Our French teacher always asks us on Thursday what we'll be doing over the weekend. Since we only know the present tense at this point I'm sure our responses sound pretty bizarre, but we can't tell. Jack, ever philosophical (and knowing that we didn't have any firm plans) tried to say that he couldn't think past Friday, but it ended in confusion. I wanted to say that I was going to make my fantastically delicious onion bread. Turns out "make" is the same as "do", so I ended up saying "I do the bread of onions". She said that sounded strange and asked why I was making it, and I told her I had bought 2 kilos at the grocery. Why? Because the other onions looked bad (except everyone heard "old" instead of "bad"). So this devolved into a misunderstanding about how the bread could possibly be good with 2 kilos of onions in it, and due to my limited skills I couldn't respond that, no, it actually only takes a few.

Friday we celebrated Bastille day by eating Thai food and staring at other people celebrating Bastille day. Those French can really let loose.

While this blog seems to have devolved in a retelling of our weekend adventures, I'm still attempting to highlight aspects of Belgian/Eurpean culture that I find interesting. One of these is the amount of money that they seem to spend on cultural events. Even though there's always something free (or nearly so) going on in DC, you usually have to know where to look and to do your homework before setting out. Here, there's posters all over the place trumpeting this or that event for weeks in advance. One such happening is Bruxelles Les Bains, where they turn a street next to the canal into a beach for a month, with tons of sand, live musical performances, yoga, grassy patches surrounded by tropical plants and waterfalls, and dozens of closet-sized cabanas selling all your beachy needs, from feijoada to milkshakes to bikinis. Why anyone would want feijoada on a sultry day is beyond me, but it's good to know there's a restaurant nearby selling it so I can get some during the colder months (actually Jack makes a tasty version of it, too).

On Saturday, after accomplishing some clothes shopping, we went over to the beach and sauntered amongst the people frying in the mid-afternoon sun. The cabana that stood out a mile from all the others was that of the bar Jesus Paradise, which, instead of going au naturel with the bundled stick walls like everyone else, they had enrobed their booth in hot pink fur. Naturally we had to stop there for a drink.

(One thing I think I failed to mention previously about Belgium and many other European countries is they just don't seem to get cold beverages, even though the hot summer days cry out for extra refreshment, and you'd think they'd have the hang of it by now. You can expect that your beer will be served at a reasonable temperature, but that's about it. Your soda may or may not come with ice, which is unfortunate because I only find soda refreshing if it's cold and watered down a bit from ice melting. If there is ice, it's usually just two or three small pieces floating forlornly around, gone before you know it. If you order a mixed drink in which sugar and ice are both key ingredients, you can be assured that the sugar will form a grainy, unincorporated layer at the bottom of your drink. How can you have a bar and not know about simple syrup?)

I got a Cuba Libre Especial, which featured green tea, mint and sugar instead of the normal cola, and Jack had something that had sugar in it as well. Mine was especially well-stratified: sugar layer followed by huge and impermeable fresh mint layer followed by ice layer, with the liquid portion residing upper and lower reservoirs on either side of the mint. So I take a sip from the straw and get a mouthful of granulated sugar. Mmmm. There is no way that the sugar can dissolve now with the mint preventing full interaction with the liquid after I sucked out the bottom aquifer. The best I can do is mash the mint down and try to drink from the top reservoir. On the upside, we managed to stake out a spot under an umbrella, so we sat for a while and watched as people promenaded by and expressed their delighted astonishment over the pink booth.

Later we hit some shops on the other side of the canal, going on the assumption that they were on the wrong side of the water and therefore would be cheaper. Not so, unfortunately. However, we did come across a fascinating store full of bolts of cloth called Le Chien du Chien, and though I felt weird about being in there knowing there wasn't much I could afford, it was still very interesting wandering around. The rich and colorful fabrics were strung from the ceiling, so 6 or so bolts would be situated one on top of the other. There were various floors and mezzanines, and the theme of the shop (aside from "expensive") was nautical life, with full-size boats bursting through brick walls and a free-standing ship's cabin serving as someone's office. We spent a while in there wandering around. The other nice thing about the place was that the sales staff left us alone, given that there was very little that ruffians like us could steal. There's some photos of their various stores here: http://www.chienvert.com/galerie/index.htm.

We did come across one reasonably priced store, a kind of paper goods/bulk restaurant supply store at which we bought a packet of cloth dye. I selected "apricot", an intense orange that looked more like "carrot" to me, for the purpose of dyeing the white slipcover for one of our couches in order to continue the process of coloring up the house.

Lastly we went to a furniture shop that I had noted on my peregrinations some time ago. It was in a warehouse-sized building and contained a good amount of reasonably priced (although not by any stretch of imagination cheap) furniture. Jack was mesmerized by a panel hung on a wall that contained many illuminated squares that would change colors. The nicest thing about the store (aside from its size, which allowed one to escape from the heat for an extended period without appearing to loiter) was that the patio furniture was situated on the roof. This store also didn't have sales staff asking a lot of pesky questions like "can I help you?", so you and a friend could probably get yourselves a couple of forties (or "118,2941s" as they're known here [they use commas and decimal points in the opposite way here as they do in the US]) and spend some quality time up there, watching the traffic on the canal float past, keeping an eye on the Petit Palace immigrant detention center, and occasionally interspersing your conversation with comments such as "I really prefer the faux wicker over the hard plastic, although the fabric covering is also a comfortable option" so as to keep the Man from harshing your buzz.

We wandered back home by way of some of the major buildings of the Molenbeek commune, including a strange Art Deco church that I wish we could have seen from the inside. We crossed the canal and visited two other churches, one that had recently opened back up to the public and was conducting a service presided over by Karl Marx when we arrived (a sad little circle of about 12 people in this enourmous building), and the other containing a statue referred to as the Black Madonna that was rescued from a pile of floating debris in the river some time ago after the Protestants chucked it in the water. Protestants hate idolatry.

Saturday night we camped out in the kitchen to try out the spare bed and make sure it is adequately comfortable for our imminently arriving guests. We rented a Dutch romantic comedy called "Rent-a-Friend" and watched it from our culinary perch. It was pretty good, as far as romantic comedies go. Turns out the bed is more comfortable than our own, but since the one in the kitchen converts to a couch when not in use, we can't swap it for the one in our room.

The highlight of Sunday was the onion bread, which was remarkably delicious given the fact that the batter looked too thick going in and it came out of the oven with a strangely glossy top. Such are the vagaries of the European baking experience, I suppose. We rented the Peter Sellers film "The Mouse That Roared", a very funny movie about a tiny nation declaring war on the US so that they can lose and use the generous American reconstruction funds to get them out of bankruptcy. Sellers plays 3 parts: the (female) royal who rules the nation, the prime minister, and the head of the military. Definitely recommended.

The dyeing commenced Monday with an almost uninterrupted day of washing to properly clean and color the slip cover. Each regular cycle on the machine takes over two hours, and it first had to be washed for the dye to adhere properly. The second cycle was the actual dyeing. The third and last wash was to remove the excess color and fix it in. I was uncertain how it would turn out given that the front-loading washer was just barely big enough to fit the slip cover and the machine doesn't use much water to convey the dye to the crammed-in cloth. It actually turned out quite well, a slightly faded version of the expected color.