I forgot to mention Brussels' best attraction of all - the Comic Strip Museum (Centre Belge de la Bande Dessinee). At least, if you're an afficionado of Tintin, or of Tibet & Duchateau, Josephine Baker, the Peeping Policeman, or Cubitus, then you'll possibly think so.
I'm not really aware of them, except perhaps Tintin (vaguely). So I gave it a miss.
I did stumble across Tintin himself though, making his way down a fire escape on the outside of a building. The others all have murals around the city too, and there are lots of comic shops, and a cartoon-themed cafe-restaurant with its own Tintin statue.
Must be something pretty special to look at on this street corner. There's always a crowd, and by some accounts it's the most exciting thing Brussels has to offer.
Fortunately those accounts are wrong. There are indeed lots of more interesting things than a nondescript statue of a small boy urinating, the Manneken Pis.
So why all the interest? Does it record an important historical event, or symbolise something important about the Belgian character? Who knows? According to Wikipedia, there are lots of rival legends about it, so basically nobody knows what it's all about.
Seafood restaurant street (Rue des Bouchers)
Europe's first indoor shopping centre (Galeries St-Hubert)
Musical Instrument Museum
Park near the Atomium
Typical European
vapour trail sky
Trying to get a handle on Brussels before I went there, I was asking people who'd been there what they thought of it. There seemed to be two camps. Some loved it, some hated it, and said there was nothing to see.
Now I've seen it for myself, I've come out firmly on the side of ..... the middle ground. There's quite enough to give you an interesting time for a few days, even if it's not in quite the same league as Berlin, Seoul or, well, Sydney.
There's the (smallish) central area, with narrow cobblestone streets, with the magnificent central square, the Grand Place. This has elegant historic guildhalls all around it, and it's quite a sight.
There are parks, there's a royal palace. There are lots of museums, including the Magritte Museum and the Musees Royaux des Beaux-Arts, both of which I explored. Magritte was Belgian, as was Breugel, sort of, and they're well represented. There are lots of Breugels, Vermeers, Van Dykes, and Rembrandts - all Dutch or Flemish - and it's all rather grand.
Not so grand was the over-automated business hotel I stayed in. What's this? No check-in desk, just a couple of self check-in machines. My machine didn't recognise my booking, then didn't recognise my passport. The other machine was successfully blocking the admission of the other chap who was trying to check in at the time. So out popped a receptionist from her hidden broom cupboard to do it all for us anyway! "Oh, zees machine, sometimes it eez so stoopeed!" she told us. I can't see that the automation is saving them much money, but the tiny room I was allocated probably was.
I'm a sucker for tall buildings with good views over their cities. So I guess I was bound to find my way up the Berlin TV tower eventually.
It's 368m tall, and the tallest structure in Germany, and was built by the then East German government in the 1960s, and was partly intended to be a symbol of East Germany's strength.
I just read an interesting piece in the Wikipedia entry, about how the reflection from the dome on a sunny day looks like a cross, an effect neither predicted nor desired by the planners. It was therefore known as 'The Pope's Revenge' (Citation needed!)
Anyway, I didn't see the reflection because it wasn't a sunny day, but made my way up from Alexanderplatz to the 207m level observation deck, and looked down on all those famous landmarks.
There was the Dom, Museuminsel, the Hauptbahnhof, Unter den Linden, Kurfuerstendamm, Charlottenburg, Tiergarten, Zoologischergarten, Brandenburger Tor, the Reichstag, and in the distance in the western sunset sky, a big long line of wind generators.
Reichstag/Bundestag
Holocaust Memorial
Brandenburg Gate
Currywurst man
Cathedral
It's tough being a Stasi operator. You work long hours for low pay in cramped and uncomfortable conditions. You can't tell anyone about your work, even though you know half the people you're spying on are probably employed as informers for your employers anyway.
On this occasion I was watching and listening in on every visitor to a rock music festival - all probably with subversive thoughts and tendencies. All needed to be thoroughly documented, though the working conditions were cramped and uncomfortable, the instruments were crude, the feedback rang in my ears, and it was hard to see anything useful really.
This was part of the fun to be had in Berlin's DDR Museum, an excellent little museum designed to give visitors and younger Germans a taste of life as it was behind the Iron Curtain. As well as the state's intrusion into the lives of everyone, it was also about shortages of goods, collective military and potty training, nudist holidays (the regime tried but failed to stamp this out), and how everyone who owned a Trabi became a first class mechanic (because they had to). There was a game in which you tried to advance your education by all kinds of strategies, but the only one that worked was to be a patriotic and faithful party loyalist. And in another game I was a factory manager desperately trying to meet production targets using the tools of the planned economy. I actually did manage a slight surplus once, but then got swamped by the corresponding increased target for the next year.
It wasn't all bad though. Apparently quite a few East Germans harbour a bit of nostalgia about the bad old days. They even have a word for it: ostalgie. Here's Wikipedia's piece on it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostalgie It's largely about the absence of unemployment and severe poverty during the period.
The DDR Museum's site is at http://www.ddr-museum.de/en
