Brussels to Oxford via London

[Written July 3, posted successfully July 5] Taking my leave from Brussels and the family was a bit wrenching, as I had forgotten how much I liked hanging out with my brother and sharing our stupid jokes and family-oriented humor / lore. But with an uneventful metro ride to the Gare du Midi and more than a little foomfitting to get through the UK passport control (odd to have the uniforms on this side of the Channel, in bowels of a Belgian railway station—same old embarkation cards to fill out), I could hustle up to the platform and board the sleek and quick Eurostar, which whisked me to Lille and then North and under the Channel at unbelievable speeds. Arriving in London’s refurbished St Pancras station only an hour and half later just blew me away—at that rate my commute from Berkeley to Davis would be about half an hour. Of course you’d never get an EIR for that kind of project.

Like a goon I sprang for a cab and inched through traffic, acutely aware of the meter but figuring in the muggy heat-wave heat I ahould just eat the charge. I ditched my rolling bag in the ridiculously crowded luggage room, crossing my fingers that it wouldn’t be pawed through (I did the pull-half-a-dozen-bags-out first so mine could be deepest), and started my mosey down memory lane. With my little Lonely Planet tear-out map not quite reaching to this hotel in Bayswater, I headed across Kensington Gardens in the general direction of Victoria via the Victoria & Albert Museum. Thousands of people on the grass, most of them sensibly avoiding the direct sun—not a typical London scene.

My sense of direction was generally OK, and eventually I sussed out the bus service to Oxford—much simpler than I had originally thought, a good omen for the trip to Oxford I have planned for next Friday: rather than spend the typical buttload of money for a coach and driver (as suggested by the “We love spending your money” folks at the London agency), I figure we can get the students up to Ox, AND through in an excursion from the Cherwell Boathouse renting punts (flat bottom boats propelled with a pole) for all thirty for three hours, with lunch at a streamside pub. Quintessentially Oxford.

I couldn’t believe how friendly everyone was, from the coach driver (whose Irish accent broadened when another colleague joined him at one of the earlier Oxford stops) to the porter at Oriel (who despite the lateness of the hour welcomed me to take photographs as I introduced myself as "another misty-eyed Old Boy") to the nice lady at the B & B up past Summertown in North Oxford, where I used to do my shopping my second year.

As I walked around the town after 25 years (28 years since I officially left—just a brief visit in 1984 I think), I kept noticing how much cleaner it seemed, and how many fewer cars there were—lots of streets are restricted access or no cars at all. The Covered Market was closed by the time I arrived, so I couldn’t confirm that the old smell was still there, but lots of things seemed just as they were. More foreign languages, fewer university students (it is prime time for Italian and French late-teens it seems to work on their English, smoke, and flirt with each other).

I couldn't resist having some nice tourists (from Albania of all places) take my picture in front of the place I spent so many gray days reading back in '78, and then from '79 to '81. Wow. Back then there wasn't a railing around the Radcliffe Camera, and tourists would come right up to the windows and snap photos of us as we sat at the long tables that ran spoke-like outward: it was like going to school in an aquarium. . .

Then it was bus up to my modern and fairly charmless B & B booked on the Internet, a decent run (out toward the canal near Godstow, the end of one of my more ambitious loops back in the day), a hasty meal (didn’t feel like anything special), and then too much time on the excellent wi-fi connection catching up on e-mails and talking with my coordinator back in Davis. Best part of it was sitting out in the perfect-temperature terrace (well, gravel extension of the car park) watching as the hot spell began to end: sure enough, this morning after a not very restful sleep I awoke to rain, which mercifully let up once I headed back into town.

I’ve exceeded my allotted time, so I will try to upload this onto the blog via a pathetic and expensive pay as you go wireless service here at the hotel in London (no time for a full description)—with my window propped open (thanks to my trusty Swiss Army knife that enabled to me to dismantle the doohickey that stopped it at 8” wide) and a fire door propped open and a window in the stairwell open, I actually have air to breathe. But lots of traffic noise and the wafting of the open-air concert a mile or so away in Hyde Park. Wish me luck. Tomorrow they arrive.

Brussels, Bach, Brotherhood

Sunday morning I attended my first Bach Cantata concert at the Chapelle des Minimes, a somewhat funky church in an odd part of Brussels; since 1982 a group has been performing cantatas there every month (July and August excepted), and my brother has been principal cellist and choir master and assistant director almost from the beginning. I had intended to catch the dress rehearsal on Saturday after taking the express train from Paris, but ended up schlepping myself and my bag for a good hour around the neighborhood near the Louisa metro stop, having gotten bad directions from several cheerful but completely misinformed passersby! No harm, no foul (except for my sweatiness)--I got there, enjoyed a beer with my brother at the cafe next door, and went to dinner with his wife and my niece later that evening. As my brother warned me, on the morning the attendees would run a gauntlet of panhandlers with faces straight out of a Brueghel painting--after all this was the 'hood where the Brueghels lived!


The Minimes concerts are a beautiful tradition: the chorus is mostly amateur, the orchestra a mix of amateur and professional players, and the level of performance is quite good. Back in the early days my father had dropped in and played viola with the group while visiting my brother, and in the mid-80s I had played recorder in a couple of concerts the group did as part of a festival in southern France. Like so much of Brussels the organization is extremely polyglot, and if you can't follow rehearsals in Flemish and French you are in trouble; there are three music directors who rotate through, and all are fluent in multiple languages; many of the members can effortlessly switch from German to French or Flemish to English, and hardly show they know they're switching. Amazing.


The run-through begins at 9 AM and there are always audience members who are there before the musicians, staking out their chairs and settling in to hear the cantata twice, in effect. The age range seems to be from babes in arms to nonagenarians, and I'm sure that there are some now attending as adults who were first brought as infants. By the 10:30 start time there are upwards of 300, with some standing, and by tradition the audience is coached in the Chorale and invited to sing along. I was very proud to see my brother working this way, clearly enjoying professional-musical and personal success; I was also glad to see a familiar face of Julius' old friend Jacques, who'd recently reconnected after several years.

The music (no. 30, Freue Dich, Erloeste Schor) was glorious, the small chorus sounding good, Julius' cello students holding down the continuo fort with some struggle but a good bit of success, and the professional soloists making some tough bits sound pretty easy (the soprano in particular seemed to have no problem with high B's at 10:45 in the morning, even, as my brother pointed out, with the organ's tuning getting slightly higher with the warm weather).

In the afternoon most of the group re-united for a potluck garden party barbecue at the home of one of the violinists, and I got to hear at least 30 people comment on how much my brother and I resembled each other in facial characteristics, voice, body language, you name it. Pretty funny, but moving in a way.


Later in the evening was the Annual General Meeting of the Brussels Madrigal Singers, which my brother directs, and which has some overlap with the Minimes group; I mostly hung out like a fly on the wall, but chipped in a couple of comments when I thought some of our experience with PME was relevant. I was also amused to see some of the same group dynamics operating here as in PME, as minor complaints about attendance or punctuality were voiced and (in this case) fairly quickly dismissed as the facts of non-professional music life that they are.

Throughout the day I was still writing and answering e-mails about the Tour. The big decision was whether to spring some extra dollars on a facility near the Luxembourg that would provide a classroom space for the 30 of us: there was no room big enough in our hotel, and what had been proposed was private dining room in a nearby restaurant, but in the end I realized the convenience of the new location and its other features would offset the added costs that had been imposed since earlier programs had used this particular facility in the past. Hey, this is why it's Grand, right? I continued to marvel at how tirelessly the Program Coordinator was working even on a weekend, knowing she also had half a dozen other programs to ride herd on. Go Kathy!

Today after a mixed sleep I spent most of the day trying to get organized with calendars and lists, semi successfully, and I also took a wonderful run in the Foret de Soigne, one entrance of which is a few hundred yards from our front door. Getting lost on confusing paths amongst the beech forest was actually quite pleasant, and I went probably 5 more miles after taking leave from Julius who not only had a cello lesson but also had to take it easy due to a bronchial problem and some potential back issues still lingering after his 2007 bout with staph abscesses near his lower spine.

All in all a great couple of days, both in the personal and professional sides of my life, and I really feel the Tour is going to actually happen and be a success. Now I have to plan some more, plus craft a pre-flight Welcome e-mail and nail down a few dozen more details before setting off for London on Wednesday.

As I post this I look out over the rooftops and it is only just getting competely dark--at 10:45 PM. Yet another thing to get used to while traveling....

My second morning in Paris started with immaculately crafted croissants bought a block away from 'Tcha's apartment, consumed on her tiny rooftop terrace under blue skies that defied the meteo's dire predictions. We then blasted off past the Pantheon and into the neighborhood she'd suggested we could find much nicer hotels for a future iteration of the Tour; from the number of yuppies pushing BMW-equivalent baby carriages I could certainly tell we were in a different world from the gritty environs we'd walked through yesterday.

Sure enough, entering the birdsong-filled courtyard of a little hotel off the Rue Mouffetard, and talking briefly with the quartet of American sorority sisters who were just checking out, I could tell we were in the equivalent of Polyface Farms paradise after the industrial-tourist CAFO hell of the neighborhood I'd be navigating a couple of weeks later with my thirty charges. Alas, despite this being the perfect little Paris hotel one would stay in if one didn't have the benefit of incredibly generous Friends with Terraces, the news was not uniformly good, in that their maximum group size is ten, and their brochure seemed to indicate that they would not accept reservations next July until March--too late for Summer Abroad coordinators who need to have accommodations locked in nine months in advance. But perhaps we could divide the group, use different close-by hotels and the like? It was worth looking into.


After coffee with 'Tcha's mom opposite the Luxembourg (punctuated by loud and confident suggestions of several more things I would've could've should've investigated), we ambled through the park to a possible classroom facility over toward the Montparnasse, again marveling at the difference in vibe as we stepped into a courtyard and saw what might have been / might still be: overcoming my usual reluctance to go up to fonctionnaires and risking disappointment, I found myself being shown around the various classroom spaces, several too small for our group but the last "just right"--and apparently things became less busy in July and we might be able to work things out.

For me these matters are fraught with all sorts of peril, as multiple contingencies and complications lead to analysis-paralysis: the nice woman was going on vacation for a week; she wasn't sure of the charges; I wasn't sure Summer Abroad would go for it (or whether they had already to committed to an alternative classroom site); perhaps there was some hidden barrier that would render this just a fanciful dream. In this way my pessimistic side too often leads me to not even ask, whereas my lovely and optimistic wife usually "goes for it" and wonders why I'm such an Eeyore. I'm sure there's deep psychologizing to be done on this.

Meanwhile we walked back, with me churning over the e-mails I would have to craft before heading to Brussels that afternoon. On the way we spotted improbably sights like this canary-colored bird with her appendages...










... and once in the park again we ran into a neighbor, whose cries and laughs waft through the skylight and inevitably brighten Tcha's life.

So before packing, I dashed off my e-mail to my soon-to-be-on-vacation administrator, then sorted gear (leaving my carry-on with hiking boots and miscellaneous items I figured I won't need til Paris in two weeks) and headed downstairs to give the key to my gracious hostess who was eating lunch with a friend, and rolled my enormous suitcase to the Odeon metro, thence to Gare du Nord, and via TGV to Brussels to catch my brother's last cantata concert on Sunday.

But that is for another post. (I wrote most of this one Sunday morning, having awoken on my pad on the floor of my brother's cello studio, bright and early at 6AM. If this be jet-lag, let us make the most of it.)