Village of Variety

In the States, my experience has generally been that in any city or town you'll have the ritzy sections, and the more run-down, or much older sections. Near our house in Maryland the trend is to cut down all the trees and build rows of McMansions, all ridiculously priced. But a mile or two away it's a much less affluent feel. There, like most places in the U.S., the two are usually separated and one can easily tell which area one is in. Not so here in Waterloo. It's amazing to me how the "neighborhood" changes, almost from house to house. Our town is considered very up-scale by Belgian standards. As such, there are plenty of small mansions and other gorgeous homes. But, within a minute's walk you also find a very different sort of house. They are mixed together here and, within no more than 150 yds., you can go from mini-mansion to cute-and-quaint to Yikes! See for yourself.

Resting in Peace

Resting on a beautiful bluff (at least today it's beautiful) above D-Day's Omaha Beach is probably the most famous American cemetery in Europe, located at Colleville-sur-mer. This is the one highlighted in Saving Private Ryan. Nearly 10,000 are buried here, many obviously from the first days of the invasion in June 1944. Like all the other U.S. cemeteries we've visited in Europe, this one is immaculately clean, well kept up, and serene. As it should be. Perhaps most touching for me and Lucie during our recent visit was seeing the number of non-U.S. visitors. I'd guess that no more than 10% of the 500 or so visitors we encountered there were from the States.

66 Years and Counting...

That's how long these German guns have been silent, on the cliffs above Omaha Beach in Normandy. It's amazing the condition that some are still in. The cement emplacements are no doubt indestructible; there is no way nature can get rid of these. The guns themselves do rust and some have rusted into oblivion. But some live on.
It's totally peaceful here now, with plenty of sun and color and tourists. Even with a vivid imagination, it's hard to close your eyes, go back in time to June 1944, think about all those horrible black-and-white photos we've all seen, then open your eyes and believe you are standing at that very location. Pretty amazing...

Fun With Language

I was recently chatting about parenthood with a German buddy and asked what the German word or phrase for "the birds and the bees" was. I figured it was either a phrase like "the wild boars and the honeysuckle of spring by a clear brook," or a single word of about 30 letters (the Germans, unlike the French, just love long words). As it turns out, I was wrong on both counts: it is a single word, and one of only 10 letters. The word is "Aufklaerung." (The "ae" is actually an umlauted a - you know, the a with the two dots over it).
But what is far more interesting than the word itself are its 3 primary definitions:
1) military reconnaissance
2) the Enlightenment (as in, European history)
3) the birds and the bees.
Try as I may, I just can't find a very solid nexus between even two of these, let alone all three. Have fun coming up with your own!

Not Your Holiday Inn

Nope - you won't find any such hotels in this off-the-beaten-path part of Normandy. Instead, we stayed at a 300+ year old B&B known as the "Farm of the Cats" (Ferme aux Chats, in French). Boasting all of 4 rooms (each named for a breed of house cat) but with managers with hearts the size of lions, this place was a marvelous find. The breakfasts included a half-dozen home-made jams and preserves and in the evening you could count on tea, a library full of books and magazines about D-Day, and the more-than-potent local booze, known as Calvados. Supposedly, it's made from apples, but at about 90 proof, I'd swear it's made from aviation fuel. They also had 6 cats (hence the name), geese, ducks, and even an eerie pet cemetery (complete with ancient-looking headstones). Should you make it to this neck of the woods, look for Fermigny on the map, only 3 miles from the famous U.S. D-Day cemetery.

Big Sur...a la France

These are the cliffs of Etretat, on the English Channel, only about 50 miles across the sea from the more-famous-but-less-spectacular White Cliffs of Dover. This is probably the most stunning piece of shore scenery in all of northern Europe. The winds were well over 40 MPH and it alternated between sun and rain almost every 10 minutes. It's a healthy hike to the top but the view is...well, you be the judge. By the way, there are no rails, ropes, or fences here. Not for the faint of heart, nor for the ambulance chasers.

Return of the Flowers!

Once again, it's the Flower Carpet on the Grand Place in
downtown Brussels. For just 3 days, 600,000 begonias
do their best to enthrall the crowds (most of whom, it
seems, just flew in from Tokyo). By the end of Sunday,
they will already be on their last legs (flowers and probably also tourists) and the show will
be over once more, until August 2012.
This is sight like no other and, once again, the weather
gods have been very kind. You might want to compare
these photos with the ones I posted back in Feb 2009.

It's Good to be King

Soccer is probably the king of sports, world-wide. And the FIFA organization is most definitely the king of soccer. That's the international body that controls soccer with a tighter hand than the communist party controlled the USSR. Did you notice that at the recent World Cup in South Africa, all players standing on the sidelines wore an identical smock, with "FIFA" emblazoned on both sides? That was far from an accident and far from the only example of the power wielded by this sports dictatorship.
Once FIFA decides which country gets the World Cup every 4 years, the "winner" owes the organization, big-time. Belgium and the Netherlands have put in a joint bid to host in 2018 and recently some of the concessions both nations will have to endure, should they be selected, were made public.
Among them:
* no tax will be paid on any income made by FIFA during the games (by the way, FIFA pocketed a cool $2 billion during the recent World Cup. Makes you wonder how much the people of South Africa pocketed...)
* no Value Added Tax (the super sales tax in Europe, running near 20% in most countries) will be paid by any FIFA personnel for anything they buy, including meals and hotel rooms
* a special FIFA-vehicles-only lane must be built onto all highways, "to avoid congestion" (I'm guessing FIFA gets to keep these lanes and take them home with them once the games end)
* my personal fave: all restaurants and bars within a mile of every World Cup stadium will only be allowed to advertise FIFA sponsors, to include Coca Cola, Budweiser, Sony, and Adidas. Additionally, they will be forced to "change their selection of products" during the games, allowing no other brands of competing drinks to be sold.
There have been loads of articles recently about corruption in soccer, world-wide. I wonder how anyone could possibly have come up with such a ridiculous idea...

The Front Door Key...Don't Leave Home Without It!

Ever!
You see, here in Waterloo only about 1 in 4 or 5 houses has what we would consider a standard front door knob. And even when you do see one, in many cases it is solely for decoration (you can't turn it to open the door). What do all the other houses, like our own, have? Absolutely nothing, other than a slit for the key. Which means that every time that front closes, it is locked on the outside and if you don't have your key, you are out of luck.
When you live in a foreign country, you pick up odd habits, but little habits that keep you from big problems. When I walk out that front door, even if I intend to leave it open, even if I'm only going to the mailbox at the street, I always grab the house key. An ill-directed gust of wind or maybe even an evil cat, and then that door closes. And then you're in trouble.
Or, as the Germans might say, you're Scheiss' ausser Glueck.
Actually, I'm making that up. They would never say that. But maybe they should.