A Belgian Interlude

We didn’t actually go to Belgium, though we need to correct that in the very near future. It’s a lovely place, and we have friends there. This time our Belgian friends came here.

It was not the first time Fran was in Our Little Town, though. Way back in the pre-pandemic days she spent about seven months living with us as an exchange student and now of course she’s family. The summer after she returned to Belgium we went over there to visit her and her family, and it was always everyone’s intent that they would come back to visit us as well except that somewhere in there the world caught fire and it took a while to get things back to some semblance of normality.

Whether that applies to the US today is an open question whose obvious answer we try not to dwell on, and we did ask them several times if they were still going to travel here in these parlous times. But they are courageous people and in the end it turned out fine. They made it here and back without being assaulted by masked government thugs, and for that we are grateful.

Last year they asked if this summer would work for a visit and well of course it would work! We’d make it work! So they planned a grand US tour for this month. Fran, her brother Niels and sister Lien, and her parents Roeland and Veerle would fly to New York City to see the sights there, spend a day or two in Washington DC, then go to Chicago for a few days. At that point Niels and Lien would fly back to Belgium and I’d head down to O’Hare to pick up Fran, Roeland and Veerle and bring them back to Our Little Town.

And it worked out pretty much exactly that way, though with the added excitement of their travel agent dropping the ball on hotel accommodations in Chicago during what must have been Every Event Ever Planned In The Windy City All Happening On The Same Weekend, but that got straightened out as well.

We arrived in good order, and Fran even got her old bedroom back!

The first order of business after we got home was dinner, since Americans (at least these Americans) tend to think from one meal to the next. We tried to do things that would be harder to find in Europe – red beans and rice, for example, and one night we went out for Mexican food since I can speak from experience that this is tricky to find across the Atlantic. One night we had a backyard barbecue – complete with sweet corn, since it is the season for that and there is nothing more American than corn on the cob. Sharon, Steve, and Laine came by for that – Sharon and her family were Fran’s first hosts during her exchange year and they hadn’t met Veerle and Roeland before. They were only supposed to keep Fran for a week or two as a Welcome Family but there was a shortage of host families that year and it was December before she found her way to us. It was lovely to get everyone together.

Another night we made homemade pizzas and set up the cornhole game in the driveway, and if the first part of that isn’t the usual Wisconsin thing the second part most definitely is. You can consider yourself a real midwesterner once you’ve eaten sweet corn you’ve shucked yourself and played cornhole in the driveway. There’s a certificate and everything.

After dinner on that first night, though, we walked over to the local soft-serve ice cream place because that’s just what you do in Our Little Town, even if the road in front of it is missing entirely (to be replaced by sometime in October, we are told). If you want to understand America, a soft-serve place on a warm summer night in a midwestern town is a good place to start.

My goal for this visit was to show our friends that the US is a good place even if our current government is a Fascist train wreck of cruelty and ignorance. I grew up in and around Philadelphia in the 1970s at a time when City Council meetings often featured fistfights and about half the City Council ended up in jail on bribery charges one summer, and one of the lessons of that time and place is that you should always draw a clear distinction between a place and its government. So we did our best to forget the larger issues facing this nation and focus on seeing some of the highlights of southern Wisconsin. You can’t get to them all, so Fran and her family will just have to come back for another visit someday.

Their first full day here we took them on a tour of Our Little Town, starting with Local Businessman High School where Fran went during her time here. I remember seeing the school where Lauren went in Germany during her exchange year and enjoying that connection, so I hoped Roeland and Veerle would like it too. We also went to Home Campus where they got to see the place and Roeland even managed to get in a shot or two on the pool table in the student lounge. The highlight of the morning was probably the big gardens in town, since a) they really are nice, and b) Roeland’s hobby is taking professional-quality photographs of insects and if there were going to be interesting insects anywhere in town it would be there.

There were a few interesting insects, though the ones that seemed to make the most impression on this visit were the monarch butterfly that landed in front of our living room window while Roeland was sitting by it (they don’t have monarchs in Belgium) and the fireflies that swarmed out once the sun got low enough in the sky. They have those in Belgium, but not as many of them. After the soft-serve place Oliver drove Roeland and Fran out to one of those big fields where the fireflies congregate in numbers and that was a lovely thing.

The big issue facing our local tour, though – and, indeed, the issue entire time they were here – was that it was weapons-grade hot outside, with all sorts of warnings and admonitions being floated about by Official People, so after the gardens we retreated to our air-conditioned home for lunch and then headed off for a similarly air-conditioned museum north of town. I used to run that museum – it’s a great place, really. It was a stop on the Underground Railroad once upon a time, and even now it serves as a reminder that there is often a stark difference between what is legal and what is moral.

That evening we went to the water-skiing show. Our Little Town has a very good water-skiing team and twice a week they put on a show for anyone who wants to come by and sit in the bleachers and watch them as they prepare for the state and national competitions. There’s always a bit of narrative framework around it, but the main reason people go is for the skiing.

But while Our Little Town is a lovely place to live there are more things to do further afield and so for the rest of their visit we introduced our friends to the American concept of “It’s only a 90-minute drive! That’s nothing!” which can be a bit of a culture shock for people who come from a country you can drive all the way across in about two hours. But they were game and the minivan has American-standard nuclear-powered air-conditioning, and off we went.

We spent a day in Madison, where walked down State Street to the Capitol building, went up into the dome and climbed out onto the rooftop observation deck to look out over the city, and then went back to the Memorial Terrace before walking along the lake for a while.

We hit our favorite Peruvian restaurant for lunch while we were there. At one point I was thinking to myself that those would be hard to find in Europe but then I went to Florence and, well, the place is thick with them. But it’s good food and we enjoyed it.

Another day we took them to the House on the Rock, which is something you should do at least once in your life because you can always use it to justify whatever level of drinking you care to do. If you’ve not had the experience, the House on the Rock is what happens when way too much money meets not nearly enough medication, and it consists of two basic pieces.

First there is the House, which is – as advertised – on a rock. Imagine if Frank Lloyd Wright had married Elvis Presley in 1974 and then set up house together, and you wouldn’t be that far off. It’s got a lot of shag carpeting (some of it on the ceiling), a small creek that runs through it, an unnatural abundance of desperately uncomfortable conversation spaces scattered here and there, very low ceilings throughout, and the occasional full-sized hydraulically powered orchestra that you can start up by inserting one of the coins they give you with your ticket. It also has the Infinity Room, which is legitimately cool.

You wind through the House on a set path, and afterward you think, “Well, that was weird but it was weird within spec and I have made it through unscathed,” and then you get to the Collections and that’s when you realize that the House was just teasing you and now the weird is really going to get rolling. There’s a room with a life-sized model of a whale in battle with a giant squid. There’s a room with the world’s most psychotic carousel, spinning rapidly under a ceiling full of mannequins dressed like angels. There’s a room with a hundred model circuses. There’s a room that looks like Tim Burton’s last therapy session. It just goes on and on, each room leading to something else that will require debriefing to move on with your life, and no trip to southern Wisconsin is complete without it. It’s a lot of fun, in an aggravated what-the-fuckery sort of way, and you should go.

To recover from that we went to Devil’s Lake State Park, which is a lovely and mostly quiet site full of natural beauty where you can sit and just let the day wash over you in peace, and you kind of need that after the House on the Rock.

We came home via the ferry that crosses the Wisconsin River.

The rest of the night was devoted to puzzles. Fran and her family are expert puzzle solvers – they compete in a puzzle competition in their hometown, in fact. That puzzle didn’t stand a chance.

We also spent a day at the RenFaire. It’s always a bit odd bringing people to a Renaissance Faire when they come from a country that actually experienced the Renaissance but the RenFaire is a particularly stylized version of the Renaissance that overlaps with the original approximately not at all, and thus a good time regardless of your historical background. We saw a lot of the performers that we try to see when we go there – the Mud Show, Moonie, Barely Balanced – and generally had a good time wandering around the place even though it was, as noted earlier, very hot.

And of course, if you’re going to show people the better side of America, particularly here in the midwest, there is no more appropriate place to do that than the local County Fair. It’s got farm animals! It’s got all sorts of tasty and moderately nonlethal food! It’s got art! What more could you ask for?

We also went to the Farmer’s Market, because Our Little Town actually has a pretty nice one even when it rains on everyone, which it insisted on doing that day. But it’s right downtown – the city has been doing a lot to make the downtown more lively and accessible and the Farmer’s Market is a big part of that – and we got to visit our friend Lois who runs the kettle corn stand.

Not all of their visit was spent running from place to place, though a lot of it was. There was also some quiet time, scrolling or reading or just hanging out and talking. It’s good to spend quiet time together.

But all good things must come to an end, and eventually I had to drive them back to O’Hare so they could go home again. Though not before the World’s Worst Toy came back to us.

At some point during Fran’s initial stay with us – I believe during the Ukrainian Christmas celebration in January that year – we came into possession of a small cowboy figure, maybe an inch or two tall. He’s stretchy, odd, and tacky in every conceivable sense. It has become a game to pass it back and forth. We sent it home with Fran after her exchange year. She sent it back with us after our visit. We returned it to her when she came back in 2019. And now, all these years later, Fran has deposited it into Oliver’s keeping.

So now we really do need to go to Belgium.