Dear lord, it's almost March!!!

Where has 2008 gone? Yikes!

Last weekend was awesome. Dad hosted his annual Burgundy tasting dinner, and actually invited us to attend! W00t! First time ev4r. There were 18 bottles of wine for 18 people, some 9 different wines (2 champagnes, 2 whites, 5 reds), and a delicious dinner. And great company! Many of the attendees hadn't seen us since our wedding, so it was great to catch up with them and witness their surprise and delight at K's "new" hair- and beardstyles. We arrived at 6:30 and didn't leave until 12:30. Decadence!

Then Sunday was another foodstravaganza: my Aunt E.'s Chinese New Year Party. Gong Shi Fah Zay! (Note that's the Shanghainese version of Gung Hay Fat Choy) She cooked up a storm, and Aunt J. and Mom brought even more to eat. The cousins and mini-cousins were there, and it was a great family gathering. Chinese New Year is the time to eat symbolic foods pertaining to luck, properity, and fertility. So there were lots of eggs, round things, things whose Chinese characters look or sound like money...between the fat and the family, I felt very rich! Super-bonus: my cousin Bob (who, like me, was born in the Year of the Rat - this year!) brought a bag of plush rats to hand out the the mini-cousins. Five fat, furry, buck-toothed, thick-tailed rats from IKEA. It was awesome.

This weekend we had dinner with one of K's colleagues: J and his family. We spent most of the dinner taking about games. Classic video games, new video games, board games. It was a complete geek-out. Lots of fun. K also saved the universe (playing Mass Effect), and I pulled a bazillion weeds out of our front yard. My back and legs muscles are really paying for it, but it makes me happy to have a neat(er) front yard. It was great weather, so there was also a lot of cat-like basking in the sun. With the not so cat-like New Yorker.


A quick Brussels restaurant redux:

Brasserie de la Gare - not too far from work and yummy Belgian food. Great interior decor.

Belga Queen - very chic and with very Belgian food. The bathrooms were unisex with transparent doors...until you turned the lock. I ate foie gras and woodpecker. Yum!

Kokob - the Ethiopian place. Tasty, but not as tasty as Cafe Colucci here in Berkeley. They did have a nice hibiscus, ginger, and something-else aperitif though.

The flight home was delayed at JFK (shock! dismay!) and the nice Delta folks comped us the movies and games. I spent most of the flight riveted by a Popcap game, something to do with flipping links to eliminate them. Damn those electronic crack dealers!

Next trip? Probably back to Brussels in April. Mom's muttering about going to Japan in May but the planning might be complicated.

Brussels Weekend 2: Teh Googles are watching me

They detected I'm in Belgium and gave me google.be results. They even changed my Blogger options so I had to choose between "Blog maken" and "Aanmelden" to make this post! Auuugh! I feel so geotargeted.

Anyway, I wanted to write about my weekend, mostly undistinguished except for significant stomach troubles and a glorious trip to the opera to see Handel's "Giulio Cesare in Egitto". My 10 euro ticket got me entrance to a lovely small European-style opera house, and my legs got me up the stairs to my seat. Along the way I bought an 8 euro program that consisted of two beautifully bound books, one filled with the synopsis in four languages (the Brussels standards of French and Dutch, plus English and German, super-bonus!) and about 4 different articles about Handel and the opera in French and Dutch, and bilingual cast biographies; and the other with the libretto in the original Italian, French, and Dutch. What a bargain!

From my seats I couldn't even see the supertitles, but they wouldn't have helped anyway. They were in French and Dutch, of course! Thankfully I'd done some research online and knew the gist of things. The music was truly beautiful, and the production what my Dad would call "eurotrash" - very modern, and stark, and black-and-white. Super-bonus: there were three counter-tenors onstage that night, instead of the predicted two, each with a distinct style and carriage. Neat stuff. It's very incongruous for modern audiences to hear such high-pitched voices and think of them of heroic; we're just conditioned otherwise. Audiences invariably titter when they first open their mouths. And then stop, if the singing is good enough.

Since my stomach had been a bit touchy all day, I contented myself with a quick waffle snack before the performance. Waffles and opera, a good day!

Brussels Weekend 1

Well, K and I owe some serious holiday updates, but for now here's mine. I'm camped in Brussels for the nonce, and had a very nice weekend.

Friday: stayed up stupidly late watching "The Punisher", featuring John Travolta as the bad guy and some easy-on-the-eyes guy as the Punisher himself. Plus, it was dubbed into Italian. How could I resist?

Saturday: woke up groggy and headachy and hungry at noon. I stumbled across the rainy plaza to Le Pain Quotidien and had a sublime salad of smoked salmon and lentils. Even the group of chatty Flemish folks didn't kill my buzz; the asked what I was eating and I managed to find the right item on the Flemish-language menu. In the afternoon I wandered the streets, eyeing sale displays & antiques, and eventually found a market that sells yogurt. I also gathered up a fair sampling of gourmet chocolate goodies. Saturday evening I failed to find a restaurant with availability and settled for the local bar/cafe. Turns out they've updated their menu since I last had it, and it includes some decent salads and desserts. Huzzah!

Sunday: woke up at a decent hour, chatted with K (he was up late, gaming with buddies), worked out, went back to LPQ, did some work, met a friend at the Museum around the corner to see the Reubens exhibit. Trudy Kohler, these "pink, squishy bodies" are for you! It proved beautiful and educational - apparently Reubens was so successful that later in his career he would sketch out models of large works and hand the execution over to other studios. Outsourcing it, old school! The room with his huge religious works was just gorgeous - he really packs his compositions with action, motion, and detail. Then we went to a local cafe and enjoyed some sinfully rich rasberry meringue tart. Sugar buzz!

I'll probably go back to the cafe tonight for simplicity's sake. Sometime this week I'm determined to check out the Ethiopian restaurant near the Grand Place, as well as a few more Thai restaurants and some classic Belgian joints. Though those are often hard on the arteries...can't take too much of that. I did find a Japanese restaurant, so that's on my list for when I need some comfort food. And the opera house is showing Handel's "Julius Ceasar in Egypt". Dad says if I can catch a performance, I'll have been to an opera house that he hasn't. Ha!

A few takeaways so far:
1. Nearly everyone in Brussels speaks English. I'm giving up on my shitty French for now.
2. A cold, overcast day in Brussels is a good day. At least it's not raining.
3. I need to find healthier things to eat in Brussels. Waffles, fries, beer, shrimp, mussels, and chocolate don't make for balanced nutrition.

Sprouts-ville

One of the tourist attractions in Brussels is the Manneken Pis, or the fountain with a little boy peeing. Notice I didn't say "big attraction" (you'll have to click on the pic to actually see him). Anyway, the Bruxelleois are inclined to dress the poor guy up for any of a number of events, so I was amused to notice the very practical ladder chained up in plain view to the right of the tourist-swarmed fountain. You can see the feet sticking out below and to the right of the urn. I noticed it while I was looking for the "CAMERA SECURITY!" indicated by two signs on the wall. Couldn't find a camera. They must be pretty secure.

I came back to my hotel early today to rest and, later, work. Turned into a nice day so I opened the window and set up shop. Not such a bad location, really.