On to Paris

We woke this morning to wet streets and cloudy, threatening skies. Our plan had been to get up early, head to Brussels, and do a quick three-hour walking tour before our 1:15 pm train to Paris. With the rain that seemed a lot less attractive.

Instead, we had a leisurely breakfast and ambled down to the main square around 10, picked up a bus for the station and hopped on the train for Brussels that left at 10:30.

By 11:30 we were sitting on a bench in Brussels Midi station waiting for the train to Paris. We stuck our heads outside, but it was raining harder now. Also, there's really nothing interesting to see at the Midi station; the interesting sites are at the Central station and the trip didn't seem that attractive now that it was raining.

We took turns sitting, watching the luggage and walking around. We picked up some sandwiches, sodas and paprika-flavored shoestring potatoes for a picnic lunch on the train.

Around 12:30 we headed up to the platform to wait for the train, but it was already there, so we found our seats. The Thalys train is one of the very high-speed trains that goes from Brussels to Paris in a little more than an hour. Last time we were in Europe, we had a Eurail Pass, so we were always in the first-class carriage. This time we bought 2nd-class tickets, and the seats were a little more like economy-class airline seats. Still very nice, but a little cramped.

As we pulled away from the station, we brought out our lunch and books. The train was really fast and really quiet. Several times we paralleled a freeway and we passed the cars going our direction like they were in first gear. Kathy fell asleep right after she finished eating, but I wanted to make sure I knew how to get on the subway and find our apartment once we got to Paris.

At 2:30 we stepped off the train at Gare du Nord, paused a second for a picture, and set off in search of the Metro (which was right in the train station). I stopped by a Tabbac shop and bought a carnet of 10 tickets, we found our line and hopped on.

Four stops later we were at Les Halles, walking through the mall and up the escalator into a sunny, busy Friday afternoon in Paris.

Our apartment was about two blocks from the Metro stop. We passed the door once. It looks just like this one, but it is actually two doors down. Following the instructions sent to us by Vacations in Paris, we let ourselves into the building and finally opened the door on our home for the next week.

The apartment was very nice but we immediately had one disappointment. One of the selling points was the view, directly across from the l'Oratoire du Louve. The city of Paris, though, has begun restoring the building, so the entire facade is draped in white, which isn't nearly as attractive.

The rest of the apartment was great. It has a separate bedroom and bath along with a small, but nice kitchen and a large combined dining-living area that looks out over the street. There's also a small balcony.

Our first order of business was to do some shopping. The "house book" left in the apartment said that the best grocery-household shopping was on Rue Montorguil just north of Les Halles. That looked like only a few blocks away, so we took off walking.

As we walked through the park at Bourse de Commerce, we were surprised to see several homeless people sleeping on the street and in doorways. I didn't remember seeing that back in 2007.

Rue Montorguil was indeed a great shopping street in the Parisian sense. There was every kind of store; cheese shops, bakeries, fish mongers, butchers. We weren't quite ready for that, though; we wanted something more like a Ralph's. Fortunately, on the corner, we found a familiar sight: Starbucks.

From the guidebook, I had "memorized" the location of a good grocery store, "Monoprix". I had also "memorized" the map to get there. It seemed like we walked for every, and, when we didn't find it, we purchased some more subway tickets and headed back home.

We stopped by a local grocery (kind of like buying groceries at a 7-11) and got eggs and milk. Once we were back in the apartment, I looked up the address again, and realized that we should have been looking for 21 Rue du Opera instead of 51. We also realized we had forgotten quite a few things, so, at 8:00 pm we made one last run and found the Monoprix.

It was a really nice store and we got almost everything we needed. By 9:30 (early, I guess, by Parisian standards), we were home and unpacked, and headed for bed.

Tomorrow, the Left Bank.

Thursday: Visiting the Churches

I had to cut short yesterday's post because it was after midnight and Kathy wanted me to turn out the lights and get to bed. Here are a few more tidbits about the bell tower. Here is a picture of the gear-works that drives the pulleys and hammers.

Here's a picture of the bells with all of the cables connecting them.

Here are a couple of pictures of the city from the top of the bell tower.


Of course, after all of that work, we needed some refreshment and a rest. Fortunately right in front, on either side of the ancient entrance are two Flemish fries trucks doing a brisk business.

All that was left was to find a nice place to sit and enjoy them. (We tried the "cocktail sauce" which is spicy ketchup and mayonnaise this time. It wasn't as good as the ketchup and mayonnaise combo from last time.)

The Rest of Brugge
The bell tower and Flemish fries took most of the morning, but we were still ready to go, so we headed off for station 2: the City Hall and the Church of the Holy Blood. We walked around inside and looked at the old paintings (Napoleon greeting the mayor of Brugge). Outside, the front of the building was decorated with golden statues.

Kathy especially liked the gargoyle "hitching posts" where you could tie up your buggy while doing your business with the city.

Here's another City Hall detail, a lion and a bear, that Kathy wanted me to shoot for Houtik K.

When we went to enter the Church of the Holy Blood, (the next step on the guide-book tour), it was closed for lunch, so we continued on to the Tanners square, which was previously the headquarters of the Tanner's Guild. Around the side of the square are several bas-relief panels detailing the tanning process.

Just beyond the square was the original fish market where the boats would tie up and sell their wares.

In the middle ages, Brugge was a thriving port; now the sea is ten miles away. The canals still remain, though, even if the biggest catch is now a boatload of tourists, which can be carted away by carriage once they've been landed.


The canals also provide the picture-postcard views that Brugge is famous for. Almost everyone who visits takes a picture that looks a little like this:

Further down the road we skipped the Groeninge and Gruuthuse museums and crossed the bridge leading to the Church of Our Lady where the last rulers of Brugge, Mary of Burgandy and her father Charles the Bold were burried in 1482 (before Columbus sailed for America).

Here's a picture of Kathy standing in front of the church.

The church is most famous beause it has the only Michelangelo statue to leave Italy in his lifetime. He created this at the same time he was working on his famous David.


Before dinner, we headed back to pick up the Church of the Holy Blood, built in the 1200s at the time of the Crusades. (There are actually earlier monuments in the basement of the Crowne Plaza Hotel. When they were building the hotel they discovered the remains of the first settlement at Brugge and the remains of a Carolingian-age church from the time of Charlemagne.)

The Church of the Holy Blood was built to house a relic (a vial of Christ's blood) brought back by a Bruggian knight from the crusades. Every year there is a procession where the blood is venerated. (It's next week.) The church itself is DiVinci-code-like; it looked a lot like the Crusader ruins we saw in Israel. Here's the view of the Basillica.

And here's the main church that houses the relic.

As with the Shroud of Turin, you don't actually get to see the relic. Instead, it is placed behind the silver alter shown here. (The city of Koln, not so far away, has the skulls of the three wise men, but you can't see them either.)

Winding Down
It was a long day, walking through all of the city. Tomorrow is a travel day as we get up and head for Paris. Because of the wind, there were fewer tourists in town, and the restaurant we planned to eat at was closed. We had seen some school kids eating at a take-away place, and so we showed up just as the owner was closing and got some sodas and spaghetti, which we ate on a bench in the park.

On the way back to the hotel, we saw this window which reminded me of Kathy's mom, Rose Eileen.

Of course, the perfect way to end the day would be with some Flemish fries, but the stands had all closed. We had to make do with second best: Belgian Waffles.

Miss Sixty in Brugge

Many of you know that this trip is a celebration of Kathleen's 60th birthday; finally, she's an adult.

Today, we spent the entire day touring Brugge from top to bottom, and we were surprised to see that the town knew we were coming, because they even named one of the stores for her: Miss Sixty.

We woke up to a cloudy, windy day, which is actually kind of nice when you are going to be outside a lot. (A little less wind would have been nice, though.) Here's the picture outside of our window when we woke up at dawn.

The Hotel Patritius, where we stayed had a great breakfast. (Judah and Hosanna say that Kathy's going to get tired being pictured with food, but I thing that's impossible; how could you have too many pictures of food?)

After breakfast we started on our official tour, following the Rick Steves' Brugge guidebook. Our first stop was to climb the 566 steps of the city's iconic bell tower, featured in the movie, "In Brugge".

It cost 16 Euro to climb the tower but both of us thought it was worth it. Here's Kathy climbing down. At the bottom there is a lot of graffiti on the walls. One tagger wrote: I really hoped I wouldn't die!


We got to the top just on the hour, as the bells started playing, which was quite an experience.

May 25 - London and Brugge

"Coffee, coffee, coffee.", the little voice kept whispering in my ear. Looking out our fourth-floor window, London was just waking up and already the sidewalks were full of people scurrying off to work and the streets themselves were clogged with what appears to be a perpetual traffic-jam.

If you want to drive your car into London, I understand that you have to pay a daily "congestion tax". I don't know why people would even try driving here. Every street reminds me of the worst freeway at rush hour.

Because of that, there are a lot of bicycles in town and everyone rides them, from students to businessmen in their suits and their briefcases on the back. Throughout town are collections of 20 or 30 blue bicycles with the Barclay's Bank logo on them. These are free for a half-hour and cost 1 Pound to rent for 24 hours. We saw a lot of people using them. (I think that you need to have a European-style chip and pin type Visa to check them out, though.)

We were walking, though; out of our room by seven, down Grays Inn Road to the Starbucks in the shopping court. We got online and I updated our blog while Kathy just made a dent in her email. We helped an American couple get online (the registration form asks for county, but actually wants the state from those of us in the US.) An Australian woman trying to get hooked up with her iPad heard us talking and had the same problem. Unfortunately, the registration form didn't give her any hint as to what to put for the "county".

Two hours and two Venti coffees and a morning bun for me, a regular coffee and a turkey sandwich for Kathy, we were rushing back to our hotel to grab our bags and make our train connection on the Eurostar at St. Pancras. (I had misread our departure time as 10:30, instead of 10:57, so we were in a bit of a rush.)

Under the Channel
We bought our Eurostar tickets in the States through RailEurope. (I think that's the only way you can get them here...uh, there). You print out your ticket at home and supposedly use the little bar-code in the corner to check in. St Pancras is absolutely huge, and it wasn't at all apparent where to check in, so we asked a very helpful gentleman, who told us that unfortunately the RailEurope bar-codes don't actually work in their machines.

He took us over to a booth where they checked our tickets by hand (which only took a minute or two) and then put us in a line for an airport-style security check. (You don't have to remove your shoes and belt, though, and you don't go through the side-scan-radar machine, so it's not quite as intrusive.)

Because of my mistake, we were about a half-hour early. The lounge was completely filled, but that was because the London-Paris train was leaving at 10:30. After those passengers went up the escalators to their train, the waiting area was mostly deserted. Kathy read and I wandered around. There was an ATM machine that dispensed Euros, so I used my Bank of America ATM to get some out. Well, I tried to get some out. It just kept denying my transaction. (Yesterday I got our Pounds using our Teacher's Credit Union card and that went just fine.)

I wasn't worried, of course, but Kathy was a nervous wreck. (For those of you who don't know us that well, that's a joke, folks.)

Finally, our train was called at 10:40 and we joined the line up the escalator to the platform. Because each car has it's own entrance, boarding is much faster than on an airplane. By 10:57, the Eurostar was pulling away from the station.

Our car was mostly filled with a group of American high-school study-abroad students along with their teachers. I don't know what school they were from, but all the boys were wearing ties and everyone was very well-behaved. We sat across from an American post-graduate student named Amanda, who was on here way to Ghent to a conference where she was going to present a paper on a Russian author. She is a PhD student in Leeds, but her father is in the US navy, so she got to travel around the world growing up.

The Eurostar itself is very fast and very quiet. You go through several tunnels on the way, so we were surprised when we pulled into a station and the loudspeaker announced, "Arriving at Calais". There was no announcement at all that "you're about to go under the English Channel".

An hour before we were scheduled to arrive at Brussels, everyone around us started standing up and getting their luggage. We asked Amanda and she said, "This is Brussels". We didn't know about the time change.

Brussels to Brugge
I the Brussels station, we needed to purchase our train tickets to Brugge as well as a ticket to Paris for Friday. I waited for a ticket agent and when one was free, walked up to the counter. He directed me to the very clearly written instructions (in English) about taking a number at the machine by the door. (I felt kind of like some of my students: read the instructions!).

After we got our ticket, and our number was called, we went to the agent and found that we were in the wrong ticket area. The one we had chosen was for international trains leaving today. We had to go to another room for local trains (to Brugge), and yet a third room for international trains leaving in the future.

This time, though, we knew what to expect, so we got our numbers, waited a few minutes, and got our tickets (55 Euro round-trip to Brugge and 160 Euro one-way to Paris). Our Brugge tickets could be used at any time, but we decided we had better get started, since it was already 2:45.

We found the platform, but it wasn't obvious which train was going to Brugge. Two other couples (from Britain and South Africa) were also waiting, though, and they helped us get on the train, which was running about 15 minutes late. Once on the train, we discovered that we actually need to change trains again in Ghent. We waited another fifteen minutes or so for the next train and by 4:00 we were at the Brugge train station buying bus tickets for the center of town.

In Brugge

"Brugge is like a fairy tale."--Ralph Finnes

Arriving in the famous Market Square at 4:15 it actually seemed a lot more like Disneyland: very, very crowded. We got off the bus and pulled out our map. Our hotel (the Patritius) is an 1830s mansion, converted into a 16-room, family-run hotel. We easily walked the four blocks from Market Square, and were shown to our third-floor room overlooking the city. It was a beautiful room as you can see.


Our first order of business was to get some money. Elvi, the owner, circled some of the ATMs in the city and we set out. The first one we tried rejected my Credit Union ATM. Kathy was beside herself (Ha ha!). But the one across the street worked just fine. The secret appears to be looking for the Visa/Mastercard logo on the ATM.

Once that was out of the way, it was time for a snack. In Brugge, that means only one thing: Flemish (not French) fries. We stopped by a Fritture recommended in our guidebook and ordered a medium fries and a couple of sodas. The sauces (we got the special: half ketchup and half mayonnaise) are extra.


The fries came covered with diced onions and were heavenly. Think McDonald's fries before they switched to eco-friendly oil, only two or three times as tasty.


We spent the rest of the evening wandering around town. Tomorrow we'll get out our guidebook and "see the sights". Today we just wanted to wander and enjoy. Amazingly, by 6:00 those thousands of tourists had disappeared, and the city looked much more like the medieval village it had really was.


By 8:00 we were ready for dinner. We ate at The Flemish Pot, a restaurant specializing in Flemish food. Mussels are the real specialty in this area of Belgium, but neither of us care for them. There were also a lot of Eel dishes which went beyond our comfort zone. We both had the Flemish Beef stew which was great. Much sweeter than our beef stew; no carrots or potatoes in the stew. Instead, you get a mound of fries and some great applesauce.


The dinner was great but I forgot to bring the access code so we had to cut our meal short to get back to the hotel before the doors were locked for the night at 10:00 PM. That gave us time to have a nice soak in the giant tub, read a bit, and turn out the lights by midnight.

May 23-24-A Brief Visit to London

"Oh no, it can't be morning yet.", I thought to myself. I heard Kathy breathing, and knew that she was awake too. "What time is it?", I asked. "Midnight", she said. It was our first day in London, and we'd been asleep for four hours. I really didn't want to start our trip with a bad case of jet-lag. I started worrying about it, and the next thing I knew, the sun was coming in the window. It was 5:00 AM on a clear and cloudless Wednesday in London.

Leaving LA
Monday morning, both of us woke a little dazed. We've been packing for days, and both of us had been attending to the little details we needed to put our jobs to bed. We were packed but there was still more to do.

Kathy had to finish some emails about a book that Back to Basics was publishing, and also had to run over to Kaiser when she found out that one of her prescriptions had run out. I had to run over to OCC to make sure that my grades got posted and my attendance turned in. By 11:30 we had finished the last of the food in the refrigerator, washed the last of the dishes, and double-checked (we hoped) the last of the details.

Our friend Houtik Kazarian pulled into the driveway a little before noon in her VW Beetle convertible, and we were off for LAX. The drive was pleasant--no traffic, good conversation--and we arrived at Air New Zealand just as the check-in line was opened. There were about 20 people in front of us, so that took an hour or so before we got to the front of the line.

They weighed our carry-on bags and told us we were both overweight. The new weight-limit for carrryons is 7 Kilos (about 15 pounds) and ours were about 11 Kilos each. We (Kathy) really didn't want to check our bags though, so we decided to let them take them at the gate if they wanted. (Besides, if everything went smoothly, I wouldn't have anything to worry about!) As we sat at the gate, there were a couple more announcements telling us we should check our bags, but in the end, they let us through without any problems.

While we were sitting waiting in the lounge for our flight to be called, Kathy was reading and doing some last minute phone calls. I sat and worried about our bags being overweight. Neither of us were especially on guard; after all, we were still in America. As soon as we got on board the plane, though, Kathy noticed that her little purse was missing (when she went to put her phone away.) The airline staff sent a message back to the airport, but it never showed up. Thinking back on it, both of us think she got "pick-pocketed" by a friendly "passenger" who was hanging around the lounge, but never actually got on the plane. Fortunately, except for a little cash, a phone card, some lipstick, aspirin and nail-clippers, not a lot was lost. All her credit-cards, passport and drivers-license were already in her money-belt.

Kathy was hoping for an upgrade, but the flight was entirely full, so we spent the flight in the last cabin. The seats actually had enough leg room for my 6'5", though, so it was not agonizing. We got two meals (dinner and breakfast), and the food was pretty good. There was also an in-flight entrainment system that was kind of neat. I watched Casablanca and Gnomio and Juliette. (Actually, I only watched the first few minutes of Gnomio and Juliette; the trailers were more interesting) Neither of us slept much. (Actually, I didn't sleep. Kathy says she didn't sleep, but it looked to me like she did for three or four hours.)

Getting off the plane, going through customs and passport control were all painless and took about an hour. By noon we were buying our first "tube" ticket for Kings Cross station. In the guide books I read that there were much quicker ways to get downtown from Heathrow, but I wanted the experience of traveling on the tube. It was really fun and easy (although both of us tended to doze off). We sat across from a family with a little 5-year-old girl who chattered away playing with her toy camera and Tyrannosaurus Rex puppet.

Because we were going to be in London for only a few hours, I wanted just to get a cheap hotel that was close to the train. The Travelodge Kings Cross was 85 Pounds (very cheap for London) with an early Internet rate. Because we got through customs so quickly though, we arrived two hours before the 3 PM check-in. For 10 Pounds we were able to check-in early and head up to our room, where we faced a choice: take a nap or keep going. We both knew that if we laid down for a second, we'd be up in the middle of the night, so we cleaned up and headed out for North London.

The area around the train station is kind of tacky (like train stations everywhere), although the St Pancras train station (where we'll be taking the Eurostar tomorrow) is beautiful. A block down Euston Road, though, the neighborhood gets much nicer. We had two destinations in mind: the British Library and the British Museum. Before we got there, though, another destination intervened: Starbucks.

A cup of coffee was just what I needed to keep going. More importantly, though, we got online and got a Starbucks Wi-fi account set up. Kathy posted on Facebook and sent an email to the family. (If I hadn't stopped her, she also would have started cleaning up her in-box.) After an hour, we were across the street at the British Library. (Here's a picture of me in front of that statue of Issac Newton; somehow, that's not the picture I had of him.)

The British Library is amazing (and free). We saw early Bible manuscripts (Codex Sinaticus and a 3rd Century Gospel of John), one of the original 150 Guttenberg Bibles, illuminated manuscripts from the middle ages, including Chaucer and Beowolf. There was the orignial copy of Shakespeare's Hamlet, several of Marlowe's plays, Jane Austen's writing desk (and several of her letters). There were the original, hand-written lyrics for Help, a Long Day's Night, Michele and several others from the Beatles. Finally, they had several original versions of the Magna Carta. It was really impressive.

The exhibits are actually just a small part of the library. The library offers free Wi-fi, so all the halls were filled with desks and tables and students working on their computers. There are three floors with reading rooms where you can read the books in the collection. (I don't think you can check them out and take them home.) In the center of the library there is a huge 6-story bookcase filled with old books.

Our goal after the Library was to keep going until 5:00, get something to eat, and then, somehow, keep awake until 8:00 PM, hoping to stave off jet-lag. We headed off walking the six blocks to the British Museum, stopping along the way to walk through the parks at Russell Square and Tavishom Square. These are really peaceful little pockets throughout the city. (We haven't seen a lot of homeless people, like you'd see in Lyon's park, for instance).


We finally got to the British Museum (still free, although there are a lot of suggested donation boxes around. I'd expect that government to start charging admission soon.) This is the most amazing museum. I don't know how they prevent the displays from being vandalized, because there is no distance at all between you and the artifacts; some, like the Rosetta Stone, are behind glass, but most are just out in the open. There are signs everywhere saying "Don't touch the artifacts", but really! I wonder if the CCTV everywhere acts as a deterrent.


We walked through the Egyptian and Assyrian exhibits. Saw the Rosetta Stone and the giant winged bulls from the palaces of Ashurbanipal, Sargon and Sennacherib and finished up looking at the Elgin marbles from the facade of the Parthenon in Athens. (These are the artifacts that Greece is so anxious to get back.)


By this time, Kathy was a zombie, and I wan't that steady on my feet either; but, we had made it to our 5:00 PM goal! Now, on to dinner.


On the way back, we looked at several options: MacDonalds-no, Burger-King-no, MacDonalds again-no. Several nice Italian restaurants, but still not what we were looking for. Then, on Euston Street I looked down a side street saw Mable's Pub with a lot of people standing around. Kathy said, "Let's just go for it." We walked over, and had a really nice "pub" dinner. I had fish-and-chips and Kathy had spinach-chicken-sweet-potato-coconut curry. Curry is big over here, I guess. It was really good and pretty inexpensive (25 Pounds for both of us). (I'm sorry, I forgot to take a picture of the food! Next time, I promise.)

After dinner we went walking back to our hotel. Mabel at the pub told us where we could find a pharmacy (so Kathy could pick up some lotion to replace the stuff from here lost purse) and we walked down to a nice village. I was much different than the downtown along Euston Road and seemed a lot more like the every-day London life. A little further along we came to a mall with a supermarket, where we're headed in the morning to upload this blog.


We got back to our hotel by 8:00 PM and were asleep by 8:30. Tomorrow, the Eurostar, Brussels and Bruge.