The end of the Summer vacation is upon us...

Today is the last day of August, and Malcolm is babysitting the children of friends of ours, the Vissol family.  Duncan also has gone over to their house to play, and Maggie is at work; her school year resumed last monday, and she has already had two days with her students.  So that means that the house is quiet and empty for the first time in a long while, and I can gather my thoughts.

Every year it is the same routine, but somehow it seems to surprise me anyway; the number of bills to pay in advance of the school beginning, registration for recreational activities like karate or dance or music or drawing, the inventory and replenishing of school supplies, etc.  And there are always additional administrative things to do.  This morning I went downtown to try to arrange Duncan's subscription for the Brussels transit service.  The yearly subscription is free for school-children under the age of twelve, and then after that age students receive a 50% discount.  A yearly abonnement costs 120 EUR for the first child in the family, and 50 EUR for the second.  Interestingly any additional abonnements are free, a smart idea that gives larger families a financial break.

(Parenthetically, if one puts this together with the Belgian allocations familiales policy, which pays out a monthly benefit (like a baby bonus) that increases with each subsequent child (e.g. the first one receives about 115 EUR per month, the second 215 EUR, and the third 280 EUR) and you can see that Belgium wants its citizens to have babies, and doesn't mind supporting them.  This promise of savings is not enough to encourage us to have a third child, in case you were wondering.)

Rather surprisingly it was only a short delay of about ten minutes to get this transit pass done, so I was happy to not have had to wait longer in the very stuffy and oppressive atmosphere of the Porte de Namur Metro station.  However, we're not out of the woods yet; Duncan also needs a TEC abonnement (TEC is the Walloon regional transit authority) as he will be taking a TEC bus from the train station here in Brussels to Wavre in Wallonia, where he will be attending school beginning this week.  He's very excited about the prospect of this new school, in a bilingual French-English programme, and we are really hoping that he will make use of the opportunities that it will provide.  I will go with him the first day on the bus to Wavre and will have to purchase the TEC card there, as there is strangely no TEC kiosk in Brussels!  Of course there isn't.

Malcolm has a geography examination de passage tomorrow... in his Belgian school, secondary school students are given a sort of "get out of jail free" card, called the "rule of 60%".  The Belgians have no issues whatsoever in holding a student back a year; Maggie tells me that half of all students will "double" at least once in their twelve years of education.  The rule of 60% means that if your average in all subjects is above 60%, having a failing mark in one subject can be excused, and you may pass into the next year.  To Ontarians a 60% average sounds ridiculously easy to achieve, but given that 65%-70% is considered a good result in a Belgian secondary school (I am not kidding) for some a 60% average may seem to be a formidable challenge.  For complicated reasons involving a sparsely attended Latin class school trip and a missed test Malcolm didn't pass his geography course last year, so he could have opted to use his rule of 60%.  But he has decided to save it for when he needs it, and instead has taken the option of writing a make-up exam, which will happen tomorrow morning.  His classes begin properly on the 3rd.

But enough about the kids and their schooling.  I have some time to share some photographs from our trip!  It started on the 6th of August, when we left for Genova...

Stop-over in Strasbourg

Opéra National du Rhin, Strasbourg

In the textiles district of Strasbourg

Strasbourg really isn't very far away from Brussels, less than five hours by car, or around 450 kilometers.  We were there in pretty good time to get established in our bed and breakfast, and then to go out to see the cathedral and the opera house, and to have a glass in the main square.  Strasbourg seems like a very nice place to visit, and Bruce has sung there, as have a number of other Belgian and German singer friends, so I must keep it on the list as an auditioning place.

The next morning began with the longer trip to Genoa of around 620 km, passing through Basel, Lucerne, Lugano, and then Milan.  We had hoped to get to Milan early enough to spend some time there, but as the day wore on we decided to go directly to the port in Genoa.  It is a good thing we did as it was quite tricky to find the right entrance to the port, and then we had to line up for a long time.  The Moby ferry from Genoa is really a pretty grubby one; many people who use it don't bother to rent a cabin, but sleep on therma-rest camping mattresses on the deck, or in the hallways!  But we had a cabin that was just large enough for us, and we slept reasonably well on the overnight journey.

After our arrival in Corsica, the last leg of the trip was to drive from the port of Bastia to Pietrosella about 170 km away, over quite rugged terrain; it took us about three and a half hours to get there.

In Pietrosella
The house that Kiana found us was beautiful, and very well suited to our combined needs.  The kitchen was very small but well-equipped, and we were happy to find a gas range.  Interestingly, as befits a warm-weather house, the gas was supplied directly by connection to a tank like the ones used for a barbeque.  We made a lot of good curries on that stove, and of course it was used for morning espresso.  Both Kiana and I had brought our small Bialetti moka pots, but as it happened the house also had a large one, so we were never without a good supply of morning espresso.

The beach was only a short walk down a very steep hill, and it was very quiet.  Most of the people vacationing there seemed to be on the slightly larger beaches to either side, and fortunately this smaller cove also had no restrictions against dogs, so Osa was able to come down and romp around in the surf.  We all spent a lot of time snorkelling in the rocky areas of the seabed, looking for shells and fish and sea-urchins.  The kids found an octopus as well and spent a good couple of hours investigating his behaviour.

a la plage

sur la plage

evening contemplation

watermelon seed spitting lessons

The house had a small separate room with its own shower and toilet on the lower level that was accessed from its own entryway; Malcolm took this room.  The three other boys shared the large sunken living room with its big pull-out sofabed, and India slept on the upstairs sofa in the upstairs salon.  There were two bedrooms, a bathroom, a toilet, and a laundry up another short flight of stairs, and the grown-ups took these.  All in all I can say it was really a very nice house.  Naturally the kids spent most of their non-beach time inside looking at games or books or the occasional ipad screen, and the adults spent most of their time outside on the veranda overlooking the beach, drinking something alcoholic, grilling something over the fire, talking, doing food preparation, playing cribbage, or just chilling out.  Kiana and Armani are keen foragers and so they picked prickly pear cactus fruit, and during one of our road trips we stopped to frantically snatch several litres of ripe figs from a tree that was overhanding the road... and we brought back several jars of the fig jam that Maggie and Kiana made from the scavenged fruit.

If I had to give a fig, I would be prepared

the day of the thunderstorm

beach-bound again

sand games

and board games

We made a few visits away in the car... this trip was quite different from our last one to Corsica in 2009; we stayed halfway up the east coast that time.  The eastern coast of Corsica is quite flat and so the roads are fairly easy to navigate.  This time we were maybe one-third of the way up the west coast, in Pietrosella, which is fairly close to Ajaccio, and since the west coast is far more rugged there are many switchbacks on the roads, and it takes much longer to get anywhere.  We revisited two places that we had previously enjoyed: one was Bonifacio, where we had a pizza lunch just down the street from the same place that we had lunched back in 2009, up in the old city.  While in Bonifacio we took the boat tour of the caves and cliffs around this port city.  I found it gave a different and valuable perspective to see these beautiful wind- and water-carved patterns on the sandstone cliffs from the sea.  It really is a gorgeous place.

the view from above the cliffs

huge yachts in the harbour below the citadel

on top of the cliffs

view of the cove opposite the citadel

boat tour

one of the many secluded coves near Bonifacio, more easily reached by boat than by car

pizza decisions

a secluded beach on the drive back from Bonifacio (the road was pretty dodgy so we were happy to get back out again)

view from the pass at the top of our alternate GR20 route near the Col de Bavella

The second place that was worth another visit was the Col de Bavella, which is a very picturesque area with waterfalls, waterslides and pools, fed by ice melt from the extremely high mountains above, called the "Needles of Bavella" because of their almost impossible elongated sharpness.  Bryan was training for his upcoming Ultramarathon at Mont Blanc / Les Contamines, and so first he ran part of the GR20 route, while Kiana, Armani, India, Kenzo and I also hiked an alternate part of the GR20, while Maggie and the boys hiked a third route.  We met up after a couple of hours at the café near the Notre Dame de la Neige statue at the foot of the mountain, and after a glass of beer were ready for some cold water, and so made our way about 10 km down the road toward the city of Solenzara on the east coast, until we came to the access point to explore the Cascades of Purcaraccia.

cooling off in the Cascades

We were really very happy to find this location again, having enjoyed it so much in 2009, and the Hammer family also enjoyed it.  Canadians in Eastern Ontario are marvellously spoiled, growing up as they do with freshwater lakes and rivers to swim in in abundance, and so while seawater does give you added buoyancy, and its clarity means that you can see lots of beautiful fish and other sea life, there is nothing as refreshing as an ice-cold mountain stream on a 40-degree day.  (I think that there is a York Peppermint Patty commercial to that effect.)

On one of our trips home, it started to get dark, and as the mountainous road included a lot of switchbacks, Duncan started to get car-sick, so we stopped for a moment while he got himself together.  It was so dark that the Milky Way was clearly visible, something that I almost never see in the light-pollution of Brussels.  While standing and stretching outside of the car, we saw one of the most incredible shooting stars... it was very, very bright, and left a very long straight glowing tail that covered a quarter of the sky.  We soon learned that our stop on the mountain was coinciding with the peak of the Perseid meteor showers, and there were a couple more shooting stars that quickly followed.  Indeed for the next couple of days we saw more shooting stars from the terrace back at Pietrosella, but even there the light pollution made them less visible that they might have been, away from the town.  I have written before about things I miss from Canada, and a starry night sky seen from a wilderness area away from city lights is definitely one of them.

Other benefits of vacationing in the mediterranean are the fresh fish.  There was a super poissonerie just down the road, maybe fifteen minutes away, and Kiana and I got up early one morning to check it out.  These red fish were on special and they looked super fresh, so we bought them...

... as well as some calimari, fresh sardines and a big sea bass...

...and we grilled them all on the charcoal fire.  Admittedly, I was missing my Barbecook charcoal grill, or my Weber gas grill, but we managed to make do.

At the end of our holiday we packed up fairly easily, and took the mountain roads back to Bastia, for the daytime ferry.

waiting for the ferry doors to open at Genoa

From Genova we parted ways with the Hammers who headed for Mont Blanc, while we drove the two hours to Milan, where we had booked a hotel there for a couple of nights.

road trip resumed

Milano
Milan has many important monuments and buildings... we planned to focus on three of them: the Duomo or cathedral, the Opera House (or Teatro alla Scala), and the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, a four-story shopping gallery that was completed in 1877.

in the extremely posh Gallerie Vittorio Emanuele II

view from the roof of the Duomo Milano

evidence of continuous ongoing repair/replacement of the stonework of the Duomo

We first went to the Duomo, and as we were very early, we beat all the lines to climb the 919 steps to the roof, to see the gargoyles and stone carvings, and to view the city from this special vantage point.

I wonder who authorized the construction of that monstrosity of a building?

The Duomo is undergoing continuous renovation and reworking, and you can see where the old carvings have been replaced with new blocks that copy exactly the dimensions and decorations of their predecessors.  We opted for the combined ticket, which also gave us access to the cathedral itself, the archaelogical museum underneath the cathedral where the large historical baptistery (dating back to the fourth century, and almost certainly the place where St. Augustine was baptised in A.D. 387) is found, and finally the Duomo Museum, an amazing collection, filled with many examples of sculpture reaching back hundreds of years, and executed in different regional styles, including some by Flemish sculptors.

votive candles

the ecclesiastical clock at the Duomo

the great organ at the Duomo

in the museum of the Duomo

many shelves of statuary models

gargoyles from the Duomo

statuary in the Duomo museum

After the Duomo we tried to see the Teatro alla Scalla, but unfortunately we had come to Milan on the holiday of Assumption, so it was closed, so I had to settle for a photograph outside of the actual theatre.

Instead we had some ice cream, did a little window-shopping, and then went back to the hotel to rest a bit.

gelato milanese

Milano is the fashion capital of the world, after all

window shopping (or inspiration shopping)

In the evening we went to see the Milan Expo2015, the world's fair, which was dedicated to the themes of food and nutrition.  An evening ticket was only 5 EUR, and we also bought inexpensive tickets to see the special Cirque du Soleil show that was created for the fair. There were international booths from many countries, and the dedication expo site was so large there was no way that we could see more than a couple of the international pavilions, but we managed to check in at the Belgian and Lithuanian (in honour of our friend the Ambassador Varvuolis) ones, and we also checked out the coffee pavilion, and bought some special edition Illy coffee.  We also had dinner at the "Eatalian" pavilion, which was not at all crowded (our hunch that the Italians would all be sampling international cuisine instead paid off).  I had a fantastic Negroni cocktail there; the boys had a chinotto, and we all enjoyed our meals.  It was a real pleasure to see all of the regional italian foods, and we even bought some 36 month parmigiano at one of the stalls there.

(P.S. If you've never had a Negroni, you need to do so immediately: it's an elegant summer drink and has quickly become my favourite apertif.  Think: Sophia Loren, narrow ties, linen suits with skinny lapels, Lambretta scooters and Persol sunglasses...  It is equal parts gin, sweet red vermouth (I prefer Cinzano) and Campari, on the rocks with a slice of orange peel... neither shaken NOR stirred  http://www.campari.com/int/en/cocktails/list/negroni/).

bouncing around near the Illy coffee pavilion

dinner at the "Eatalia" pavillion

a glass of prosecco to celebrate

a dramatic light show at Expo2015

Cirque du Soleil

Duncan had never seen a Cirque du Soleil show and he was very much impressed, especially by the tumblers and acrobats... he was heard to ritualistically mutter the word parkour to himself for most of the rest of the trip...

The next day we had a very early start, but made it home to Brussels without too much trouble, stopping for lunch in Alsace.  The serving sizes were heroic... I had a delicious homemade choucroute that I am sure would have sustained me for several meals, and Maggie had a "cordon bleu" which as it turned out was a schnitzel as big as a newspaper wrapped around about a kilogramme of ham and cheese... the hungry boys had to help her out with that dish.

Gotthard tunnel in Switzerland (almost 17km)

misty mountains in Switzerland

That meant that we were driving all day on the 16th August, but it was no great hardship to celebrate our wedding anniversary a couple of days late, by going out to dinner the following friday at the very nice Brasserie du Prince d'Orange on the other side of the Bois de la Cambre, making use of a prize voucher that Maggie had won in a raffle.

I was very happy to wear my anniversary present of a peacock shirt, that Maggie had made for me from a Liberty print that we chose last summer in London, and she wore her present from me, a new pair of citrine earrings, which are a special shade of pale aquamarine that very closely match her eyes.  It turns out that she made this shirt while Bruce and I were in Leipzig / Bayreuth; she also made a skirt for herself out of the same material, as well as a bouquet of bowties.  One of these matches a dress she made during the same sewing session, with a "scenery" print of spring flower blossoms that resembles the famous flower beds that emerge in the spring at the Keukenhof in the Netherlands.  So we are both well-supplied for bespoke finery these days thanks to her...

Liberty print custom "Rose" shirt

"Keukenhof" dress with accessorised husband 

Now that holidays are done we are busy getting ready for next week.  Maggie should be home from work soon, and Duncan should return from his friends' home shortly, so I should sign off.  We don't have a September Labour Day holiday in Europe; that happens on May 1st, but I wish all my fellow Canadians a happy Labour Day weekend and a peaceful beginning to September and the new school year...