It was Mr. Waffle, had I taken the car key with me? Yes, I had. Back through the various layers out on to the street back to the building, up the spiral staircase, hand over key, renewed goodbyes to puzzled children, back down the staircase etc. etc. And I still had loads of time to get the train because despite two sets of passport checks and x-ray machines, it’s still a lot faster than the airport and also because this place is exactly five minutes walk from the Eurostar terminus. I know because I have recently done it three times.

If you have children, or even, if you don’t, may I enthusiastically recommend this place to you, if you find yourself in Brussels by Eurostar (or, I suppose, even if you don’t though it is supremely handy for the Eurostar). I found the whole experience to be quintessentially Belgian from the deserted beautiful building, to the pug dog and the high seriousness of the comic strip. It’s fabulous and, for my money, better value than the much more famous comic strip museum. True the latter is housed in a spectacular building but the art is more difficult for children to appreciate, since they have to muscle their way through a crowd of spectators to see it and, as far as I know, it certainly doesn’t boast a private family cinema. 6 euros well spent.

How different, how very different from the home life of our own dear Queen


Posted in: Belgium, Ireland, Princess

I was born in Cork and grew up there. I went to school with Cork children. My mother was considered mildly exotic because she came from Limerick (adjoining county about 40 miles away). We had a girl in our class in primary school whose mother came from Dubin and this was considered so exotic that there was an article about her mother in the Evening Echo. As I remember it, the headline was something like “Dublin Woman moves to Cork”; it’s not as though her mother was famous or had done anything very thrilling once she got to Cork. I suppose I’m saying that Cork in the 70s and 80s was a pretty homogenous place.

Obviously, going to school in Belgium, the Princess was never going to be in a class full of her compatriots but what amazes me is the range of nationalities in her class alone: Poles, Belgians, Pakistanis, North Africans, South Americans and one Irish girl. This morning she explained to me that she had a cooked lunch in school yesterday (itself a matter calling for some investigation as she had left the house with a sandwich, but we will leave that to one side) but not the same as the “musulmans” because they don’t eat meat. I explained to her that the English word was Muslims and they do eat meat but it has to be prepared in a particular way. It is amazing to me that she knows more about other religions and other cultures at four than I did at fourteen. I can’t help feeling that there is quite a lot to be said for globalisation all the same.

Spring is in the Air (a dull summary of our weekend activities for the benefit of loving relatives who have already heard it on the phone)


Posted in: Belgium, Family

The weather was beautiful this weekend.  On Saturday we went to the park; the Princess was on her bike (which is excellent and has really extended our range of destinations on foot) and the boys in the buggy.  Michael objected loudly to this and for the length of our street sobbed and said “bicycle, bicycle”.  Daniel tired of this and whacked Michael on the head, a move which I outwardly condemned while, inwardly, having every sympathy with him.  One of the training wheels loosened on the royal bike and Mr. Waffle was sent sprinting home to get the spanner while the children and I continued carefully.  No sooner had the offending nut been tightened than the chain came off.  Please bear in mind that as all the repair work was continuing Michael was howling determinedly.  By the time we arrived in the park, fine weather or no, we were all a little tense.  Everyone had a lovely time in the park, though, and they were very good when we went to our friends’ house for cake (the Princess even used cutlery) and on the trek home.

On Sunday, we went to Mass where the children were all miraculously well behaved.  Te Princess went to a Sunday school type class – hooray – and emerged commenting that she had no idea that Jesus wanted her to be a good girl and why hadn’t we told her; I feel that this is a very promising development.   Afterwards, we went for a walk around the Etangs d’Ixelles picking up various things in the market.  It felt like being on holidays (a feature of my childhood holidays in France being Mass on a Sunday and market afterwards) and I wondered why we don’t do this kind of thing more often.  Possibly because it is not always wonderfully fine and sunny on Sunday mornings in Brussels.

That afternoon we went to a showing of “The Little Mole” which the children loved.  It was the boys’ first trip to the cinema and they were enchanted.  A bit like an old silent film, the showing was accompanied by two musicians with a range of instruments (explained and identified to the audience) which the kids were allowed to inspect afterwards.  It was described on the poster as 6 short films by Zdeněk Miler which, as Mr. Waffle pointed out, made it sound a lot more intellectual than it actually was.  I did spend some of my time wondering whether it was communist propoganda. The little Mole stole a watermelon from a pile that a man was selling to children; then the Mole cut it up and gave it away to his friends.  The watermelon seller does not come up smelling of roses.  In another of the films, with the help of all the animals of the jungle (except for the mean lion), the Mole digs a well.  Perhaps all cartoons for small children emphasise the value of co-operation and it is only later that we urge them to compete and assure them that they will stand or fall on their own efforts alone.

All in all, it was the first weekend in some time where that hasn’t left me desperate to get into work on Monday morning. Could we be turning a corner?