Venice

My first time in Venice left me with a lot of impressions and a real desire to go back with my husband and kids someday.  Because I was taking care of little Anastasia from 9 to 6 (with an hour break at lunchtime, which I used to get out for a walk every day, exploring different neighborhoods) I got to know the city in an entirely different way than if I had been on a weekend city trip, which was actually really cool.

Laundry is hung everywhere in Venice.

I don't think I'd want my undies out for the grabbing right at street level...

Part of wandering around with a toddler means you look like a local.  Every day we spent our mornings in one of the few city parks, and by the end of the week, I'd made acquaintance with some of the other mothers who also came every day.  Old ladies on the vapporetto boat we had to take to get to the park always commented on how beautiful Anastasia is and what nice chubby legs she has (you don't have to know much Italian to understand these sorts of comments).  And more than once, tourists summoned up their very best Italian to ask me directions, and I felt bad disappointing them - not only could I not understand their request but often I was just as lost as they were!

Venice is a pedestrian paradise but a nightmare if you have a bad sense of direction!  And the main highlight of the city for me, seeing as I had little time for museums and churches, was just walking around the city and seeing it as one big open air museum.  Luckily I was able to take my time in getting to know the area our apartment was located in, and then slowly branch out.  After a while you get a mental map of the city in your mind, and you also realize that if you happen to get turned around in a street there is no need to panic, just keep going and soon you'll see something you recognize, or signs pointing you either in the direction of the train station or St. Mark's square, the focal point for tourists in Venice:

St. Mark's Basilica

One thing I hadn't expected was the difference in sounds in Venice as compared to home.  For an entire week, I heard not one car, bus, motorcycle or heavy truck rumbling outside my window!  Instead there were the church bells tolling every hour, sputtering boat motors, and singers on gondolas.  Quite a change of soundscape!

Spot the grumpy looking cat in the window?

I did poke my head into a few churches during my wanderings...

View of the Grand Canal from the Accademia bridge

It was an intense and tiring week (taking care of toddlers is hard work!) but at the same time rewarding and extremely interesting.  I was even able to get a ticket to a concert of chamber music by Vivaldi in a little church for my final evening, which was really special.   But by the end I was missing my family and looking forward to going home.  So we ended the week with an excellent farewell lunch at La Zucca (a well known restaurant that specializes in vegetable dishes), and I flew back to Brussels, hoping to return someday.

Enjoying a well-deserved Aperol Spritz!

Life is like a box of chocolates...

...you never know what you're going to get.

Remember that line from the movie "Forrest Gump"?

That really describes how things have been around here lately.

My parents-in-law were planning a big party to celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary and as one of the gifts my sister-in-law arranged a photo shoot with a photographer, which was unexpectedly a lot of fun for us all.  The party itself went really well - a good time was had by all and it was so nice to see some of my husband's cousins we normally never see.

Tomorrow, I leave for a week in Venice!  This was also unexpected - I'll be looking after the 18-month-old daughter of a friend of mine who has to do research in an archive there.  She was having a hard time finding child care and asked me if I would consider flying down and helping her out for a week.  I've never been to Venice so it will be exciting and I am hoping to get out for lots of walks with little Anastasia to see different parts of the city.

Then, in October, my husband and I are going to Japan for a week!  This was my husband's idea to celebrate our 20th anniversary (which was two years ago - ha ha!) and he kind of sprung it on me early this summer.  I've been quite anxious about the whole idea (especially leaving my kids on their own while being so far away, which they think is great, of course) but as it's coming closer, I am starting to get really excited about it.

Finally, I even surprised myself and finished the Matt Roberts 12 week workout program I mentioned I was doing way back in May, I think.  I did take off four weeks while my niece was visiting us in July, but after she left I got right back on it and ended up doing all but 8 of the 84 days of the entire program.  The program was hard, and there were some workouts I really dreaded (like swimming) but I did it.  I lost some weight and had to part with some clothes that got too baggy, but the best thing is how good I am feeling physically right now - all set to take on looking after a toddler for a week, right?

Once a Runner, Always a Runner?

Sunday we met a couple whose 17-year-old son had just competed in a track meet here in Kessel-Lo, and had come in 6th in the final of the 5000 meter.  I was curious about what his time was, so I asked.  His father was pleasantly surprised that I was interested and when he told me the time (around 14 minutes), he was pleased at how impressed I was and that I had an understanding of how fast that was.  "You must be a runner," he said, "most people have no idea what those times mean."

You must be a runner.  I'll be honest, it felt good to hear that!  Even though I haven't really felt like "a runner" for some time, I have actually been running here and there, so I guess that does mean I'm a runner.  Right?  What are your thoughts on this?  Is there a certain amount of running you need to be doing to call yourself a runner?

In any case, motivated by this nice conversation, I took myself out for a "real" run on Monday morning.  Yes, I've been doing interval runs on the treadmill for the past few months, and I've done a few run/walks with my husband on Sunday mornings, but it had been a long time since I'd just gone out by myself on one of my old routes for what in my book qualifies as a run.

Just me and my Garmin, the path through the woods and the neighborhood and past the old abbey farm where the horses graze...it felt great.  I was doing ten minutes of running alternating with 2 minutes of walking and I hit 5000 meters at 36 minutes.  Not too shabby, I thought to myself.  I may be slow but I'm still a runner.

Summer Recap: 5 Teenagers (including1 Niece), 3000 Kilometers, 4 Weeks, 7 Countries!

Outside the cathedral in Bourges

So, my niece Maddie came to visit us for nearly a month this summer, and we really wanted to give her a chance to see as much as possible while she was here.

We managed to get her to seven countries while she was here (Belgium, Luxembourg, France, Spain, England, the Netherlands and Germany), the highlight of which was a big road trip to the south of France for ten days.  It was a lot of fun - all five teens (Maddie, my three boys and Charlotte, Florian's girlfriend) were great company and good travellers.  I had been wanting to take my kids to the area for years to see the medieval city of Carcassonne, which I visited when I was a teenager travelling with my French host family.

Cloisters in Narbonne Cathedral

Hiking down to the natural bridge in Minerve

We stayed in a gorgeous gite in Pouzols-Minervois, a small village in the middle of vinyards located about a half hour inland from Narbonne, which was really well located for the Mediterranean coast as well as neat places like Carcassonne and our new favorite spot, Minerve (which inspired our running joke of saying "tu Minerve" while we were driving there) - a very cool ancient Cathare city built on cliffs and with an amazing natural bridge in the ravine below - and much much less touristic than Carcassonne, which really put the kids off.  Most days we went and visited things in the morning and then headed back to the gite late afternoon to spend some time relaxing before making dinner.  And one day we drove the 150 kilometers to Spain, to visit Figueres, which happens to be the birthplace of Salvador Dali, and where they have an incredible museum showcasing his life and work.


We could not get over how busy it was at the Dali museum!  The line to get in stretched right around the building and the place was jam packed.  The crazy architecture and the sheer number of Dali's works of art made the trip more than worth it, however.  It was quite an adventure!

I feel so lucky to have been able to get to know my niece better, spend time with her, my husband, kids and my son's lovely girlfriend, and get back to one of my all time favorite parts of Europe.

Enjoying a relaxing boat ride on the Canal du Midi

Can you tell I'm in my laughing place?

Maddie wrote some very nice blog posts about her European adventures on her own blog (including lots of pictures!):

France Part 1
France Part 2
London
Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany

A special visitor, a special place

My niece, Maddie, is visiting us this month!  It's her first big European trip on her own.

This weekend we took her to the Groot Begijnhof (Beguinage) here in Leuven.  It's a neat place, like a tiny city within a city, founded in the 13th century as a community for unmarried, widowed or temporarily single (when their husbands went on crusades) Catholic women (but not nuns).  They had everything they needed within the walls of the city.  Quite a feminist idea for those times!

These days, the houses have all been renovated by the university and are used for housing for students and visiting professors.

Row, row, row your boat...

For the past several weeks I've been doing the Matt Roberts "I Will Make You Fit Fast" program (which I think I've blogged about before).  It's a 12-week program of workouts by a well-known UK trainer.  I have two of his books and I've always really liked them.

The great thing about the program I'm doing now is the variation in the workouts, which challenges me to do different things and get out of my usual routine.  I'm on week 7 now, and plan to finish the entire 12 weeks by the beginning of September, allowing a couple weeks off for when we're on vacation.

So yesterday rowing was on the plan, a gym machine I hardly ever use.  There are three rowers at the gym, and there was a young guy on the middle one, so I took the one on the left, and an older lady I know was on the one on the right.  I quickly got into a rhythm and was very focused on watching the distance I was doing (I had to do 2200 meters), when the lady called over to me, "He's moving forward!"

I looked up and yes, indeed, our fellow rowing dude's entire machine had moved about a meter forward into the aisle, and was inching further!  I had to stop myself from laughing out loud, it was so funny!  And I wasn't even sure if the guy realized it, as he kept rowing away!  Should I tap him on the shoulder and warn him?  I figured that there could have been no way he hadn't noticed he was moving forward, though, and after a few minutes he stopped, got off his machine and sheepishly pulled it back to its original position.  But the other lady and I both congratulated him - "wow! awesome rowing!" - and so then he smiled and looked kind of proud of himself.  I was glad we made him feel better about it, but I made a mental note to avoid the middle rower in future.

16K "Dropping"

Ingrid and I had been planning to do what we were calling a "dropping" for several weeks. We wanted to challenge ourselves with a 15K walk and so I figured out where we could start, and planned out the route so that it would take us about 15 kilometers to walk back home. And then I asked my oldest son, who recently got his driver's license, if he would drop us off at our starting point. "Sure," he said, "but technically, that's not a dropping." Oh, yeah? "A dropping is when you get dropped somewhere without a clue how to get back or even knowing where you are, not to mention how far you are going to walk and the exact route, Mom!" Hmmm. Well, we still are calling it a dropping, because we got dropped off and we walked back. In my book, that's a dropping. And we were pretty darn proud of oursevlves for completing it: It was a gorgeous sunny day and we had a great time. The route we picked had some really nice paths, a lot of variety and some decent hills. By the time we approached our home stretch, after three and half hours, we were definitely feeling it. Before we parted we stopped the Garmin so we could see how many calories we had burned (830) - and then we both headed home, which was another 400 meters or so (I started a new route on my Garmin on the way home just to be sure). Which means we did 16K - our longest distance to date. I was pooped when I got home and my legs were killing me. But I was very pleased with our accomplishment. The only downside to a dropping (well, our style of dropping) is that the last stretch is a bit too familiar (= boring), being in our own neighborhood, and since we don't finish together, we don't get to share a cold beer at a cafe afterwards...I think our dropping formula is going to need some further tweaking if we decide to do it again in the future. But it was fun to try for a change!