Les voyages

I haven't posted in a while; having Maggie and the kids around for holidays has kept me too busy to sit at the computer for long. We did a fair amount of travelling during the two weeks we had off together, and I spent a few days in Provence this week (this is a picture of a me visiting a famous bridge in Avignon), and just returned yesterday.

Maggie has already blogged three times about our Easter holiday; I'm including links to her posts in this one so that you can read her eloquent descriptions of our adventures. In brief, we went to Edinburgh for three days to stay with Rob and Viki Freeland (see Maggie's posts here and here) then came back to Belgium for the rest of the first week. We socialized a bit with our neighbors and celebrated a birthday of Duncan's friend. I went to Liège to see the opening performance of Lalo's Le Roi d'Ys, which was lovely, and had a rising young Canadian soprano playing one of the leads. The story was based on an old Breton legend, and the music was stirring and quite beautiful.

My post-show euphoria didn't last long, however: although I left the opera promptly at 22:30, I was astonished to discover that there were no more trains back to Brussels! After a frustrated and disbelieving search through the train schedules, I decided to stay over in a hotel near the station and take a 7:00 train home the next day.

I arrived home rather wearied from the night's adventures, only to pack while Maggie picked up the rental car (a nice mid-size Mercedes diesel). We left around noon and set off for Hamburg to visit with Max and Séverine, our friends whom we had met during their visit to Canada in 2006. They have recently built a beautiful eco-house in Bad Bramstedt, near Hamburg, and are expecting their first child shortly. Here's Maggie's post for more.

On the way home from Hamburg we went for a late breakfast/lunch with Séverine's father Walter, whom we also had met in 2006. Walter showed us around his beautifully finished home and garden in Ebstorf. He is a musician and retired schoolteacher with a passion for classical music, so while we shared an elaborate German style breakfast to the sound of opera arias, we had plenty of time to catch up while the boys had fun climbing trees and looking at the goldfish in his outdoor garden pond.

While driving back into Belgium, we passed through the Netherlands, and imagine our surprise when while scanning through the radio dial, we heard the sound of Steve Patterson hosting CBD radio one's "The Debaters". The topic? Minor league hockey.

For a moment we were all reminded of weekend car trips home from the cottage, and after our cheering subsided, we realized that we had picked up a transmission from the Canadian contingent of the AFNORTH base near Aachen, on the German/Belgian border. It didn't last long, but we felt pretty good for hearing it, since our only source for Canadian culture these days is the online newspaper editions of the Globe, Star and (gulp) National Post, along with occasional visits to McLeans online. I wonder if I can get an international subscription to the Walrus?

It's funny, but Maggie had applied previously to the school at AFNORTH, and recently visited their school and met with some colleagues. While the schools are beautiful, the teachers positive and the students well behaved, some people never leave the base and its enclave of familiar US culture; the big bases have department stores with all of the familiar products, and you can almost pretend you haven't left your native soil. Seems kind of twilight zone-ish to me; isn't the whole point of an international career the new adventures you have, getting to know the new country and its people? In that sense we are lucky that things have worked out as they did...

Then we passed into Belgium, and saw a sign written in Flemish by the side of the road... I remarked to Maggie that it was great to see a familiar language at last!

We spent the rest of our holiday socializing, with our neighbors and then on the final weekend with some of Maggie's colleagues, at a restaurant called Chez Leon, in the rue des bouchers just steps from the Grand'place. Duncan ordered the moules frites, and surprisingly ate them all; I guess he's really starting to adapt to the Belgian lifestyle.

This week saw us return to the normal routine of school and work, although for me that routine was to be short-lived, as I headed south to Provence for an audition in Avignon. I flew to Nimes, and from there took the train to Avignon, and was struck by the fields of grapevines, purple flowering trees and chocolate-brown tilled earth on one side of the track, and the craggy, misty mountains that rose on the other side.

The colours in Provence seem to be drawn from an entirely different palette than I am used to seeing in Canada, or in Brussels. Everything seems sepia-shaded, with a warmth that oozes from the stones, the bleached terra-cotta roofs of the houses, the faces of the inhabitants, and the soil. It's like an old photograph come to life, although instead of looking worn-out or thin, Provence is old - yet lively - the way an old leather jacket is old; lived in, creased and distressed yet exceedingly comfortable.

The opera house was quite beautiful both inside and out, made of the same stone as much of the surrounding buildings. I toured the inner part of the city by foot, something that is very easy to do because of the human scale of these old places: unlike a new city, it actually is possible to walk across the old town in a matter of half an hour. The palace of the Avignon popes is an intriguing part of history, a monument to a time in the fourteenth century when Avignon, not Rome, was the heart of the Catholic church.


I arrived at the opera house in the afternoon, and met with the accompanist while the dress rehearsal for Rigoletto was going on. It was exciting to be there while the costumed cast ran up and down stairs, humming their bits, and I was energized for the run-through of my pieces. The accompanist and I got on well, and we talked a little bit about France, Brussels, and Canada; I was complimented, in fact, on my Brussels accent! It's not surprising, since Brussels French is what I'm hearing daily. I must say that it's great to be able to converse freely and confidently in my adopted language.

The audition went well, and it was a pleasure to sing in the historic theatre. Afterwards I relaxed in the hotel, ate a picnic lunch and started to think about the journey home.

That started fairly early the next morning. My train left Avignon at 9:00 and arrived in Nimes about a half an hour later, and as I had a bit more than an hour before the bus left for the Nimes airport, I took a walk from the station towards the city centre, and soon saw the most famous landmark of Nimes, the amphitheatre, which dates from the second century. It was built just a few years after the colosseum in Rome, and is the best preserved of perhaps 230 Roman stadiums that survive.


I climbed up to the top and was greeted with a dramatic view of the city. The Arènes of Nîmes is built in an oval shape 133m long, 101m wide and 21m high, seats 24,000 spectators, and because of its many corridors and exits allows for the stadium to empty of spectators in about four minutes! These passages are called vomitoria as they allow spectators to "spew" out of the stadium at a high rate of speed, and not because of any literal meaning, although there would likely be some queasy stomachs after some of the gladitorial combats. Let me put it this way: the word arena comes from the Latin word harēna, which means sand, and there was lots of it on the floor of the amphitheatre to sop up the blood. Yikes.

I didn't have much time to see anything else in Nimes, and in fact was just in time to take one of the last seats on the bus to the airport. From this point on the journey home was pretty tedious, beset with delays, starting with an hour on the runway waiting for a window to take off, continuing with another hour's delay taking the bus from Charleroi to Brussels Midi station, and culminating with another delay on the Louisa streetcar home. As it was, I checked out of the hotel in Avignon at 8:30 AM, and walked in the door at 6:30 PM in time for a nice dinner of steak frites that Maggie had prepared. I guess I have nothing to complain about, although I was pretty tired, but I was glad to be home.

Until next time...