| Submitted by: Mark R. Leeper United States |
| Submission Date: 10 February 2005 |
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When the bill came and Dale charged it, the waiter asked if Dale wanted to put on the 'tax.' By tax he meant, no doubt, the Bad Service Tax the waiter expected above the tip included in the bill. A tax for bad service. Dale said very straightforwardly he didn't think so.
After dinner Dale and Jo returned to the Grand' Place; Evelyn and I returned to the room to read on Liege, our next destination, and to write in our logs.
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If you think that Canada has tensions between its French and non-French speakers, Belgium has them much worse. Before there were Europeans in Canada the French speakers of Belgium (called Walloons) were in the thick of dissent and Liege was the center and capital of Wallonia and famous for its hot-air Walloons. In 1468 six hundred Walloons climbed the hill near Liege, sneaked into the encampment of Charles the Bold, found the most opulent tent and attacked it to kill Charles. Charlie was out for the evening, as it turned out. He was sorry he had missed his company and had them all put to death. Then for good measure he killed all the inhabitants of Lie whom he could find and over several weeks flattened every building in Liege but the churches. He would have flattened the churches also, but he didn't want to be accused of excess. The whole regrettable incident only served to make the surviving citizens all the more cross.
It was to the home of these feisty people that we went our last tour day in Belgium. We ate breakfast early and took the train. It was about an hour's journey. Each of the tour books listed different hours for museums in Liege and the Frommer's claimed that museums were all free on Sundays. We were relatively sure we could adapt to just about any hours we found. Getting to Liege, we stopped at the tourist agency where they gave us a different set of museum hours with a lot of things closed on Sundays. The train station is not really in the old city of Liege so we had to take a bus from metropolitan Liege into historic Liege. On the way we saw the Opera House as the bus went past it. The old city itself is on a river and it turns out on Sunday morning it is just choked with visitors from three countries who come for the street market. The street market is nothing but a really big flea market. The market is huge and could well claim to be the Marvel of Liege. And marvelous is the assortment of things sold, but for now it was simply an obstacle course for us getting through the streets of Liege. Dale and Jo had art museums to find. I was interested in a museum of arms and Evelyn wanted to stay with me. So the two couples split up. The streets really were hard to walk, with the terrific crowds and all the stalls. Most of the buildings were impossible to get to because of the stalls in front of them. We were afraid that the museums might be impossible ti reach. We found the Arms Museum and there was a small space for us to get to the museum, but the sign was in French and it looked like it said the tour of the museum was the only way to see the museum on Sunday and it started from another museum. We went to that museum and it too seemed closed, but it had a sign claiming there was a tour on Sundays. Evelyn went back to check the Arms Museum and we kept in contact by walkie-talkie. Evelyn called me, saying the tour would be at the Arms Museum. I ran to join her. The confusion in Liege is so thick you can cut it with a knife. It turns out that the museum is indeed closed, but you can get a guided tour on Sunday. The tour is, however, given only in French. They did have a museum guide they sold in English. On the back of the guide they had museum hours. Glued over the museum hours was a mimeoed sheet with revised museum hours. The revised museum hours has a big 'X' to indicate even the revised hours were wrong.
What we discovered once the tour started is that while Evelyn and I are on a par in reading French, and while I am better at making myself understood speaking French, she is better than I am at understanding spoken French. The museum had personal weapons of all sorts and claims to have the world's finest collection of practical craftsmanship in the field of gun-making. The museum is actually linked with the local arms industry which itself is probably linked with the Walloon tradition of dissent and the anxiousness to express dissenting opinions.
They start with a history of weapons. It has some things as crude as a cannon that looks like nothing more than an old piece of pipe. There are several exhibits on gun-making and the tools that are used to make guns. Next there is a room of the medals people through the ages could earn by shooting guns judiciously. Then there is a room of personal guns with nicer engraving than armies generally require. These guns have fancy art engraved on all the exposed metal parts (but usually not the barrel). There was a fourteen-barreled gun with two circular clusters of seven barrels each. It also had a powder box with seven holes. It probably spread powder so irregularly that you really needed seven shots. There is a room showing rifles of many countries. The American ones seemed to have the more straightforward design with little decoration. And there are rooms with armor and some weapons as primitive as slingshots and funny-styled crossbows.
When the tour was over it was something of a relief just because trying to understand the guide's rapid-fire French and failing and looking politely interested was a little taxing.
We were put out on the street and there was little to do but walk around the crowded street market. My last day in Belgium I had my first Belgian waffle. They put the sugar inside the waffle in crystalline tunnels in the wide part of the waffle. Lunch was tcetchouka from a vendor. It was scrambled eggs and spicy sausage in a roll.
The market also has a section with animals. There are birds, fish, mice, cats, dogs. Odd sights included a woman with a long white tail wagging out from under her dress. I really wish I had gotten picture and started to, but someone walked in the way. It really was that she had a large white dog who was standing in front of her. His tail was sticking out behind and her skirt length and the height of the dog were just perfect to create the effect. Also in the category of the shot that got away was two cages, side-byside, one with kittens, one with young rabbits huddled on the far side of their cage as a kitten poked a paw out of his cage and into theirs reaching for them. I also saw the biggest rabbits I have ever seen, at least eighteen inches nose to tail and proportionally big around.
We bought some dried apricots to snack on the rest of the trip and the next day. I made myself sick trying to finish them before taking them through customs. The street market closes at 2 PM and people started to disappear. No doubt this was at least partially due to the heavy trucks backing through the narrow walkways.
Our arrangement was to meet Dale and Jo at 4:30 PM at the Church of St. Bartholomew, where the baptismal font is one of the seven wonders of Belgium. A special committee was chosen at one point to find the seven art wonders of Belgium that every visitor must see. By an odd coincidence each one was in a different major city. This meant regrettably that visitors could not say they had been to Belgium without visiting all seven of Belgium's major cities. So guess what, gentle reader? I ain't been there. You've spent all this time reading the log of someone who really wasn't there. GOTCHA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA!
Yes, well.
So we had about two and a half hours to walk the streets of what is actually a fairly dingy city. We walked by the Palace of the Prince-Bishops. It should be explained that people in the clergy could attain secular power but did not have the two defined as the same in the way that Queen Elizabeth is the head of the Anglican Church and people all over the world look to her as the powerful religious leader that she is.
No, in Liege they were independent and you could achieve both. You could be both a prince and a bishop. In our society that is like being both a doctor and a lawyer, though one presumes the Prince-Bishops would not be quite so powerful, vicious, or unscrupulous. This is another building in the Gothic style, with thousands of statues and relief carvings. We walked to the Museum of Walloon Life to pass the time under the assumption that Frommer was right that museums are free on Sundays. It turns out not to be true any more and the idea of seeing another museum, and one with captions only in French, did not appeal so we just continued our walk. We went back to the Quai de Maestricht, the street of the Arms Museum. We talked to an American family visiting from Germany. (I assume it was a military family.) Then we went to sit by the Church of St. Bartholomew and wait for Dale and Jo. They showed up about fifteen minutes early but about twenty minutes after us.
We went into the church and took a look at the font. I suspect none of us were really bowled over by it, but it probably was really good work for the early 12th Century. It is decorated with five relief pictures of famous baptisms from the Golden Age of Baptism. There was Jesus being baptized by John the Baptist. In another picture He baptizes two unknowns. A Roman soldier gets the water treatment from St. Peter in another. The pictures do make a nicelooking font. I guess it is like when I was a kid I had a toy gun with a picture of Davy Crockett shooting Indians on the handle.
As you walk through the church, you see an older section with a roof in the Romanesque style. That is probably something Charles the Bold left standing and the main section of the church was more recent.
After that there was a question of what to do with the remaining time. I think we were all somewhat disappointed with the possible activities in Liege on a Sunday late afternoon. Dale and Jo thought that the Palace of the Prince-Bishops was still supposed to be open so we walked there but it was all closed up. We decided to start back to Brussels. We took the bus to the train station and as it turned out just missed the Brussels train and had to wait for the next. I got a Fanta orange from the soda machine. Fanta is very different in Europe than it is at home. If you picture Fanta orange in the United States, it is bright orange and does not taste very orangey. In Europe it is genuine orangeade that is carbonated. The color is a pale yellow since it got its color from orange juice, not food coloring to make it look like orange peel.
My mother once commented to me that she thought life was very uncomfortable and unpleasant in England. I'd said that I thought that British science fiction was quite good and she said it was because the English had to have an escape from the unpleasant daily life. I cannot speak for the English. It is possible my mother is right, but I doubt it. I think my mother is looking at the disadvantages of life abroad, the things she has and would miss if she were living there, but she does not have an appreciation for what they have that we are missing here. Fanta sells a much less appealing product in this country because they do not respect the American taste. They could sell as good a product here as in Europe, but they don't bother. In Europe trains and trams and Metros run on time to the minute and there is a big clock at each station so you know precisely how many minutes to the train you are waiting for. That's incredibly convenient. Or more accurately, our lax approach to things arriving when they arrive, not on a schedule, would drive me straight up a wall if I were a visiting European. I would contend right now that with a VCR for time shifting and with cable I get better television than I get from England's four channels. |
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| Copyright © - "Mark R. Leeper" |
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