A quick update on my ongoing life and times in Europe. I’m now on the last day of a ten day stint in Belgium, where I’ve set up base at my friend Aurelie's in Brussels. The food in Europe is wonderful – spices, flavours, selection, pastries, you name it! I’d almost forgotten all those things existed in my long gastronomic exile in the east. Of course I’ve had all the Belgian specialties – waffels and Frenc- I mean Belgian fries with mayonaisse and a thousand and one sauces! It doesnt strike me as being the most particularily healthy cuisine ever, but boy does it ever taste good. One extremely odd Belgian specialty I a little hesitantly tried at Aurelie’s insistence and my own curiosity was a baguette sandwhich filled with a paste made from raw ground beef and mayo! If that doesnt fly in the face of ever food safety rule I’ve ever heard in North America... and the funny thing is that the sandwhich is called an “Americane” although no American (or Canadian) would ever EVER eat such a thing with all the (I’m sure fully justified) worries about salmonella. But they do things a little differently over here then back home (though not even noticeably so compared to how things are done in Russia, oh dear me no!). The sandwhich was actually pretty tasty and I quite enjoyed it once I turned off the flashing array of red warning lights in my brain. And afterwards I didnt even get horrendously sick, so I’m quite pleased!
From Brussels I’ve charged out on frequent ambitious trips to far-flung parts of Belgium. Ok there actually are no far-flung parts of Belgium, it’s much too small! I’ve covered a lot of places while I’ve been here: Brussels of course, wonderfully preserved medieval Brugge, the battlefield at Waterloo that saw Napoleon’s final defeat, and the charming little university town of Leuven to visit my friend Izzy who’s studying philosophy there. I also just visited Ypres, site of some of the most terrible trench warfare in the First World War from 1914 right through 1918, in which Canadians were heavily involved. It was one of the most affecting places I’ve been.
The first time I went to Ypres it was pouring rain when I arrived, so I first decided to try waiting out the foul weather at the In Flanders Fields Museum that occupies a wing of the famous Ypres Cloth Hall, a deeply impressive giant gothic building that once again dominates the town’s main square after being reconstructed afer its complete destruction by four long years of German shelling (which also levelled the rest of the attractive old town). The museum was very well done, with brand new eye-catching displays that always emphasized the personal side of the war in Ypres with plenty of stories and experiences of individual soldiers from all sides. There was plenty of fancy audio-visual to spice up the exhibition, like a series of computers on which visitors could follow the story of a real soldier who fought in the area or the intermittent sound effects that swept through the main hall overhead; the incoming sound of a low-flying plane or the long scream of a shell followed by such an unexpectedly loud explosion that the girls right near jumped about a foot in the air! I might have been startled a little too... This sort of thing can often be a little cheesy, but here it was very effective. The sound system must have been top-notch; at one point it sounded like a squad of British troops were marching by and singing bawdy soldier’s songs on their way to the front, and you could hear each man distinctively pass by eerily just overhead and then slowly dissapear into the distance. Incredible! There was also another really horrific room that tried to give an abstract impression of the horror of the trenches through a clever display using just light, sound, and a few artifacts. Disturbingly effective.
Unfortunately the rain was still coming down steadily when I left the Cloth Hall so I walked around the city’s nice Vauban ramparts (old, 17th century) anyways until I was completely cold and miserable (part of the authentic Great War experience I suppose) without getting anywhere near the actual frontlines, which I realized were a good 3-5 kms out of town. I left Ypres really disappointed to not even have seen the battlefield at all, so once I got back to Brussels I found a promising bus tour guide on the internet and resolved to go back!
Luckily when I did two days later, the weather was miraculously perfect, miraculously because the pleasant British couple and their son who were on the tour with me said it was by far the nicest day they’d seen in the 9 times they’d been to Flanders! Our tour guide was named Chris, an expat Brit who did an excellent job at keeping things interesting with an extensive knowledge of all sorts of fascinating details about the Ypres Salient.
First stop was the small Essex Farm Imperial War Cemetery on the old canal from Ypres. It’s just one of a staggering 137 in the tiny Ypres salient area, which is only about twenty square kilometres altogether – twenty kilometres in which 1,000,000 soldiers died in four nightmare years. The bright white war cemeteries literally dot the peaceful landscape around Ypres, and every major intersection we came to had signs with directions to still more cemeteries farther afield. What makes Essex Farm in particular so special is that it was the site of a dressing station where a certain Canadian surgeon named John McCrae worked, patching up the broken men that streamed in from the adjacent front lines. It was here, in one of the claustorphobic dugouts built into the bank of the canal embankment, that he wrote “In Flanders Fields” after seeing a friend blown to bits by a shell just outside. McCrae survived Essex Farm but died before the war’s end in 1918 at another military hospital after contracting meningitis. He’s not buried in the cemetery there but there is a VC winner, a sniper who sacrificed himself holding up the advance of an overwhelming German attack so his unit could retreat to safety, and a 15 year-old, the youngest British soldier to die at Ypres.
I still have Tyne Cot, Vancouver Corner, the German war cemetery, Passchendaele, Sanctuary Wood and Hill 62, Hellfire Corner, and much more to tell you about but I’m going to have to call a break here, as it’s far too late to write more but hopefully I will get back to it soon - if I can with my travelling and infrequent internet access. Off to London, cheerio!
