Benelux Field Trip - first weekend



Spent Saturday afternoon touring around Brussels for my first extended look at the city since arriving. I liked what I saw (even though it was damp and unseasonably cold for the seventh straight day). I ate my first Belgian waffle covered in chocolate from a street stand. I saw Manneken Pis, the famous statute of the little boy peeing. I strolled around Place Royal and Grand Place. I sat down in a bar to watch some real football and down a couple bottles of Leffe.



I also purchased a one month Benelux rail pass which I will be able to use to go anywhere in Belgium, the Netherlands, or Luxembourg for any five days of my trip. So I hopped on a 7:40 train last night for Luxembourg, got to my hotel after a three hour train ride, and went straight to bed. The hotel I picked out was bland, but it was also perfectly clean and was located midway between the train station and the Old City -- which was all easily walkable.

There's nothing truly spectacular about Luxembourg City. There's no crap-your-pants moment or sight along the lines of Jerusalem's Old City, the Great Barrier Reef, Florence, Yosemite, etc, etc, but there are some "nice" things to do and see. I woke up this morning and walked up to the Old City. It was still damp and chilly out and most shops were closed because it was Sunday, so at first, I had the whole place to myself. I walked down into the great park in the Petrusse valley, saw the cute little area along the Alzette river known as Grund, and then went back up to the Chemin de la Corniche, a pedestrian promenade along the edge of the city walls overlooking the valley below.


in front of the Palais Grand-Ducal

The walk then took me to the Bock Casemates, an extensive series of rock cut tunnels under the site of the famous hilltop fortress which stood on the Bock in various forms from 963 until it was mostly dismantled in the 1800s. These tunnels actually reminded me a bit of the ones Mary and I saw in Cappadocia in central Turkey. After the Casemates, I walked past the Palais Grand-Ducal in time to see a changing of the guard as the sun finally came out. After a quick pizza lunch, which included a free glass of champagne for some reason, it was back to touristing.


Chemin de la Corniche

I spent a couple hours of my afternoon in the National Museum of History and Art. Among the art highlights, they had an enormous 35ft x 20ft Roman floor mosaic in excellent condition which dated to the 3rd century AD. Notably included in the collection of paintings were some gorgeous 16th century paintings by Pieter Breugel as well as some more modern pieces from Cezanne and Picasso. I then spent a little while visiting the Luxembourg City History Museum. The lower two levels dealing with the real history of the city and state were actually quite nice. However, the top level could basically be described as "this is how the plumbing works in Luxembourg" and was not worth much time. Finally, they had an interesting (and bizarre -- and also apparently controversial) temporary exhibit called "Watch out, gypsies! The story of a misunderstanding."


Grund, along the Alzette river

All in all, Luxembourg is a lovely little place I probably never would have visited without already being on an extended trip to a city that's a short train ride away. Some of the folks I spoke to around Brussels, both co-workers and locals, weren't so keen on Luxembourg City, but after my day there, I'm glad I went. I sure wrote a lot about it, anyway. Though I guess that's partially because this is the first time I've travelled abroad without Mary being with me, so I really want to have it all written down to share with her.

found something cool in Brussels

Well, actually, I found something cool online while in Brussels.

Just got back from a practice with a local ultimate team. They were a lot of fun and the ultimate was pretty decent... too bad I'm still not 100% after my weekend of no sleep (travel from DC to Brussels was brutal thanks to the nor'easter, but that's another story). I wound up with bad calf spasms in both my legs after a while and had to call it quits three-fourths of the way through.

okay, time to go to sleep

ps - did i mention that the club team has a lit field with a pub literally right next to it to retire to when you're done playing? best setup I've ever seen in 15 years of playing ultimate

Finish Heinz Field!

Now that a new arena for the Penguins is finally in the works and the team's future in Pittsburgh is secured, perhaps it's time to switch gears back to the Steelers' Heinz Field...

A couple weeks ago, I emailed the Pittsburgh Steelers season ticket office to find out how I am doing in terms of their waiting list. I placed myself on the list back in June 1998 and was told at the time to expect a wait of "approximately 10 years." So I was hoping that I might be getting close to that magical day after nine years on the list. Unfortunately, I learned that they are only processing people right now who signed up in February 1995. That sounded okay at first, but I realized that it's actually pretty bad after thinking about it for a moment. Thanks to Bill Cowher's first peak of success with the team from 1994-1997, I imagine that a ton of people signed up during those years. I'm guessing that could easily mean nine years down, with nine more years (or longer?) still to go for me.

This situation led me to wonder why the Steelers only expanded their capacity by five thousand seats when they left Three Rivers Stadium and built Heinz Field in 2000-2001. And then I thought, "Why not add more seats to Heinz Field?" Finish the job! Close up the south endzone. I came up with four very good reasons why the Steelers should try to add another ten thousands seats there.



1) This is football, not baseball. People actually focus on the game, so nobody really cares about what the place looks like. And even in the unlikely event that some people truly care about the view, the layout of Heinz Field never made sense from the start since the open end is aligned with the Point rather than the actual downtown skyline. Only about one-third of the seats have a good view of downtown while the rest face the mostly empty Mount Washington hillside as you can see here:



2) Open end = additional chilly breezes coming in

3) Open end = valuable crowd noise escaping

4) A closed end would mean more money for the team coming in. The extra seats would obviously be filled, so that would be at least $5.5 million in additional ticket revenue per season (10 home games x $55+ per ticket x 10,000 tickets). And that does not even include revenue from new personal seat license sales, parking fees, concessions sales, occasional home playoff games, etc. Why would the Rooneys say "no" to all that money?

Here's my quick and dirty cut and paste job on the first image above to show what the place would look like closed in with additional seating on the south end. I like the way it looks.



Though Pittsburgh is not a huge city, the Steelers are one of the most popular sports franchises in North America. A 65,000 seat venue is a bit smallish for them. A 75,000 seat venue seems to be a more reasonable size for a franchise like the Steelers. I just wish the Rooneys would get greedy and do this so I could finally get some season tickets!

Morning news... and morning metro ride from hell

- I have little doubt that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was a "bad guy." However, I'm having a lot of trouble even caring about his big confession about 9/11 and other terrorist plotting. If he had been in the custody of the normal American criminal justice system, that would be one thing. But a confession from a guy that's spent a few years in secret CIA prisons and at Guantanamo Bay??? Maybe the confession is legit. On the other hand, I'm sure at some point, they could have gotten him to confess to starting World War I by plotting the 1914 assassination of Franz Ferdinand.


- What the hell is wrong with Metro these days??? The past two months have been absolutely ridiculous. I've been riding the Metro pretty extensively for over a decade and can say with absolute certainty that the past couple months have been the worst ever. This morning was perhaps the seventh time since mid-January that I've had to deal with a major delay. The red line in particular seems totally snakebitten. First, there were track problems this morning -- which were probably related to the Metro fire (!) last night. Then, after service was restored, I watched about six completely full trains pass by. And then when I finally got myself onto a train, service was shut down again to deal with a sick passenger. All in all, it took me an hour to go four stops from Cleveland Park to Metro Center. I literally could have walked to work in that amount of time.

To bring this back to a sports frame of reference: if Metro were a sports team, I'd have to say their 2007 "season" was looking a lot like the one put together by the 1985 Pirates.

Heading to Brussels

My work is shipping me over to Brussels this weekend for an extended stay. One of the firm's clients has a mountain of documents over there that we need to review. I'm still not quite clear on why they want to send the lawyers to the documents instead of vice-versa, but it is what it is. Hopefully I will have my weekends free so I can really get to see a good bit of Belgium and perhaps the Netherlands, but I'm trying not to get my hopes up too high for that.

My itinerary is for four weeks, but there is a bit of fluidity involved, so I may be back a bit earlier or later than expected. The travel is, of course, really cool. On the other hand, I really thought that Mary and I would never be separated for this long again after I finished law school and moved back to DC in spring 2005. So that's a real bummer.

I also had to ditch tickets to a couple late-season Penguins games and will be missing a lot of ultimate, including the always-fun April Fool's Fest down in Fredericksburg. And most distressing -- after the "no Mary" part -- is that I will be away for most of March Madness and the start of the NHL playoffs. This brings back sports memories of our time in Israel on the kibbutz:

I remember getting up at 3am once to watch the Steelers play a Monday Night Football game in the kibbutz volunteer lounge. When the game ended at around 6am, it was time for us to go to work in the apple orchards. If (IF) the Terps manage to claw their way through the first two rounds of the NCAA tournament this weekend, I could see that same scene playing out again next week for their Sweet 16 matchup, only with the orchards replaced by a room full of documents.

[I will still be in touch via email while I'm away, but I will not be available by cell phone after 3pm this Saturday]

Simpsons News once again

I'm starting to like this new Google News Simpsons theme. Here's a screen capture from 10 minutes ago. And the one from a couple days back. I presume a bit of human editorial decision making goes into which pictures are selected for the news page, but perhaps it's all algorithms and other automated processes?? Either way, it's funny.

UGH

I just spent a couple hours listening to Maryland redefine the phrase
"shit the bed" in their first round ACC tournament loss to last place Miami. We obviously got caught looking ahead to a quarterfinal game against Boston College tomorrow. We only shot 58% from the foul line, 39% from the floor, and 17% from three point range. We were significantly out-rebounded. And we were also out-hustled on many loose balls. The first half was particularly terrible as we went to halftime down by 13 after putting more turnovers than field goals on the stat sheet. Actually, the game felt a lot like the first half of the Steelers' season when they inexplicably bumbled their way to a 2-6 start.

I guess we are looking at a five or six seed in the NCAA tournament now. However, if it was at all possible for a 24-8 team with a top 20 RPI ranking to be left out of the tournament, I would argue that we deserve to be left out based solely on the fact that we once again turned into a JV high school team when faced with a game against Miami, a team that is 3-12 against ACC teams not from the state of Maryland. In contrast, Maryland went 24-6 against the rest of the country but 0-2 against Miami... and neither of those games were even played in Miami.

Before today, I think I would have been okay with a second round exit from the NCAA tournament. But Maryland fans might need a trip to the Sweet 16 now, just to erase the taste of today's awful loss.

Interesting story/photo combo from Google News

I grabbed this screen cap at some point late yesterday. Check out the picture accompanying the second story in the Health section. I guess she's the aspirational role model for The Wandis.

Cleveland Park news

- The Blockbuster Video next to Magruder's closed last week. Slightly disappointing, but no big deal.

- The Whatsa Bagel in the same strip as the Blockbuster also suddenly closed last week. Very disappointing and definitely a big deal. That was one of the places that really contributed to the character of the neighborhood. I thought having a locally owned and operated bagel joint was really special. Now we're stuck without a bagel shop. And to add insult to injury, I read somewhere that Cosi might open up a store in Cleveland Park. Barf. Why not just have a second Starbucks open up while we're at it???

- The Uptown is finally getting a "big" movie. 300 opens there on Friday. The early reviews are mixed. So far, it's right on the edge at Rotten Tomatoes with a 60%. Still, I'm excited just because the theater has been home to a seemingly neverending string of small screen movies after the last Star Wars film left theaters in mid-2005. Last year's two month run of Scary Movie 4 at the Uptown quickly comes to mind as a good example of what they've been wasting that huge screen on.

- Don't use the Cleveland Park CVS for photos. I took our disposable camera there after our Snowshoe trip and this is what I got back. That's the full-size, full-resolution image from the photo CD they gave me. I went back and tried to explain that a bunch of 10 to 15 kilobyte digital files could not even qualify as a "photo CD," but the photo tech there tried to tell me that the pictures were low quality because it was a disposable camera. Incredible. So I turned around and took the negatives down the street to Ritz and they did a fine job with them as you can see in the Snowshoe post below.

Nice weekend at Snowshoe



Mary, her brother Eddie, and I spent the weekend at Snowshoe. The skiing was pretty good, with Sunday being a bit better than Saturday thanks to some fresh snow. On the other hand, the weather was nicer on Saturday; Mary's car thermometer read 12 degrees when we left the mountain yesterday afternoon. Eddie had never skied before, so he took a lesson Saturday and seemed to pick up some of the basics and enjoy himself even though his day inevitably involved a lot of falling, as everyone's first day of skiing does.

We stayed in a "Company House" for two nights at Cass Scenic Railroad State Park in Cass, WV, the first little town east of the resort. The place truly was a "house" which was incredible for only $280 for the weekend. It had a full kitchen, dining room, living room, and three bedrooms. The only downside was that the one bathroom was small and pretty crappy on a variety of levels.

Additionally, here are a couple good stories I collected this weekend:

1) We spoke to a guy from Chapel Hill, NC while riding a lift. He was a huge North Carolina fan, of course, but had a friend who was a diehard Maryland fan. He told us that she was at the recent Maryland/Duke game in Durham, NC (Duke's Senior Night this season) and that she somehow snuck in a Maryland flag. Here's the part that's awesome: when the game ended and Maryland had won by eight, she managed to get past security and single handedly rushed the court, waving her Maryland flag on the floor of Cameron Indoor Stadium!

2) I met a guy working at the equipment shop in Snowshoe, WV who was a Deadhead Steelers fan that used to live on Morrowfield Avenue in Squirrel Hill, a.k.a. a five or ten minute walk from where I grew up in Pittsburgh. He was basically an alternate version of me, working at a ski resort and a few years older.

3) While trying to make our way from Snowshoe, WV to I-81 during the drive home yesterday, I royally screwed up and drove 25 or so miles southwest when we generally needed to be heading northeast. This totally reminded me of the sequence from Dumb and Dumber when Lloyd (Jim Carrey) drove hundreds of miles in the wrong direction on I-70.



I had somehow lost eastbound US 33 in Franklin, WV and wound up on southbound US 220 instead. I suspected things weren't right when I noticed we were driving towards the late afternoon sun which obviously meant we weren't heading east. And I knew things were fouled up when we hit the WV/VA border on a totally flat stretch of road because the WV/VA border on US 33 (which I still thought I was driving on until that point) is right at the top of a pretty rugged route over a mountain.

Bartow, WV and Monterey, VA are 24 miles apart via US 250. As you can see when clicking on the map above, I managed to turn that into a 62 mile, 90 minute odyssey.

Awesome story from The Onion today

Seriously, I think this is one my all-time favorites. Even the picture [pictures] alone is great.

YEAH TERPS!

Maryland completed a season sweep of Duke last night on the road, winning their fourth straight road ACC game and sixth straight ACC game overall in the process. And they are now 3-0 against Duke and North Carolina (which makes the loss at home to Miami earlier this season seem all the more insane). Despite our RPI finally jumping ahead of Duke's, I'm sure the voters in the polls will still find some reason to rank Duke ahead of Maryland heading into the ACC tournament next week.

My favorite post-game comment came from Vasquez: "A lot of people don't think we're good... the game was on ESPN, so I don't know, maybe people were watching it."

Of course, people were TRYING to watch it, but because it was apparently amateur hour at ESPN last night, nobody actually got to see most of the final three or four minutes due to technical difficulties. How could ESPN eff up on televising a Maryland/Duke game??? That was inexcusable.

Anyhow, since we were deprived of an unknown number of great shots of Duke fans in anguish, I decided to touch-up an old classic to match last night's result:



Gary Williams just knows how to beat Duke. In the last eight seasons, Duke and Maryland have played 20 times with Duke holding a slight 11-to-9 advantage. To put that accomplishment into perspective, consider that Duke has an incredible 222-35 record (an .864 winning percentage) against the rest of the country over that time frame.


UPDATE - ESPN posted the ballots of their seven "experts" for their final "Power 16" poll of the season. This poll included last night's results. Guess who was the only guy among the seven voters to name Duke (losers of five of their last eight ACC games) among his top 16.

ESPN should be ashamed of that guy by now. If I worked for ESPN, I'd be embarrassed to be on the same payroll.