| Submitted by: Mark R. Leeper United States |
| Submission Date: 10 February 2005 |
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Against my better judgement we picked a place to eat right on the Grand' Place. Evelyn got a recommendation for a place called 'The Cellar.' We ordered as weirdly as we could on the menu. I got something called Waterzooi. Evelyn got a weird beef dish (well, actually we went halves). The restaurant is expensive by United States standards but surprisingly cheap by Brussels standards. On the two Rues des Bouchers, dinners are about $20 and tend to be just okay. Beverages are just too darn expensive, however. An 8-ounce (or so) Coke is about $2.20 and after being dehydrated all day I usually drink two. While we were eating, a small black cat sat down next to me on the bench I was sitting on. It stayed about ten minutes and left.
After lunch we headed out for the Museum of Classical Art. (Literally translated, it is called the Museum of Ancient Art, but there is little I would call 'ancient.') This is another big museum with free admission. About the first thing you see is a gallery with neo-classical sculpture. At first blush I thought this would not have a whole lot of interest. I'd made a bad call on the restaurant and another on this gallery. The first piece I saw was called 'The Satyr and the Young Faun' by Pickery. In spite of these being mythical figures, their expressions were very human and very tender. A beautifully realized satyr cradles a young faun in his arms and looks at him lovingly. The next piece is 'The Amorous Lion' by Geets. A maiden sits next to (or on?) a lion who looks at her lovingly. The maiden was done unimaginatively, but the lion is done very well with what certainly seems like an affectionate expression. Its mouth, however, is very realistically done with big teeth and the lips shaped in a way that must have taken great study.
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Saturday morning we took the tram out to the Museum of Central Africa. This used to be the Museum of the Belgian Congo but was quietly renamed when the Congo was no longer Belgian. It is a fairly comprehensive collection of all aspects of the Congo. A tour gets off to a somewhat shaky start by showing all the uses of wood, such as we get from Africa. I don't know if you knew just how much wood touches our daily lives
However, after a less than fascinating start, things got a little better. You next go into a fairly good collection of tribal art. They are mostly wood masks and sculptures. After that you move into artifacts of the European exploration of Africa. There is a concentration on Stanley and Livingstone, though there us also mention of Richard Francis Burton and John Hanning Speke, whose expedition was portrayed in the recent film MOUNTAINS OF THE MOON.
Some of the interesting pieces include tribal art depicting the Europeans, including a very funny model of a European driving a car.
There are European paintings of the Belgian conquest, many of which show what we would consider to be maltreatment of the native population, though it is not clear if it is the artists' intent to make an anti-colonial statement or just to picture what they see.
Toward the back of the museum there is a modern piece of art, a giant praying mantis maybe eight feet long.
There is also a very long boat--hand-carved. And there are mementos of battle like from the Mahdi Campaign. Oddly, there is no mention of Charles Gordon, who defended Khartoum for ten months against the Mahdi's siege. Gordon was defeated but it was a bitter victory for the Mahdi, who wasted on one city the strength he intended to use to conquer all of the Sudan and who knows how much else. The Mahdi died shortly after taking Khartoum and his campaign failed. Khartoum became for the British what the Alamo is for the Americans.
As Evelyn pointed out, the museum also talks about how the Congo eventually became independent but does not mention what a bitter struggle against Belgium it took to get their independence.
The museum finishes up with a look at the natural history of Africa, including large insects (one as thin as a twig but about a foot long). There are also exhibits of the geology and exhibits of stuffed animals. The latter had some problems. They would do dioramas of animals but show natural enemies too close together. Apes would be given unrealistically human expressions. There was one case with stuffed lions, including a new-born who was mostly head with a tiny body.
We took the tram back to the city, leaving Dale and Jo to their art museums. We had another site we were anxious to see.
In February of 1815, Napoleon Bonaparte escaped his imprisonment on the island of Elba. In March he returned to France, where King Louis XVIII decided it would be a good time to be any place but France. With amazing speed Napoleon I rebuilt and army of conquest. He had reason to speed because he did not want to combined English and Dutch forces under Wellington and the PRussian forces under Bluecher to have time to organize. Napoleon won the race and split the two armies before they had a chance to get together. He routed the PRussians at Ligny and sent Marshal Grouchy to chase them. He already had Marshal Ney off fighting Wellington's force--smaller than Bluecher's--and now that he'd taken care of the PRussians he could join Ney. Wellington could not defeat both Ney's and Napoleon's troops and retreated to Waterloo. Napoleon rushed to Waterloo to crush Wellington's multi-national army. Saturday night, June 17, Wellington was dancing at a fancy ball. At 2 AM Sunday morning, Wellington got word that Napoleon's army was coming. Wellington could retreat further or stand and fight. In the hopes that Bluecher's army would hear of what would happen and join him, Wellington decided to stand and fight. As long as he didn't have to go far away, Wellington decided to dance till dawn. Wellington was something of a jerk.
Some time around noon the battle began. Napoleon took the offensive against Wellington and made a number of errors. He decided he needed Grouchy here, not chasing Bluecher's PRussians, and sent orders for Grouchy to join the battle. Neither side was fighting very well and both were having heavy losses. Napoleon's forces knew they could take the day if Grouchy could join them in time. Finally they saw what they were waiting for. The army was approaching from their right where they could fight Wellington on the other side. The French spirits soared, then fell. The approaching forces were not Grouchy's French army; they were Bluecher's PRussians, who had eluded Grouchy. It was the French who would have to fight on two sides. It suddenly became painfully clear to Napoleon that this would be his last battle. He continued fighting, even sending in his Imperial Guard, but he knew he'd lose his army this muddy Sunday evening. Eventually his army was routed and he fled. Four weeks later he was captured trying to escape to America and was exiled to St. Helena. He lived there almost six years and slowly died of gradually and secretly administered poison. The diagnosis of death by poison was only determined within the last twenty years, by the way. It seems to me traces of the poison were found in his hair.
The Napoleonic dream of spreading revolution to the world died about 175 years before the similar Communist dream would die.
Very important to the battle was the terrain of the field. Wellington's men could lie flat on the muddy ground and as the French approached they could rise up out of the ground. To understand what happened, you have to stand on the battlefield and look around you. That was our plan.
We had a hard time understanding the bus driver in Brussels. We guessed what was the right bus and asked the driver. He said something in French and realized we did not understand. 'To Napoleon?' he asked. Yeah, this was the bus. We and an English couple also looking for Waterloo boarded. The ride was nearly an hour. There was a commotion on the bus when two large families boarded, both quite noisy.
The bus left us off in a fairly unpromising farm community. The driver pointed off in one direction and we walked. You quickly see a large conical hill with a statue of a lion at the top. Belgian housewives had wanted to honor where the Prince of Orange had been wounded and brought baskets of earth to form this mound. It is something like 120 feet high. For 200 Fr. (about $6) you see a model of the battlefield with lights showing the movements of the armies. That doesn't sound impressive, but it was very well done. It gave you a strategist's view of the battle. You see it as line of force moving and it gives you a good representation of how the armies are slowly reduced in size.
Next you go see a fantasy film--sort of 'Twilight Zone-ish'--of a group of kids playing on the battlefield and suddenly finding themselves in the battle. Included was a liberal dose of stock footage from the 1971 Russian-Italian film WATERLOO, which has Rod Steiger, Christopher Plummer, and Orson Welles. Your ticket also allows you to climb the Butte. We climbed the hill and from the top read about the battle and saw where it all took place.
We bought a booklet by historian David Howarth that guided you to parts of the battlefield, then explained what happened there. That was really the most interesting part, due to Howarth's descriptions. This is all farmland and it smells like it, but you still get a feeling of really being there.
It was tough getting directions on how to catch the bus back. People tried to explain in English since it was clear from our eloquent inquiries in French that we were trying very hard to talk French and they wanted to put the same effort into speaking out language. In any case, no matter how obvious it was that our French was 'tres beans bocou,' people were more anxious to try out their English on us. Being good guests, we were happy to oblige them.
On the bus on the way back I read the booklet on Waterloo. Dale and Jo were already back from their exciting day. They had gone to the Horta House, a house that an artist had decorated entirely in Art Nouveau, a style in which there are no straight lines. It was clear they thought we'd been foolish to miss the Horta House in order to see Waterloo, but I enjoyed seeing and learning more about history, even at the expense of my Horta culture. I suspect that had we come by ourselves we would have been to fewer art museums.
The previous night was Dale and Jo's first and it took us quite a while to pick a restaurant on the Petit Rue des Bouchers. Jo had complained, 'What's the big deal? We should just pick one.' This time it was their turn to pick. Jo quickly saw what the big deal was, I think. It took them about as long to pick a place, comparing menus. They did. We sat down. Then they decided that they did not like the menu after all and we got up again and continued to look.
Finally we found a restaurant where the owner told us, 'The food is very good.' There was something about that I didn't like. The fixed-price menu was 695 Fr. (about $21) here, where it was 595 Fr. other places. The preliminaries were okay. I had a fish soup and something else, I guess a small piece of fish. They had put five pieces of bread on the table. I'd taken two. (I'd missed lunch.) Jo took two and Dale took one. By the time Evelyn decided she wanted one, there wasn't any, so we asked for more. (This was during the long wait for the food to be served.) We had to ask three or four times. The main course, for which Dale and I had ordered the same thing, was fish on brochette. It turned out to be three tiny pieces of fish and two slices of lemon on a five-inch stick. We were heartily unimpressed. My dessert was an okay chocolate mousse. Dale had a creme caramel which he discovered he did not like. |
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