Fête de L'Iris

Perhaps it is because Brussels is the "Capital" of Europe or maybe it's just that the Belgians like communal gatherings, but there seem to be lots of festivals, markets, and events going on all the time. Earlier this month, there was a two-day outdoor festival to celebrate Iris Day or Fête de L'Iris (the iris is the symbol of Brussels). The center of the city was closed to cars for the entire weekend, and the festivities included music, food, street performers, tons of bicyclists, and lots of people watching. The weather was beautiful, hot even! But the most entertaining part was a crazy soap box race, complete with costumed teams and fanciful, sculptural vehicles (think Kinetics on land).

Keukenhof Gardens, Holland

After the hustle and bustle of packing and moving, we decided to take a day-trip up to Holland to visit the Keukenhof gardens during the May Day & Ascension holidays. We made pretty good time driving up there until we got within about 10 km of the gardens where we got snared in a ridiculous traffic jam. After an hour of inching along, we discovered the cause: the road crossed a large canal and road traffic kept stopping when a drawbridge was raised to let boats pass on their way to the coast for the holiday. Seriously.

As a result of this unexpected delay, we did not have time to both tour the gardens and bicycle through the tulip fields as we had intended. We decided to save cycling for a future trip, and stuck to the gardens. Needless to say, it was gorgeous, and featured an entire pavilion devoted to orchids, a beautiful, historic beech tree allée, plus numerous formal and informal plantings, a biergarten, even a calliope. Holland, springtime, flowers...enough said.

Livourne

As I mentioned in my previous post, House Hunt,  I looked at 13 apartments with our relocation agent in one day and although most were suitable, and many were great, none of them jumped out at either Simone or me as being our next home.  So I kept my appointment for the one final apartment on the morning of what would be Day 2 of The House Hunt.  The apartment was on a street called Rue de Livourne and was in the heart of the Châtelain.  It was perfect, and both Simone and I loved it.

Great historic exterior . . . 

Wonderful natural light from the southwest, all new interior and appliances, open kitchen, and a view of a tree, that I hoped was still alive and would provide some much needed green in the heart of the city . . . 

A small terrace that gave us views some views of the city and was a few levels off the street . . . 

We've since moved in to our new home on Livourne and have even gotten some sunny weather, which makes eating outside possible (the tree is alive!) . . .