Visiting the Modern Art Museum in Brussels (Belgium) with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Visiting the Modern Art Museum in Brussels (Belgium) with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

On a quick trip to Brussels (Belgium), my friend Eileen and I planned to visit the Modern Art Museum in downtown Brussels to view their collection of the Belgian Surrealist painter René Magritte.

First, we ate lunch at a restaurant called the Moule Sacré that had good food at a good price.  Mussels are called the “poor man’s oysters,” but I noticed that the Belgians, who ate them had become rather wealthy.  Mussels also taste good especially when made with crème fraîche, shallots, and white wine.

Eileen and I tried a menu special that had the following items on it:

-avocado halves with chopped, boiled shrimp and creamy, estragon dressing

-Scottish smoked salmon with rye bread and salted butter

-Dames Blanches sundaes made with vanilla ice cream, chocolate sauce, and whipped cream

After lunch, we went to the Modern Art Museum well fed and eager to view the Surrealist paintings by René Magritte.

I loved Magritte’s painting of a train coming out of a fireplace as well as his painting of a baguette loaf of bread floating in the sky.

After visiting the Museum, Eileen walked me to the Gare du Midi, so I could go back to Paris.

I read a book about Hong Kong all the way home.  I liked being Miss – Information even when I was young.

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup of Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Visiting Bruges (Belgium) to Visit the Memling Museum by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Visiting Bruges (Belgium) to Visit 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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Visiting Antwerp, Belgium's Home of Flemish and Dutch Masterpiece Paintings with Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget and Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Visiting Antwerp, Belgium’s Home of Flemish and Dutch Masterpiece Paintings with Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget and Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

My husband Laurent and I bundled up Florence, put her in her car seat, and set out for a weekend in Belgium on a cold, winter day in Paris, France.

The destination I had in mind was Antwerp, Belgium to visit the Koninklijk Museum.  The famous Rubens paintings of wealthy, corpulent women were being restored, but there were still galleries full of paintings by Frans Hals, Rembrandt, Brueghel, and Memling to admire.

My favorite painting by Abel Grimmers (1570 – 1619) was entitled Springtime.  Springtime showed men planting gardens and making their vegetable gardens tidy and lovely.

That desire to beautify one’s surroundings was something I loved about the French, Belgians, and Dutch.  I liked making a little vacation home for myself like the French still do in this way, too.

We walked from the Museum to Antwerp’s Grande Place where we ate mussels with French fries the way the Belgians do; you dunk the fries in mayonnaise. 

That combination sounds awful, but tastes great with canary-yellow, homemade mayonnaise.

We drank Trappist wheat beers made by monks with our meal.

After dinner, we walked around the cold port and returned to Brussels for a good night’s sleep before returning home to Paris the next day.

You can take a TGV (French Speed Train) from Paris to Brussels (Belgium) as well.

I love how you can go all over France and to Italy and Spain on those TGV trains.

By Ruth Paget, Author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Exploring Ghent: Visiting the Spiritual Homeland of Flemish Belgium with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Exploring Ghent: Visiting the Spiritual Homeland of Flemish Belgium with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

The suburbs and most of the countryside around Brussels, Belgium are Flemish while downtown Brussels is French. 

Belgium is a bilingual country:  Flemish is a variant of Dutch spoken in the suburbs and countryside while French is mostly spoken in Brussels and in Wallonia in southern Belgium, a coal mining area.

On one of my trips to Belgium, my buddy Eileen and I went to the spiritual capital of Flemish Belgium in the town of Ghent.

Like Brouges (Belgium), Ghent has many old brick buildings, pretty canals, lace shops, and churches that would be major attractions in smaller towns.

We ate at a restaurant that also served as a bakery and served as a kosher food products store called Bloch on Veldstraat.  The waitress, who spoke English, told us that the restaurant has been there for almost 100 years.

We ordered Shepherd’s Pie.  It was made with a browned crust of mashed potatoes and savory beef and onion filling.

We visited St. Baaf’s Cathedral downtown and admired the Mystic Lamb Altarpiece by Jan van Eyck.  Flanders is Catholic like French Belgium and has much artwork to admire in its churches.

The English guide to the Cathedral is enthusiastically translated as follows:

“Thank the Lord for the profusion of beauty in your life” and I did just that as we headed back to Brussels on the train. 

(In 2018, I still want Google to develop Google Art Project to make museum collections overseas and in the US available to Americans, who may not have the money or physical ability to visit these collections.)

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Exploring Bruges: Visiting Belgium's Venice with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Exploring Bruges: Visiting Belgium’s Venice with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

I loved being able to take the train to Brussels, Belgium from the Gare du Nord in Paris (France) to visit my Detroit buddy Eileen, who worked for the European Union after finishing her master’s degree at the London School of Economics.

Eileen took a vacation day, so we could visit the picture-perfect town of Bruges.  Bruges is full of canals with swans.  We rolled Florence around in her baby stroller looking for restaurants and just enjoying being outside for the day.

Bruges is a beautiful, distant suburb of Brussels for upper management, who could do consulting work at home.

We eventually decided on a restaurant.  Eileen and I both had a savory, tomato soup and Italian omelets called fritattas.  We were feeling pretty good, because we drank Duvel (Flemish for ‘Devil’) and Geuze wheat beers with our garlic toast and omelets.

We walked around Bruges for another three hours.  The Eglise Nôtre had a beautiful Madonna and Child sculpture in it by Michelangelo that was a surprise find for us.

The swans on the canals enchanted me as did the lace makers on the curving, cobbled streets, who set up shop next to chocolate stores.  I felt like I was walking through a wonderland.

We ate Leonidas chocolates on the way home and counted swans on the canals on the way out of town.

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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