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 a few words of English.
Being Ascension Day, everything that was going to open, opened late. Okay for us. We weren’t in a hurry. We stopped in at the Musée de la Vie Wallonne (separate post by Grubb), had a look at the 11th century St. Barthélémy Collegiate Church (separate post by me that I’ll get to) and St. Paul’s Cathedral and Cloister ( one of us will describe the hidden Lucifer, modern stained glass and beautiful cloister).
We stopped for a late lunch of boulets à la Liégeoise (and a gin duck for me). I’ll post that later with a description. Totally stuffed, we continued our stroll taking in the University of Liege which has 30,000 students spread over four campuses.
The day was chilly. With wind chill it stayed in the mid 40s all day with occasional bursts of rain. I felt a bit icy by the end of the day.
Now we’ve got a load of wash going. There is a dryer in the apartment as well. Still a bit unusual in European households. I’m burrowed under the covers trying to stay awake until the wash is done. And it’s not even 8 pm yet.
Neat to have a dryer. And they gave you a drying rack as well. We’ve taken wet laundry to laundrymat to dry at least 3 times on this recent trip.
I guess Hercule Poirot was (is?) a Wallonian.
Strange/interesting that the French-speaking Belgians speak so little English while I assume the Dutch-speaking Belgians do speak English pretty well?
This is the 2nd place that has had a dryer on this trip which makes it so much easier.
And about languages, this is the first place on this trip where there was so little English spoken. In the Netherlands, most people who were raised there are multilingual. Dutch, English, French, Spanish. And in the Dutch speaking areas we were in, there were lots of people who spoke English (and maybe French as well).
Moira and I visited Liege in 2025. We had a car and we used it as a base to tour sites and cemeteries associated with the Battle of the Bulge (World War II) [Liege was also involved in World War I, but as Grubb noted, to a far lesser extent than Flanders]. There are two American cemeteries close by and Bastogne, a crucial pocket controlled by the Americans who held out against the Germans until a counteroffensive could be mounted and literally saved the day, isn’t that far away.
There is another museum near the St. Bartholomew, the Grand Curtius Museum, which is excellent, but maybe not Ella’s thing. Among other things it has Cesar Franck’s piano and the studio of Eugene Ysaye, a famous Belgian violinist, as well as a small memorial to those killed by the Nazis.
Lastly, for Grubb, George Simenon is connected to Liege and there is a square honoring him with some exhibits.