Bubbles

Brussels is a city of Bubbles.  Let me explain; Brussels is not really a city where one wanders seamlessly from one nice place to another, as I have felt possible in some other cities in Europe.  There are a few “arteries of niceness” (oh dear) running through the city, but one has to know the city pretty well in order to navigate these, and in fact they are not very well joined up, and rather stretch the imagination to be considered as actually somewhere “especially pleasant”.  So, one must instead make a mental collection of the places which are special and enjoyable, the great majority of which are small and somewhat disconnected, hence the term bubbles.

Today I arrived back in Brussels by mid afternoon from a photo session elsewhere in Belgium and decided to go out and enjoy the sunny weather, and pick up a badly needed bicky burger (a bicky burger)  After achieving this modest goal (I know the best place in town for a bicky – the frites hut at kapellekerk/chapelle) I decided to do one of my favourite things when exploring a city, which sounds simple but for me was a little revelation some years ago; to just follow the streets which look somehow intriguing/inviting.  This can be strange when one already feels like one knows the city, but today it worked out well.  Not even knowing which way to go at first I just sort of drifted towards a few streets with the intention to have an easier decision once I reached them.  These two streets are the two main antique streets of Brussels, I won’t mention the names (as I don’t have all night to do the double translation!) but the important thing is that they run through the old Brussels district of the Marolle(n/s), somewhere rather interesting and precious, where it is said the old dialect of Brussels (named…”Brussels”, a fantastic mix of Dutch and French) still exists – more on that another day.

But I diverge…walking along hoogstraat I quickly took a small alleyway up the hill, and came across some small streets I had never seen before, and although rather absent of life they were a nice discovery, and a reminder of what I suppose was the original character of this place; compact, unexpected.  Here I discovered a little theatre “Theatre La Samaritaine”, with a door about 1.5m high, complete with old brush installed on the head of the frame to warn people not to bump their head.  It looked rather forgotten, having a sign recommending it in one of those tour guide books of 1996, but anyway the charming drawing of the space inside sold me on it.

Theatre La Samaritaine

I hope to go sometime to check it out.  Health and Safety eat that! (in the UK I can pretty much guarantee such a place would be shut down by the government, over zealous  in its attempts to take all responsibility out of the hands of people., through the “Health and Safety” laws)

But anyway, let’s not get bogged down in criticising somewhere else.  Wandering further I eventually arrived at the area beside the “Palace of Justice”, a truly ridiculously huge building plonked (“dropped”) right down into the Marollen once upon a time.  I still had not been inside this monster, so I went up the wonderfully oversized stairs but could only advance as far as the first entrance halls, open to the air, it seems that it’s closed on a Sunday.  Oh well.  It is still something incredible that I must check out sometime.  A nice touch is that in the Marollen there is a bar dedicated to the architect of this building, named the evil architect (“skieven architect”) and I certainly don’t criticise the sentiment, although the bar itself is not really so great itself, it must be said.

Photographer - pas le matin (on flickr)

Entrance hall - Photo: Marie Kappweiler

Further on I ended up in a place I had never been, an area of the Marollen which has become detached from everything else; on two sides the smaller of the ring roads of Brussels, on another the Palace of Justice (what a name…) and on the last side the rather messed up district around South Station.  So, not particularly pleasant, but certainly memorable, a sort of only-possible-in-Belgium mix of modernist apartment blocks with old houses, in an incredible clash of sizes and styles, with this weird sense of loss; a place once ‘somewhere’, now not really going anywhere in particular.  The evil architect at least a little bit to blame…

So, inevitably the subject of enjoying a belgian beer entered my mind, and not much later I was sitting on the Flea Market “jeu de balle” (game of ball?) with a friend and a friend of theirs, enjoying a beer in the setting sun.  After some strong but very enjoyable discussions over the social security system of Belgium, the toilet ladies (present in a huge number of toilets in bars, clubs, cinemas, where somehow paying already for the beer etc is not enough to keep a toilet clean once a night) and finally the very enlightening idea that West Flanders is basically the “Scotland” of Belgium I began to feel  pretty happy with my day out.  So, for now, I should really make my dinner, therefore I leave it at that, bonsoire, goedenacht,goodnight

bru

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