Magrilless

One of our goals for this year was to do things differently than we’ve become accustomed. In that vein…

Here is our washer

And our dryer

We’ve been doing a lot of map-gazing; cartography is a universal language. Green square: playground potential! Yellow road: highway to be avoided. Lots of crossed and crowded skinny roads: pedestrian heaven with interesting architecture. So we decided to just follow these zigzags and hope they led us somewhere interesting.

What we found was initially a vertical neighborhood, where your garage is a couple flights of stairs below your house and you toot your car horn before every hairpin.

It turned into Monte Rosso, a protected park with trees and trees and trees and ferns and grasses and moss and old stone walls and trees and bushes and everything evocative of fairie peoples and magic.

And then the trail burst into a village of stone and secrets and streets so narrow even the scooters had to park in the town parking lot.

Every building in Cavandone is constructed of the same stone. Every alley you turn down is completely the same and completely different than the one you were just in. It felt like we stepped right into David Macaulay’s PBS movie Castle (remember that one, and Cathedral, Annalise?).

But wait; there’s more! The trail kept going! Through orchards with more beehives than we have fingers and toes. Through hedged tunnels that were dark and cool. Through walled passes with gates and arches. Past sweeping properties looming over the lake.

Until we finally found our way back to our favorite gelateria and home. I’d say this was a hike unlike anything we’ve done in the US. Yay for map-gazing!

We are in Italy! We took a plane from Brussels to Milan, a train from Milan to Stresa, a boat from Stresa across Lake Maggiore, and a hike from the shore up 300m to our hillside apartment. A full day of all sorts of travel!

Our first couple days here have been astonishingly pleasant. We’ve walked the cool shadowed neighborhoods down by the lake.

We’ve discovered plants and crops and huge fecund garden plots along our steep one lane road. (Seriously, we have to put our feet sideways to not have our toes run over when a car passes.) (And seriously, these gardens are iiiiiiiinsane!)

But mostly we’ve beached it up!

And then in the afternoon we get gelato.

Pretty good living in Italy!

Well, we’ve said goodbye to French-speaking countries for this summer. And. We. Loved. Belgium. We got a very comfortable routine down over the 2 weeks we spent in and around Namur.

We figured out how to stash our grocery bags when we go shopping. We learned the names of the 3 most common bourdons here (bombus terrestris, bombus lapidarius, bombus Pepsi cola — ok, we almost learned 3 names).

We got used to saying bonjour to every person we passed on the street, and started replying merci even to each other.

We can recognize a patisserie a block away, and no longer raise our eyebrows at 2 dudes having beers in the park at 10 AM. Tall skinny houses with long skinny walled backyards could be apartments, doctors’ offices, or fiduciaries, no matter what is next door.

We got used to river traffic: taxis, tour boats, pleasure craft, barges flying international flags with dogs and kids and the family car on board.

Tessa made friends with some kids within 5 minutes of arriving at a playground, language differences be damned. And Maggie discovered a new burgeoning obsession with comics and role-playing games (if she asks “please can we learn Warhammer” one more time…).

Mostly we just felt healthy and happy and welcomed. Merci, Belgium. Until we meet again!

P.S. There were things we didn’t like as tourists, and no country is perfect to its residents either. For one thing, there was a ton of litter, despite there being an enormous number of available trash cans. The river constantly had trash floating in it, and playgrounds seemed almost perilous at times. Also the traffic noise was great. Unmufflered scooters and sirens and trash trucks combined with narrow canyons of brick and asphalt created a definite and close to constant din. No sleeping with the windows open. And bathrooms: where do Belgians pee besides their own homes? Thank goodness our town had a university where we just occasionally let ourselves in. If anyone asked, we could just say Bill was a professor on sabbatical. Generally speaking, though, it was easy to travel and assimilate into the culture for a short time. I guess we were just a good fit!

We hopped a little train for a day in the big city. In our last major city (Paris), we went pretty art heavy; mostly the girls indulged us. This time we went in a bit of a different direction. First stop: the museum of comics!

Did you know Tintin isn’t the only famous Belgian comic character?? There’s also Smurfs!! Their name in French is hilarious (schtroumpf), but makes me wonder if it actually means something, otherwise why would there be a translation into English? Such a great word – I’m going to start using it all the time! And I’d forgotten how funny those little guys actually are!

The museum was in French and Dutch, so we only really gleaned information from the wordless comics. (Check out Dickie Boerke. He’s pretty funny.) But there were lots of opportunities for fun candid shots.

And they have a free library of comic books with an English section. So cool!

We stopped at the Grand Place for a picnic lunch (yeah, mostly chocolates). There was unfortunately lots of construction-y type activity going on in the middle of the square (maybe a big concert – stage, lighting, etc), so we might have missed out on some of the grandeur. But geez, what a lot of imposing architecture and gilding.

Next on our agenda was the Sewer Museum. Yes, you read that right. We failed in our attempts at Paris’s catacombs, so we thought we might do some other gross underground activity.

It was actually pretty fascinating and educational (plus there was an English guide for kids). The Senn River was bricked in and diverted under the city; it was almost dizzying to watch it flow past us in the darkness down there. And then the sewer sewer – it’s totally what you think it would be like! We absolutely did see a rat “in the wild,” and all that other stuff you would expect and find hilarious if you were less than 10 years old.

Look at us down there! We were chaaaaaaaanged!

Waffles with strawberries and whipped cream and the famous peeing boy rounded out our day’s adventure before we picnicked on the train home.

I have only one more thing to say: Schtroumpf!