Quartier du Châtelain

Gray clouds are assembling outside. The air is still quite chilly. The calendar says February, which in most places in the Northern Hemisphere lands you firmly in the grasp of winter. And yet...Does the moss on the trees look slightly greener? Are the leaves on the shrubs thickening? Today there is this undefinable something in the air. Dare I say it? Could it be a touch of...Spring?!?

At any rate, while FB-ing with a friend in New Orleans this morning, she reminded me that we have long planned to do a post about our little corner of Brussels. Believe it or not, this month marks the one year anniversary of Troy's arrival in Belgium! Over the last year, we've taken many photos of our apartment, street, and quartier (neighborhood), and since they were taken over a period of months, you'll even get glimpses of Brussels in different seasons. So, let's begin our virtual tour, shall we?



Around the corner from our house, at the corner of Avenue Louise and Rue de Bailli. This scene is typical--cars and bikes and trams and pedestrians going every which way all at once.



This is our block. One of the things I love about Brussels, architecturally-speaking, is all the beautiful cast-iron balcony railings.




Here's our building at the tail-end of renovation. Our apartment is on the European 2nd Floor, so we're the third set of windows up in this shot. Since this time, the yucky garage door has been replaced (good) and the lovely climbing vine has died (bad).



This is our dining room and kitchen with a view towards the front of our apartment. As you might guess, Troy took this shot before we moved in.



Here we are on our balcony, looking up Rue de Livourne to the north.



Back down at street level, this is a look at Rue de Bailli. There are tons of great shops, bars, and restaurants on this three-block stretch. And, I love the way an urban designer long ago chose to terminate the visual axis on the lovely Trinity Church.



Here's Troy sitting outside the Roxi, one of our favorite neighborhood watering holes. He's enjoying an Orval (just one of the hundreds of varieties of Belgian beers) and some sunshine! This was during the two weeks of May that constituted our summer last year.



Brussels has done a really wretched job in the urban planning department--so bad, in fact, that there is a term in Europe: the Brusselization of a city means that it has been ripped apart with little or no regard to historical resources, urban form, or continuity of use. That being said, however, Brussels is the birthplace of Art Nouveau and, somehow despite itself, the city is littered with beautiful examples of the style. This building is one of the prettiest examples we've come across, and luckily for us it is located about a block-and-a-half from our apartment.



In previous posts, including the last one, I have mentioned that the proximity of the weekly Châtelain Market was a key factor in determining our choice of apartment here in Brussels. Since we moved in, we have continually found other wonderful aspects to our neighborhood and feel so blessed that we landed where we did.

Click Here - Châtelain Quartier Photo Album

Lasagna

One of the things that I enjoy most about living here in Brussels is the opportunity to cook a lot from scratch. And, luckily, finding ingredients for my various rounds of 'experimental cooking' is rather easy as we live about two blocks from one of the best fresh markets in the city--the weekly Wednesday market at the Place du Châtelain. (Though really, there is not much luck involved--about this time last year, Troy was working really hard to find us a sweet apartment in this neighborhood, partially so that we could be near to the market and all the fun activity that it attracts.)


My Bruxellois version of a 'grocery-getter'--my market basket and my supermarché rolly-cart.

So anyway, our friends Emily and Kyle recently had their first child, a sweet little boy named Charlie. We wanted to do something to help them out during those first few joyful/crazy weeks of a baby's life, and so I decided to bring them dinner one night. Having a rare moment of typical American-ness, I decided to cook the quintessential-comfort-food-casserole-meal: Lasagna! And, feeling very Martha Stewart-esque in my new role as expat housewife, I decided to make everything other than the noodles themselves from scratch (I don't have a pasta-maker or similar).

What I did not realize is how hard it would be. Not hard as in mentally-taxing-Calculus-test-hard (though candidly, I would know nothing about that as I rebelliously dropped Calculus just before my senior year in highschool, opting instead for Discrete Math and Statistics, and have never looked back!), but rather holy-crap-that's-a-lot-of-pots-and-pans-and-ingredients-hard.


That's my kitchen in the wild throes of lasagna prep.

I devoted a Sunday afternoon to making the béchamel and marinara sauces, and then spent the better part of the immediately-following Tuesday making the lasagnas. Notice I wrote lasagnas plural. Now, I like to think that I have my moments of pure kindness and untarnished generosity, but come on--as mentioned above, this was serious work, so I figured Troy and I ought to benefit a tiny bit as well. I decided to make our friends a nice big lasagna, and a half-sized one for us (New Year's diet and all). But, somehow in all my conversions from ounces and pounds to grams and kilos, instead of making a 1.5x recipe, I ended up with double+.


Close-up on some of the yummy ingredients

Luckily, the biggest part of what we shipped overseas was kitchen stuff, so, in a game-time decision, I just pulled out extra dishes and ended up with 3 pretty lasagnas of various sizes and levels of constituent ingredients.


The finished product! (Our half-sized portion.)

After about four hours(!), I finished up my project and, after a quick stop at the corner bakery for a baguette à la ancienne, I made the quick, three-block walk to Emily and Kyle's house....well, as quick as I could toting my seemingly 15-lb casserole dish. Our friends seemed really grateful for the meal, and the lasagnas ended up tasting pretty good as well.


Troy lighting the candles for our lasagna dinner.


Mangia, mangia, mangia!

Our First Houseguest!

My partner in crime, sorority sister, and truly dear friend Angie came to Brussels for a quick visit this past weekend, and we had SO much fun! She was our first official houseguest, and we really enjoyed getting to show her 'our Brussels', as she termed it. She works in the high-end audio business, and had a tradeshow in Amsterdam last week. So, she booked her ticket to fly into Amsterdam and out of Brussels, and took the train down to Brussels last Friday to spend the weekend with us.

Like an old-fashioned movie, I decided to "meet her at the station". Since Angie did not have a cell phone that works over here, our plan was to meet under one of the big Departure/Arrival boards in Brussels' Gare du Midi/Zuidstation. If we missed each other, she was to find a pay phone and call my mobile phone so that we could connect. Sounds foolproof, right? We each did our part of the plan, including the pay phone call, except for one tiny thing: Angie got off at the wrong train station. She 'debarked' at Gare Central/Centraal, which is one stop too early! (In her defense, it is an easy mistake to make as Gare Central is the first stop in Brussels and really, why is South Station known as Gare du Midi instead of Gare du Sud???)

Angie and I are largely cut from the same cloth and, both being Women of Action, we determined to Solve This Problem! By each setting out to Find the Other One! Which we discovered when Angie called me from Gare du Midi as I was on the Metro headed toward Gare Central. Oy veh! (In our mutual defense, we were communicating via a pay phone that kept eating up her money and cut her off at the critical part of her sentence, i.e. "I am jumping on the train to come to you".)

Eventually, we did end up in the same station (hooray!) and had a quick tram ride back to my house to begin our weekend. We did not do the super touristy-type activities during this trip as a) Angie has been to Brussels before, thus somewhat negating the need to sightsee, and b) she injured her foot in Amsterdam, thus rendering her a bit on the gimpy side. (She sprained/possibly-broke her foot in a run-in with a cyclist in Amsterdam. It was eerily reminiscent of when I broke my foot in the motorino incident in Rome, with a similar outcome. Yikes!)

So given these circumstances and being the thoughtful friends that we are, Troy and I arranged our outings around the really critical aspects of Belgium: waffles, hot chocolate, shopping, dining, and beer.


In post-waffle bliss, doing a little fresh-market shopping at Place Flagey.


Walking along the 'Ponds', Les Etangs d'Ixelles


Posing like the statue behind us in the Petit Sablon.


One of the lovely buildings off the Grand Sablon.


At the lace shop in the Galleries St. Hubert where we have both, on separate occasions, purchased each other the same lace bookmark!


The serious process of picking out chocolates at the original Neuhaus, the best chocolate shop in Brussels.


Having a beer 'fortifier' at Falstaff, near the Bourse.


Troy after tackling a gigantinormous shell fish platter at dinner at La Quincallerie.


Dinner at La Quincallerie. (That's the platter!)


Best friends in Brussels!

Hello again...

As some devoted followers of our blog (wait, do any of those exist? hmmm...) may have noticed, we have been on blog-hiatus for about six weeks. This is partly due to the fact that we were in the States for a month over the holidays. We got to spend Christmas with both families, see lots of friends, celebrate two family members' birthdays, and enjoy some fantastic Colorado sunshine (and a little snow too)!

Short video clip of ice-skating for Blythe's b'day -- this is pretty much how it went all afternoon!

CLICK HERE - Winter in Colorado Photo Album

Though it was bittersweet to say to goodbye to friends and family in Colorado, it was also nice to return to Brussels and pick up the reins of our lives here. Instead of boxes and uncertainty, strange names and unfamiliar places, this time there were friends to reconnect with, French classes to attend, resumption of work and rehearsals and a nice, familiar routine. We are looking forward to what the rest of 2009 will bring!