What do you do when you arrive in an unfamiliar city after being shorted 7 hours of your night and your hotel room won’t be ready until 4 pm? You walk the heck out of everything! We took the train from the Airport to the Central train station, put our luggage in lockers, and then started wandering the city center. I had had neither the time nor the mental capacity to plan ANYTHING or read up on Brussels beyond the little bit I know about it, so it was all new and rather random–just first glimpses of things that we will likely walk by again in the next couple of it.
Initially, the pleasure of this was limited, because when we emerged from the (underground) train station, it was drizzling, and got worse from there. We had wandered into a quiet cathedral which suddenly filled with sodden tourists when it started pouring. (The cathedral turned out to be St. Michael’s and St. Gudula’s, memorable to me only for its CRAZY Baroque pulpit carved out of wood–an enormous expulsion from Eden scene from 1699 that would completely upstage any fire-and-brimstone sermon delivered there.)
Afterwards, we walked to a park near the Royal Palace and stayed under the trees, but then decided that one of dozen or so museums in the vicinity of the palace would be a better place to spend the rainy morning. We picked the Belvue, which provides an interestingly curated overview of Belgian political history since 1830 mixed with sometimes pertinent, sometimes random artifacts, and also happened to have a small but lovely art deco exhibit that just opened today. Favorite finds were some lovely samples of art deco ceiling tiles, a display box including Belgian comics paraphernalia, including my special favorite, Franquin’s Marsupilami, and a poster-size enlargement of a photo of emigrants from Belgium to North America in front of a sod house. The main point were emigrants to Canada, but the sod house made me look at the booklet with the image and object descriptions: of course, it was a NEBRASKA sod house!
When we had wandered through the Belvue exhibit (the 18c architecture of the building was fun to take in), the rain had stopped and we went on to explore the Mont de Arts–the Hill of Art Museums, really–and the shopping district between it and the big city-center plaza more generally. We walked downhill through a lovely symmetrical park with a view of much of the area and then past many streets of Belgian chocolate shops, bars with Belgian beer, Belgian waffles, Belgian fries and the occasional lace and toy stores. In other words, Tourist Central, but I got the impression that the Belgians also loved wandering around there. The plaza at the very center (Grote Markt or Grand Place) was an outsized and more impressive (and more gilded) version of those we’ve seen in Germany.
We had a sandwich along the way, and because we’re also tourists, actually, later also a Belgian waffle with ice cream and chocolate sauce at a completely overdecorated cafe with a charming cat that (as per our guesses based on the number of photos taken in the half an hour we sat there) features in visitor photos hundreds of times every day. It actually became sunny and quite enjoyable. Around 3:30, we retrieved our suitcases from the train station lockers and started on the mile-long walk to our anonymous but central hotel/guest room (with kitchenette and a warning that not doing your dishes will cost you $50, but with no dish towel). We saw one more striking building, an actual ruin (there’s plenty of new construction, but this was our first ruin here), and looked it up later: it is called the Anneessens Tower and is a leftover piece of the original city wall and one of the gates from the 13th century, one of the few that’s well-preserved.
After we chilled for a bit in our charmless but practical room on the Boulevard du Midi, trying very hard not to fall asleep, we ventured back out for a bit to eat and some groceries from the nearby SPAR, and called it a day.