Meet the parents

Arrgh, I've been so slack updating this, I know. It seems like it's endemic in the blogosphere, with people shutting down their blogs left and right or just not updating that often, but that's no excuse. I'd like to say it's because of my busy social life, but truth is, I still have no friends in Brussels, so it's not that. I'd like to lay the responsibility on baths. I have a bit of a bath addiction, and it takes time to soak in the tub. Okay, it's not the worst vice the world has ever seen, but it has taken a toll on my water bill (90€ for a quarter, ouch!) Apart from just that it's nice to lie in a tub of warm, bubbly water and read, I think the appeal is that it somehow feels like a liminal space beyond the routines of everyday life, somewhere where you're forced to disconnect from your phone and the internet and just exist in a figurative and literal bubble. Or maybe I'm overthinking it. Sometimes a bath is just a bath.

Anyway, I'm not here to talk about bathing, I'm here to catch up on the actual outdoor things I've been doing. October was a busy month, or at least the second half of it was, starting with my parents' visit to Brussels. As I mentioned, this was a bit of a nervewracking prospect, since of course it was the first time they were meeting Jules. Well, I think everything went very well. Jules even got through an entire 5-day Madrid holiday with them, which is much more than I think I could manage if it were the other way around!

My parents had been to Brussels before, notably last year when we came to Belgium for the Spa Grand Prix, so this time we mostly concentrated on day trips to get a glimpse of the rest of Belgium. On Friday, we went to Ghent and magically discovered a whole new, beautiful area to the city that we completely missed when we went with my sister back in July. Best of all, the weather, after an initial spot of drizzle, was sunny and unseasonably warm. I really felt like we'd been transported to some southern clime as we relaxed on a terrace sipping wine and eating local specialities (I tried the waterzooi, very good).

Me and Jules in Ghent

Lining up in height order

The main event was the Ghent Design museum, specifically chosen to appeal to my mum's sensibilities. It was a nice museum, small enough to not exhaust you, but large enough to have quite a lot of beautiful and interesting objects. The cutest thing was the little Playmobile figurines they put in many of the display cases, making a quirky little treasure hunt through the museum.

My parents' visit coincided with Jules's birthday, so we headed out on the Friday night for a nice dinner at a local restaurant. The concept of the restaurant is "slow food", and being run by a couple - the husband cooks and the wife takes care of the front of house - it certainly lives up to the name. However, along with the slow food vibe comes a relaxed, family-style ambience. By which I don't mean that there are children running all over the place (shudder), I mean that from having to ring the doorbell to enter to the small space feeling like someone's set up half-a-dozen tables in their front room, it just feels like you've popped around to a relative's house for Christmas dinner or something. That possibly makes it seem awful, but when the hostess makes sure you've got nibbles and a gratis glass of bubbly plopped down in front of you shortly after you walk in (and keeps topping up your glass throughout the evening), you find you don't mind having to wait quite some time in between courses. We all had a really lovely evening (and yummy food), and by the end of the night there were hugs for all of us from the woman, particularly for my mum, who went back for two or three (you can't keep topping up my mum's glass without such consequences).

Birthday boy with my mum

We somehow managed to haul ourselves up and out on Saturday to hit the road for Antwerp, since my mum had commented on an earlier blog post that she'd like to visit. Again, it was a lovely day, and we basically retraced much the same steps as Jules and I on our previous visit, including seeing Saint Peter's church again in the sunshine and doing a spot of (very successful shopping). It's hard to believe that our first, relatively cold and definitely grey visit was in June, whereas this October trip was warm and sunny, but I'm definitely not complaining.

Just before I passed out

For dinner, we went to one of the semi-fancy seafood places on Saint Catherine's Square. I suppose this was meant to be a bit of a posher treat, but it suffered a bit in comparison with the delicious food and friendly atmosphere of the night before. The ambience was very cold, and the waiter annoyed me by doing the thing where they keep your bottle of wine in parts unknown and only come to dole it out when they see fit. I know this is supposed to be posh, but it's just irritating. Let me serve my own wine. I suppose there's a way to do it well, but this does not involve me having to flag the waiter down to ask for my glass to be refilled, as was the case on this occasion. The food was fine, but quite a bit pricier than the night before, and I think we all much preferred the fun atmosphere of the other place.

On Sunday, we checked out the antiques market in Grand Sablon, and I added to my (small) collection of Gien faience (thanks, M&D), before fitting in a bit of chocolate shopping - got to be done in Belgium, right? Then I actually can't remember what we did before eating dinner (a nap, I think) at my parents' apartment, which was followed by me getting horrifically sick. I was meant to go back to work for three days between their visit and our trip to Madrid, but I ended up at home sick, which of course probably looked totally fake, but honestly wasn't! I always feel like everyone at work thinks I'm faking illness at the best of times, so that was doubly the case this time. It could have been worse though, it wasn't the worst timing in the world falling between two exciting long weekends. Next time, Madrid...

Chocolate, lobster and (no) wild pissing

When we visited Belgium en famille last year (can't believe it was that long ago already), Brussels was pronounced to be pretty much the most boring place ever by my sister, who stayed behind while Dad and I were off to Spa for the Grand Prix. So when she came for a visit back in July, the pressure was on to find some fun activites to show a different side of Belgium. Basically, as long as it involved yummy food and drink, Jess would be happy.

So on the Saturday, I booked us in for a chocolate-making workshop at Zaabär. I've had my share of fairly cheap and nasty Belgian seashells bought from tourist trap shops around the Grand Place, so I thought this would be a fun way to learn a bit more about how chocolate is made and, more importantly, get to make our own creations. The class started with a brief demonstration of how chocolate is tempered, before we got to go to work making our own chocolate bars, mendiants and truffles.

Tempering chocolate the traditional way, by spreading it out on stone

Jules all frocked up for the workshop

Making some non-traditional mendiants

Making truffles

Our tray of truffles

It's not the world's most flattering look

My very own chocolate bar

Overall, I would say it was a fun activity and good value for money (20€ for the hour and of course you get to take your chocolate home). It's not the sort of thing you'd go and do any old time, but for an activity with visitors, or if you're a tourist yourself, why not? The chocolate bar and mendiants were done with individual piping bags, and it was pretty fun making different mendiant designs and choosing the toppings. The truffles, on the other hand, were made by dipping a truffle centre into a bowl of liquid chocolate (using tongs) and then rolling them in nuts. Our bowl of chocolate was shared with a couple of kids aged around 7 and 10 or so, who had the unfortunate habit of losing their tongs in the chocolate and fishing them out again with their hands. I'm not usually the most squeamish person in the world, but I also view children with a general suspicion, so the truffles we made are actually still sitting in my fridge uneaten.

A big bonus to the chocolate workshop was going into the factory shop afterwards. There were abundant bowls of free samples, and nobody bothered us as we duly sampled pretty much every type of chocolate (whether they're as welcoming if you've just come off the street, I don't know). They specialise in exotic flavours, so it was great to sample chocolate made with all kinds of crazy things, from thyme to jasmine, to chilli to sage to curry powder and many more. Not all of the herbs and spices quite worked for me, but it was fun tasting them. I went home with the less adventurous choices of plain, macadamia and tonka bean (although I looked up tonka beans on Wikipedia later and found out that they're banned in food in the US because they're poisonous in large doses, so that's quite exotic).

Jess doesn't eat meat, but luckily Brussels has some great fish and seafood restaurants, so in the evening we headed to François restaurant for some lobster. I've had lobster before, but this was actually my first time eating a whole (actually a half, but you get what I mean) one rather than in a salad or a soup etc. It was nice, but I don't think it's amaaazing. It came as part of a fixed-price menu, so it was a case of "might as well order lobster" rather than getting cod or something for the same price, but I wouldn't pay squillions of dollars for it.

Fashion tip: always try to match your shoes to the curtains

It was a good day for protective clothing

On Sunday, we went to the Gentse Feesten, a street festival in Ghent. Allegedly, this is one of Europe's biggest city festivals, attracting around 2 million visitors. All I can say is, there was not much going on when we were there. Not many visitors, but more importantly, not much festival. Maybe we were there too early, maybe it was because the previous couple of days had been hot and sunny, whereas the Sunday was a bit grey and drizzly, maybe it was because it was a Sunday (although the next day was a Belgian public holiday). We walked around a bit, had a yummy lunch, a few drinks, and saw the famous van Eyck altarpiece, and that was pretty much that.

Didn't even have the chance to do any wild pissing

Me and Jess in Ghent

So maybe that was not the most exciting event either, but I tried! Before we knew it, it was time to drop Jess back off at the Eurostar, to send her back to the land of Lewis Hamilton.

Is that a pain au chocolat in your hand, or are you just happy to see Lewis?