Flower Carpet

Once every other year the Grand Place of Brussels is covered in flowers, begonias to be exact.  This display is referred to as the flower carpet.  (If you would like to know more details, you can check out www.flowercarpet.be)

The flowers are put into place on Friday afternoon and are left in place through Sunday evening.  These flowers are not planted, no soil is involved, they are just tightly packed into spaces bordered by turf.  The entire carpet is over 2,000 square meters. There are approximately 300 flowers to every square meter.  My math calculations tell me, there are alot of flowers.


For the best view of the carpet, it is helpful to get some height.  For just two hours a day, the public is allowed to go onto the balcony of the hotel de ville.  This cost us 3 euros per person.  It was a beautiful sight to see the expanse of carpet with the back drop of the guild houses that border the Grand Place.

It was also a good place for a photo op, even though some of us did not appreciate getting up early on a Saturday morning to see this.




The carpet won't be back until August 2012.  Each time the carpet design changes, so this one won't be seen again.

hotel de ville with people on balcony at second floor level

Old Fashioned Laundry

Like our Virginia house, our house in Belgium has a washer and dryer.  They are on the first floor (hooray!).  The laundry room is larger than the one I had in Virginia.

Unlike in Virginia, electricity is very expensive which means running a dryer is very expensive.  So most of the time, I was the clothes and then hang them to dry. This means the laundry room often looks like this.

I have four lines running across the room and bunches of clothes pins.  Oddly enough I kind of enjoy hanging the clothes out to dry.  Kyra helped me with it the other day and her comment on the experience was, "This is old fashioned."  Which I suppose it is, but it is kind of neat to think that I am doing what my grandmothers and great-grandmothers and generations of women have done.  Only I have a machine to wash all those clothes for me first.

Bathroom Privacy

The master bathroom has a lovely and large window that extends from the floor to just 18 inches shy of the ceiling.  From this window I can see my neighbor's fields, their horses, cows and dog.  I can also see their house and into their windows.
Which I am guessing means they can see my house and into my windows.

in the left window you can see a neighbor

Here is the view immediately opposite the window.   That would be my toilet and next to it the bathtub.  It is hard to see in the photo below, but the shower is right next to the window.  Exiting the shower means stepping right in front of the window.







I should note that our landlords have left us a curtain rod and a curtain.  This would be great if the curtain were big enough for the window, but the curtain is not.  It is long enough, but not wide enough.  So it has to be strategically positioned for optimal privacy based on one's bathroom activities.

So an order was placed for frosted contact paper, a tension rod and sheer curtains.  Kyra helped me with this project.   First we put up the contact paper.  This is not a strong suit for either of us.  It wasn't very straight, nor smooth.  So then came the next step - a small tension rod and sheer curtains.  Looking at the photo is appears we didn't get that level either, but I can easily fix that.   But now there is privacy when before there was none.