PICKING UP OUR PACE IN BRUSSELS

Brussels was cold and teeth chattering and we walked around with frozen faces and numb noses and other frigid extremities. But the city was busy and bustling…streets strung with Christmas lights, shops windows displaying sleek tailored garments on long-legged mannequins and coffee shops, jam-packed and bursting at the seams. Brussels is a city of young people, so unlike Chania with our aging population of retirees sauntering about town leisurely. In Brussels, we…les personnes d’ageés…aged people wrinkled around the edges…have to step up our pace and keep up with the younger generations and not block the human traffic on pedestrian streets and pavements. Yiannis and I were forced to walk briskly and hop on and off trams and the metro and almost forgot our age. During our stay, we spent our whole day with Louise and her parents and returned to our hotel, next to the Parc du Cinquantenaire, only at nightfall, after dinner. On the second day, after a full day of activities with the kids, we walked a little weary, our bones stiff with the cold, into the warmth of this beautiful old mansion, now turned into a hotel and headed straight to the lift, looking forward to a warm shower and a nice stretch on our comfortable bed. We stopped short at the lift and stared in disbelief at the information on the notice stuck on the door of the lift, written in bold letters, both in French and English…EN PANNE…OUT OF ORDER.

Me: Surely that can’t be possible!

He: ( Silent.)

Me: What are we expected to do????

He: Take the stairs.

 I was aghast! We were on the 8^th floor which is actually the 4^th floor because even landings are counted as floors. Thank goodness they don’t count floors like us. But no matter, it was still a Herculean task to navigate those endless wooden flights of stairs. We huffed and puffed up those narrow creaky stairs…the two of us…les personnes d’agée…then catching our breath on the landings, then huffing and puffing some more and then wheezing the rest of the way to our room. We could have crumpled and perished on one of those landings and nobody would have been the wiser. But luckily the next day, they moved us to the ground floor with a room that opened out to a terraced wintry garden, wet and dripping with rain, white marble statues and tall  trees with a couple of fat hooded crows of grey and black perched on their bare boughs. And what a relief it was.  

 Just before New Year we visited the Christmas market with the kids. Louise sat on her father’s shoulders and then switched to her grandfather’s. While she sat on Yiannis’ shoulders, she sang a song that only she understood. Now and then we stopped at the stalls and tasted their vin chaud-mulled wine, warm and sweet, snacked on hot dogs with a line of mustard and onion rings and for dessert, waffles…all held in our hands while walking and talking and inspecting the wares at the stalls. When Louise got tired, she grumbled and screamed. But her eyes lit up with delight when we got to the carousel. The rides were birds, dinosaurs, aeroplanes whales etc and Miss Loulou went straight for the aeroplane. She grinned from ear to ear as it took her and other kids on aerial creatures and sea creatures and flying machines round and round and up and down. But the best ride of all for little Loulou was on the metro. It was her first time and she absolutely loved it…the sound of the speeding train, the scramble for seats and the crowds. At restaurants, she was very well-behaved because she likes people-watching. When Miss Busybody is not craning her neck and following the goings-on at other tables, she needs to visit the toilet…more than once. She is fully toilet-trained except…when she sometimes forgets…and this happens occasionally at home and at school but not at restaurants…whose toilets hold a special attraction for her.

 Since she is in a French speaking country, she speaks mostly French and mainly in phrases…in a toddler proficient way …sometimes dropping the `verb to be’ and other times brushing away prepositions and particles like bothersome flies or gnats…totally superfluous and dispensable. She attends the maternelle-kindergarten now and has picked up some useful life skills…staking her claim on things before anyone else does…`Ce moi! Ce moi!’… which is her convenient version of c’est á moi-it’s mine. I’m guessing this is something she’s picked up from her peers…a bunchful of squabbling toddlers, grabbing toys or colouring pencils with their grimy little fingers and laying claim to them.

Since Annie speaks to her in English and she watches a lot of Cocomelon, she understands English perfectly and it sometimes slips into her utterances, like when she was looking for her little toy dog, one of her bedtime companions. Yiannis was actually sitting on it, quite unintentionally and quite oblivious to the whole thing while Louise was searching for it. She turned to me frantically and asked…`óu est le dog?’. She also wanted to recall her summer in Chania, when we sat together and read the alphabet picture book. She fished out the book from the shelf. She rattled off the first few letters alternating between English and French and when we got to L, she got terribly excited and pointed to it and screamed…`Comme Louise! Comme Louise!’- Like Louise! Like Louise! Then we came to the pictures and words and I pointed to A for apple and asked…`What’s this?’…She shot back with speed and exuberance…`applepomme!’ and looked at me triumphantly suggesting that she had nailed it…hammered in both languages one next to the other.

When Louise was in Chania in summer, she condescended to take some instruction from me. But now, four months older and approaching three years and in her home territory, I have been relegated the bottom rung in the pecking order. There was this day when Annie decided to order hamburgers for our dinner. Since it was the holiday season, business was booming and the burgers were said to be coming from 8 and never came until 10…and they came in two lots. The first bag arrived by motorbike and Annie handed it to me only to go down again to wait for the second bag which lagged behind…probably delivered by bicycle. Anyway I placed the bag on the dining table, only to be ordered by Miss Bossy Toddler to take it to the kitchen…`Non! Non! La cuisine! La cuisine!…pointing to the worktop in the kitchen. I did as bidden. Then there was this other day when we were having pizza. Yiannis and I decided to sit on the couch and eat it in front of the TV. Miss Bossy Toddler was sitting at the dining table with her pizza. The minute she saw me plonking myself next to Yiannis, she screamed out…`Non! Non! Ma place! Ma place!’ I had to make room for her. The boss of me then slid down her chair, grabbed her plate and parked herself next to her grandfather. I sat at the end of the sofa next to the cat.

We had a wonderful time with the kids and were sad to leave but happy to get back to our routine in Chania. Yiannis is back to work, the garden has been left to the rain to take care of and I’m pottering around the house. Annie had brought me some snail slime from Korea which I’m slathering on my face and hoping to get…not the glass complexion that the ladies in Korea boast of…but at least to get it to smooth out some of my crinkles.

So that’s it for now. Cheers and have a good year!