West London derby in Brussels

After another day in the Brussels office, me and my Spanish colleague retired to the De Valera pub to watch Fulham take on bitter rivals Chelsea in the SW6 derby.

But when we got there…..

Hang on? What????

A quiet word with the bar staff and the problem was rectified.

That’s better

And then the unbelievable happened.

1-0
Nice Guinness
West London is ours!

Amazingly Fulham won 2-1 – four wins in a row. The walk back to the hotel was surprisingly quiet – the result clearly didn’t rock Brussels. But I did my best to wake up the neighbourhood – Come on You Whites!!!!

This looks nice

À Bruxelles

I had to go Brussels for a work trip for a couple of days. My colleague and I took the train direct from Lyon and arrived in time for lunch.

Euronews’ office is near the European Commission building so we took in some of the sites.

The first president of EU Parliament
I love that Eddy Merckx has a tube stop

After work it was time for dinner – we only had one thing on our minds.

Moules frites

Galette des rois part deux

Today there was another pot at work to welcome everyone back for the new year.

And of course this time it featured une tranche de galette des rois but this time avec un verre de cidre.

Un verre de cidre

Ma prof sera contente parce qu’elle m’a toujours dit qu’il faut manger les galettes avec un verre de cidre. Et maintenant je l’ai fait.

Au revoir et merci le sapin

The other job of the weekend was to take down and recycle our sapin- our Christmas tree.

When we got the tree we also bought a charity bag to recycle it in.

Le sapin dans le sac

It makes the job a lot easier – very few pine needles in the flat.

Then it was a short trip to our nearest recycling point for it to join the other sapins at the end of their Christmas shift.

This mountain of trees keeps getting bigger

L’Epiphanie et la galette des rois

It is 6 January – the epiphany, when the three wise men visited Jesus. The day is marked in France unsurprisingly by the sale of patisserie.

Galettes des rois and galettes des reines are sold in all the bakereries.

Voici des mages venus d’Orient

So of course we bought one.

Ours is a galette des reines – but I don’t know the difference

As you can see it comes with a crown – to be worn by the lucky person who finds the charm inside the cake – la feve.

J’ai trouvé la feve – moi

Oingt en crèches

Cath saw that our favourite village in the Beaujolais region was having a display of Christmas crèches. But today was the last day – so off we went.

I’m glad we did but a word of warning – there were a lot of them. Below are some of the best.

Some more formal
Some more fun
And a Christmas-looking tree

Bonne année

New Year’s Eve so we booked a table at our local restaurant Le Rive Gauche. They had a special menu for the occasion.

Raviole de langoustine

And it was delicious. Service great, wine great – rapidly becoming our favourite restaurant.

Ce n’est pas une pomme

Earlier in the day we joined the queue at Le Merveilleux de Fred to buy another Bûche de Noël.

Ooooooooo 😋
We’re saving this for New Year’s day

First visit to Musée des Beaux Arts

We had not yet visited Le Musée des Beaux Arts but today we decided we should go and see the Nicolas Poussin exhibition.

I didn’t know much about him but Cath was explaining his style to me on the short walk to the museum – a leading French painter of the French baroque style in the 17th century.

Venus featured heavily
As did Bacchus

There was also some Picasso works inspired by Poussin. All in all a very good exhibition and the musée is great with some lovely paintings and sculptures.

Necro? You what?

When someone famous is ill or dies a newsroom will usually have an obituary to hand.

The same is true at Euronews and with Pele dying and Pope Benedict XVI seriously ill we have been talking a lot about these obituaries.

In English these are known as Obits. In France the word they use is Necros.

I’m not the only who finds this term a bit unsettling. Necromancer, necrosis, necrophilia – let’s leave it there.