Why Wednesday Wrapped It Up

Sean was approaching the end of his trip. I deluded myself up to this point that our European excursion would never end, but sure enough the final hours came. Wednesday is the day in my schedule that starts early in the morning and ends late in the evening, so I was unable to meet with Sean until the evening, where he decided to have us get some Dutch pancakes.

We settled in the eatery that was attached to the lobby of the Prince Hendrikke's Hotel, where a stately and dapper man waited on us in a somewhat contemptuous way. He seemed rather miffed that we didn't order any drinks, but was happy to take our order. Sean got himself one drizzled in peaches and sugar and got me a pancake covered in slices of ginger. These pancakes were absolutely delightful and whetted our appetites for something more.

We returned to the area near my apartment and walked around, looking for somewhere pleasant to eat. Our walk took us to where Sean was staying the first few nights he was in town, and we were stuck between a Chinese restaurant and an Italian place next door. Our most recent Chinese meal led us to the latter choice, and what a choice it was.

This restaurant was run by a homely and rotund woman of about 60, who said nearly nothing to us but "Aushtublieft." The meal consisted of a first round of homemade bread and butter and full courses of Italian favorites, all complemented with the best tasting bottle of wine I've ever purchased. Sean and I reflected on the entirety of his visit and this dinner provided the perfect closure to our two weeks together.

We arrived back at the apartment, where I quickly crashed, and Sean stayed up all night packing and keeping himself busy. Sean awoke me at 4 am to say goodbye, where I embraced him in a moment of tender thanksgiving, truly pleasured by his presence during my first month in Europe. After this moment, I said something foolish and humorous, though in my half-asleep state, the exact phrase has completely disappeared from my memory. And with that, he left and I was back to living alone.

Topping Titillating Tales from Tuesday

Tuesday, Sean and I started the day in a cloud of lethargy, barely getting up before the crack of noon. We slowly made our way to Chinatown in Amsterdam for lunch. For those interested, Chinatown can be walked in roughly 5 or 6 minutes, from the end of its one block to the other.

Emma hadn't prepared to meet us, so we entered the Chinese restaurant with the cheapest menu and relaxed over a cup of tea. I ordered and, as Sean described it, "dazzled the waiter" with my limited Chinese abilities, and we were pampered the whole meal. Emma brought her fine self around, and we drank pots and pots of free tea, while enjoying the restaurant to ourselves.

That night, Bram, a family friend of Sean's, took us around Amsterdam to see what the night held.

The Sandman Slowly Slips in our Schedule

Exhausted from our Bruges trip, I forced myself awake to get to my noon course, whereas Sean slept in till beyond when I left. We arranged a meeting spot, planning to see the Rijksmuseum and get lunch after my course. That day, I was exposed to more mind boggling exercises in my pursuit of knowledge of advanced rhythms.

Inconveniently, I received an email Sunday night to begin lessons with my piano instructor that evening, which initially seemed to take away from how much time we'd have at the gallery. We made a joint decision that lunch near the museum was the plan, and sat at a friendly cafe, where I was met with one of the most overly packed sandwiches of my semester on the continent so far. I was able to maneuver the Goat cheese, lettuce and local veggies overstuffing the French roll, I was outdone in my estimation of the quality when we first arrived, which was already high.

The gallery of the Rijksmuseum was stunning, albeit small. The museum had plenty of small hidden gems, something I was keen to notice after only expecting to see Night Watch, Rembrandt's piece of great magnitude that deserves some recognition. There was a collection of art truly inspired by and made by the Far Eastern countries that the Dutch had contact with. One item in the style of the fine China designed with blue paint on ceramic was a violin constructed so masterfully and beautifully that it was my favorite thing I saw. There were baskets made exclusively of ivory, Rembrandt masterworks and other very characteristic dutch art.

Despite our worries of my constricted schedule interfering with our museum visit, we left the sliding glass doors so typical of the European castle with more time than we could have expected. I departed Sean and had him meet me in front of the Conservatory and Library area of the dock, where we left to go see a showing of Roman Polanski's newest film, Carnage. This film peaked my interest, since it featured some of my favorite actors to watch and I had previously no awareness of its release. The humor and screenwriting were so entertaining, the performances excellent (with the Jodie Foster character's out-of-control-crazy personality) and the environment, a lavish theater that allowed Sean the luxury of drinking a terrible glass of wine in a movie theater. It was one small step for Sean, one giant leap of stress on his liver for organkind.

Still exhausted from the Bruges excursion, we called our night early and finished Jaws which was started on the way to Amsterdam from Bruges. With the still potent horror of Jaws, I attempted to go to bed and get ready for my early afternoon class and my meeting with Sean later in the day.

Yeah, I'm Taking Pictures Of My Food

Sunday was our second and final day in Bruges. We awoke early in the morning, though of course not as early as our desired wake up time, and made it to the streets by about 945 am. Coincidentally, places in Bruges don’t open up until at least 10 am on Sunday, so we were the first customers in a restaurant that advertised “Belgian waffles.” As soon as I took a bite of my diabetic nightmare, a waffle covered in cinnamon roasted apples and a healthy dollop of vanilla ice cream, I recognized that getting Belgian Waffles may be like getting French Fries in France. The meal was so sugary sweet and so unhealthy, it can’t be something that the Belgians had been eating since the inception of the country.

We then spent the rest of the morning looking for everything we could do in Bruges. Unfortunately, the thing that I was most anxious to see in Bruges, the tower that Brendan Gleeson jumps from in In Bruges, was closed for renovations, and many other sights were closed on Sunday, since religious observance of Christianity still exists in its un-Americanized (bastardized) form.

The first stop was the Bruges town hall, the center of the city that had been standing since the town’s inception in the 1100’s. One of the fascinating pieces was a portrait of the room, which nearly looked identical to the one we were standing in, that housed a large audience of people (possibly politicians at the time of the painting) as well as representations of the paintings that were still hanging in the room with this painting. So it was a painting of paintings that was so….

Then, we shuffled next door to see several large portraits hanging from the walls of another central Bruges building. Large portraits of people that looked like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson hung up on the lavish marble walls of this gorgeously decorated building. The last thing really of note was the portrait shown here. Tell me if you see what’s weird about it.

On the walk to the next thing we were seeing, we stumbled upon a large stone tower that resembled something straight out of Damascus or Jerusalem, and was so aptly named the Jerusalemkerk (Jerusalem Church). We weren’t able to go in due to it being a holy day, and we walked past it to see our next stop: the Folklore Museum.

I’ve seldom seen a more blatant misnomer. Sean and I assumed, under the title of the museum, that it would be a gallery in reference to the creation and maintenance of folk tales throughout the centuries, especially in Bruges. We arrived to see a museum that highlighted the aspects of every day life of the Bruges citizen in the early 20^th century. Each room had a theme, and some even had unpleasantly life-like manikins of people who’s professions were shown (cotton weaver, barrel maker, tailor, etc. ).

Each room had several interesting things to see, from gorgeous handmade pipes and canes to Converse shoes (?) and intricate lace, a specialty of Bruges. The layout of the museum was bizarre and included two courtyards, one that had pictures lining the walls of men at a cross-dressing gala or gathering.

Though unsettled by the bait-and-switch, the Folklore Museum was actually one of the most rewarding activities in the town and we spent so much time there that we needed to make a lunch stop before doing anything else. Upon walking around and browsing each menu (and their astronomically priced entrees), we settled on a restaurant that I’m sure was that of a hotel, yet they had reasonably priced food and the atmosphere seemed pleasant enough.

Sean greeted the waiter with, “How are you?” to which the waiter seemed perplexed and contorted his face to show us so. Awkward moment aside, we order our food and reflect on our trip so far, talk about what Sean and I talk about and wait for our food. All the while, there is a family sitting behind Sean that’s ordered copious amounts of food, with their plates nearly full, who seem to be content with how much of it they ate. The waiter came around and took their plates, which seemed to be untouched when they passed me, and I became aware of how droll their conversation topics were, which were spoken louder than the soft music coming from the speakers.

Upon receiving our food, a heap of pasta with fresh local vegetables stewed in tomatoes and Sean’s Croque Madame, we took out our cameras to add to our photos from the trip. At that very moment, the girl sitting at the unpleasant table behind Sean blurted out, “Look! They’re taking pictures of their food!” She said it with such an obnoxious sneering tone, that Sean began to raise his voice at the girl, but I tried to get him to avoid the conflict and we did.

The next stop was the Gruuthuse. This mansion, which was built to accommodate the family of the people that owned the rights to beer making (an extremely lucrative business in medieval Europe), now houses an extensive collection of Bruges exclusive art and artifacts, from unique playing cards to some more lace. The thing that was most striking about this whole exhibit was the location of one specific item. In the first room in the museum, on the wall is a tapestry, in the middle of the room is a model of some of Bruges, there’s an old pot under the stove, and tucked away in the corner, like it was a forgettable trinket was a LIFESIZE WORKING GUILLOTINE. This machine, awe-striking in its power and existence, and still slightly stained with blood from its use was sitting in the corner like it was nothing. I was just astounded at how soft-spoken the exhibit was about it.

The rest of the day consisted of a few art galleries, preparations for the trip home and a visit to a recommended chocolate shop. This shop, which the man working at the desk at our hotel said made the best chocolate in Bruges, stood out from the 50 or so chocolate shops we had encountered every few steps. Besides their elegant display of all the chocolate, the hyper-friendly service, and the excellent selection of chocolate, next door was something exclusive to their business.

In the shop next door, owned by the same chocolate shop, was a room with large glass windows seen from the outside where two men stood all day crafting each piece of chocolate by hand. Some of the elder master’s works stood on the shelves: a soccer ball made of white and dark chocolate, a chocolate butterfly, chocolate geese, a chocolate palm tree and other confectionary wonders. Walking in, I half expected the man to be unpleasant, grumpy about having to make chocolate all day, but completely surprised me with how polite and inviting he was to us.

With the sun setting, we made our last stop in Bruges. There was a small wine and cheese shop that had this salmon casserole dish in the window on Saturday, which we saw while looking for our hotel. We went inside and were greeted with the Belgian hospitality that we had grown to expect, and the women working easily convinced us, with free samples and recommendations, to buy about 40 euro worth of cheese and food. The moment we came in was the moment that they had just renewed their supply of the casserole and I had been lucky in the timing, or I would have gone home empty handed.

On the train back, Sean and I ate some of the things we bought. The salmon casserole was cooked salmon and egg wrapped in smoked salmon, and was some of the freshest fish I’ve eaten in a very long time, and the block of Oude Brugge cheese I had was the best dairy product I’ve had in Europe. The two days in Bruges were packed to the brim, but on the train ride back, I knew I was glad that we had made it.

Somehow I believe, Ken, that the balance shall tip in the favor of culture, like a big fat fucking retarded fucking black girl on a see-saw opposite... a dwarf.

 

6 am, before the sun came out, we rushed to Central Station in Amsterdam, catching a train that took us from Amsterdam to the beautiful Belgian city of Antwerp, which until arriving in it's lavishly painted station, I had no intention of visiting. The station was several stories tall, with beautifully engraved marble balconies, and a full station's worth of busy, day to day, Belgian traffic. With the timing working the way it did, we arrived in Antwerp station roughly 10 minutes before our next train, which allowed us to locate the correct train platform indicated by the train timetables all over the station (as well as an escalator that was both vertical, as if they were stairs, as well as horizontal, all in the same mechanism!). We settled into a comfortable place in the cab, and patiently waited to arrive at our final destination: Bruges.

Twenty minutes into the train ride, the ticket collector comes to our seat asking for our passes. She takes a glance at our tickets, furrows her brow, and looks back at us. She hands us our tickets and plainly states, "It's impossible for you to be on this train."Despite the strange nature of that statement, we figured out what she meant and we were told then to get out at the next stop, a tiny Belgian town named Lier. Here at this station, I saw something I never would have seen in the United States: a conductor of a train was waving to the small children waiting on the platform as if we were living in some children's show on PBS that has the words "Happy Time" in it. We sat on the platform, where we waited for roughly half an hour for a train back, and thus forty five minutes later found ourselves back at Antwerp Station. There it was another two hours until we left for Bruges, a train that ran infrequently since it was both Saturday and a less than central location.

We finally found the correct train, boarded after we had fully identified it's correctness, and promptly arrived in the town of Bruges, roughly three and a half hours later than we had planned (which unfortunately was 10% of the trip planned). We made due with what time we did have in the afternoon, and found our hotel promptly, got a strong lunch of croques- a French dish that's popularity has caused it to spread as a culinary staple in many regions surrounding France. The croque, of which Sean Malin has an unhealthy obsession, is basically the French version of toast, typically loaded with ham and eggs, though sometimes with variation, as my smoked salmon croque proved. Belgium is in a strangely unique position in this region of Europe, as it is one of the newer countries, one that initially was part of the Netherlands and split off due to its uniqueness, and is equally influenced by French culture and history.

So here we were, late in a new place, and decided that the best course of action was seeing as much as we could before everything closed (which was around 5 or 6). The first thing we went to see was the Basilica of the Holy Blood, a church that was built in the mid-12th century, and exhibited nearly every stereotypical quality of European churches that you can imagine: stain glass windows, grandiose artwork lining the walls, familiar architecture of the pre-Renaissance architects. What really stood out though, is an item that this church contains. The basilica's contents, "the holy blood" is a vial that supposedly contains a few drops of Jesus blood! This container, which looked to me to be straight out of Star Trek, had a few drops of congealed red liquid that hundreds of thousands of people must visit every year. To many, this signifies physical existence of the one that they devote all of their efforts in life to, their personal savior.

"Although the Bible never mentions Christ's blood being preserved, one of the apocryphal gospels asserts that Joseph of Arimathea preserved the Precious Blood after he had washed the dead body of Christ. The daily making present of the Blood of Christ during the Mass was central in the religious life of the Middle Age in Europe. If genuine, a relic of the Blood of Jesus would be of utmost significance, a uniquely important witness to Jesus’ Passion and a perpetual reminder of the historical character of the Christian Gospel."


Despite my skepticism of the legitimacy of the object that was presented in this basilica, I was still in awe and reverence of the atmosphere present. This was the most sacred I ever could perceive a christian structure could be; it was so separated from the profane existence of the christian individual experience. The atmosphere of the church was similar to the ones I had felt in Buddhist temples in China, in that there was a certain sense of spirituality truly felt that many try to artificially create all over the world in other forms.

Once leaving the building, we had found that all of Bruges had shut down, as far as historical sites were concerned. Sean and I, appreciating the beauty of this city that had been preserved throughout its history decided to take a walk along one of the canals. This stroll may have the most beautiful part of the trip, as we got to the see the lovely canal homes, lavish buildings that typically were pedestrian in their importance to the average Bruges resident, and humongous windmills that were unbelievably monstrous, though all were closed since it was the winter.

We then looked for a place to end our night, as we needed to get some food in us. We passed up on the "La Taverne Brugeoise" (La taverne bourgeoise, it was so bourgeoise). We found a moderately middle eastern place that had some truly delicious food and was being staffed by what must have been an 8 year old male child and a little girl no older than 4. Somehow, despite the child labour, I was able to enjoy my meal. We found an Irish pub to get a few drinks and then called it a night to get up at 9 and see as much of Bruges as we could in our 9 waking hours that we had left.