On vacation in Ottignies / Bousval

Balloons over the treeline

Balloon tree and cloud textures

flame on

a dream of rainbows

Last night was a beautiful quiet night, and after our lunchtime guests Raoul and Louisa left to return to Brussels we were relaxing on the patio, and heard the roaring of the hot air balloon igniters coming from the field across the road.  Sure enough several hot air balloons were soon floating over the house and out over the valley. It was a magical moment that marks the end of a wonderful holiday here.

We've had visits from a number of friends, and a good share of campfire time.  There has really been no major interest in television or video games or even recorded music for that matter, but instead quite a bit of book reading has gone on, as well as playing cards and board games, cooking and so on.

But before we describe our time here in the country, we need to pick up where we left off and fill in one piece that came after our visit to Orval on the 29th of June, but before we came to the country...

Back home in Brussels, we took advantage of the first Wednesday of the month of July to take the boys and Maggie to see the Art Nouveau Museum.  This is something I've been wanting to visit since it opened over a year ago, and we were not disappointed.  Most of the museums in Brussels are free on the afternoon of the first Wednesday of the month, so we were also happy to save a little dough!

Maggie has recently completed an embroidery project that took her about 25 months' work, and is an adaptation of an Alphonse Mucha piece depicting 'evening contemplation', part of a tetraptych (how's THAT for a ninety-eight-cent word?) of the times of the day, originally painted and printed in 1899.

 

Fantastically, there are a many art nouveau works presented in the musee fin de siecle but only four Mucha posters, and guess which ones were there?  The Times of Day, including the one that she had chosen.  A wonderful coincidence!

Now she has washed and ironed the piece; it needs only to be sewn onto a piece of masonite, and then we have to find a suitable frame.  I will do some searching among the antique stores and brocantes, but we also have access to a number of good framers around the city who should be able to do such a beautiful embroidery justice.

There are so many lovely things to see at this museum, I plan to go back again and again.  I won't bother to post any more than a couple of our photos but you can see the collection here:

http://www.fin-de-siecle-museum.be/en/the-musee-fin-de-siecle-museum

Some photos of our museum visit:

A portrait of the Belgian revolution, in the lobby of the main museum

Verheyden's "The Dragonfly"

Rodin's "The Thinker"

Meunier's "The Valkyrie"

One section of the exhibition was focussed on the Brussels Wagner Society, so there were posters and photographs of famous opera singers of the time, lots of maquettes of the set designs of Wagner operas, and a lot of sculpture and painting that we inspired by or referred to Wagner's music.  I was surprised to learn that a lot of Wagner's operas had their premieres in Brussels at La Monnaie, because of the great interest that the Belgian Wagner Society had in his work.

Mucha's "Nature"

It was a fantastic visit; we were in the first throes of the canicule or heat wave, so walking around inside a climate-controlled museum at the height of the day was a good idea.  Afterwards we walked down to the Grand' Place and treated ourselves to frites and Malcolm and Duncan each bought a new comic book, and Malcolm a new vinyl record.

But now, back to our time in the country.

Here are some pictorial samples of some of the activities we have enjoyed over the last couple of weeks...

dad finally gets some hammock time

Bonifacio-style thin crust pizza with egg on the barbie

running through the sprinkler on a hot day

I never knew chickens could climb trees, but Larry, Curly and Moe seem to be able to...

catch (aka "Osa in the middle")

casualty of window

art class al fresco

cribbage

risk (round three)

multitasking

studying up for Dungeons and Dragons

great lunches with salad, grilled meats, pita chips, guacamole and rose wine

berry picking and jam making with Mike and Joyce Hill

reading by kerosene lamp by the campfire

up next: road trip to Gelsenkirchen, and the second half of our holiday in Bousval/Ottignies...

Orval

We were on our way home after deciding not to visit the Centre Pompidou-Metz, and suddenly realized that we were about to pass relatively close to the Rochefort Abbey, which I have blogged about visiting before, as part of a tour of abbeys for organ concerts and beer tastings back in March of 2010 (http://matthewzadow.blogspot.be/2010/03/abbeys-tour-in-ardennes.html).  Maggie hadn't attended that tour, so we thought Rochefort would be good to see, but then I noticed that as we were approaching the southernmost parts of Belgium, Orval Abbey was also close by.  This won out for our choice of en route stopover, and we weren't disappointed.

Maggie spotted this old green Triumph convertible near the entrance, and we posted for a shot or two.  Since we moved to Belgium she has become really interested in old cars, she says because the lack of road salt allows them to stay in use for much longer than they do in Canada, so they aren't 'beaters' but beautiful functional vehicles that people use on beautiful days.

We walked over to the monastery first and had a quick look around.  All the online advice indicated that the tour of the Abbey ruins was well worth it, but it was getting to be past lunchtime, and so we decided to go first to the cafe L'Ange Gardien, 150 metres or so up the road, for a little food and some of the beer.

The standard Orval beer is available exclusively in bottles, and has an alcohol content of 6,2% which makes it a little light relative to the other Trappist beers.  It was the second Trappist beer to be widely distributed, following the success of their fellow Trappist Abbey of Chimay.  We have noticed recently that Orval has become very difficult to obtain in normal places in Belgium; unlike Westvleteren Trappist (of which I have written before) which is available only at the monastery, Orval is distributed commercially, but in very limited quantities, in order to keep the demand high.  We see it very infrequently in the local Delhaize grocery, and when it does appear sales are limited to eight bottles per person.

At l'Ange Gardien, one can also purchase glasses of the biere pression Orval "green", or "petite Orval".  This is a lighter beer than normal Orval, with an alcohol content of a substantially lighter 4,5% alcohol by volume, more like the beer that the monks themselves drink regularly.  We had a little tasting platter of varieties of the locally produced cheese, and a couple of small salads.  As well we discovered that one can order young Orval in the bottle, produced recently, or "aged" Orval, which has been lying down at cellar temperature for at least a year.  We had a bottle of this aged Orval to share, to see how it tasted.  

Orval is different from other beers in a few ways.  First, unlike many Belgian beers, it is "dry hopped".  This is an english technique, which you might have heard of, which involves immersing mesh bags filled with hops in the beer just after initial fermentation is complete, during the three-week maturation process.  In other production methods the hops are boiled in with the malt much earlier in the process, which imparts a different taste; India pale ale for example is dry-hopped, which gives it that distinctive flavour.  The yeast used for fermentation of each beer also imparts a specific flavour; in the case of Orval it is Brettanomyces lambicus, a wild yeast from this particular region that now is cultivated by the University of Leuven and supplied in quantity to the brewery.  As well, after dry-hopping during maturation, additional sugar and another variety of yeast is added to allow for some additional fermentation and bottle-conditioning.

Since 1995, the quality control director of Orval has been Anne-Francoise Pypaert, and in 2013 she succeeded Jean-Marie Rock as Brewmaster of Orval, the first woman to hold the post of Brewmaster of a Trappist Brewery.  Here's an interesting article about Anne-Francoise:

http://drinkbelgianbeer.com/breweries/meet-anne-francoise-pypaert-the-first-female-trappist-brewmaster

We made our way to the monastery and bought tickets.  The brewery itself is not open to the public except on one weekend each autumn, but the ruins are able to be explored, and there are a ton of amazing exhibits that illustrate the brewing process and explain the history of this abbey.

Orval was founded in the twelfth century, but destroyed by fire in 1252, then rebuilt over the subsequent 100 years; then it was a relatively quiet place until the Thirty Years war, when it was pillaged and burned again in 1637.  It became quite prosperous in the late 18th-century and an ambitious building scheme produced the large structures of the abbey (now visible only in drawings, maquettes or in ruins), but it was completed at last...  But there was more bad luck for the Trappists: just as they were metaphorically cutting the red ribbon on the main entrance, the French revolution of 1793 brought French forces who burned it and dispersed the community.

It was a picturesque site visited mostly by artists looking for dramatic ruins as models for their drawings for the next hundred years or so, and was acquired by the Harenne family in the late 19th century, who then donated it back to the Cistercian order in 1926, so that they could re-establish a monastery there.  It took 22 years to build the new abbey, and it wasn't completed until 1948.  The Brewery opened in 1931 however, and it is clear that much of the money to rebuild the abbey came from the sale of beer.

The legend of the original founding of Orval is that the widowed Mathilde of Tuscany was visiting the site, and lost her wedding ring in the spring; she was horrified but prayed for its return, and a trout appeared on the surface of the water, bearing the ring in its mouth.  She declared that the place was truly a Val d'Or or golden valley, and provided the initial funds for the founding of the monastery.  The trout and ring symbol is still seen on the labels of the bottles and glasses, and we saw the symbol in a number of places as we toured the museum exhibits scattered throughout the ruins.

Having toured a number of whisky distilleries in Scotland, and previous breweries in Belgium, we were no strangers to the basics of how malted barley gets turned into beverage alcohol.  The process is much the same for beer as it is for whisky, but we found the exhibits entertaining nonetheless.

I was very happy to discover something that I was certain should have happened: that the Belgian crystalier Val Saint-Lambert had indeed produced a crystal beer chalice for a Trappist beer.  I have since had a little look on ebay but so far have had no luck at acquiring one myself.  That would indeed be a Belgian "grail" chalice if I could fine one...

A case of beer in Canada is sometimes referred to as a "square" but in the case of Orval it really used to be one: five-by-five wooden crates holding 25 bottles were the order of the day until recently.

We had a great time walking around the ruins, but they are so large and extensive that we sometimes had to stop and take a moment to rest... the abbey really must have been something grand back in the 18th-century.

We finished off our visit with a purchase of 24 bottles of Orval beer to take home, and some of the Orval Cheese.  We will have some guests this summer so I suppose we will have to sample these together.

Next: end of the school year, vacationing in Ottignies

Metz and Luxembourg City

Last weekend Maggie and I left the boys alone in Brussels overnight and took a little road trip. Malcolm is sixteen years old after all, and has been babysitting for a few families; he is trusted with as many as three kids at a time from the ages of young as ten months, and Duncan is twelve; as neither he nor Duncan seem concerned about being alone in the evening we decided to make an attempt at a short trip away.  As it happened, they were just fine and we had a good time driving first to Luxembourg City and then to Metz, in France.

Originally the whole reason for the trip was to sing an audition.  Korneel Bernolet is a harpsichordist and conductor friend, whom I met while he was playing continuo for Don Giovanni, and he conducted me in the Faure Requiem recently.  I heard that he was assisting the French conductor Christophe Rousset at the Opera de Lorraine in Nancy (just another hour or so south of Metz), and so wrote him to arrange an audition there.  We chose the 28th, not realizing that the schedule would be very tight that day as it was a matinee, and as it happened Korneel was somewhat ill anyway and so could not play; we decided to reschedule the audition for this coming spring (april/may) in Brussels, when Christophe is next working there.  So it all will work out better I think; auditioning at home is always nicer and much less stressful than doing so away, plus I will have more time to work up the material with Korneel, who has offered again to play for me.  But I had booked a little bed and breakfast for Maggie and I, and had invited her to come along, and as it was already paid for we decided to go to Metz anyway, via Luxembourg.

We had never visited the city of Luxembourg before, but decided to stop for lunch there at a little tapas bar in the valley.  It was really lovely and quiet, and nice food.  We walked around and explored the lower town a bit.  There are many little tributaries of the Moselle that pass through Luxembourg city and it has many quaint little corners.  We found one area that is obviously a repurposed industrial section, that reminded us of nothing so much as Toronto's distillery district.  Maggie commented that is doubtlessly is a hopping place in the evenings.

With all of the little tributaries and rivers there are many waterfowl, and the rivers look healthy; certainly there was no shortage of herons fishing in the shallows.

We drove up to the upper city and parked, then walked around and saw the outside of the Ducal Palace, the theatre des capuchins where some of the opera productions of the Luxembourg opera are performed, and had a cup of coffee before heading back to the car and driving the hour to Metz.

Our bed and breakfast was located 2 km from the centre of town, but Metz is not quite so big a city, and our host indicated where we could park for free outside the old city walls.  We walked along the ramparts for a bit, noticing that here too the river seems to be in excellent health.

Malcolm and I attended a Marc Chagall exhibit a couple of weeks ago in Brussels, and on our trip to Rheims several years ago, I remember seeing the Chagall windows in the cathedral there.  We had read that he had also done some windows for the Metz Cathedral, and so we were happy to have made it there just a few minutes before closing, and had a good look around.

The cathedral St. Etienne de Metz is really something, with the largest expanse of stained glass windows in the world, encompassing almost 70,000 square feet!  The cathedral's current structure was begun in 1220, and wasn't completed until 1552. Really it was an awe-inspiring and amazing sight.  We could have spent hours just looking and looking.  Fortunately the sunlight was very strong and there were marvelous effects taking place inside, so we felt lucky to see some very special late afternoon visual effects.

As well as the Chagall windows, there are many more from a variety of masters, from the gothic period (Hermann von Muenster, Theobald of Lixheim, Valentin Bousch) to the romantic (Charles-Laurent Marechal) and cubist and modern periods (Jacques Villon, Roger Bissiere). 

The exterior of the church is in quite good condition, so it looks to me as if it is cleaned and maintained regularly.  Cathedrals mark the "seat" of a bishop, and as is the case with most cathedrals, it is made clear in the iconography who holds the power in such places... hint: it isn't the king.

There is a beautiful little church on the island in the middle of the many Moselle tributaries, called Le Temple Neuf, or the "Church of the Nine Germans".  It is very picturesque little protestant church, built between 1901 and 1905, during the period that Alsace-Lorraine was part of Germany.

Apart from the swans that are always seen in the river near the church, there are many other birds, including pigeons, ducks and more herons. 

This little island is also the home of the Opera-Theatre de Metz Metropole, built from 1732-1752, that seats 750 people.  This theatre is the oldest opera house still operating in France and one of the oldest in Europe, and today is joined artistically with the Opera de Lorraine in Nancy.

We explored some more, and really enjoyed the feeling of this very cool city.  We even saw a few things that reminded us of home; after all, Metz isn't that far from Brussels.  Our restaurant of choice was unfortunately without a place, but we managed to find a good restaurant on the edge of the river and had an excellent steak frites meal before heading back home.

The next day we came back to the city centre for some more explorations, and to have a nice cup of coffee in the square.  There was a big brocante going on next to the church, but to be honest we are terribly spoiled for such things in Brussels and so found nothing much of interest.  Instead we moved on to the Centre Pompidou, a large modern art museum.

The Centre Pompidou-Metz is a branch of the museum of modern art of the same name in Paris, and is the secondary display space for that centre.  It is the largest exhibition space in France outside of Paris, with 5,000 square metres (54,000 square feet) of display space.  The design is quite unusual, by the Japanese architect Shigeru Ban, and was inspired by a Chinese hat that the architext found while visiting Paris.  It is an interesting mixture of wooden structural beams and metal and glass.

After our extensive walking tours of Metz we were starting to feel a little weary and so didn't view any of the exhibits, but decided to push on and begin the three hour drive home.  But while enroute, we realized that we would pass within about twenty minutes of the Trappist abbey of Orval!

*next up: Orval Abbey, brewery and restaurant