| Submitted by: Mark R. LeeperUnited States |
| Submission Date: 10 February 2005 |
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We see a celestial goddess (whose name escapes me) stretch out so she will lie over the dear departed. As you keep walking, you see more and more recent art. You see art of the Middle Ages, including a seven-part retable of martyrs 'getting it' in all kinds of nifty ways. I guess there is nothing like seeing a good example of coming to a nasty end. Somebody here clearly took some ghoulish delight in how realistically he could show it. Today he would probably be making mad slasher films.
They have a rotunda with an Easter Island statue with an expression of studied disdain on his face. There were some ornate clocks. I told Evelyn that I would not like such a clock. They were well-decorated, but they were still just single-function clocks. I preferred my multi-function Casio. As we continued there was a clock with about eight dials, one for time, one for tides, one for day of the month, and who knows what else. Okay, so they had Casios even then.
What else did we see? Well, one thing surprising was the rooms that were set aside for the blind. One might ask how you could have rooms for the blind in a museum. They had models of cathedrals made of wood, statues, and several other pieces of art that were not so highly valued. The blind are invited to feel them and read the Braille descriptions.
Also of some interest were some sleighs of unusual design. One, for example, looked like a flower blossom. The collection in this museum was huge and made more impressive by the fact that two large sections are closed off on alternate days. The complete museum is substantially larger than what we saw.
The complex is an 'H' with the Arch being the cross-piece and gardens on each side of the H. Diagonally across from the Museum of Art and History is the Military Museum (Musee Royal de l'Arme et d'Histoire Militaire). This museum also has a huge collection, but unfortunately too much of it is not well explained, even in the local languages. It starts with a big collection of armor and swords from Medieval times. From there you go to the age of early guns and cannons. The type of thing you see is on the wall they will have a piece of chest armor and around it in almost a floral pattern will be forty swords and scabbards. There will be three or four of these in a row. Later instead of swords, there will be rifles. There is a lot of display there, but it is unlabeled and it really is too much to take in in one viewing. The floor will be littered with bell-like short cannons. Eventually you get to displays of the uniforms from first World War I and then World War II. There are five or six cases with three mannequins each showing the German uniforms, then at least one or two cases each for Russian, French, English, and American uniforms. Filling up the spaces between the mannequins will be memorabilia. They have an American Jeep with two mannequins dressed as soldiers. There is Eisenhower's uniform neatly folded. There is a map printed on silk that could be hidden in a uniform button. This reminded me that the Americans consulted with stage magicians and escape artists on what tricks and mechanisms could be used by Americans to escape from Nazi POW camps. The silk maps were supposedly recommendations they got, among many others. It was a very clever approach if indeed it was true and not folklore. A large section of the floor was blocked off; who knows how much more material it had?
A walk through a doorway and you are suddenly in the Air Museum. Again a huge floor covered with--what else?--airplanes and helicopters. They have the usual sorts of things, like the front of an airliner with a stairway to allow you to look at the controls. There was a DC-3 on the floor (I flew two of them in Africa, not this particular one though, obviously). There is a mezzanine with a full-sized model of a Fokker Tri-plane. There are gliders, there is a Sopwith Camel, there are sections of a Zeppelin, parts of a Messer-Schmidt, an entire V1 buzz-bomb, and a heck of a lot more.
Walk out to a courtyard and there are something like fifty armored tanks, including Pershing, Stalin, and Sherman. On the other side of the courtyard are tank memorabilia, including posters from the British Tank Corps, dioramas, cartoons, and who remembers what else? With paper documentation on the collections, these two museums could easily be worth two or three days' study.
There was a third museum called Autoworld, but it required a paid admission and we were pretty museumed out, so we gave it a miss.
It was a fair distance back to the hotel, but in spite of being tired of walking we decided to walk back and get a better look at the city. What we saw looked like pretty much any modern city. The batteries in our shortwave had died so we wanted to replace them. Without the shortwave there would be no BBC, and without the BBC we would be out of touch with the world and with what was happening with the Iraq hostage crisis. We found a photography store and paid about $7 American for four double-As. However, the pack said these were UCAR professional-quality audio and photo batteries. Gee, here Evelyn thought I was just some everyday slouch and here I am with professional-quality batteries! Pretty good, huh? We bought more fruit and then back to the room to write. Dinner was back on Petit Rue des Bouchers. I had mussels Provencale. Finally back to the room. At about 10 PM Dale and Jo arrived. They seemed very pleased with the hotel.
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August 30, 1990:
We are now up to Thursday morning, August 30. We would spend our last few days seeing Belgium with Dale and Jo and head home September 3.
The day would be spent going to museums in Brussels. Our first stop was breakfast, of course. There was an American couple that turned out to be brother and sister who had a fight right there in front of us. It seems that the brother insisted on having the seat facing the window. Not that the view out the window was anything spectacular. It was a wall across an airshaft. For variety it had some windows in the wall but the curtains were drawn. His sister came down before him and sat in the seat facing the airshaft. The Ugly American came in wearing his usual outfit of pants and an undershirt stretched tight over a beer belly. He saw his sister had not left him the view and started arguing with her. He sat at another table. She eventually moved to the other side of her table so he could have the seat he wanted. Another morning he was complaining to the waitress who had enough problems with English that someone 'didn't speak no English.' Every day this guy did something else that was boorish. He seemed to drive Jo up a wall.
Our next step was the Grand' Place which was just a couple of blocks away. We walked in the rain, however, since the very hot temperatures finally broke and the next four days would be cloudy or rainy in the morning and clear in the afternoon.
I described the Grand' Place earlier, but today we would actually go into buildings. Things were not yet open so Evelyn read to us from the guidebook what some of the lesser buildings we were seeing were. They were mostly guild houses.
I tried to take a picture of the group with the Hotel de Ville as a background but there was a woman sitting on a box in the way and it was hard to take the picture with the right angle without getting her in. She stared at the camera and made no attempt to make things easier. I think she ended up in the picture. To some extent people are not as polite or helpful in Belgium as they are in Holland. As a side-note Brussels, like Manhattan, has its share of people who carry on heated discussions with (to us) invisible aliens from the planet Zaarquod. I just never heard these discussions in French before.
Our first visit was to Le Musee Communal in the Maison du Roi. It was not the Palace of the King, as the name might imply. It really was the low court for the King of Spain. They had a collection of retables. These are sort of statuary in a fold-out box. Typically there is a wide box in the center and two boxes the same size but half the width. In this way you can fold in the sides like shutters and it becomes a simple box. The smaller ones have handles on the side for easier carrying. I guess there are portable and console models of this medieval home entertainment center.
There were also several examples of china pottery made to look like what it was intended to contain. For fish soup the china would just look like a big fish with a big fish face. You can eat cabbage out of a large china cabbage. It also helps prevent items on the kitchen table from going uneaten because nobody knows what was in the dish on Uncle Fred's left.
Actually my favorite piece in the museum was a painting of the town showing off all its armaments, like the Moscow May Day Parade. There were lines of soldiers showing off weapons and military might. Some were firing off guns. But what I liked about the painting is standing in one of the lines of soldiers the artist drew one dragon. It looked like just a sort of subtle warning not to mess with Brussels. It just says if you make us really mad be warned we do have dragons.
I did not mention on our Tuesday walk the great symbol of the city of Brussels. The great symbol is a statue that is dear ti the heart of any citizen of this city. It is called the Mannekin Pis and it is a statue about sixteen inches high showing a little boy relieving himself into a fountain. Though the exact meaning of the statue has been lost, you see all over the city references to this statue, more than you see in New York of the Statue of Liberty. You see lace pictures of the Mannekin Pis, you see souvenir statues. Jo said that she even saw chocolates in the shape of the little boy pissing. (I asked but she could not remember if the chocolates had liquid centers.) I think one theory as to how this image became associated with the town was that one of the town fathers lost his son and found him in the act shown. Another has it that it is a memorial to a boy who saved the city by putting out an incendiary bomb using only the materials at hand. In any case, the town has taken the irreverent symbol to its heart. He is the city's Alfred E. Newman. They dress him in all kinds of weird costumes like Elvis suits. The suits in wide variety are on display in Le Musee Communal. Included are a Dracupis vampire costume and a filmmaker costume with the filmmaker holding himself with one hand and hiding a board that says 'Clap' in the other hand. In many cases the suits did not have flies. They often cleverly drill a hole right though the jacket.
From there we crossed to the Town Hall (or Hotel de Ville) for the tour there.
In 1695 Louis XIV had some particular hatred of this town hall. His French Marshal de Villeroy decided to pulverize the city, telling his gunners to use the tower of the hall as their target. They pulverized the entire square. All the guild houses were demolished. They even hit the tower a few times, but their primary target never fell. No wonder Louis figured that after him would come the Deluge.
The Town Hall is a building of more opulence than interest value. This is the kind of place where they have paintings on the ceiling of gods and angels and things. In the main council room where the burgermeister and the aldermen meet there is one of those tiresome angels whose eyes follow you around the room. It's the oldest trick in the artistic book, you know, the following eyes. It comes free with art on two-dimensional surfaces. Now what would be impressive is a picture that looks like it is looking at you when you are standing one place and that shows you the side of its face when you stand someplace else. When I was young I used to watch 'Have Gun Will Travel.' It always started with Paladin pointing his gun right at you no matter where you stood in the room. We used to run all over the room and that gun was still pointed directly at you. I kind of got it out of my system then. |
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