sprocket i/o

The weekend started out innocently enough – sitting in a pub off the main square of Mons, having drinks with my wife, and two co-workers, Paul and Mounir. Paul is a native Belgian, so he offered a lot of insight into how things work here when it comes to daily living, taxes, insurance, etc. One interesting quirk about insurance in Belgium is that if you are commuting to or from work, any injuries are covered by your employers insurance, rather than your own. It’s basically workers comp.

On Saturday morning, Dallas and I headed toward Parc de Tervuren, on the recommendation of one of her local friends, to do some photography. Tervuren is a dutch speaking town just east of Brussels (see map of sites in this blog entry). The center of the Parc is the Royal Museum for Central Africa. Here is a photo of Dallas and I outside of the museum:

We wandered around the park for about 90 minutes, capturing some very pretty tree and snow scenes, as well as bird species that were new to us, such as Mandarin Ducks:

In the freezing cold, our fingers went stiff, and the shutter on Dallas’s Nikon D50 ceased to work properly altogether. We evacuated the park and instead went into the nice warm museum.

The museum had plenty of history to it, much of it centered around the Congo Free State. The history of it is more interesting than I expected — it was initially founded by a company run by a corporation owned by the king of Belgium at the time, King Leopold. The hope was to turn the colony into a center for rubber production, but instead of harvesting rubber, they collected the severed hands of the people who were unable to meet the rubber quotas. The exhibit glossed over the bloodiest bits of this reign, but all told, millions of natives died during it.

We ended up spending some hours in the museum, much of it enjoying their wonderful café, where I have had some of the best food in Belgium yet! The next destination was Media Markt, which can best be described as Europe’s answer to Fry’s in the US. I wish someone told me about this place before I got here, because it was fantastic! We went to their downtown location, but not before dropping the car off at our house and taking public transit in, to avoid traffic and parking issues. We bought $50 worth of power converters, power cords, and power strips. Enough that I was finally able to put our wireless network up at home again! Like most stores in this part of town, it was absolutely crazy jam-packed on a Saturday, and closed on Sundays. After this, we wandered to the Flagey area of town, where we shared a bottle of fantastic white wine and some yummy greek food.

Sunday morning I dropped my rental car off at the airport. This was a particularly exasperating experience, as I was unable to find any pumps open on a Sunday morning that accepted Visa or American Express. Quite a few places here only accept bank smartcards, I assume because the fees are less than typical Visa cards. This surprise gets worse if you end up in an unattended metro station, as they only accept euro coins (not bills) and bank cards! It ended up that I had to give in and return the car with a mostly empty tank. I hope my company will still reimburse me

Afterwards I met Dallas off of the Abbey tram stop, and walked over to La Balmoral, a very tacky 1950′s America style diner in Ixelles. We were here to meet the Brussels Brunch Club, a group of expats who meet together once a month for coffee and food in the Brussels area. We met people there from Toronto, New York, Brazil, Bulgaria, Nigera, and England. They provided a lot of feedback on what to look for in apartments here in Brussels. You cannot assume anything here, it seems. Many apartments have no ovens, showers, bath tubs, washer/dryer connections, freezers, ice boxes, and none have closets. I hope in our budget, that we will at least find one with a toilet! The brunch club was a very talkative group, and I look forward to meeting up with them again next month!

We were supposed to go to the Arts-Loi metro station to meet up with the The Brussels New in Town Meetup Group, but instead got into the car of this crazy Bulgarian guy named Nikolai, who we just met at Balmoral. He wanted to go to the meetup as well, but he had his car, so we figured we’d skip the metro station and head out to the intended destination, the René Magritte Museum. Magritte was well known for his awesome surrealistic artwork, which you can see more of with Google Images.

On the way there, traffic came to a stop. We found ourselves in the midst of the largest protest I have ever seen. People waving flags and banners were coming from all directions.

Little did we know at the time, but we were surrounded by 30,000 to 50,000 protestors. Officially they were showing their solidarity with the Palestinian government, but the posters were mostly showing how upset they were with the Israeli invasion of Gaza (Operation Cast Lead). While some 890 Palestnian’s and 13 Israeli’s have died in the conflict, the crowd seemed to be most focused on the children that have been killed.

I hope that a peaceful end to the conflict comes soon. Both sides have a lot of work to do in that regard. One thing I did find a bit weird was the random local socialist and communist groups who joined in with their own banners:

I hope your weekend was as filled with excitement as ours was! More photos are at my Picasaweb albums