I spent the weekend in Belgium, with Julien. Brugge was very nice, but kind of a tourist trap. I had moules-frites (mussels with french fries) and an enormous-looking beer at a restaurant on the Market Square on Friday night. We walked around all day Saturday and saw the churches and architecture, and the Choco-Story Museum. I liked the "History of Chocolate" portion of the Choco-Story Museum. The demonstration of chocolate-making was given in Flemish, and the room was very crowded, so we didn't get much out of that except a tasty sample of chocolate. Afterward we took a long walk to the outskirts of the city to see some windmills, and then followed the river around to some other sites.

On Sunday we went to Ghent, which has a lovely picturesque canal. We ate lunch al fresco, even though it was a little cold. There were a lot of Belgian boy scouts and girl scouts running around, apparently engaged in a scavenger hunt. Sunday activities included two live animal markets, mainly selling birds and rabbits. And there was a neat flea market near one of the churches. I mostly looked at books, of which there were a few in French. There were also two large boxes of porn DVDs lying on the ground. One little girl started going through them and quickly decided she wasn't interested.

Julien had thought we could spend the whole day in Ghent, but there really wasn't very much to do. So I checked out the "Belgique-Luxembourg" Michelin Guide that I had borrowed from my landlord's bookshelf, and we decided to stop in Kortrijk on the way back to Paris. It was a tiny town, with a very interesting tower in its central square. There were some weird plaster sculptures in a park. It had rained, so the plaster was kind of disintegrating. We also saw a bus trying unsuccessfully to make a turn to cross a tiny bridge, and holding up traffic on both sides of the bridge. Then later we thought we saw the police arresting the bus driver.

It was a fun weekend, and a nice break. But I didn't feel like working yesterday, so I read a mystery novel I found downstairs. Well, actually I saw the mystery novel and decided I had to read it, as it's been ages since I read a mystery novel. It was Hard Time, by Sara Paretsky, which meant that it was set in Chicago. One of the first major events that happens to V.I. Warshawski in this novel occurs at the corner of Glenwood and Balmoral, which I used to pass all the time. So that was fun.