Parents' Visit, Au Thé de Pékin

My parents came for a visit last week. They'd spent some time in Brussels before, so were willing to skip the usual tourist destinations. We spent a lot of the week scouring open-air food markets, as my parents are possibly even more serious about food than I am. (They were super-psyched to find herring matjes and an abundance of white asparagus.) One thing that's funny about my parents is that, almost 40 years after emigrating to the United States from Taiwan, they still cannot travel without seeking out Chinese food. So a trip to Brussels Chinatown was mandatory - for a meal, and to set me up with a local purveyor of Chinese supermarket foods. Before their visit, I had gotten by with visits to Super Store Tagawa (Chaussée de Vleurgat, 119) but was eager to find both a Chinese supermarket and go-to restaurant. As usual, the 'rents delivered: we had a fantastic meal at Au Thé de Pékin (Rue de la Vierge Noire, 16-24), and I will be going to the smelly (and thus authentic?) Kam Yuen (Rue de la Vierge Noire, 2-4) for all future Chinese cooking needs.

At Au Thé de Pékin, I would stick with the non-dim sum menu; I read somewhere that all dim sum in Brussels is frozen and brought here from Paris, although I don't know whether this is true of ATP's. What I do know is that they don't bring it around steaming on carts, but that's probably due to lack of volume and demand. That being said, the dim sum assortment for two was perfectly passable and included some verifiably juicy xiao long bao (loosely translated, little juicy buns). In even better form were the gan cao niu he (stir-fried wide rice noodles with beef), kong xin cai (sautéed water spinach), ji ding (chicken) with cashew, and shrimp with vegetables. My mom even went so far as to pronounce the dishes "possibly better than Joe's Shanghai," our predictable but trustworthy New York mainstay. I agree, except for the xiao long bao.

Hiatus Over, New Blog

You may have been wondering where I've been lately, with nary a post since early this month. Well, the honest truth is that I've been incapacitated by nausea - make that "morning" sickness of the morning, day, and night variety. Now that I've entered my second trimester and the cat's out of the bag, feel free to read about my (mis)adventures in becoming a parent in a foreign country.

Passover, Au Pays des Merveilles

Passover's coming up next week, and I was thinking of trying to help J throw together a seder - until I realized I have absolutely no idea where to procure the ingredients. (The koshermonger?) I am not Jewish, but J is, and in New York we occasionally hosted a seder for a mix of Jewish and gentile friends, usually with a ceremony obtained from the internet (as opposed to the Maxwell House version used by J's parents). One google search led to another, and eventually I found a list or two of Jewish traiteurs and kosher restaurants in the area.

Along the way, I also found a fellow expat's blog which mentioned a bagel place in Saint Gilles, Au Pays des Merveilles. Driven by a mixture of homesickness and yearning for Jewish food (J has always said my stomach is more Jewish than his), we paid a visit today. The weather was unusually sunny and warm, so we sat on the terrace outside. The waiter, unfortunately, was neither service- nor detail-oriented. After screwing up the order for the table next to ours, he brought me a rather strange concoction: cream cheese with little pieces of red onion mixed in, with golden raisins and sliced apple on a poppyseed bagel. I had ordered a sesame bagel with cinnamon, honey, raisin, and walnut cream cheese. Go figure. That said, the bagels were tasty enough (more like Bruegger's or Einstein Bros. than Murray's, Ess-a-bagel, or H&H, but still), and it's fun to order an everything bagel as "un bagel everything."

Tournament of Books

For some years now, I have been religiously following The Morning News' Tournament of Books, a literary competition (of sorts) styled after March Madness brackets, a self-described "annual battle royale between 16 of the best novels published in the previous year." While in New York, I would try to convince my fellow bookclub members to actually participate in a pool - usually to no avail. But even from rainy Brussels, I can follow the proceedings, which also involve a "Zombie round," in which previously defeated books with the greatest popular support are given one more chance, right before the finals (imagine if this happened in the NCAA). Best of all, the winner receives an actual, live Rooster - in honor of David Sedaris' brother by the same nickname in Me Talk Pretty One Day. This year,  I was saddened by the early defeats of Netherland and Unaccustomed Earth, but will definitely stay tuned tomorrow when the results of the championship match are announced.       

Lady GaGa

IMAGE VIA DAGUNKZ-REMIX-BLOGSPOT.COM
I can't believe I'm blogging about this - but what I really can't believe is that Lady GaGa is actually American. Because, Really?! When I first saw her video at the gym, I just assumed she was one of legions of Euro pop tarts. Imagine my surprise when it turned out she was American. More than anything, she seems straight out of a terrible SNL skit like "Deep House Dish," a joke-as-emblem of exactly the type of European phenomenon that Americans would label/mock as "Euro," with or without "trash" as suffix. Just look at the crystal mask from the future. Maybe there's some elaborate joke I'm not getting. But otherwise, shame on you, Mark Ronson.

Harassment

Brussels-based expat mag The Bulletin caused a big uproar recently with an article entitled "Single, but not safe, in the city." According to the article, which cites an attempted strangulation in January and testimonials from a number of the author's friends, verbal and physical attacks on women are rampant in Brussels. Which is terrible, obviously, but not something I was really aware of. After the article was published, J's secretary asked him to tell me she thought the article was a bunch of baloney, but one of J's colleagues countered that his Scandinavian partner gets harassed all the time.

All this talk about the article made me realize something: whereas I had become used to the highly annoying and offensive catcalls most women receive on a routine basis in New York, I have not been subject to verbal harassment a single time since moving to Brussels. (Unless you're counting all the ni haos, that is.) When I told one of my friends in New York about the contrast, she responded matter-of-factly, "Of course not, you're an oddity to them." By which she meant that my Asian- and other-ness has unexpectedly rendered me immune to harassment. Which is just fine by me - I'll happily take it.    

Skinny Mec and Smurfette

Every morning around 6:30 AM, like clockwork, footsteps best described as belonging to a mythical giant begin to resound in our bedroom. What's most miraculous is that this noise is being produced by our diminutive upstairs neighbors, a young French couple - he a skinny mec, and she, frankly, no taller than a dwarf - hence the nickname Smurfette.
Unfortunately, we live in an old maison de maître, with paperthin floors and ceilings. And under the floorboards, which once harbored fleas, there is no insulation. Which is why J went upstairs a few nights ago intending to have a friendly, neighborly talk - more along the lines of "We're all in this together; do you mind paying a little attention?" rather than "Keep it down!"
Smurfette (who is, in all fairness, very nice) answered the door and immediately called for Skinny Mec, as she speaks no English. (I had considered going up myself, but after deliberating with J, decided my French might lack politesse.) J explained the situation - thin floors, no insulation, lots of noise - in the least confrontational and accusatory way possible.
At this point, Skinny Mec completely flipped: "Non, I weell not! You cannot tell mee how to leeve! I weell not leeve like dat!" He went on . . . and on, throwing a prototypical French fit straight out of the kitchen of a Disney movie. I could hear him downstairs and pictured smoke coming out of his ears. With his tail between his legs, J came back downstairs. Poor guy. Being a nice, reasonable person, J almost wondered if Skinny Mec's inexplicable tirade meant he had done something wrong.
Of course not. But afterwards, we sat for a while in our apartment, contemplating the episode in complete consternation. For one, did Skinny Mec and Smurfette really find it outrageous to be asked to be slightly considerate of their fellow neighbors?
Which, unfortunately, opens up an altogether broader topic - that of level of consideration, and whether we as Americans are perhaps overly polite. People do not open doors for you here, preferring to let them slam in your face as you're entering a building. (Apparently, it's because Belgian women take offense if a man holds a door open for them - but I don't entirely buy this explanation.) Petty line cutting is common. And the other day, while my friend and I were walking on Avenue Louise, an older, quite bourgeois Belgian lady decided to bulldoze between us, parting the distance between us as if it were the Red Sea. To which I can only say: Really?! I thought people from New York were supposed to be rude.