Super Bowl and Mardi Gras

After 5 straight days of sunny, warm, and overall very nice weather I guess we should have known that this was coming, but today had to have been one of the worst days I've experienced in Brussels. The fog has been so think all day that you'd think you were in London (although maybe not even that, as you'll see) and the cold temperature and bitter wind was not helped one bit by the dampness. I think a woman on my tram home tonight described it best when I overheard her say it was a "dense cold". I also heard her say that she was from London and this was far worse than anything she has seen there, in terms of the fog and the cold, so that might give you an idea of what its like right now.



Oh, and my commute home took nearly 45 minutes because after 7pm they start pulling all the trams off the tracks, even though there are still alot of people trying to use them to get home. The result: only a few trams running, and all of them are packed with people. Not fun at all.



I havent been updating this as often as I would have liked, but I'm going to try to spend the next few days and catch up on the things that have been happening in February. Lets start with the Super Bowl - which I had to watch in French (and with no commercials, probably the only time I'd ever complain about that). I'm still not sure where that game should rank on the all-time list of Super Bowls (definently not #1 because it was such a boring game until the last 5 minutes), but it has got to be in the Top 5 because of 3 things:

#1 - the over-confident Patriots (who spurned the football gods all season long by running up the score, cheating, and basically asking for Karma to smack them upside the head) being unable to establish anything on offense with the exception of that last drive in the fourth quarter to briefly give them the lead. If there was one team in the league who should know not to be over-confident when you have the best offense, it should have been them. Remember how the Patriot dynasty began? Super Bowl XXXVI against the Rams (the greatest show on turf), in which the heavily underdog Pats stopped the Rams offense for 3 quarters, then let them back into the game in the 4th before Brady drove them down for the winning FG. The game was exactly like that one, except the Patriots were now the Rams. Need one more sign of the overconfidence? During media week, Brady scuffed at Plaxico Burress' prediction that the Giants would win 23-17. Said Brady, "He thinks we're only going to score 17 points?" Now he wishes he could have had 17 points. AND he could have had 17 points if Belicheck hadnt been an overconfident idiot in the 3rd quarter and gone for it on 4th and forever.

#2 - the ugliest game winning drive in Super Bowl history, but one that has to go down next to Montana's drive vs. the Bengals as the best ever. Seriously, Manning threw 2 good passes the entire way down the field, threw 2 others that should have been picked off, and got a TD pass because the Patriots CB fell down (although it was a great move by Burress). Yet somehow he took them 87 yards in 3 minutes to win the game. Moral of the story - we knew the Pats defense was weak all season and this proved it.

#3 - The Play. ESPN's Sports Guy is trying to come up with a name for it. I think it should simply be "the play". I'm still not sure how it happened, and I only know one thing for sure: that pass would have been incomplete (or maybe never even thrown, had Manning been sacked) if the Pats hadnt been tempting Karma to come and get them all season long. In terms of sheer impossibility, that has to be the greatest play in Super Bowl history. Nothing else comes. Furthermore, I think it's the greatest football play I've ever seen - just ahead of McNabb's scramble/60 yard bomb to Mitchell and McNabb to Mitchell on 4th and 26.

So thats the thoughts on the Super Bowl.






Last Tuesday we took a CIEE-sponcered trip to Binche, a small town in southern Belgium that is really only known for one thing - a huge Mardi Gras party (lasts for 3 days). The culmination of the party is a huge parade in which nearly all the men ever born in the town march while dressed in costumes designed to mimic native Americans. Thats right, the Belgians are imitating native Americans. The tradition began when the first pictures of "indians" were arriving in Europe, and after seeing them with feathers on their heads, the Belgians tried to do the same, which resulted in costumes like this:

Those giant cotton balls they are wearing are feathers - Ostrich feathers.

So all those guys come down the main street throwing oranges by the hundreds into the crowd. That tradition began around the same time, when oranges in the middle of winter were a really special treat. Now, there are so many that you dont really know what to do with all of them. This is what the street looked like after the parade was over:

And thats just the ones that people didnt catch and eat. They're really good too. So thats about all for now. I'll update again before the week is over with info and pictures from this past weekend's trip to Antwerp, so stay tuned.

Last Weekend: Bastogne

This saturday we had a fully-sponcered CIEE trip to Bastogne, which is, of course, famous for its role in the Battle of the Bulge in December and January of 1944 and 1945.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_bulge

The town is a tiny, tiny, little village in the southeastern corner of Belgium, near the border with Luxembourg. (Brussels is broken into 10 Provinces, the province in which Bastogne is located is called Luxembourg, and it borders on the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, that tiny little nation between Belgium and Germany. Oh yeah, and the capital of Luxembourg (the nation, or duchy, if you prefer) is also called Luxembourg, so you can imagine that this is never, ever, confusing at all.

We left from school at around 8 in the morning (the earliest I've been awake since getting to Europe), and drove all the way to Luxembourg for a visit to the American cemetary there, which serves as the final resting place for thousands of men (and 1 woman - a nurse) who lost their lives in the Battle of the Bulge. Amoung those buried there in General Patton, who requested that he be buried amoung his men when he died. Apparently he was killed in a minor car accident in Germany just after the war, I never knew that.

After the cemetary we headed up to the town of Bastonge for lunch and a brief tour of the town itself (which doesnt take too long, its only a few streets). We then moved on to the battle memorial which is located just east of the town on a little hill. From there you can see pretty much the whole town and the surrounding areas. Our guide (who had witnessed the battle at age 8) pointed out the various places where the Americans were positioned and you could see how close the Nazis were to overrunning the town on all sides. The monument itself is pretty impressive as well, a fitting tribute to the people it was built to honor.

We also visted a portion of the woods around the town, in the area that was being held by Easy Company (if anyone is familiar with the HBO mini-series Band of Brothers), and had a chance to actually see some of the foxholes which are still there. The forest is incredibly dense and dark (even in the middle of the day) and its hard to see anything more than a few hundred feet in front of you. Since we were visiting in the beginning of February, I expect we saw things very much as they were when the battle began - there was even snow on the ground. After looking at the size of those foxholes it's hard to believe that anyone could manage to fight a war while living in one of them for the better part of a month.

Finally, we made a brief stop at a German cemetary in the area, just to the north of Bastogne, which is quite different from the American cemetary. Rather than being in a wide open, sun-lit field, this place was covered mostly by trees and looked much more somber as a result. Another difference was the grey crosses that were used instead of the bright white crosses we're used to seeing in military cemetaries. Apparently, under the Treaty of Versaillies, one of the punishments to Germany was that they could not bury their soldiers under white marble crosses any longer, so they had to use grey granite instead. When WWII began, they continued this practice, so all German cemetaries from the two wars have grey, not white crosses.

We returned to Bastonge for dinner (probably the best meal I've had since we've been here), which was absolutely delicious. Restaurants in Belgium take a little getting used to, because when you go out for dinner here it's not simply because you need to eat, it's an event in itself. Most dinners in nicer places will be at least 2 hours long, probably more. They don't exactly rush to bring you your food, and then when you are finished they give you a nice long break before dessert and coffee. Even after all that, you have to actually ask for your check, because the waiters arent trying to hustle you out the door like they do back home. Mostly that has to do with the fact that you arent supposed to tip over here, so the servers aren't dependent on getting as many customers as possible to make more money. Instead they make an hourly wage, so they are happy to let you take your time. Then again, the flip side of that is that service isn't always exactly first class, but usually it's been pretty good.

Anyways, back to our trip.....Its interesting to note that the town of Bastogne, unlike many other places in Wallonia (the French-speaking half of Belgium), and certainly unlike France itself, is all about America. There were 2 American tanks parked in the town with flags flying above them and a bronze statue of General McAuliffe (famous for his responce to the German request for surrender: "Nuts". The Germans had a hard time understanding what that meant) who is revered for saving the town.

After dinner we headed back home, and arrived back in Brussels around 11. It was a long day, but a very interesting and worthwhile one, I'm sure this will be one of my favorite memories from Belgium.

Next: Mardi Gras in Binche on Tuesday! (actually it already happened, but it will be my next post).