Walking in Flanders (2/2)

I planned to walk for three days, to find out if Dog and I can, and how far.

Dog can. She was full of energy after day 1.

I probably can. I liked day 1.

But together we couldn’t.

It was a walk of country roads. There were only a couple of carless places where I could let Dog off. She was on the lead the rest of the time. On the lead, on an interesting walk like this, she pulls sideways. It isn’t reprehensible but it messed up my back. I’m not going to explain because I don’t want to turn into the old bloke in the corner going on about his medical conditions. So I came home early. I’ll try again in the new year when I have some more holiday days. Vlierzele, where I’ll set off from because it’s where I ended, will be more convoluted than Haaltert to get to by public transport – tant pis.

I read in Saturday’s Times about a commuter out of London. “The compartment was so packed that she had to stand by the doorway to the first-class carriage with a single foot inside”. She was fined. Dog and I went into a café in Ghent and had the opposite experience:

– Is it OK with the dog?

– Go down to the other end, sit at the end table and your dog can be in the shopping centre while you are in the café.

In London in the early 80s I lived for a short while in Brixton and got to know local lefties. One told me that the newspaper sellers and leaflet giver outers and other people liable to be moved on by the police used the entrance to the tube station. Inside the line marking its boundary the courts had established that the local police did not have jurisdiction. British Transport Police were in charge (and had other priorities, I suppose). This photo made me remember that. The line looked the same.

 

Walking in Flanders (1): Haaltert to Vlierzele

Low, coldish, grey, no rain.

When I walked through Luxembourg, France and Germany the pattern was village — fields or woods (2-4 km) — village. Here there are houses along the length of the country roads. For planning reasons I think it is easier to build new houses in Belgium than in Britain or the Netherlands; and to build the house you want. As I walked along, I saw many joyful brick houses.

There were also several street corner chapels, like this.

I’ve only seen them before in Bavaria and Austria. I liked this modern version which still, I think, is a chapel not a church.

I saw sheep,

llamas,

and chickens.  At lunch, in Mere, I met the president of the James Bond society of Belgium and the Netherlands. Towards the end of the afternoon, in Zonnegem,  tiring, I had a beer at ‘t Oud Bierhuisje, which is three hundred years old. The landlady welcomed Dog. Dog and Landlady’s two dogs raced around the bar and garden for half an hour.

We established after discussion that, as at home, dogs are not allowed on the table.

Done in, I got two buses and a tram from Vlierzele to Ghent where I’m staying.

(In the photo at the top, look out for the ironing boards.)

Walking in Flanders (0)

On a Saturday morning in April 2008 I cycled away from my house in Ixelles, Brussels, heading southeast. That evening I reached Rochefort, in the Belgian Ardennes. It was the first of 53 days over the last ten years that I’ve spent walking (solid lines) and occasionally cycling (dotted lines) in that direction. A year ago this month I reached Vienna.

I love my job at the European Commission.  I realised, though, that for work I mostly visited the capital cities of member states. The idea of this journey was to see what the rest of Europe is like.

The journey has done that, and given me other things too. In a Richard Long sort of way, I like the invisible line I have made. I think that it didn’t exist before I did the journey;  it does now. The journey also gave me the chance to spend full days in the company of Old Dog – until in 2014 or 2015 (I’m not quite certain of the dates in Bavaria)  I more or less dragged him into Dingolfing because he couldn’t do it any more. We missed our train by five minutes and got home half a day late.

This line, understood as a succession of Hodson-powered stages, has three gaps. On a summer’s day in Lorraine, west of Binche, Old Dog was too hot to walk on. We had to get a taxi for 10 km. (He was a Spring and Autumn Dog.) In the suburbs east of Karlsruhe I ended the walk one year at the foot of a funicular and could not resist beginning it the next year at the top. And for railway timetable reasons I finished one walk at Münchmünster in Bavaria and started the next at Neustadt an der Donau, 6 km further on.

I go out and back by train. Now I’ve got so far, it takes a day in each direction. That means it’s only possible to journey onward when I have something like a week of time off. So in April 2016, when I had just a weekend to spare, I walked away from my house in Ixelles, Brussels, extending the line west.

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Since 2013 I’ve been getting physically less good at long walks. In April 2017 I did another day heading west from Brussels, reaching the town of Haaltert on the day that the Round of Flanders was being cycled. I did a couple of days’ walking in Rwanda later that month, visiting Daughter.. Conclusion: I couldn’t keep comfortably going for any decent distance.

Last year, therefore, in Austria, I cycled. It was fine, physically. But it isn’t the same. You see less because you have to devote some attention to the act of cycling, you are more limited in where to go, and you eat up the journey too fast.

Now I have a long weekend. (New) Dog has never done a proper multiday walk. I haven’t done one for 2½ years. As a experiment, we’re on our way. Tomorrow morning, we will set out northwest from Haaltert.

One of the interesting things will be, before, when I was walking in Flanders, I was comparing it with Brussels. Now, after eight months in Alkmaar, I’ll be comparing it with the Netherlands.

The journey from the research site where I work to Aalst where I’m spending the night was slow (20 kph door to door) and expensive (€0,45/km). I changed trains in Antwerp. The station entrance hall is as gorgeous as it was when I was last here.

I don’t know another European jurisdiction which would have prevented the building of shopping opportunities in such a space (think of Milan station, or Liverpool Street in London).

Aalst: I wanted to stay in the New Hotel de la Gare for its low price and unFlemish name. They don’t take dogs so I’m in the Tower Hotel instead.

Living in Holland 4

This lunchtime I cycled from work to the beach at St Maartenszee. A good wind. Roiling waves.

Two long lorries were taking away long pipes.

These pipes have run out into the sea since I’ve been coming to this beach, since last March. I supposed they were sewage pipes. My colleague the wise man of Garda put me right. They are, he thinks, sand redistribution pipes. They do their work and then are moved from beach to beach, along these parts, on a five year cycle.

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Living in Holland, Travelling Companion and I want to learn Dutch. When I started work a course started that very week and I got on it. Travelling Companion found it harder. One course was cancelled for a lack of participants. She couldn’t get on the next because it already had too many. She eventually started Dutch classes in Amsterdam last week.

Her classmates are mostly au pairs. Today (class two) they did family relations: oma, neef, dochter…  (granny, nephew/cousin, daughter…).

My classmates, like me, are EU staff working far from home. We learned these family words last month, in class forty.

מיומנויות השפה של עמוס טברסקי

Michigan required that all PhD students in psychology pass a proficiency test in two foreign languages. Weirdly, the university didn’t count Hebrew as a foreign language but accepted mathematics. Though entirely self-taught in mathematics, Amos chose math as one of his languages. For his second language he picked French.The test was to translate three pages from a book in the language. The student chose the book, and the tester chose the pages to translate. Amos went to [the library and] dug out a French math textbook with nothing but equations in it. ‘It might have had the word donc in it,’ said Amos’ roommate Mel Guyer. The University of Michigan declared Amos Tversky proficient in French.  (Michael Lewis, The undoing project, 2017)

In 1977 I spent time on a kibbutz. Wednesday night was film night. The film would be delivered in the afternoon, in a silver film can, to the dining/socialising block. We volunteers would try with our fragmentary Hebrew to work out from the label the title of the film we would see in the evening.

The film that I saw then, that stays with me now, is Duel.

(Dublin, 2017)

At the « Terminus Nord » in Paris

It’s mid-afternoon on the first Sunday in November, getting dark. Travelling Companion, Dog and I are heading out of Paris. We’re on our way home from Châtelaillon-Plage in the west of France: taxi to La Rochelle (no public transport on Sundays), train to Paris Montparnasse, metro to the Gare du Nord, train to Brussels, train to Amsterdam, train to Alkmaar.

The available food on the La Rochelle-Paris train was awful.

In Paris, though, we had time to eat the last fish soup of this wet long weekend at the Terminus Nord opposite the station.

The soup came, as it should, with bread, croutons, cheese and rouille, which you stir in.

Travelling Companion asked me to pass the cheese – Oh, it’s in my soup I said. I thought that little pot was all for me. Well I explained and asked for more. The waiter brought a pot for Travelling Companion and an additional one for me, laughing.

Now this restaurant is evidently designed for people who are travelling through. There are plenty of places to leave your bags.

The food comes quickly and, when you ask for it, so does the bill. Why do they bother about cheerful good service? The other places opposite the Gare du Nord do not. If you ask for a beer at the bar on the corner of the rue de Dunkerque and the boulevard de Denain they bring you a vast one without asking and curtly charge you eight euros. Could it be because at the Terminus Nord they have a commercial strategy of being the place you choose to come back to when you’re passing this way? (We still talk about the time we were there with our children and a waiter spilt coffee over Travelling Companion. We all four were brought a glass of champagne. It is, in any case, the place we go back to.) Or, as I think, is it that organisational cultures arise at random, or under a particular leader, and are then passed on over time and difficult to uproot?

When I was nineteen I worked for a summer in a pickled onion factory in Zeeland. We were 150 British men, randomly divided into alternating shifts. One shift crystallised around leadership, hierarchy and a macho culture. The other shared around the good jobs (shooting onions into the factory with a water cannon) and the bad (picking green onions off the conveyor belt).

In one of the work cafeterias I used to go to in Brussels, whoever the staff – and there was a decent turnover – they always worked slowly.

On the gate at the research site where I work now, whoever the staff, they are always jolly.

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Dog is slim and weighs 12 kilos. We told the taxi company she weighed 9 kilos and would sit on a lap (which she did). Is she at most 7 kilos and do you have a bag to carry her in, pleaded the ticket office lady at La Rochelle. We couldn’t say so, so we had to pay €31,50 for her, rather than €7, on the train.

At the Terminus Nord she wouldn’t settle. I offered her my nice leather bag, and a plastic one as an alternative. She dragged my new leather hat out of the plastic bag and sat on it.