Arrgh! Star Wars Episode 99

I am long suffering, my friends. Not only do I have to witness and participate in light-sabre duels with my four-year-old, but I have to play "star wars" figurines with him, watch the movies over and over and over again and participate in lengthy family discussions about Princess Leia's parentage, but now I've been dragged to the exhibit of STAR WARS. Last weekend (with again lovely weather) we went to an exhibition hall here in Brussels and for 13 Euro each, got in early to the first weekend of the show. Luckily we went when we did, as when we left the place around 4 p.m the line ups were out the door and around the building.

I should be knighted with that sabre for my patience and giving nature...I'm starting a petition now if you'd like to sign it...

It was 2 hours of viewing paraphenalia of the six movies. Now, granted, the costumes and maquettes (models) were spectacular, but the best part was witnessing the excitement of my husband and our sons over stuff I didn't even know existed (did you know the names of the moons around Tatooine? all three of the men in my house do!). The worst part was resisting the, "mom, can I buy that?" or, "Dad, how much does this cost?" when in the gift shop as final room of the exhibition. Here one of my boys is posing with a life-size model of Jango Fett (I had to ask who this was). Needless to say, we didn't fork out a scheckle for anything as this was definitely not the reason why we went.

As I said, it was a lovely day, and we left the exhibit looking for a cafe patio to wind down. We are not very familiar with the Gare du Nord (incidentally, right next to where M's father worked when he was here in 2004) so weren't successful in finding such a spot open on a Sunday afternoon. Instead we went to the convenience store, got a couple of cans of beer, a big baguette, some aged gouda cheese cubes and iced tea for the boys and picnicked on the cement terrace outside the train station. The boys burned off some steam (as you see here) and we all enjoyed the fresh breezes in the dying rays of the day's sunshine. It was quite cool only an hour later when we walked up the steps to our house, as the air is not accumulating any warmth the sun provides yet. The soil is warming up, though since the daffodils and crocuses are out in full bloom and the ornamental cherry tree outside our bedroom window is awakening in its gown of blush pink with buds like ruby bead accessories

This weekend was also lovely, but disappeared in a wink. We had our first dinner out without kiddies and took all the next morning to recover (long awaited celebrations will do that to a liver) and had Belgian guests in for a BBQ this sunday afternoon. Their older son was very patient with ours, playing archery over the pool and being humiliated by my first born who made the target almost every time with his homemade bow and arrow (willow sticks and butcher twine). This is the first time in about a month where I've had to struggle to use my french again. When I wasn't working, I actually practiced more since I was out and about more shopping, meeting neighbours on the street, listening to conversations at the mall. Now when I'm busy every day teaching, speaking and working in English, I get no chance at all. It was quite a stretch at first for my wee vocabulary, but I think I did okay...but not great. Perhaps there will be other occasions in the spring with more people out in their gardens and the days getting longer.

Hope you're getting a breath of spring, where ever you read this from...I'll send you our cherry blossom photos next week, as they'll be at their peak then.

lovely day at the Antwerpen/Anverse Zoo

This Bilingual country has at least two names for everything, hence the title...

I am painfully nursing my sunburn as I write this (ahhhh....good thing quality Belgian beer -- Kasteel-- has good analgesic properties).

We had a great day at the Belgian National Zoo today. We left soon after 10:00 a.m. in Kristin's car piling three kids and three adults into a five seater Renault (I'm sure that's not legal, but Kristin assures me an adult equals two children, so the number of seat belts was in keeping with Belgian highway traffic laws) and drove the fourty minutes north east to Antwerpen (Flemish)/ Anvers (French)/ Antwerp (English) zoo. We got there with no stress, little trouble parking and with bright and sunny moods, in keeping with the weather which was to reach 12 today under mostly clear skies. We sang camp songs the entire way there, and had fun teaching Kristin's daughter Lara the English versions of songs like "The itzy-bitzy spider" and "Ram-sam-samm". Her father is Welsh, but I bet they've not heard the same number of camp songs as Matthew and I have over the course of our childhoods. Our favourite today was the Sharon-Lois-and-Bram version of "We're goin' to the zoo this mornin'" sung at the top of our lungs. The Zoo is right behind the spectacularly renovated train station, a national monument to a communication and transportation giant that brought diamonds and money into this town like a massive pipeline. This is one of the largest settlements of Hasidic Jews outside Israel, so the children found people-watching on the city streets was as much fun as the animal watching within the walls of the zoo.

Not to be outdone, the entrance of the Zoo is also spectacular, designed with Romantic and Neo-Gothic architecture and lots of government money. In a city, zoos tend to be cramped, a little unnatural and a bit sad due to the close quarters for the animals...thankfully this was not the case, as the zoo was well landscaped, broadly spaced and well thought out for its day... it's not The Rouge River (East Scarborough where the Metro Toronto is located) but that, I think is the exception to the rule in zoo designing...

Doing research before we left for this activity, I found out that this attraction one of the oldest zoos in the world and is one of Antwerp's most popular attractions. With an animal population of over 5,000 and more than 950 different species, it attracts about 1 million visitors each year. This current zoo is located on 26 acres of prime real estate and a new expansion has been announced which by 2017 will add a surface of 15,000 sq m (4 acres) to the existing zoo. Interestingly, this zoo is also the global sperm-bank for five animals, including the okapi. This animal was introduced in the zoo shortly after its discovery in Congo. There are still several of these strange animals with long tongues in the zoo. More than 75% of the okapis in captivity have Antwerp blood. Some other notable animals out of the +900 species that we saw today were the Siberian tigers, Indian lions, Arabian oryxes, Indian elephants, gorillas, bisons, orangutans, penguins, pygmy gibeons, giraffes, foques (seals), and my personal favourite, the blue Macaw (thanks to a Canadian children's Author who wrote a marvelous book called "Sarah Saw a Blue Macaw"...penned by Jo Ellen Bogart and expertly inked by Sylvie Daigneault. The rhymes and pictures are perfect bedtime reading for my boys' ages, and many of the animals in the south American rainforest depicted within these pages were also part of our discovery today...
Now in order to make the first days of our spring literally a splash, yesterday Matthew and I cleaned and heated the pool so that there'd be something to refresh us upon our return today...at 16 degrees in the water and 12 degrees out, Matthew and Duncan certainly found their VERY quick dip in the piscine the epitome of refreshing...as my husband shivered up the stairs of the shallow end, he jokingly said, "I think I've been turned inside out--I'm a woman now darling"!

Pictures to follow in Matthew's blog once I find the camera in our chaos of picnic debris, discarded towels clothes and sweaters and the clutter due to the neglect of the house during the best outdoor weekend so far of 2008.

sorry to rub it in...but...

The weather this weekend (the end of our carnival mid winter (ha!) break) has been just glorious. 14 celcius in the sun, 11 in the shade. Think of the Carolina's during March break, should you have had the pleasure...warm, crisp, sunny, a bit breezy but cool at night and sweet smells in the newly awakening garden and new bird songs in the air ... here's what the weather holds for the next five days (and let me tell you we certainly feel blessed, as we're being taken to the Antwerp Zoo tomorrow which will include a picnic as well!)

Long Term Forecast

	Saturday Feb 9	Sunday Feb 10	Monday Feb 11	Tuesday Feb 12	Wednesday Feb 13
High	11°C	12°C	13°C	11°C	11°C
Condition	Sunny	Variable cloudiness	Variable cloudiness	Cloudy periods	Sunny
Low	2°C	2°C	4°C	3°C	0°C

Updated:Saturday Feb 9 2008,10:58 CST - Brussels

Carnival Party & Mardi Gras BE Style

When someone said they celebrate Carnival here in Belgium, I got all excited...thinking of the rigid festooned feathered costumes and beaded bodies of New Orleans...exotic bird costumes, masks with sequins, lots of jazz music and parties. Well, everything has its own twist here in Brussels, so of course it wasn't as anticipated. Here's how it panned out:

Thursday afternoon, the principal got on the blower and said that Friday was a normal uniform day if kids didn't come in costume, so virtually all 411 kids the next day got dressed up, but many were indistinguishable from those kids I'm used to teaching in Canada: skater dude garb or sports jerseys over jeans or madonna-like layers of bright colours and big hairdos...this was carnival? Here's a picture to show you my kids in our classroom--we have a basketball coach, a Mexican fruit picker, a ballet dancer with incognito glasses, "Laura Ingles", a Disney princess, a Chicago-1970's afro bedecked boy with a-peace-love costume and those were the ones I could identify...the rest of the school was also decked out and this made for a fun parade into the middle and highschools, and celebration of the last day before the week off for skiing. We had a party in the afternoon with the whole school in the cafeteria and then games in our room to while away the last half hour.

Another way I know I'm in a different league than in Thorncliffe Park (Toronto) when I polled the kids to find out what they're doing for the mid-winter break: here are just a few destinations planned:

Swiss Alps for skiing
New York City to tour the sites
Egypt, Cairo (this boy is taking an extra week after skiing first with his family in Austria)
Paris (just to go shopping)
South of France to open their summer cottage
Ardennes Chalet to cross-country ski

...and I'll be lucky to get to the Antwerpen Zoo for a day trip! At least I can enjoy the daffodils and tulips coming up in my garden, the lemon-green buds sprouting everywhere on the prolific rosebushes outside my living room window and the morning larks having singing contests in the garden as we anticipate an early spring and a lovely awakening of our adopted surroundings...sorry to rub it in when I know the Nor-Easterns dumped 20 cm of snow on Ontario last week!