Category: Barreling thru Belgium

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…

Two traditional Liege folk characters, Tchantchès and Nanesse, pilot the plane called Le Petit Avion. The pilots are sculpted as portrayed by the Belgian comic artist François Walthéry.  Tchantchès is cheeky, irreverent “everyman” who represents the spirit of the city. He’s traditionally a puppet character and there’s even a puppet museum dedicated to him in…

I mentioned we stepped into St. Paul’s Cathedral and Grubb has written a post on the hidden statue of Lucifer. I was more taken with the cloister, which was entered through a massive wooden door and might easily be missed if weren’t standing ajar with a view down the beautiful Gothic ogival arched hallway. In…

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…

A boulet is a  meat ball made from minced pork or beef or a mixture of the two. Liege style boulets are large with a serving consisting of only one or two meatballs.  Smaller than a baseball, bigger than a golf ball. The boulets are simmered in a rich gravy made with onions, beef broth, and sirop…

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…

Today we tried to get a sense of Liege. With a population of 200,000 (630,000 in the metro area), Liege comes in as Belgium’s third largest city and is also the economic capital of Wallonia (Grubb will explain all things Wallonne). This is a French speaking region and very few people we’ve met speak more than…

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…

A bit of a project, getting to our place in Liege but we are here with a beautiful view from the apartment. Rotterdam -> Brussels Nord -> Liege Gullimins -> Liege St. Lambert -> Rue de Saint Gilles, Liege. The trains were fine but the last bit was a local bus. The transit workers were…

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…

In 1955 a famous photography exhibition opened at MOMA in New York called “The Family of Man”.  The FENIX has a space divided into hanging panels displaying 200 enlarged photographs called the Family of Migrants depicting the story of migration. Some of them are recognizable masterworks like Dorothea Lange’s migrant mother escaping the Dust Bowl, and…

The FENIX gives homage to the birds amongst us. Migrants Who Don’t Give a Fuck, 2019 Kiluanji Kia Henda (Angola, 1979) “Towering walls, complicated visa procedures and lengthy asylum processes can make migration impossible. Kiluanji Kia Henda’s flamboyant flamingos defy such barriers. These pink birds, which refuse to be fenced in, symbolise freedom of movement.”

There will come a time, beyond a moon flyby, beyond The Martin, beyond Project Hail Mary…yes, it’s Space migration! Refugee Astronaut IX, 2024 Yinka Shonibare CBE (United Kingdom, 1962) “A lone figure carries a net bulging with belongings – a teapot, Dominoes, a lamp – hastily gathered. The nomadic astronaut is in search of a…