Traveling Baker

For four days I walked around Brussels reciting to myself the few French words I know. This tiny collection of phrases, I figured, was all I needed to survive in a French-speaking city.

“Hello,” I would begin. “Please, pardon, but I don’t speak French. Do you speak English? Thank you, have a nice day!”

If all else failed, a series of hand signals would ensue. Most times, fortunately, the store cashier or hotel clerk would know enough broken English to nurse the conversation along.

More times than not, Sarah’s vague knowledge of the French language has bailed us out. But on Saturday night, when we ventured into Le Paradis, a Yugoslav restaurant in an ethnic pocket of Belgium, her French was put to a real test. Our waitress didn’t understand a word of English. A long game of sharades began as she and a customer tried to explain that the cuisse de poulet aux sauce de champignons was not filet but, in fact, contained bones.

“What’s this?” asked the customer, a smiling chain-smoker pointing to his wrinkled pinky.

“Um, a finger,” Sarah answered.

“OK,” the customer continued, “and after you eat finger, what is left?”

We laughed hysterically, not quite sure why wed be eating our hands.

Eventually they gave up and just sent out our food. After a meal involving bony chicken and pomme frits — not French fries, because that is insulting to the Belgians who invented the much-loved grease sticks — we made quick friends of two men, daily regulars of the cafe named Dimitri and Jean Marc. Dimitri was a burly man with graying hair that hung past his ears, large eyes, and a cigarette practically glued to his lip. He buys and sells artwork. Jean Marc was younger, a tortured artist with a story Dimitri said was simply too sad to tell us. Jean Marc, of course, smoked cigarette after cigarette and sipped wine with abandon; Dimitri’s drink of choice was beer.

Dimitri thought it hilarious that our names are Sarah and David. “You are Jewish?” he asked. “Like David and Goliath?”

The most fascinating moments involved our discussion of the United States. When we told them we are American, Jean Marc, who had been friendly and joking with us, quickly hung his head low in disappointment, then mockingly held two fingers like a gun to us. “Americans? Bang!”

He looked up at us again and asked, “You like Bush?”

“No, actually we dont like the president much at all,” Sarah answered. “Most people in America don’t approve of what he’s doing.”

That was all it took to win over Jean Marc again. He slapped my back and smiled. Later he ordered a fitting beer for me: a Bush beer, one of Belgium’s finest.

Highlights from the trip so far:

• Choosing from more than 100 kinds of beer in Porte Noire, a 16th-century wine cellar converted into a bar. The brick-lined hangout was filled with black-clad locals and tourists in the know.
• Watching a fellow traveler, a pretty, young lady from California, undress in our shared room, and trying not to fall out of the top bunk. We were out of the hostel the next day and checked into a hotel.
• Taking an hour and a half to drive 10 minutes to the other side of Brussels, an excrutiating exercise in navigating the winding foreign streets. The kind folks of Belgium apparently cannot be bothered to post any street signs, so figuring out which street you’re on is anyone’s guess.
• Attending Easter Sunday service in St. Michael’s Cathedral, a cavernous old Catholic church, where we didn’t understand a word of the sermon, but the singing of the chorus was truly moving.
• Also on Easter, we drove to the ancient town of Bruges, where we saw up-close a vial containing what was purported to be the coagulated blood of Jesus, collected centuries ago and kept as a religious relic by the townspeople.
• After all that religious stuff, naturally, we had to move to the other end of the spectrum, so we drove up to Utrecht, just outside of Amsterdam in the liberal-minded Netherlands, where we will be staying briefly with our friend Karin.