We spent the past week getting our Euro-culture on. We started out Friday by eating at a tiny restaurant called La Canne en Ville housed in a former butcher shop, as we had a gift certificate from Jack's family. It was a nice space, elaborately tiled. The glazing on the tiles had cracked, presumably from age, and a brownish stain had permeated the cracks. Jack said he would have liked the tiles better if they didn't have the aura of having been spattered with years of animal blood. We started off with the suggested aperetifs, which were white wines mixed with fruit liqueurs. A woman who was perhaps the owner came over and translated the menu, and knowing full well what he was getting into, Jack ordered the snails for an appetizer. They were really good! I know, I know, if entire countries consider something a delicacy it's probably quite tasty, but that still doesn't make it any easier to stare down a plate of, say, sea cucumber, and take a bite. While I consider myself an adventurous eater, I'm not, as it turns out, an adventurous orderer. I guess that's what separates the boys from the men: anyone can try a bite of duck tongue on someone else's plate, but not everyone can envision themselves eating the remainder of said plate. Kudos to Jack. The remainder of the meal was equally good, with one of the highlights being a potato gratin with just enough cheese to hold the thing together and form a lovely brown crust on the top. Mmmm.

Even though we had made our reservations for 8 p.m., an almost impossibly long time for me to wait to start dinner, there was only one other couple in there when we got there. The place really started filling up around 9, an by the time we left at 10 or so it was packed. The two waitstaff managed to be attentive to all the patrons, surprising given the neglect we've suffered at other places with twice as many staff members.

Saturday we attempted to work on the apartment a bit, getting a printer cable and assorted sundries at the hardware store. After we set up the printer following the French directions, Jack began installing our retractable clothesline. It was, unfortunately, not a success: not having a drill makes it extremely difficult to make appropriately-sized holes in the wall. Who knew? Now we'll probably have to get a drill. I suggested getting an old-school hand-powered one that resembles an egg beater, but I don't think he's going for it.

Sunday we headed downtown to the big art museum. We saw a lot of art from the 15th to 18th centuries. Most of it was religious in nature or portraiture. "Still life" in French is apparently "nature mort". There was a Hieronymus Bosch of the temptation of St. Anthony, one of those classics of his with a bunch of crazy stuff going on. And, on the next wall over, another painting of his that was a straight-up portrait. Never would have guessed it was by the same guy. There were other paintings by other artists of the same temptation scene scattered about, also featuring a variety of beasts not found in nature, so I'm not sure how Bosch got to be known for this style. Perhaps people went wild for it when it came out, and subsequently that's the genre he chose to pursue.

It appears that wealthy art patrons back in the day used to demonstrate their piety by having their likenesses painted into scenes from the Bible and displaying them in a prominent place. There were many of these paintings in the churches of Bruges, and more in this museum. I'm not sure what they were trying to convey by showing their family (adults: full-size, grown-looking children: half-size) kneeling at the foot of a dying Jesus on the cross, the family's patron saints hovering behind them like mother hens. It's not as if they were attacking the guards and saving Jesus from his horrible demise, just mostly staring at some mid-range point that conveyed the unfocused boredom of the sitter. Maybe the sin of pride was only written into later versions of th Bible.

One of the interesting things about viewing paintings in a roughly chronological fashion was being able to see the development of painting techniques, notably correct perspective. The flat religious iconography of the earlier years, employing lots of gold and oddly-shaped faces and babies that resemble scaled-down adults on a plain background, gives way to scenes of people in a room, figures overlapping yet the same size as if they're crowded up against each other, but you can see the room's walls slightly receding behind them, gives way to advanced techniques of outdoor scenes of gardens with fancy trellising in the mid-distance telescoping to a hazy glimpse of a town far off in the background.

For lunch we strayed from the museum, which has a cafe run by Aramark (the folks who do such a wonderful job with RFK stadium), and went down the street to the Musical Instrument Museum, which is housed in a former store called Old England that is a paean to the Art Nouveau style: lots of ironwork curlicues. While not particularly drawn to the museum itself, they have a restaurant on the top floor that has nice views of the city. Last time we had tried to go there it was packed, but on this day it was about half full. I ordered the "pain viande", thinking it would be some kind of sandwich like a cheesesteak without the cheese. It was meatloaf. It was very tasty, so no complaints. On the way back home we encountered a shop that had a bunch of international papers, including a scanned, printed and glue-bound copy of the Washington Post for 4.25. It was the District-Maryland version of the home delivery paper, not even the Final, so we passed it up. I'm not sure what the legitimacy of this was, since the Post certainly doesn't offer home delivery here although they could if they were in on this operation.

Tuesday we started French lessons with a class of 5, including a couple that hails from Canton, OH. The "professeur" speaks exclusively in French (unless 100% of us are staring at her blankly, and then she'll sometimes give us a single word of English), which makes Jack and me founder to various degrees since we probably each understand about 1/4 of what she's saying and can get the gist of about 3/4. On the one hand I feel like I'm falling behind at times, with everyone else nodding and taking notes while I repeat her words in my head for some semblance of meaning, but on the other I get to practice my French accent, which seems super-fake to me when I'm trying to communicate out in the world but is apparently some approximation of the real thing.