On this trip, we spent the whole visit within Belgium -- in fact, within Flanders. As you can see, we still had no shortage of things to see and do.
The flight over was fairly uneventful; Thomas slept most of the way. The in-flight movie was WILD,WILD WEST, which I've been wanting to see but couldn't really watch due to Thomas trying to grab my earphones and me being really tired :-P. We'll rent it one of these days; Jan enjoyed the train scenes but missed enough of the text that he'd like to see it again too.
Our first couple days in Belgium were recovery days -- sleep, rest, adjust baby to Belgian time, go into town and buy Jan some new pants that he'd needed.
On Thursday, we made our first day trip, to Antwerp to see the zoo. The zoo is conveniently located next to the train station -- no problems finding it!
The Antwerp zoo is the international breeding center for the okapi, and they're one of the first animals you can see as you walk around. They also have the zoo standards of lions, tigers, elephants, and giraffes, and a variety of other hoofed critters, plus seals and sea lions, otters, and pengiuns. The night animals exhibit is fairly interesting; we went through while it was fairly quiet and saw animals in about half the cases, and Jan said that this was the most he'd ever seen in one pass -- usually he's been there when a crowd of rowdy kids has been passing through, and all the animals are hiding. The reptile exhibit is pretty neat (ever hear a turtle fart? it was, er, educational....), as is the insect exhibit and the bird cages -- great owls. We picked a good day for seeing the place too -- the weather was cold and rainy, but this meant that there were hardly any other people there, except for a couple groups of schoolkids.
Friday, we left Thomas with his Oma for the day and went to Gent, occasionally spelled Ghent in English texts. (If the phrase "treaty of..." is going through your head, this is the place, though I can't remember which medieval war was ended by it.) Jan enjoyed this trip because while he spent quite some time in Gent when he had to do his military service, of course he didn't get to see much of the town. We saw the outside of the military building, which gave proof that the Cold War is over -- no guards outside, a big surprise for Jan. We walked around town, had lunch in a restaurant that had these really cool Art Deco chairs, and visited a church that had excellent stained glass windows -- most of them the old traditional type, but a few that were modern and that reminded me of quilt patterns or African fabrics. This church (whose name I'm blanking on, though I want to say St. Baaf's) is also the home of a famous triptych of Van Eyck, THE LAMB OF GOD. Not much is known about Van Eyck, but we know he was a perfectionist; botanists studying this painting have been able to identify about sixty plant species from his painting, and there's one palm tree in the painting that indicates that Van Eyck must have travelled at one time to the Balkans, as that's the only place the particular species grows. One of the panels is of an angel playing an organ; Van Eyck repainted the hands about six times before he was satisfied with it, and apparently scholars have identified the exact popular song that she's playing.
We originally planned to visit the museum of old textile processing equipment, but the address in the guidebook was incorrect, so we visited the Museum of Design instead. Lots of cool items in various styles, and some very weird stuff, particularly the big easy chair covered with soft-sculpture bananas. Afterwards, we stopped in a small knitting/weaving shop, where I bought fifty bobbins for lacemaking. They're in a sort of purplish wood; the shopkeeper said they were something that sounded like "amaranth", but I'm not quite sure that's what she meant. Anyway, they're quite pretty.
Saturday was the visit to Jan's maternal grandmother. Happy, happy, happy to see Thomas. We got some genealogical information from her and from Jan's aunt Joske.
Today was Jan's nephew's baptism. Jan was the godfather and groused a bit on how he was fixing to lie in public -- the Apostle's Creed is, to put it lightly, not an accurate reflection of his beliefs. Anyway, it was a small afternoon ceremony, with just a few relatives present, and then a big reception full of tasty sweets at Jan's sister's house. Jan got genealogical information from his brother-in-law's family; Thomas played with toys and with his cousins' cousins.
We spent the day around the University of Leuven, where Jan did his undergraduate work. (This is not to be confused with the University of Louvain, which is about 12 miles away. Leuven is the Dutch-speaking university; Louvain is the French-speaking one. Belgium is complicated.) We visited a couple comics shops, went through various university buildings including the zoology collection (worm phyla in jars and so forth), and generally wandered around town. The town hall is covered with sculptures of various people; I'd love to have a guide to the place and find out which is which.
This was another visit the family day, this time in Ieper, where Jan's father's family hails from.
Ieper, also known as Ypres, was a small medieval town that remained pretty well unchanged up until World War I. We saw a street map of the city from the 1500s, and Jan said that other than a few fields being filled in by houses, it's still accurate. Then came WWI, and the German troops. The entire city was pretty well demolished; it's said that at the end of the war, a man on horseback could see from one side of the city to the other.
After the war, they gradually rebuilt the whole city, including the big Gothic church and the old clothmaker's guild house (the oldest Gothic building in Europe that wasn't a church, before it was destroyed), using old photographs and illustrations to help them. Walk around it now, and it looks just like any other European city -- tons of old buildings. Except that the whole thing was built between 1920 and 1950.
In the former guild house is the Flanders Fields Museum. If you are in Europe and you are anywhere near this area, go to this museum. If World War I doesn't mean much to you, go to this museum. If you want to understand why many European countries seem to want to stay out of nearby conflicts, go to this museum.
It's impressive from an artistic standpoint -- they did some very interesting things with surround-sound speakers, so that occasionally you hear a group of soldiers marching by, or a shell going off in the distance. There's a section showing various gas masks, and on the wall are three WWI poems -- McRae's "In Flanders Fields the poppies grow", Owen's "Dulce and Decorum Est", and a poem by a French author about the gas. There's a computer display that gives a history of the factors leading up to the war, items from soldier's kits, information about trenches and a room that recreates some of what "No Man's Land" was like -- shells flashing, dead bodies underfoot, wire and gunfire....
The one part that hit me the hardest was the section about the Christmas Truce. Christmas 1914, English/French and German soldiers in many places along the line laid down their arms and sang together, played soccer or had snowball fights, and generally stopped fighting. But the higher-ups couldn't stomach this and eventually ordered their soldiers to end the truce. And thus, the whole thing went on, and dragged on, for four more years. If a few generals and politicians could have said "hey, we've stopped the fighting, so let's take this chance to TALK again," perhaps that could have been averted. But no....
There was also a brief note in one exhibit on how one effect of WWI is felt to this day in Belgium: The real Flemish/French language tension began at that time, due in part to the fact that most of the Belgian officers (the upper class) were Wallonians and the foot soldiers (peasants) Flemish. Jan commented that one thing they left out was that Flemish soldiers died at about three times the rate of Wallonian soldiers -- because the Flemish soldiers couldn't understand the commands, and the French-speaking officers weren't about to lower themselves to such a debased language as Flemish.
After we left the museum, we went to see Jan's paternal grandmother, who lives in a nursing home with her son Rik, who has Down's Syndrome. She's the one who's very "traditional", and she was absolutely overjoyed to see her oldest son's son's son. (This is the woman who, when she first met me, told me "Don't have daughters. Have sons instead.") I saw some interesting family portraits, including one that had the seven living kids plus an added image of a child who had died. She's got sort of a shrine to Jan's father over her bed and gets very teary-eyed every time she mentions him (he died of ALS five years ago). At any rate, she enjoyed holding Thomas and showing him to all her friends, and Thomas was pretty tolerant of it all. Afterwards we went to visit Jan's uncle and met Jan's cousin's twin sons, who are a week older than Thomas.
Wednesday was another family visit, this time to the family of another one of Jan's paternal uncles. His wife owns a shoe store in Dixmuide, which is the only place I've ever been able to find shoes that I love. I'm wearing my new pair now -- they fit, they have space for five toes, and they still look classy. We walked around the town a little bit too, and Jan showed me the "Man in the Moon" statue. This was another city that was flattened in WWI, but the statue was never hit by the shelling, and everyone considered it a good luck piece. The very last shell of the war destroyed it. It's since been rebuilt.
We spent a quiet morning at Jan's mother's and then went to Brussels for the afternoon. We saw the comics museum (did you know that the Smurfs were originally a Belgian comic?), walked around the Grote Markt a bit, and rode the subway. Brussels has some great subway art -- one station has the UN Human Rights statement in several languages, several have interesting scupltures or paintings. The newest station, named after the late King Boudewijn, has these bird sculptures made out of pipe. Very cool.
Friday we went to Tongeren, the oldest city in Belgium. There was a town there even in pre-Roman times, and the Romans established their own city on top of it. We visited the Gallo-Roman museum, which has a lot of Roman artifacts. They had a temporary exhibit about the Romans in Egypt, with items including a little KNITTED child's sock and a few embroidered pieces that have actually weathered the past 1800 years. They also have a room about the mysterious "dodecahedron" -- a metal dodecahedron with varying sized holes through the faces and knobs on the corners, function unknown. It's found in Roman sites all over Celtic lands -- but not at all in the Italian peninsula.
And Saturday, courtesy of the Belgian Railways, we went to Brugge. Saturday 4 December was the wedding of Prince Philip, the crown prince of Belgium, and Mathilde, a former speech therapist. In Belgium it's gotten the kind of attention that the Charles-Diana wedding got here, though Mathilde appears to be a much more mature and stable person than Diana was. I watched them on the news later in the day, and Mathilde seems to acutally be a lot more comfortable with cameras and public attention than Philip is. The general opinion seems to be that it's a good match.
Brugge is my favorite city in Belgium. All Belgian cities have some beautiful areas, but Brugge seems to have more of them. And, of course, it's Lace Central. Tons of stores selling lace to tourists. Lace schools. Lace museums. I bought another batch of bobbins here, and spent a glorious hour in a huge cross-stitch and knitting shop.
Sunday we packed frantically, and Monday we came home. Whew.....