In Bruges Part . . . What are we up to now?

French national news programs are, on average, twenty minutes longer than their American counterparts. Still, proportionally, there seem to be major differences in how each group allocates its time. American national news programs devote more coverage and time to the following: 1) Political issues; 2) The rich and powerful; 3) Pundits/reporters. French national news programs devote more coverage and time to the following: 1) The lives, issues, and opinions of "ordinary" people; 2) Segments about food production and consumption ; 3) Segments about artisanal/cultural production, in France and à l'étranger (abroad).

One recent segment focused on an old maison de dentelle (lace-making establishment) in Bruges. We saw lots of lace in Bruges, but figured its production was a touristy thing, an artificially-preserved relic of a pre-industrial past. But it turns out some of the best hand-made lace in the world still comes from Bruges. Which we probably should have guessed when Tom (our host/tour guide) showed us this awesome lace map of the city:

And now for something completely different. In (what we hope will be the) conclusion to our Bruges coverage, we'd like to remind everyone that a great way to see the city without actually going is to watch the 2008 film noir, In Bruges, which inspired the oh-so-creative name of this series of posts.

There's a lot of cursing and a fair amount of gore, but we still recommend it.

In Bruges Part II

Just after arriving in Bruges, our couchsurfing host, Tom, took us on a three-hour tour. [♫A three-hour tour!♫] We crossed and re-crossed the canals that make this picturesque city the "Venice of the North" (along with Strasbourg and Amsterdam, which share that title). Now, the only boats you see are those shuttling tourists around the various sites.

Tom, a history and Dutch teacher, took us to places most tourists don't see and shared wonderfully obscure (but totally relevant) factoids. One of my favorites:

Just above the entrance to the skinniest building in Bruges (left of center) you'll see the following figurines.

It's a little hard to tell from the picture, but they're stevedores, and they're carrying the building just as they'd normally carry goods from the ships that docked in Bruges' canals when the city was the largest port in the world, in the 15th century. The figurines denote the building's role as headquarters for the stevedores' guild, which was a kind of nascent union/lobbying group looking out for the stevedores' financial interests. Neat, huh?

The only thing Tom couldn't explain was the architectural predilection in Bruges for terraced roof facades. Any ideas?

Thanks, Tom, for the great tour and for your wonderful hospitality!

In Bruges Part IV

Great thing about museums in Bruges: buy one ticket, get into a few museums. Buy another ticket, get into a few more. If a bunch of rooms are closed at the Groeninge Museum, get a super reduced rate (1 euro for students). Then again, the Groeninge Museum without its best Flemish Primitivist art wasn't much of a Groeninge Museum at all. We elected not to to use our super-reduced-rate ticket to get into the Museum's extension across the courtyard, instead choosing to enter the Notre Dame of the city, the choir of which I've already described. To get into the choir, we had to buy another 1-euro ticket - which also got us into the Gruuthuse, just next to the cathedral. During our tour the previous day, Tom had explained that the family with the privilege of running the Gruthuis (which collected taxes on products needed to make beer) actually connected the Gruthuis to the cathedral via a private passageway, so they could attend Mass without leaving the comfort of their own home.

The path between the Groeninge Museum and the cathedral takes you over this ridiculously quaint/picture-perfect bridge. You can see the ambulatory of the cathedral, and to its right, the Gruuthuse. The little gate right on the water is where the Gruthuis occupants would meet incoming boats to exact the tax on the beer-related products they were carrying.

The Gruuthuse

(looks like someone combined Princeton's Collegiate Gothic architecture with Harvard's brick fetish)

After the Gruuthuse, which seems to be the Museum of Mundane Objects Throughout Bruges' History, we stopped into the Stadhuis to see the Renaissance chamber and learn about the city's political history.

Actually, the Stadhuis is composed of about 5 quasi-separate buildings, each of which is designed in a different period's style: Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, and Classical, with a touch of Neo-Gothic thrown in for good measure. Here, from left to right: Classical, Baroque, Neo-Gothic.

After lunch (more on that in another Flemish Foodfest post), dessert, and a waffle, we stopped into Sint-Salvadorscathedraal, which is the "main" cathedral, then walked to Konigin Astridpark, and finally it was time to leave Bruges.

Until next time, Bruges, city of kind people and weird serpent benches . . .

In Bruges Part III: Sounds of Two Cities

This is what Bruges sounds like around noon on a Friday:

You hear the ringing of the bells in the belfry, the tower that houses the privileges of the city of Bruges (and the tower that figures so prominently in the city's namesake film). You also hear the horse-drawn carriage that pulls tourists around the central square (from which the following picture of the belfry is taken) and you hear the preferred form of transportation for the locals - bikes!

As a completely unrelated complement to that soundscape, here is what I sound like playing Schubert's Shepherd on the Rock with Anne-Chantal Carrière, soprano (who performs frequently with the chorus at the Paris Opéra), and Dominique Fournier, piano, who happens to be the French husband of an American organist and scholar (Carolyn Shuster-Fournier) whom I met in the microfilm room of the BN one afternoon when I recognized her name (from footnotes in a few articles and books I've read) on a box of film. I struck up a conversation, mostly in the interest of getting help on my dissertation and making a new contact. She asked me what instrument(s) I play, I said clarinet, she exclaimed, "But my husband needs a clarinetist for a concert he's giving in a salon in the 9th in April!" and I said, "Sign me up!" We rehearsed Shepherd on the Rock for the first time on Saturday, and it wasn't terrible. Except at the very end.

Flemish Foodfest Part 1

Happy Thanksgiving!! Just in case you were wondering, Maggie and I are attending two Thanksgiving dinners: tonight, we're joining some other American expats at the apartment of our friends Rachel and Adam (we're contributing a banana cake and stuffing); tomorrow we're taking the train to Munich to have another dinner with Maggie's first and second cousins who live there. We'll spend the weekend in Munich and come back Monday - oh, and we're taking Panda.

But before that happens, I wanted to celebrate Thanksgiving (a food-centric holiday if there ever was one) by finally describing some of the Flemish food we ate on our trip two weeks ago. And as with all our posts recently, there's too much information to give all at once, so this will also be in parts.

In Lille, at A la Renaissance, Maggie ordered carbonade, which is the typical Flemish dish. It's beef stewed in beer, chocolate, and pain d'épice (gingerbread), usually served with some version of potatoes. As Belgium is known for having invented French fries, both times we ordered carbonade it came with fries.

I tried potjevleesh, a terrine of different kinds of meat (pork, rabbit, turkey, beef) served cold and held together by a kind of gelatin. I liked Maggie's carbonade more, but this was good too, especially if you like meat.

Our night in Bruges we dined at a disappointing establishment called Poules Moules, which (as you might guess from the name) specialized in chicken and in mussels (moules-frites, or mussels with fries, is a "specialty" of Belgium, although I'm sure you can get better mussels elsewhere). So I won't talk about that meal, except to say, don't go to Poule-Moule.

Luckily before we left Bruges we enjoyed some amazing chocolate (for which Bruges is famous) and a waffle (which is more of a Brussels/Wallonie thing than a Flemish thing, but what the heck.)

The chocolate came from Van Mullem Servaas Patisserie/Salon (believe it or not, that's written on the little slab of milk chocolate), the waffles from one of many tourist-oriented stands scattered around the old city.

Aside: We just got back from dinner at Rachel and Adam's, and cannot believe we're going to do this again Saturday. Right now, I can't even conceive of putting any more food in my stomach for at least three days. When we post pictures of all the incredibe (and surprisingly gourmet/non-traditional-for-Thanksgiving) food we just had, you'll understand why.

Wij komen naar België!

As all you Dutch/Flemish readers out there already know, we're headed to Belgium! We leave this Wednesday, right after we drop Panda off at the doggie resort. (From the website it seems like way more fun than a normal kennel. She'll be staying on an island in the Seine!) Due to Armistice Day, which is a jour ferié (state holiday) in France, Maggie has no classes Wednesday through Friday this week, so she's not missing too much. And now that I've been researching consistently for six weeks, I feel like I can afford to take a break too.

Here's our itinerary:

View Larger Map

Wednesday night, we'll stay in Lille. Thursday night, we'll stay in Bruges. Friday and Saturday nights, we'll be in Brussels, and we'll return Sunday afternoon. We already have couchsurfing hosts lined up in each city, and we're looking forward to making new friends.

Due to the last-minute nature of this trip, we haven't really had time to plan out what we'll do in each city. Let us know if you have any suggestions - things to see, to do, to eat, things we absolutely shouldn't miss or things we absolutely should.

We can't wait to tell you all about it when we get back!

In Bruges Part I

In Bruges, there's a greenway that encircles the oldest part of the city. Here's one way they mark the bike lanes:

More Lille

We planned our trip so we'd get to spend one full day each in Lille and Bruges, but it didn't quite work out that way. Thanks to a last-minute rush to get Panda one more vaccination before she went to the kennel, we didn't arrive in Lille until Wednesday evening (instead of early afternoon), so we only had a few daylight hours on Thursday to explore. We split that time four ways:

1) We checked out the "famous" market at Wazemmes, the outdoor portion of which was similar to the Marché aux Puces in Paris, or Cowtown in New Jersey; the indoor portion of which was much like the Reading Terminal Market in Philadelphia (fairly swank, high-quality stuff). The building around which the Marché takes place (Lille's own, well-preserved "Les Halles") is quite nice too.

2) We visited the Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille, one of the premier Beaux-Arts in France (supposedly second only to Paris). Again, I was as impressed by the building housing the collection as by the collection itself. Highlights: Velasquez, Rodin, arch-arcade hallways, the modern extension behind the building (which reflects the older building beautifully; everyone wants their own glass-pyramids-at-the-Louvre kind of thing), I could go on . . .

3) We walked around the Grand Place, Place Rihour and Vieux Lille, all of which was fine, but not too distinctive. (Sometimes it seems like every city in Europe has a pedestrian-only shopping district centered around the "old" part of town (including a central square) characterized by winding, narrow streets first laid out in medieval times and recently gentrified to attract tourists like us.)

The Grand Place

Lille's Opera, just off the Grand Place

4) We ate at an amazing restaurant we stumbled upon quite randomly. It's called À La Renaissance, and the food we savored there deserves its own post. Coming soon.

We left Lille after spending almost exactly 6 hours touring the city. Clearly, we're going to need to go back, and since it's only an hour from Paris, it's possible to make a day trip out of it. Anyone want to join us?

A taste of things to come

We're back from Flanders!! (When I said we were going to Belgium, I really meant Flanders, since Lille is technically in France, but Lille, Bruges, and Brussels are all historical centers of Flemish culture.) We'll be posting about our experiences traveling this weekend in batches over the next week, so as not to overwhelm anyone (especially ourselves). For now, consider this picture our e-postcard to all of you - hello from Bruges!

Every good Belgian beer has its own glass and its own bottle, each idiosyncratically shaped. If your server places your glass and/or bottle without the beer's name facing you, you should immediately leave the establishment.

Flanders Panders

I was going to post about all the delicious food we had in Flanders, but I want to save that for when I have enough time to do the topic justice. So for now, enjoy some of the patterns and lines that grabbed our attention over course of the trip.

Courtyard of Brussels' Hôtel de Ville

Warehouse along train tracks between Kortrijk and Brugge.

Typical Flemish tile pattern, floor of Brugge Stadhuis

Ceiling, Brugge Stadhuis

This row of seats in the choir of Onze-Lieve-Vrouwekerk (Notre Dame en français) kept the Knights of the Order of the Golden Fleece sitting up straight when they had a chapter meeting during the months the Dukes of Burgundy spent at their northern capital, Bruges (as opposed to their southern capital, Dijon). (In case you're like, "whaaaaa?" one of my generals topics last summer involved studying a series of masses probably written to celebrate the Order and pay homage to its Burgundian leaders. So I was really excited to see these seats, and the coats-of-arms of each member of the Order painted on the walls above them.)