Brussels and Passion Week in France

*Jane in Paris*

I'm actually going to start with the second topic. The main thing I wanted to share about Easter in Paris is that it's not Easter! No bunnies, no eggs, no one trying to get me to buy things to celebrate one of the holiest days on the church calendar. Here Easter is called "Pâques," meaning Passover. From what Nick tells me about Easter in Vienna, it sounds like the cute pastel animals come from our Germanic heritage. The church that I've been attending held a special service on Palm Sunday that featured a beautiful Passion cantata by one of the many artistic people in the congregation, John Featherstone. This helped me to start off Holy Week with a sense of solemnity. The other special thing I did that week was to go to Good Friday (here called "Holy Friday") mass at Sacre Coeur basilica. It's one of the larger Catholic churches in Paris, but it lacks the touristy atmosphere of Notre Dame. The most powerful moment for me was when the priests and attendants processed down the aisle, empty handed, and then all prostrated themselves on the floor of the sanctuary for two minutes. We in the crowd immediately dropped to our knees and it seemed like no one moved in the church until the celebrants stood up. I'll also always remember watching the nuns process up to the choir (the nice older woman sitting next to me brought their movements to my attention), all of them in white dresses and black head-coverings. The simple color combination seemed to encapsulate the sentiment of Good Friday. In short, it seemed much easier in Paris to have a meaningful Passion Week than I find it to be in the U.S. It is too bad that the nation's companies have managed to turn it into just another day for Americans to buy things.

Nick visited me in Paris last week, and our biggest adventure was a day trip to Brussels, Belgium. We took an early morning train from Paris and found ourselves at the South Train Station after just 1.5 hours. Right away seeing all of the signs in Dutch and French captivated me, because Dutch seems like a comical, corrupted form of German that I can almost understand. We made our way to the famous Grand Place, snapped some pictures, and then visited the church on the square, St. Nicholas. The priest was standing at the door, greeting people who passed by. Parts of the church had been built in the 13th century and other buildings on the square were actually attached to the walls of the church and obscured parts of the windows. Later in the day we visited another church that we happened upon on the way to a museum, St. Michael. The stained glass inside the church was beautiful and reminded me of the windows of Chartres. All around the outer aisle of the church were paintings that had been inspired by a particular religious poem. I really like that churches in Europe so often support the arts (for instance Notre Dame's participation in Nuit Blanche). One of my favorite paintings was Pâques. We also saw the Atomium, Brussels's version of the Eiffel Tower: a huge model of an atom (mercury I think) also built for a World's Fair.

It was nice to visit a country that was brand new to me but where I could still communicate; despite what I had heard, French in Brussels didn't seem to differ noticeably from Parisian French. Nick and I liked that new and old building mixed fairly freely in this city, which isn't the case in Vienna nor in Paris. Our last activity there was eating Belgian waffles topped with chocolate sauce and fruit.