| Submitted by: Mark R. Leeper United States |
| Submission Date: 10 February 2005 |
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I guess he was one of the most famous counters in history and hence was very appropriate. Noting how tasteful the statue appeared to be, I told Evelyn, 'There is Noah counting, for taste.'
Evelyn had stopped for tea before, but I was getting thirsty, so I stopped for a drink. They had a local brand of soft drink called Oasis and I got their tropical flavor. Good stuff. It is like Hi-C but where Hi-C is 5% fruit juice, this is 20%. It is like a tropical fruit ade. The flavor is quite fruity. It is subtle and fairly fruity. I will get more if I can find where. Ordering a beverage with a meal is quite difficult here. At home I can easily drink three or four glasses of water with a meal. Here the custom is not to drink much fluid with a meal. Having ended up with expensive mineral water several times when I have ordered tap water, I have decided that when in doubt I should order Coke.
We continued walking around more or less to whatever either looked interesting or was recommended in the tour book. Yes, we really are members of the League of Whim and Fodor's. Eventually we walked to the Church of Saint Nicholas. This is one of your more casual churches. They have free tours in four languages. Inside, the church is not all that different from other Catholic churches except that it does appear to be more friendly. I guess I noticed that mostly by a woman who had come in to pray and had brought her poodle which was sitting quietly on a chair beside her and looking at statues and the passersby.
From there we were hot so we stopped at a small grocery/fruit stand and got two peaches and two plums. In fact, the temperature was downright uncomfortable. While it had been cool in Amsterdam and comfortable in the Hague, in Brussels it was over 90. At home the temperatures don't bother me much because just about every building and even the car is air-conditioned. We use large quantities of energy to buy off the heat. Not so here. In Belgium it rarely gets very hot and when it does, as it is now, they don't really have mechanical ways to avoid the heat. You basically just perspire. What I will occasionally do if the heat becomes too much is put on a wet T-shirt. After returning to the room I discovered a cool shower worked for just about ten minutes, so I had to try the wet T-shirt and that worked fairly well.
After writing in my log for a while we decided to go out and try one of the restaurants of Butchers' Street. Each restaurant seems to offer a complete dinner for 595 Fr. and generally include three or four courses. We picked a place. I had fish soup (Evelyn has gazpacho), shrimp (mussels), grilled salmon (mixed grilled fish), and we each had chocolate souffle for dessert. Evelyn's gazpacho and mussels were better than my ordered dishes, but the salmon was great and her mixed grill was just okay. Of course the salmon was served with mussels. Just about every mean seems to be incomplete without the mussels of Brussels.
After dinner we went walking the streets to get a feel for the city. We saw modern shopping malls, various lace shops, and bookstores. Then we made what must have been an unusual turn and ended on a very ghostly site. It was some sort of memorial square. In the middle was a monument to Belgium's dead and around it were marble buildings. They had apparently been turned into university buildings and fast-food shops for a while. Now the windows were all boarded up and the square had a very neglected look. There was a feeling of neglected magnificence, magnificence that had flown. The Romantic poets might have had something to say about it.
Back in the room we started sweating in the heat almost immediately. Evelyn called Dale and Jo in the Hague to let them know we'd reserved a room for them and where the hotel was. I wrote in my log for a while then slept on a damp towel to keep cool.
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I woke up refreshed, ready to face the day, and discovered it was 1:50 AM. The same thing happened at 4:30 AM.
Wednesday we were to go to the museums that Dale and Jo were not interested in. We went down to breakfast at about 7:30 AM. It is not as nice as at either of the previous. You get two pieces of bread (i.e., a croissant and a piece of French bread) and coffee, tea, or chocolate. And if you know to ask for it (and we didn't the first day), a glass of very sour orange juice. If you want it, there is also a big square slice of processed cheese like a Kraft single.
Of course, the most popular type of bread/pastry in the world could well be the croissant. In the United States you will find restaurants/bakeries just devoted to them or with a selection that features croissants. You often find other types of rolls formed into crescent shapes as if they by sympathetic magic could take on the characteristics of croissants by just taking the shape. And what are these characteristics? They have a light flaky shell that comes from dough that has been rolled paper-thin, then separated by layers of grease. It is almost impossible to eat this delight without it disassembling itself into a pile of greasy bread flakes on your plate and often on your clothing. They almost always have a greasy, fatty flavor. They leave a thin layer of grease and bread flake in your mouth. Somewhere someone got the impression that this unhealthy, inconvenient, expensive roll was classy. Those who eat out for status rather than for the characteristics of the food are welcome to have my croissant when I am given some reasonable alternative.
Following breakfast we headed out for the Atomium. First we had to buy Metro tickets. You get a long stiff card that you stick into a machine rather than dropping a token in a turnstile. It stamps on the card the date and time so you can prove when and where you got on if challenged. Each time it chops a little piece off the card, so the new registration goes in its proper place. That is the same principle that United States public libraries use to stamp date-due cards.
We took the Metro to the Atomium. This is a 335-foot structure built for the 1958 World's Fair. It is a structure made of steel and aluminum that represents an iron crystal molecule and consists of nine spheres, each 59 feet in diameter, and twenty tubes, most 98 feet long. Three of the spheres stand up in the center and the other six orbit the center, three up, three down, in a trilaterally symmetrical pattern. The easiest way to picture it is to imagine a cube with a ball at each of the eight vertices and a ninth at the center. Now turn the cube through so the long diagonal is vertical. Twelve long tubes form the edges of the cube, eight more connect the center sphere to each of the others. It has been converted into a science museum. It is supposed to open at 9:30 AM and we should have smelled a rat when it did not open until 10 and seemed to have scaffolding up inside in part of where the exhibition space would be.
As it turns out, the corporation which runs the Atomium are doing so as a fraud on the public. How would you feel if you paid full-price to get into a museum only to discover there were no exhibits? That's just what the Atomium is. They take you to the top atom so you can look out through yellowed plastic covered with graffiti, then down to the central atom and you walk down from there past a photo display of the building of the Atomium and closed-off areas with signs apologizing for the mess while they are changing exhibits. There is really nothing to see, but there is no warning of that until after you have paid you $4 to get in. The implication is that you are paying your money for the joy of being inside and the exhibits are not part of what you pay for, which is clearly not true. The corporation which runs the Atomium is running a tourist scam basically because they probably feel most tourists, many of whom do not speak French, will not complain.
There is one interesting effect in the Atomium. You walk between atoms on a stairway in which all frames of reference you see are slanted at about a 30-degree angle. To Evelyn, who goes by internal feeling more than by what she sees, this is just going down a long flight of stairs. I go more by what I see and to me it felt as if I were walking on a long walkway in which I was somehow leaning backward. It was a very strange effect. It was as if gravity had suddenly shifted. We rode up to the top and came down twice, figuring we were owed at least that much.
We took the Metro to the next set of museums. Something should be said about the art in the Metro stations. Most of the stations feature art in some form or other which the Belgians claim accounts for the low suicide rate at the stations. In many of the stations the art is intended to be seen as you are moving past. In one, for example, you see a pattern like the sound track on a film. It is little waves in bigger waves and you only get a feel for how the whole wave is moving when the Metro starts up and you go past at high speed. Another features a series of pictures of people standing at a Metro. In the first everyone is in focus, then the people in the background start to look smeared and blurred. Then the same is true for the person at the front. Finally they all sort of blend into an abstract painting. Another touch I was not used to is that the train in some stations reverses direction. You can have been traveling forward and suddenly find yourself riding backward.
We rode the Metro to the Palais du Cinquantenaire, which houses some of Brussels' most nifty museums. Unlike in Holland, the state museums seem to have free admission and are quite good, usually having collections far too big to take in on one visit.
The centerpiece of the Palais is the Triumphal Arch celebrating Belgium's greatest military victories. It is reminiscent of the Arc d' Triumphe in Paris both in its scale and in that the great military victories it celebrates do not leap immediately to mind.
We first went to the Museum of Art and History (Musees Royaux d'Art et d'Histoire). This museum has excellent collections of ancient Egyptian and Greek works of art and at the very least a good collection of Roman art. In Greek art there were many nice vases or pots with illustrations of mythic stories. There was a nice piece they called 'Hercules and the Amazons' and another of what I take it was 'Phineas and the Furies.' There was also a nice statue of a centaur. The Roman collection included a section that was a large piece of a floor, maybe sixty feet or more, that was an entire transplanted Roman colonnade. Another room was nothing but stone head of prestigious Romans. I was also struck by a decorated Etruscan brazier. It took me a few minutes to recognize that it was a brazier. The labeling is in Dutch and French with no English. Neither of these is a brick wall, though. I can understand the French about 60% of the time and the Dutch about 10% of the rest. Evelyn had taken to translating for me, even though she had never had French and I had been sort of letting her. I had had a year of French but was not greatly fond of learning anything so irregular as a language, so I denied I really knew French. However, once she told me she thought she was better at French than I was in spite of her never having had the language, I have taken to doing much more of the translation for her. Occasionally I am surprised by some of the things other people on the trip really are having problems translating for themselves. Jo has had three years of French and occasionally has problems that surprise me. Of course, there are probably times when other people's understanding is better than mine.
The Egyptian collection is also fairly complete, with many mummies and various examples of hieroglyphic passages, art showing the gods, etc. They take one mummy lid and stand it upright in a case in the middle of the room. |
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