Visiting Bruges
(Belgium) to View the Memling Museum by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget
I
went on a solo trip to Brussels (Belgium) to visit my Detroit buddy Eileen, who
had recently graduated from the London School of Economics (LSE) and was
working as a consultant for the European Union.
I
knew Mick Jagger also attended the LSE and asked her if she was going to
promote “European music for mega money in the EU and abroad.”
“More
like cheese and wine,” she said probably wondering when Peter Pan Ruth was
going to grow up.
As
ever, the first order of business when doing business in a country that is
French or has some sort of French heritage is to eat. We walked from the train station to her
apartment and picked up a few items at Delhaize Supermarket on the way home.
We
ate a light dinner of prosciutto, smoke salmon, lettuce with blue cheese
dressing, and fruit salad with slices of baguette and Kerrygold butter.
We
drank a Sauvignon de Touraine with our little meal and went to sleep to early,
so we could get up bright and early for a trip to Brouges the next day.
I
love taking the train to Bruges. The
fields around Bruges are green, the canals are clean and shimmer, and swans
glide along the canals on the way into town.
We
went to the Central Train Station to go to Bruges. The train originated in Cologne, Germany, so
we had to stand all the way to our destination, but we did not care. We were having fun, laughing about the books
we were reading and wondering where we could eat waterzooi, a Flemish fish stew
in Belgium.
When
we arrived, we went to the Memling Museum in Bruges. The Museum holds two rooms of art that is
very important to the Flemish people.
The
most stunning piece was a casket for the relics of Saint Ursula. According to the legend that Memling painted,
the devout Ursula refused to marry the pagan English prince Etheric until he
converted.
Ursula
was a demanding woman and also insisted on having three years to make a
pilgrimage to Rome with 11,000 virgins.
Ursula
was martyred en route for refusing the advances of the King of the Huns. The tale was quite popular in the Middle
Ages.
It
was noon, so we went to eat. Eileen and
I walked around and checked out menus before choosing a restaurant with good
food at reasonable prices.
We
ordered in English not French. Even I
knew that the Flemish regions around French-speaking Brussels were rather
snooty about speaking Germanic languages, which include Flemish, Dutch, and English.
Eileen
and I were twins and ordered the same thing.
We started our meal with puréed carrot soup. Our next course was grilled salmon with a
light, cream of tomato sauce with a side of sheet pan baked potatoes.
I
can make puréed carrot soup, sheet pan baked potatoes, and grilled salmon with
a light, cream of tomato sauce now and save a lot of money.
Dessert
was a scoop of highly perfumed vanilla ice cream with a slice of musk melon.
After
lunch, we spent a lot of time touring town on foot looking at homes, flowers,
swans, and the canals with clean water that reflected everything in the
sunlight.
We
visited a cookware store and a bookstore.
Surprisingly, there were many English-language books in the store. It reminded me of the FNAC International
Bookstore in Paris with the exception that the FNAC had magazines, newspapers,
and books in many languages, especially those of the European Union.
We
made our way back to the train station and were happy to find seats after all
the walking we had done.
By
Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France
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