Impressions of the Capital

Posted: November 21st, 2009 | Author: admin | Filed under: fun, trips and notes | No Comments »

of Europe

First, I have to explains a few things in order for this not to be taken the wrong way

1. the impressions below are based on a complete two-day period spent in Brussels but this has always been enough for me to make my mind about other cities that I compare it to (except for Berlin)

2. the weather was great: some 15-18˚C while it was 10˚C below that in Sofia

3. I did not have any architectural landmarks on my list, meaning that I went there without doing my homework but without any expectations either

4. I had no car but the city has a subway and bicycles, so this did not matter

5. and there was something else that was important to point out but…

well – Brussels sucks! that’s it

initial impressions:

dirty,
unwelcoming,

no trees on the sidewalks,

overpopulated,

the subway stinks,

the beggars around the streets,

Arabs and ninjas everywhere (nothing strange about it, but what’s really interesting is that black people do not impress me as much as the hijabs)…

the popular Manneken Pis (a statue of a little boy peeing) which the city is famous for (nobody knows why) is indecently small and standing remotely in the crossing of two world-famous streets. the chances of passing by it without noticing it, if you had never heard of how very popular it was, are tremendous…

the Manneken Pis:

and if you thought is was big enough, here is a picture of the group for scale

I will pass on the old part of Brussels (when didn’t I…) and I will show you just a couple of shots, enough to officially pay respect to the architectural heritage of the city: this is the central square of tourist hysteria:

while we were walking around, I was thinking that the choice of an European capital city is actually great; maybe I wished it would have been Geneva or Berlin, or even Prague, or Wien but the unfortunate truth is that it fits Brussels perfectly to be the capital city of Europe simply because it has a little bit of everything, being positioned right between the French romantic provincialism and German perfectionism; the fact that I do not fancy the smells, the crowds and the misery does not mean that they don’t exist…

in order not to picture Brussels as a place full of crowds, shops and beggars, here are some shots of the remarkable Atomium building, left after the 1958 Expo. The Expo itself had many additional buildings which were worthy of architectural attention but, unfortunately, this is the only one that survived the 50 years that separate my visit from those times:

post-war times of hope…

the atomium itself (designed by Andre Waterkeyn) is a steel structure resembling the crystal lattice of iron zoomed in 165 billion times; a symbol of using nuclear energy for peaceful purposes… well, it was in 1958 after all.

the building (if you can call it that) has been renovated and transformed into a museum a few years ago but, but as a whole, only the coatings have been replaced while the basic structure, the one from 1958, has remained the same:

room for thought: there were no computers in 1958 neither for calculating, nor for drawing up this thing…

from the highest ball

the restaurant at the top

there are escalators in the tunnels now

while there were only stairs back then

the feel is almost as if in a Lem’s novel… the left accelerator is under the critical minimum, navigator Pirx… and the only difference is that you see Brussels through hatches instead of open space.

I don’t know when and where in these last 50 years the belief in science and technology gave way to provincial consumerism; maybe this is what takes place everywhere but somehow it seems too obvious in Brussels;

The EU Headquarters building in the rain

right next to this interior (a “stolen” shot through the window on a Sunday)

is this

if, for some reason, you have to stop by Brussels and you cannot avoid it, don’t miss trying this

and

their famous beers as well as

and as for avoiding the capital – I strongly recommend it; the following pictures were taken in a small town called Lowen or Leuven, some 20 kilometers from Brussels; a new business center area along a railway line next to the town’s central train station: