The weekend

Okay, so I stayed in Brussels again this weekend instead of getting on the train and going to Paris or Bruges. For one thing, I was tired, and it was nice to catch up on my sleep. For another, when it came right down to it I didn’t feel like traveling without a friend to hang out with.

And I had a very nice time right here.

Saturday was sunny, breezy, and cool. I walked from the apartment to the central city along with what seemed likes half the other people in Belgium. The street I walked along is the same street AIRINC’s office is on, Avenue Louise. It’s a major avenue into the city center, and the closer you get, the more it becomes a shopping district: lots of clothing stores, restaurants, chocolate shops. And people.

Avenue Louise ends in a big open area near the Palace of Justice, which is huge and imposing and, at the moment, half-covered with scaffolding. There is a ridge running across the city, and at the end of Avenue Louise there’s a panoramic view of the Lower Town from the edge of the Upper. Also some war memorials. Also public bicycles. Also lots of people taking pictures.

I kept walking, and next I came to Le Sablon, Cleo’s neighborhood, where we had brunch last weekend. That’s where some of yesterdays park and church pictures came from.

A few blocks past that area there’s a huge complex that includes museums, palaces, and government buildings. There’s also a lovely park. I bought a waffle (along with chocolate and beer one of the big specialties here) from a street vendor, with chocolate drizzled on top. It hit the spot, even though I shouldn’t have been eating it. I had to try a waffle at least once, didn’t I?

I spent a little time in the art museum that houses older work. The most interesting room was the one that had eleven huge paintings by Rubens. Most of the pictures were of religious subjects: a couple featuring St. Francis and several that were scenes from the Mysteries of the Rosary. There were also two enormous paintings of packs of dogs bringing down large antlered creatures (there were not my favorite...) Two of the Mysteries of the Rosary (the Assumption and Coronation of the Virgin Mary) were so full of light it was almost as if the light in the room was coming from them. I don’t know anything about painting....but I’m glad to have seen these works.

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A few random thoughts about the city:

Streets and byways

In terms of layout, the city is more like Boston than like Milwaukee. That is, the streets go every which way instead of north-south crossed by east-west. So instincts about direction aren’t much help.

There are lots of little circles (with greenspace inside them, of course) where 5 or 6 or 7 or 10 (in the case of the Flagey square I mentioned a while back) streets come together. At big intersections on main streets there are traffic lights, just like at home. But on lesser streets the clues about who stops and who goes are painted onto the street. Instead of stop signs that draw the eye away from the road, the information you need is in front of you as you keep your eyes on the road.

Signs telling the names of the streets are only rarely on poles; mostly they are mounted on the sides of buildings. In two languages, of course.

Dogs seem to be as popular as parks, or maybe the two go together, since parks are nice places for dogs to run around in. Collectively, people don’t do a great job of cleaning up after their dogs, and in fact the public places in general are pretty grubby.

People

People seem very reserved, even more so than the English, who are renowned for their reserve. But I have to recognize that that’s a hasty and superficial assessment on my part. For one thing, I haven’t been out into the countryside, so I don’t have any way to know whether Belgians might be reserved in general, or just city people. People in general are friendlier in Maine, let’s say, than in Cambridge.

Also, some of the reserve may actually be my own. I don’t think I’m trying to have random conversations as much as I did in England and Scotland, because of the language issue.

Also, there are lots of people here from everywhere. With the EU headquartered here, many people come from other places and live here for a few years, then leave again. I don’t think it’s as remotely rootless as Orlando (where, as Betsy says, “No one is from here”), but maybe there are basically a lot of subcommunities within which people just keep to themselves.

Guess I’ll have to travel to more countries to make a comparative study. ;)

(Guess I’ll have to win the lottery first.)