A Short Stay in Brussels, Belgium (part one)

The train stopped at the main Brussels station, Gare du Midi. Everyone had to step out of the train as it was the terminus. I had been several times at the Gare du Midi, but that was a while back.

Vintage postcard of Gare du Midi, Brussels

I did not see the station as pictured above – I am not quite that old yet, and it does not look like this anymore. The first time was in 1958. My Italian friend, who had come to France to spend a month in my home, and I took the train to Brussels to see Expo 58. This was the first major world’s fair since WW2. Below is a picture I took of my friend Marisa at the fair.

But the friend who came to greet us at the Gare du Midi was a childhood friend. As I mentioned in my first year anniversary post I spent my childhood in Cité Condorcet in Paris (pictures can be seen on the posts here .) There I played with my best friend Nadia whose family was Armenian. She had a younger brother, Serge, who was a terror. He would run after us or take our toys. With age he became much nicer and we had great times together. Below is a picture taken of him and me on some Paris boulevard. I am not sure of the date but I must have been 19 or so.



He married a young lady from Brussels who he had met in Paris. My husband and I visited them once, I believe in the early 80s and then because of our respective busy lives, we lost contact. But then, several months ago, Serge contacted me. He had found me through the Internet. He invited us to come and visit him during our next trip to Paris. We had already decided to go in May, so I quickly booked our seats on the TGV train. I wondered how the meeting would go after an absence of almost 30 years. Frankly, it was as if we had left him just a few months ago. He drove us to his house which is in Brussels proper. Flowers under the windows welcomed us.




My friend’s wife had prepared a tasty lunch, which we ate on the veranda. The house is tall, 4 stories, with a nice little garden in the back. Stairs are narrow and as shown in the picture below, when people move out of a house the moving of furniture is done through the window down a moving ladder.

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After lunch our friends took us on a little tour to reacquaint us with Brussels. We went through several of Brussels’ districts. Each of the districts, or communes, has a distinctive flavor. The architecture is quite diverse - classic but also Art Nouveau and Art Deco buildings.

Actually Brussels is the capital city of the Art Nouveau world. Victor Horta (1861-1947) was the Belgian architect who was one of the earliest initiators of Art Nouveau. He built some of the most remarkable pioneering buildings in that style in Brussels. Below is a postcard showing the staircase in the Horta museum – which we did not have time to visit.

Postcard of Horta’s House staircase (now the Horta Museum)
- (photo courtesy Evrard and Bastin.)

As we drove I could not stop taking pictures of all the remarkable buildings we passed by. The car was stopped briefly so I could take a better picture of the building below. I just love that circular window in the center.

There are more than 1200 Art Nouveau buildings in Brussels on which to feast one’s eyes. They are all quite varied – large and small, from little town houses to large department stores. I can understand why many French architects came to Brussels to get inspiration.




We found a spot to park near the Grand’ Place and walked to the Place. I could write a whole post just on the Grand’ Place of Brussels. It is on the prestigious list of World Heritage of Humanity and it merits it. It is the most beautiful city square in Europe. It is an assortment of public and private buildings from the seventeenth century. The history of this place dates back to the middle ages. The original Town Hall in the place was completed in 1455. Many of the buildings were burnt in 1695 by order of Louis XIV, king of France, then rebuilt later.




My pictures don’t give a good idea of the majesty and beauty of this unique place. The two postcards below show the Grand’Place at night and when it is covered with a flower carpet. Every two years, on August 15, the place is covered with a carpet made up of a million begonias.




As we walked up the Grand’ Place I took pictures looking inside courtyards, looking up façades or looking down at the cobblestone pavement.





Too much to photograph! including the mounted police and horses.




Around the Grand’ Place are narrow streets with many restaurants for tourists. It was middle of the afternoon so the restaurants were almost empty, apart from a couple who seemed to enjoy their tall glass of beer and mussels.




But there was more walking to be done – not too fast as the cobblestones are not very soft on the feet.

Riding on the TGV Train No. 9321 to Brussels, Belgium

After celebrating May 1st with my cousins, we left in the evening to stay at a small Paris hotel near the Gare du Nord station. Our room in the Hotel Maubeuge was small, but clean, with a bizarre décor scheme. We were on the top floor and had a nice window where we could even see the Eiffel Tower in the distance. I took several pictures as the sun went down.

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I forgot to take a picture of our room but found another one on the hotel web site. We stayed in this hotel because it is walking distance to the station which made it easy the next morning to catch our train.

In the morning it rained for about 10 minutes, which was the only rain we experienced the whole time we were in Paris. We stopped at a café for a small breakfast. I had the best croissant – very fresh, crusty and authentic – yum! I think the café was called “Le Chalet du Nord.” We then walked to the Gare du Nord, which I found a lot cleaner than I remembered.



When I worked in Paris I stayed at my parents’ apartment but on the week-ends I would walk to the Gare du Nord and take the train to the suburban town where they lived named St-Leu-la-Forêt (20 kms from the center of Paris or 12.5 miles.) . Before that I also rode the train when I went to school in Paris after high school. Even before that, when I lived in St Leu, I rode the train to go to high school. The train station was about 15 minutes from home and luckily it was a walk downhill. I remember many mornings when I could hear the train approaching (it was a steam train then and made much noise and would also blow its whistle) and I would start a sprint to the station. I have a postcard of the station. It looked pretty much the same when I went to high school in the 50s as in this vintage card – well, almost. I found another picture of the station on the Net showing how it looks now.



My high school was in Enghien-les-Bains, another suburban town from Paris - about 12 kms from my home or 7.5 miles, but the train took about 20 minutes. It is a very pretty town, with a large lake and the only casino close to Paris. My high school was bordering the lake – I found a picture of my high school in winter.




The trains then were slow and used steam. I think they changed over to electric engines in the late 60s. Below are the types of trains I would ride then.


Previous to all these times, when I was a child, we would take the train at the Gare St Lazare in Paris to visit my grandparents in another little suburban town called Courbevoie. I have used trains for many a year. I do not have a picture of the Gare St Lazare but Claude Monet painted it.

La Gare St Lazare by Claude Monet, French, 1840-1926

When I would come back from my high school I sometimes would have to wait for a train to return home. I would look at all the beautiful posters lining the station and dreamed of those faraway places. Many posters said “Visitez…” which means “come and visit… “ Apart from Poland and the Czech Republic, I visited all those pictured below.

I also visited all those below and some, like Italy, several times.



The first time I went to England, when I was 13 (December 1953), I met a small group at the station in Paris where we took a train to Dieppe, then a ferry to Folkestone, then boarded an English train going to London. The English train had more comfortable seats, in velvet, and attendants would come and serve tea.

A English Southern Railway boat train (courtesy N.E. Norman)

There are several other stations in Paris. One of my favorites is the Gare de Lyon with trains going south. It is a classic station built in 1900 for the World Exposition.

Vintage postcard of the Gare de Lyon, Paris

Starting in 1957, I went to Italy four times on vacation during the month of August. I would catch the overnight train to Milan then connect with an Italian train going to the Adriatic Coast. I had to get my ticket and reservation a long time in advance because a huge number of Parisians took the train to points south around the 1st August. Sometimes I would get a “couchette” which was a bench where I could lay down. If not I was in a compartment with 6 other people. There was a small corridor outside of the compartment, as shown below. I would also go to the dining car for dinner, usually the second seating.

During the night we would be awaken when we went through Switzerland. The train would stop and the Customs Agents would get in. If we had time and I saw some vendors on the platform, I would run and buy some Swiss chocolate. It was a long trip then but now the SNCF, the French Railroad Company, has very fast trains which they call TGV. This stands for Train à Grande Vitesse, or literally 'train with a very fast speed.' We took a TGV to Marseille in November 2009 and it took only 3 hours from Paris. It is a distance of 489 miles, or 783 kms, which is a little more than the distance between New York City and Columbus, Ohio - in 3 hours!

French TGV train Marseille-Paris

To return to our trip on that Monday 2nd May, 2011, we reached the Gare du Nord with almost an hour to spare. Our train was listed on the sixth line below, 10:01 to Bruxelles-Midi, train 9321 (Brussels, Belgium, Midi station.)

We walked around the station, bought some magazines and I took pictures. My husband bought the New York Herald Tribune to read some news – it said that Osama Ben Laden had been found and killed, which we did not know.




But we finally boarded our train and sat in our comfortable red seats.



This TGV train was going quite fast. I tried to take some pictures but they did not come out sharp at all. We were going through fields and small towns. We passed several rivers and lakes.




We left Paris, France at 10:01 am and arrived at the Midi station in Brussels, Belgium at 11:20 am, or a trip of 1 hour and 20 minutes. If we had taken a flight, when you consider going to the airport in advance, boarding the plane, the flight, then deplaning, it would have taken much longer.



On an another note, we had been considering taking the train from Atlanta to New Orleans. I checked this week and found one train, called the Crescent, leaving Atlanta daily at 8:38 am and arriving in New Orleans at 7:38 pm, or a trip of 12 hours. The distance is about 469 miles – 754 kms – which is less than the distance Paris Marseille (489 M/783 kms) taking only 3 hours on the TGV. In addition, there are many trains going to either Brussels or Marseille during the day. There is only one train going to New Orleans in a southern direction and then back to Washington, DC and on to New York City going north. Just one train for a population in greater Atlanta of 5,475,213 (2009 census.) The whole country of New Zealand has a population of 4,315,000 and more than one train. There are no other trains in Atlanta going anywhere else, that's it.



In my next post I’ll explain why we went to Brussels and who we met there (we had a great time!)

Arriving at the Brussels train station

Eating Le Brie (cheese) while in La Brie (region) on May 1st

La Brie is a historic region of France close to Paris. It is a region just like Brittany, Normandy or Provence. My cousin has been living there all her life. We stayed with her and her husband when we arrived in France at the end of last April. She lives in a little town close to Melun, the larger town in the region. The region of Brie is about 50 kms (31 miles) from Paris between the rivers Seine and the Marne and covers about 5,000 square kilometers. The people are called “Briards” (masc) and “Briardes” (fem.)

Map showing the Brie region (from Wikipedia)

There is a feeling of being in the country there as the landscape still is an area of large fields, forests and small villages. There are beautiful castles close by too like Vaux-le-Vicomte.

Postcard of a watercolor by P. Riviere

I wrote a post in December 2009 about Vaux-le-Vicomte castle and took many pictures – you can see them here. I loved to go to visit my cousins when I was growing up as I felt we were going far away from Paris as we drove down little roads. Now there are freeways and the RER metro line and it is almost a suburb area for Paris. But the old farms are still there close to the fields.

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The name “Brie” is well known, not because of the area “La région de la Brie” but for its cheese, “le fromage le Brie.” It has a long history there – Emperor Charlemagne (742-814 AD) tasted the cheese in a small Brie village in 774 and this was duly noted. Later, Louis XVI’s (1754-1793) last wish before going to the guillotine was to get a final taste of Brie cheese. In 1814 the Prince of Talleyrand brought the cheese to the Congress of Vienna. This Brie de Meaux was awarded first prize and was declared “Le Roi des Fromages” (The King of Cheeses.) There are several Brie cheeses made in the Brie region – they take their names from the names of the cities where they are made. See below.




Now, all over the world different Brie cheeses are sold: light Brie, herbed varieties, double cream or made with other types of milk. The French government officially certified only two types of cheese to be sold under that name : Brie de Meaux and Brie de Melun. This certification is called “Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée (AOC)” which means “controlled designation of origin.” This is not a brand or a registered trademark – it is a certification that the product has been produced under a rigorous set of defined standards – in a traditional manner with ingredients from specifically classified producers in a designated area. Under French law you cannot call a cheese “Brie” if it was not produced in that region. It is the same for wine – Champagnes are produced in the Champagne region, Bordeaux wines in the Bordeaux region and so on. Certainly you would not call a wine a “California” wine if it had been produced in Michigan. Brie cheeses produced in California or Canada are not genuine and don’t taste the same as the real thing (I know – I have tasted them all.) There are many other cheeses in France with this AOC certification, like Roquefort, Camembert, Port Salut, etc.

Postcard showing some of France's cheeses

Because of all these cheeses, a quote from General De Gaulle is well known: “How can anyone govern a nation that has two hundred and forty-six varieties of cheese? “ (Charles de Gaulle.) That was then but now France produces more types of cheeses, between 350 and 400 or so. About 40 of them have the AOC certification. My cousin always has a great selection when we visit her.

The Sunday after watching The Wedding (see last post) it was May 1st. My cousin’s husband went to the florist early and surprised us with some lily of the valley to bring us happiness for the rest of the year – according to the French custom. (I wrote a post on this, see it here.) We went to the balcony so I could take a picture of it.




My cousin placed her lily of the valley in a little vase.




Then we went to the market to buy some fresh vegetables, fruits and cheeses bien sûr ! (of course.) Below is my cousin buying some cheese.



My cousin is a gourmet cook. The largest meal of the day at her home is lunch. The evening meal is very light. That Sunday we had some delicious scallops with fresh herbs on tender spaghetti for lunch, accompanied by a beautifully balanced rosé wine.




We ended the meal with the “plat de fromages“ an assortment of cheeses – she had at least 3 types of Brie – de Meaux, de Melun and de Provins – all this accompanied by a great Champagne (they usually go to the producer and buy a quantity of bottles.)




In the family it is well known that I like cheese. I have been brought up on cheese, really. I read in my mother’s memoirs where she said that while living in Provence with her parents soon after I was born (my father was in the war) she would sew dresses or make alterations to clothes for many farmers in the area. She was not paid but received each week a couple of eggs and some cheese to feed me. When she went away to another town to work my grandparents fed me mostly goat cheese that they obtained from the local shepherds.

My grandmother and me around 1942 in Vaison-la-Romaine

When I was about 3 or 4 I went back to Paris with my mother - food was scarce. The French were given ration books to obtain food, clothes and other necessities. Often even with the ration tickets food, like meat, was not available, and from 1940 to 1944 many ration tickets were left unused. I ate mostly cheese because everyone in the family gave my mother their cheese ration tickets to feed me. Below is a ration book and ration tickets.

The tickets above are for bread – 100 grams per day or approx 3.75 ounces – bread made from a mixture of corn, beans, rice and other grains and not tasty. For cheese the ration was 6 grams per day or 0.211 ounces. I rarely ate meat and when offered some could not eat it well. I read that France had ration books until 1948 (bread 1949.) So my eating cheese goes way back. After coming to the US in the 60s, I went back to France many times, about every other year at first, then every year and starting in 1984 when my mother became ill I flew to Paris about two or 3 times a year until 2002 – a total of perhaps 46 to 52 times till 2002 (Unfortunately I went back home not as a tourist so I rarely took pictures of Paris.) My mother, paralyzed, had the meals on wheels service so there was no cooking at home. I bought different cheeses, a baguette and a good bottle of wine - that was my dinner when I visited her.




For the evening meal of this 1st of May, we just had some “charcuterie” (paté and local sausages) and some cheese, too.

During the day the florist rang twice bringing flowers sent to my cousins from their daughters who live in other parts of France. The first bouquet was an assortment of lily of the valley with pink flowers – I don’t know their names.




The second bouquet was an assortment of pale roses and lily of the valley.




My cousin was pleased to display them in the dining room.



It certainly had been a happy 1st of May.

Postcard of a watercolor by Thierry Gaudry called Cidre Briard et Brie de Coulommiers