Up is down

Having made incredibly good time from Ostend to IJmuiden, we decided not to stop there but to continue on to Amsterdam. First we waited about an hour for the sun to rise behind the clouds so that we could see what we were doing. Then we headed straight for the lock on the North Sea Canal. After only a very short wait, the bridge opened to let us into the lock, and we tied off like pros. Suddenly John noticed that we were going down. After the Panama Canal and the lock at Ostend and based on our intuition, we expected to go up to go inland. But, no, we're in the Netherlands (which means low country) and they call it that for a reason.

So as I write this, we're motoring toward Amsterdam, below sea level, and we've finally arrived in Holland.

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Continuing on

It looks like today is the day we finally start the last leg to the Netherlands. Whoopee!

VMMK, an awesome museum

Ostend has a museum of modern art that is known by its initials, VMMK (Provinciaal Museum voor Moderne Kunst). It’s a good thing that the weather kept us here longer or we would have missed it, and that would have been too bad. We went yesterday and were amazed at how good it is and how large. All of the artists seem to be Belgian, and most are from West Flanders, the province we’re in. It was really awesome. If you like modern art and are going to be in Belgium, we recommend this as a side trip. You can get some idea of it from their website.

The gale warnings are gone from the British shipping forecast for our area, but significant gusts are still predicted, so we’re staying one more day.

Extending our Ostend stay

This is the day we had thought we would leave Belgium for the Netherlands. The North Sea weather forecasts, however, indicate that we should stay where we are for a couple more days. We’re comfortable here, and you can’t beat the convenience of the location, so we’re fine with that.

Having enjoyed the waterzooi so much, we used Google to find more Flemish recipes. There’s an interesting site called Recipes from Belgium. (It's plain HTML, so it loads quickly, which is good for us.) John has been admiring the veal at the grocery store, so he picked a Flemish veal stew for his encore. Tomorrow night I’m going to make meatloaf.

It’s good to use the stove and oven because then we don’t need the furnace as much. Our family tells us it’s been hot in Oregon, but it certainly hasn’t been here. I think we only had one day in the past week that didn’t have some rain. We’re hoping for an Indian summer (I wonder what the Dutch call that) because if the rain starts in August and continues until spring, it’s going to be a very long winter.

Waterzooi

John has been instant messaging with our friend Jeffrey in the SF Bay area. We traveled to Brussels in 2004 with Jeffrey and his partner, Karan, and one of the highlights of that trip was dinner at a Flemish-style restaurant. Three of the four of us had waterzooi with chicken. (I had something else equally yummy.) Anyway, Jeffrey reminded John about that dinner, so John looked up some recipes on Google, and tonight we had a wonderful Belgian dinner served with a Pinot Gris from Alsace.

John used a combination of Rachel Ray’s waterzooi recipe on Foodnetwork and the Homebrew Chef’s recipe. Since Flemish cooking traditionally uses beer, we figure the Homebrew Chef’s recipe is a bit more authentic, and John definitely used good Belgian beer in his version. We had broth left over, so tomorrow John is going to add some potatoes and fish, and we’ll have another wonderful dinner.

Bruges and Ostend

As promised, today we returned to Bruges. First on the agenda was climbing the bell tower to view the city. This was a serious bit of exercise, but the view was worth it. They charge you to do this, so we used our second-to-the-last prepaid stamp on it. The last one we used on the Arentshuis, a small museum showing the works of the artist Frank Brangwyn. We’d never heard of him either, but he died in 1956, so we figured the works would be more secular than those in the church museums. We weren’t disappointed.

The train stations in both Ostend and Bruges were oddly quiet at 9 a.m. on a Friday, and our train tickets were at the reduced weekend rate. When we tried to go grocery shopping upon our return to Ostend, we learned that it was a national holiday. We had to look it up on the Internet, though, to find out what holiday. Any Catholics or lapsed Catholics reading this probably know, it’s Assumption Day. Not being Catholic, I had to look up what Assumption Day was after I found out that was the holiday. Except for the grocery store closing early and everyone sleeping in this morning, it seemed to be a pretty normal start of a long weekend. For a change the weather has been gorgeous. That’s supposed to change tomorrow.

Bruges, Brussels, and back to Bruges

Buildings along market square in Brugge

We’ve been very busy the past two days. Yesterday we went to Bruges on the bus and did the first part of a walking tour. When we got there, we bought a pass to five museums. It only took one to discover that we weren’t going to be able to do all five in one day. The pass doesn’t let us skip ahead in line, and the lines are long for the most popular places. It’s summer and Bruges is a famous medieval city. So we’re going back tomorrow. This time we’re taking the train. Our bus ride took more than an hour, and it was interesting to go through the little towns along the way, but the train only takes 13 minutes, and we’ve already seen those little towns.

Today we went to Brussels. In 2004 when we visited there with Jeffrey and Karan, we really liked the fine arts museum, especially the modern art part, and wanted to return. We found an excursion through the Belgian railway for round-trip train fare plus the Royal Museum of Fine Art and the Musical Instrument Museum for €20 each. Since normal round-trip train fare mid-week is almost €30, it was a good deal.

We bought a five-day pass for Flemish buses and trams before we went to Bruges, so we’re going to do more exploring around here over the weekend. There’s a world music festival going on in a neighboring town on Saturday, so we’ll go see what that’s about, and there’s also a modern art museum right here in Ostend that we haven’t seen.

A note about spelling: Everything here has at least two spellings (Dutch and French), and most have three (something different for English). For example, the English spelling where we are is Ostend, Dutch is Oostende, and French is Ostende. Then there’s Brussels/Brussel/Bruxelles (English/Dutch/French). So if it looks like I’m misspelling something, maybe I’m just being multilingual.