Brussels

A war memorial - with surprisingly few wreaths for Armistice Day

A visit to Belgium was always going to contain a day in Brussels, that's pretty much a given.  I was hoping that after the lack of museums in Bruges that Brussels would more than make up for that, I mean it is the home of the European Union as well as the capital of the country.  Sadly I didn't plan for Armistice day, that day is huge in Belgium, well no, actually it's incredibly low-key, but everything is shut for it.  Not a single, solitary, scrap of a museum was open.

There did seem to be an awful lot of scouts around, all in shorts, even though it was freezing.  They seemed to be on some sort of treasure hunt, and were constantly forming circles and performing weird callisthenics in the middle of them.

The main square in Brussels, with some great, but closed, buildings

Another great building

I didn't realise this, but Belgium is a really young country, only forming in 1830.  Apparently when they formed they decided that they wanted a king, so they kind of just ended up asking some relative of Queen Victoria to be their monarch, which seems a strange way to chose a king.  They could have gone with straight democracy, but no, I guess they thought they couldn't be trusted with their own governance.  You do wonder if they made the right choice in starting this dynasty, since only their second king was responsible for the brutal repression of the Congolese.

I was hoping for massive wealth in the city, since it is home to one of seats of the European Parliament, Council of the EU, the European Commission and the European Council.  I'm not sure why there needs to be four different bodies, which superficially look like they would do the same thing.  The public servants who work for the EU also get paid really well, it's a bit of a bone of contention at the moment, what with the austerity going around, that the EU seems a bit immune from that.  Despite the public edifices, and the vast numbers of well paid EU public servants, Brussels still felt quite poor in parts.  Especially around the main train station, which is pretty much universally dodgy in cities, but it felt worse than most cities.  What is it about the main train station and dodgy people.  Sydney has it, Paris has it, Brussels, I could go on.  Though I don't think London has it.  I'm not sure which station I would classify as their main one, Kings Cross, Paddington, Euston?  None of those feel dodgy at all.

The most famous resident of Brussels

It seems in Brussels though that the EU public servants keep their money to themselves in the European Quarter, which we didn't really get into, only on the periphery, and it felt rich.  But on the other side of the road, it was a different story.  That's not to say it was all poor, there were some nice boulevards, and the roads were all pretty good.  In fact the zebra crossings were pretty impressive, being made from different coloured marble, rather than just lines painted.

It seems that the most famous resident of Brussels is a small, 60 cm statue of a boy peeing into a fountain.  He really is quite small, for something that causes such a fuss.  Apparently they dress him in costumes, and he has a wardrobe of 800 outfits.  Too bad when we visited his clothes were being dry cleaned.  I'm not even sure what the story behind the statue is, nobody seems to know.