Happy to be Traveling

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, we ducked into a bar called Sarajevo for Grubb’s much needed cappuccino. I noticed the young guy behind the bar was not a native French speaker and to my untrained ear, I thought it could be Turkish or perhaps Croatian.  When I asked where he was originally from (crossing my fingers I wasn’t making an…

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.”…

All this talk of Flanders, Wallonia, Flemish. I think I’m beginning to get it. The closest Belgium has to what we think of as states or provinces is these three regions. Flanders (Flemish-Dutch speaking), Wallonia (French speaking) and Brussels (bilingual Dutch and French).  Belgium also has three official language “communities”. French which is primarily in…

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…

Today’s explorations of Liege included scouting out the statue of George Simenon, creator of Inspector Maigret and a visit to the Grand Curtius which held 8,000 years of history plus an exhibit of Japonism (glass vases in the style of Japanese). Who doesn’t love a beautiful, hand painted glass vase? We also had a late…

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…