Belgium 2015

I took a trip to Belgium with Yeongmi last September.  The primary purpose was to present a paper at the Dynare Conference, but we spent a fair amount of time sightseeing before and after the conference.  The bottom line is the waffles are to die for, the chocolate is superb, but I can't comment on the quality of the beer.  Oh and the best part is they never ask "Do you want fries with that?", the assumption being that of course you do and they're automatically included!

Old Guild Halls on the Main Square in Brussels

Joseph Lejuene at the John Cockerill Statue in Seraing, Belgium

I was in Brussels Belgium for a conference last week and found myself with a Friday free, so Yeongmi and I took a trip to Liege, Belgium in the heart of Wallonia.  Before the trip my mother emailed me this photo of an ancestor of mine, Joseph Lejuene, who was from Liege.

After a long Google search I found the following entry at Wikipedia on John Cockerill, an industrialist who was responsible for building one of the first ironworks and a mechanical engineering companies in Seraing, Wallonia on the Meuse River, a few miles upstream from the city of Liege.

The statue in the photograph is a memorial to him and is located in front of the city hall in the town of Seraing.  Cockerill's grave is just in front of the statue.  The statue faces north toward the river, and on the northwest side of the pedestal is an iron statue of an ironworker that Joseph Lejuene posed for in the late 1880's.

Photo from the same spot taken on Oct. 2, 2015