Author: Grubb

What a difference a day makes.  Neighborhood street yesterday. And today. I always enjoy roaming a foreign city on a Monday. Tourists, if they even bother to venture out, don’t clump up and clog. With a lot of restaurants closed, sidewalks empty. Buses have available seats. Everything seems basically more relaxed.  We decided to visit a…

At the FENIX in Rotterdam there was an entire room filled with luggage. One emigré’s narrative was about how he heard it was cold in Canada so when he left Holland he filled an entire suitcase with socks. I realize with this trip, like with most of our trips, I’ve overpacked. Not by much, but…

Ever since Ella and I began traveling overseas in 2015 I’ve wondered why I’ve had this desire to see Renaissance art. It doesn’t matter whether it’s early, late, or in the middle of, at museums I dawdle. In Rome I was rushing from Caravaggio to Caravaggio. In Venice we had to catch the train to…

Rain wasn’t forecast until early in the evening so it was a perfect day to do a river walk. Okay, it wasn’t exactly warm, but that meant I wasn’t going to slow Ella down with my musing along the Meuse. We were going in the direction of Parc Boverie. This island park was the site…

We walked down into the downtown of Liége this morning from our apartment. Since it was a Saturday, the streets were practically empty.  Ella stopped in at St. Paul’s Cathedral to check on a recent art exhibition and then we stopped for Belgian waffles Liége-style. They had a surgery density that the other Belgian waffle…

Yesterday inside the Curtius Museum I was contemplating a dark painting of the Christ child reaching for an apple Mary was holding when I got a text from Ella who was ahead of me in the museum. She said she was in the section of the Curtius covering the Enlightenment. “Just go down the stairs.”…

After recovering from the Curtius Museum’s brief mention in very tiny letters that the ancestors who settled in the Liége region were the victims of Roman genocide, I lingered looking at Merovingian oddments and Carolingian carvings. When it came to wood, those altar adorning Northern Europeans knew a thing or two. And they banged out…

The Curtius Museum in Liège explores the city archaeologically and culturally from its Roman settlement to the Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo. At each significant period, representative objects are exhibited.  Roman litter fills an entire floor of display cases. One metal instrument I found freakishly fascinating. We all know that the Romans loved their baths. Not…

The prolific writer of detective fiction, Georges Simenon, said in his autobiographical novel “Pedigree” that his books were shaped by his childhood in Liège. Even when his stories (190 detective novels and 150 other novels) are set elsewhere they’re deeply rooted in its neighborhoods and atmosphere.  We found Georges sitting on a bench a block…

L’Arbre  à Clous (The Nail Tree) is a surviving folk tradition in the Liége region. Going back to ancient tree worship (I confess to a Shinto leaning in that direction), Wallonians believed ailments could be transferred out of the body and into a tree by means of a nail. The idea was that the tree absorbed…

Yesterday was Ascension Day in Belgium. We acknowledged it in our secular way by descending from our hilltop panoramic view into the city center. Getting off the bus, we walked by a couple of beer drinkers yelling at each other. One threw his brew into the face of his disputant and kicked at him as…

Before today if you would have asked me about Wallonia I would have thought you might have been referring to something the woman who wrote the Moomintroll series did in parodying the Oxford fantasists C.S. Lewis and Tolkein. But this morning we took the #53 bus into Liège to visit the Musée de la Vie…

After facing a world migration in a tornado shaped building, Ella chose to relax at the Haven Hotel before we went out for a Surinamese meal. I decided that since the Maritime Museum was only one long block away I couldn’t just let it sit there like some gigantic mausoleum containing mysteries begging to be…

Design to a piece of furniture, in this case a throne, explain why someone might want to migrate.

In one of the video viewing rooms at the FENIX there was an ongoing loop of tsunami footage captured by residents trying to outrace the wave. I suppose the idea was that the instability of the ecosystem is another factor (besides drought conditions) that has to be considered in the rise of migration around the…