Bonjour from beautiful Brussels! Friday it was 50 degrees, sunny, and breezy. Not that I’m rubbing it in. I can’t help but think about the weather in our former home, Portsmouth, NH, where it was probably 20 degrees with 2 feet of snow on the ground. Sorry New Hampshire, Belgium wins! Ok, now I’m rubbing it in. (But Kansas, you really win, apparently it was 70 degrees there this weekend).
Friday I started a new french class. It’s just once a week, but I think it will be time well spent. If nothing else it will be another reminder of the cultural melting pot that is Brussels–my classmates are from Spain, Ireland, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Syria, Egypt, El Salvador, Romania, Brazil and Sweden. My goal (in addition to improving my french) is to learn to say ‘hello’ in everyone’s language, I’ll let you know how that goes.
Last weekend we went to the World Championships of Cyclocross. Dan has a new gig writing for Cyclocross Magazine so he was reporting about the race for the magazine and its website. He has more information about it on his site, but here’s my deux cents–it was awesome. There were over 30,000 fans at the men’s and women’s championship races on Sunday–many of them in costumes supporting the racers from their home countries and almost all of them drunk–a fairly entertaining combination. 10 American racers came for the men’s and women’s championships and Dan was able to interview almost all of them. His articles about the races are on his site and they really capture the excitement of the day–it was fantastic.
Unfortunately this weekend has been a little less fun because Dan has been laid low by a bad back. He was fine one minute and the next he couldn’t move and was in pain. We went to a Belgian doctor who said “hell if I know what you did, but here, have some muscle relaxers and come back if you break out in red spots that start eating away at your flesh”. Mon dieu! He’s doing much better now and all of his flesh is intact so we think it was just a muscle problem and he should be back on his bike this week.
Today is Sunday, day of rest in Brussels (i.e. everything is closed) and we feasted on brunch at our friend Davina’s house. We stuffed ourselves and had a lovely time meeting new people. Today is also the birthday of two of my friends whom I’ve known for over 15 years–happy birthday you old biddies. I hope everyone out there in the interwebs is having a lovely, lazy Sunday and has a good week planned. An FYI for anyone thinking of visiting us–many airlines (AerLingus, Lufthansa and others) are having great sales to Europe through June, so let us know if you’d like to come de notre maison à Bruxelles.
Bonne soirèe!
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