One year on + a lovely weekend

I just looked up my Gcal for a year ago, because I knew it was coming up to my first anniversary here in Brussels, but I couldn't remember when exactly. Turns out it's not for a few days - moving day was Friday the 13th, which wasn't an omen of anything in particular, unless you count that the movers broke my "Bio t'y foule" wine glass that I never understood what it meant anyway.

Gcal is how I organise basically my entire life, from little reminders to put something in my handbag to take to work, to travel plans, to organising an international move, and looking at my calendar a year ago reminds me of how stressful it was, but also kinda makes me feel organised and adult, so that's nice. I had forgotten just how much was going on around the move as well - I was in Mallorca three weeks before the move, Tours two weeks before, Brussels for one night the week before and Luxembourg the week after, seems crazy (most of that was booked before I knew I was moving though).

The past year has definitely flown by. On the minus side, I don't really feel any more integrated into the city (i.e., no friends). I haven't been trying, and am mostly fine with it, since I spend all my weekends with Jules and after work I'm pretty much okay just vegging out, but there are obviously times when friends would be nice. I've never really been in the situation before of making *no* friends in a new city, so I'm trying to take that as a sign it's down to lack of effort rather than inherent lameness, but that thought's always floating about somewhere.

On the plus side, oh my god is it better living in a nice apartment, getting paid a decent wage and not having a hellish international commute. We had a barbecue at Jules's place this weekend and invited one of my old colleagues and I found myself going on to another guest about how awful that used to be and then kind of had to bite my tongue because my colleague still does the commute (although she does live closer than I used to).  It's been fun visiting a few places in Brussels and around the country too, although inevitably you always end up feeling that you don't do half the things you would do even spending a week here as a tourist. It's a pretty good hub for travelling further afield too - for once, I don't have to tack on a trip to a major airport like Paris in order to have a wide choice of destinations. The cat is way happier to have me around more as well :)

Further to the "not integrating" bit, I don't really have any great observations or insights into Belgian culture. There are probably people (Flemings?) who would hate me for saying so, but day-to-day, things are pretty much exactly the same for me as when I lived in France. Being a national and EU capital, you hear a lot more languages spoken on the street, but everybody speaks French in supermarkets and so forth. It's relatively rare that someone will just start speaking Dutch to me. Honestly, most of the time I feel I could be in any given French city instead of in Belgium.

Anyway, I should be blogging about my trip back to Tours the weekend before last, but I can't find my camera cable, so I'll have to fill you in on this weekend's visit to Bourscheid Castle in Luxembourg instead. The weather this weekend was fabulous, hence Saturday's barbecue on Jules's awesome terrace, and it was still great for our Sunday morning trip to Bourscheid. It's in a fantastic location, perched on a hill 150 metres above a valley where the Sauer/Sûre river loops by.

When we were setting out in the car, Jules promised to tell me the "story of Jules and the Sauer", but only when we got to the river. I was quite excited, expecting a tale of derring-do, or perhaps an embarrassing mishap. When we finally got to the Sauer, he told me that he used to go fishing there a lot with his granddad. "And...?" And that's the story. Not to toot my own blogging horn, but that's why only one of us has a blog enjoyed by fives of people.

Source - we didn't get this aerial view of it, unfortunately

There was a really detailed autoguide to the place, but I found it really confusing so I don't actually know anything about the castle, oops. The audioguide was in the form of a dialogue between two guys, and either I didn't listen properly at the beginning or it wasn't properly explained, because I had no idea who they were meant to be. According to Jules the premise was that one of them was from the nineteenth century or something and one from the present day and they were like comparing notes on the state of the château through time, but I just got really confused with their dialogue e.g. "Was that tower there the first time we visited?" "I don't really know, but someone told me it was reconstructed during the renovations in 1972". Okay, that doesn't sound too confusing, but they lost me with all the talk of "in my day" and "our first visit". Plus I found it hard to follow when they pointed out different parts of the castle, like "in the back left corner there is X". How are you meant to tell where the back left is?

So anyway, I'll just recap what it says on the tourist website, which is that the stone castle was started around the year 1000, it underwent various renovations and expansions over the years before falling into ruin as early as the 18th century. The government acquired it in 1972 and has carried out extensive renovations. I always feel a bit cheated by big renovation works, as though I'm seeing a fake - this is one reason I've never been to Warsaw, although it's allegedly quite nice - but I suppose the bones of the place were more or less always intact.

Rebuilt or not, it's a stunning place, and the views from the top are magnificent. Something for everyone who thinks there's nothing to see in Luxembourg -

Bourscheid Castle

Jules amongst the ruins

Jules took forever to take this photo, on purpose I think!

Some of the castle wall was carved right out of the rock

Views from the tower of the gatehouse and ruined castle interior

We climbed up to the top to take the photos of the view below

Looking down on the Sauer

View from the other side of the tower

Pale tower selfie

Of course, the only photo where I was smiling normally was the one adjusting my sunnies (I finally took them back to the shop to get them tightened up on Monday°

Tower panorama - we had lunch at the hotel in the valley immediately to the right of the tower

The reason we actually were at Bourscheid to begin with was because I happened to spot that it was restaurant week in Belgium and Luxembourg, and the only participating restaurant in the Grand Duchy was at the Cocoon Bel Air hotel in the valley nearby. It was pretty much the same as the Dining with the Stars thing we did last year, in that you pay a fixed price and get a surprise menu (except this place didn't have a Michelin star). It's in a beautiful location below the castle, and the food was pretty good and reasonably-priced, at least with the special deal - I didn't see the normal prices.

Looking back up at the castle from our lunch spot

Our salmon entrée was a bit bland, to be honest #wewantplates

But the sea bass main was tasty!

I don't like crème brûlée, so I was glad that the "revisted" strawberry CB was actually not very crème brûlee-y at all

Ahhh, so much easier to kick back and enjoy life when the sun is shining and the long summer days stretch on forever. I feel so much more motivated to get out of the house and go exploring, and we really reaped the rewards this weekend. It was great!

Soyez malins, allez à Malines!

On the last of the official May long weekends (although not the last for me, with Vitiloire - hurrah), we decided to take advantage of the beautiful Sunday weather by getting out bright and early to catch some sunshine before watching the Monaco Grand Prix in the afternoon. With this self-imposed tight time schedule, we managed to make it to Mechelen (Malines in French) before 9.30 am - it's just a 25-minute drive from Brussels. Luckily enough, since it turned out the town was hosting a "Play Festival" that day, and by the time we left a couple of hours later, the whole place had filled with thousands of children. AKA my worst nightmare.

But in the early(ish) hours of the morning, we had Mechelen pretty much to ourselves and the people setting up for the festival, and we were able to explore what felt like a hidden gem, off the tourist trail, although after our brief encounter, I would say it deserves to be visited every bit as much as somewhere like Bruges.

Mechelen actually has quite a few similarities to Bruges. Like Bruges, it grew wealthy via the cloth trade in the Middle Ages, when it was ruled by the Dukes of Burgundy before becoming, for a time, the capital of the Low Countries under Margaret of Austria. When money from the cloth trade dried up and the seats of power and influence moved away to Brussels, Mechelen went into decline - unfortunately for them, fortunately for the preservation of the beautiful medieval and Renaissance architecture in the city.

Margaret of Austria's palace, now a court. Apparently this is the "oldest Renaissance building north of the Alps" and Anne Boleyn was here for a time.

The Mechelen Grande Place

Shaking my head, partly in admiration, partly in disgust

This fallen-down fool seemed to be the symbol of Mechelen, as it was also on flags all over the city

The Late Gothic Hof van Busleyden museum (the Mechelen city museum)

Jules et le poisson

Pretty buildings near the Grande Place - we liked the golden sheep and balcony tree on the nearest building in particular

This pretty, peaceful path floats on the centre of the river, so you walk along almost at water-level

Roof-top ornaments seemed to be a speciality of the Grande Place architecture - my favourite was this bull with a curly tail

In front of the tower of St. Rumbold's Cathedral. We would have liked to go up - apparently on a clear day like this you can see Brussels and Antwerp from the top - but it's only open in the afternoon

The beautiful town hall on the Grande Place

Since we only had a couple of hours before fleeing the children and going back home to watch the Formula One, we didn't get to see much of what Mechelen has to offer. Apart from the closed tower, we couldn't see inside the cathedral because a Mass was in progress, we couldn't visit the De Wit tapestry workshop because it's only open on Saturdays, and we didn't have time for the Jewish Museum of Deportation and Resistance, which recounts the dark days in World War II when Mechelen was a major transit camp on the way to the concentration camps in the east, or the Large Béguinage, a World Heritage site.

So there's a ton to see in Mechelen, and the good news is it's really close to Brussels, so we'll be able to go back next time there's a sunny Saturday to see some of what we missed out on. Unfortunately, we'll have to wait until 2038 to see its special jubilee "circumambulation" parade, as that particular Mechelen event only takes place once every 25 years and we just (relatively speaking) missed out on it. Darn!

Medicine and Memling

May in Belgium doesn't have quite as many days off as May in France, since we don't get the 8th, but there are still three, which means, particularly this year as they fell well, plenty of long weekends in which endless thumb-twiddling eventually leads to getting out of the house and seeing what there is to do around Belgium. I've been to Bruges before, in the dead of winter, but Jules had never visited, so against my better judgement, we visited during the May Day long weekend.

I had expected it to be fairly crowded, being a long weekend in spring, but it was even worse than I thought. Here's something that might surprise you - Brussels and Antwerp have the worst and second-worst traffic in Europe and North America (or the world, depending on what source you read). This is evidently not a new phenomenon either - try Googling "Brussels worst traffic" and you'll find year after year of different surveys in which Brussels tops the worst league rankings.

I take the bus to work, so while there are definitely times when the bus is sitting in traffic, or (even more often) turns up late, presumably due to traffic, bus lanes along part of the route means that it's usually not too bad in my day-to-day life. The bizarre thing for me, though, is that the traffic never stops. Traffic back home in Auckland can get pretty dire in rush hour, but bar some massive accident, it's pretty rare to get caught in traffic on the weekend or in the middle of the day. Whereas almost every time we've tried to go anywhere across town or between cities here in Belgium, we've ended up in a massive traffic jam.

The 100 kilometres to Bruges is supposed to take about 1 hour 10 minutes to drive, but we ended up sitting in crawling, nose-to-tail traffic for around 2 1/2 hours. And then had to queue up to get into one of the jam-packed parking garages once we got there. Even worse, first off I had suggested going by train in case parking was an issue, and then the GPS had told us to get off the motorway, but its suggested route, that took a big loop around and added half an hour on to the travel time seemed so outlandish that we were convinced it must be on the fritz. So we had frustrated stupidity to add on to the annoyance of sitting in a cross-Belgium traffic jam.

When we finally got out and about in Bruges, there were way too many people everywhere and I, in particular, got rather grumpy. It was too crowded and not nice enough weather to think about the big tourist drawcards like the bell tower or the Groenige Museum, but we managed to escape the bulk of the crowds with a visit to the perhaps lesser-known Memling/Saint John's Hospital Museum.

In front of the ornate Basilica of the Holy Blood

Pretty sure a mother-in-Psycho situation is going on here with this animatronic lace-maker

Even though I like Hans Memling's bright, vivid paintings as much as the next girl (slash more), I had dismissed the idea of visiting the museum dedicated to him, housed in a medieval hospital, because I thought it pretty much consisted of a handful of Memling paintings and nothing else. Turns out, along with the atmospheric old building and the jewel-like Memlings, the museum also, fittingly, contains a range of exhibits explaining the history of the hospital and medieval and early modern medicine in general.

I'm a bit on the squeamish side when it comes to all things medical, but even I found it fascinating and horrifying in equal measures to see cases full of the different drills, scalpels and saws used in medical procedures in the past, and to contemplate how awful it would have been to undergo these operations with no pain relief and no knowledge of germ theory or basic hygiene!

Along with the medical instruments, there was also a large number of reliquaries and devotional paintings - hence the Memlings, some of which were specially commissioned for the hospital. This reflects the important religious role of the hospital, which aimed to care for its patients spiritually as much as (or more) than medically - praying for the saints to intercede with miraculous cures followed by praying for the patient's soul as they died.

I don't know about you, but I think I'd rather have the surgeon's full attention at a time like this

An anatomy lesson

This amazing shrine, telling the story of Saint Ursula, was specially created by Memling for the hospital

More beautiful Memling works

Memling's Saint John altarpiece

Details from the altarpiece

The hospital pharmacy, which like the hospital, stayed operational into the 19th century, was also worth a visit, with its walls lined with apothecary jars and boxes full of exotic herbs and minerals used to treat ailments.

Thankfully the car trip back was incident-free, but while we're still up for visiting Bruges again some time in the future, I think we'll be waiting for next winter, after the Christmas markets, when the tourists have left again for the year.