{"id":17189,"date":"2017-09-29T12:27:14","date_gmt":"2017-09-29T16:27:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.runkevinrun.com\/?p=17189"},"modified":"2017-09-29T12:27:14","modified_gmt":"2017-09-29T16:27:14","slug":"september-28-2017-a-free-walking-tour-of-brussels","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/runkevinrun.com\/?p=17189","title":{"rendered":"September 28, 2017 – A Free Walking Tour of Brussels"},"content":{"rendered":"

September 28, 2017 – A Free Walking Tour Of Brussels<\/em><\/p>\n

Upon checking into my hotel, a hotel which offered a room not much bigger than the cupboard under the stairs in Paris, I thought I\u2019d wander Brussels for a bit.\u00a0 You\u2019re supposed to leave your key at reception when you go out (as a fire check to know who\u2019s in or out of the hotel maybe?), and as I dropped my key off I spotted a \u201cfree walking tour\u201d flyer for 4 PM at City Hall.\u00a0 It was 3:57 PM and I was only a few minutes away (most things in Brussels seem to be only a few minutes away).<\/p>\n

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Mom and I had done a walking tour in Dusseldorf way back when and it proved invaluable as a \u201cgetting one\u2019s bearings\u201d overview of the city center.\u00a0 The tour here seemingly has proven equally useful for setting landmarks whilst walking about.\u00a0 After the tour as I set out on a dinner quest, I was able to think, \u201cright, right \u2013 pissing little man, Tin-Tin mural is over there, the Grand-Place is there and — oh!\u00a0 WAFFLES!\u201d<\/p>\n

The tour began with a long elaborate history lesson about why the City Hall building has a bunch of architectural errors.\u00a0 Rick, our Spanish ex-pat student tour guide, regaled us with a tale of palace intrigue and time crunches and cut corners\u2026 only to have him tell us that was all an elaborate tall tale, a myth, a lie.\u00a0 Belgians love to tell stories, to tell myths, he said.\u00a0 So you can\u2019t ever believe anything they say.\u00a0 I\u2019m not sure he meant we should always distrust the Belgians but I took that and not to believe a single thing Rick told us thereafter.\u00a0 Still, I had a good time and a sporadic check of google when I had a dece connection implied at least SOME of what I\u2019m about to scribble down is true.\u00a0 Or true-ish.\u00a0 It\u2019s truth adjacent surely and when it comes to history I\u2019m not sure we can get much better than that.<\/p>\n

\"\" <\/a>\"\"<\/a> \"\"<\/a> \"\"<\/a> \"\"<\/a> \"\"<\/a>\u00a0 \"\"<\/a> \"\"<\/a>\u00a0 \"\"<\/a> \"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Especially in the town of Brussels which has had apparently at least five (5) discrete catastrophic disasters that wiped out buildings, records, and memories on at least five (5) occasions.\u00a0 But when you\u2019ve been around continuously since before the Middle Ages, you gotta expect there to be a few calamitous events now and again.\u00a0 The most devastating one record wise was a great fire in the 1300s that wiped out the majority of pre-flames-engulfing-the-city records.\u00a0 This explains why one surviving statue, the official \u201clucky charm\u201d of Brussels has a plaque with the date 1320 and a giant question mark carved next to it.<\/p>\n

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Standing in the Grand-Place, which was being readied for a free rock festival to be held on Friday night, we were amidst buildings from various time periods.\u00a0 The City Hall had withstood the comings and goings of cholera, fire, famine, etc.\u00a0 Other buildings, like the Three Little Pigs of old, those that were made of straw and wood, had not survived and were eventually rebuilt with stronger materials.\u00a0 Many buildings on the great marketplace square were built in the late 1600s\/early 1700s.\u00a0 Originally they housed the various guilds of craftsmen and laborers and artisans.\u00a0 The Swan building (whose figurehead looks more like a goose to me) is the only building to still house the guild in question \u2013 the brewmasters of Belgium.\u00a0 The others have given way to live\/work scenarios.\u00a0 One even has a Starbucks.\u00a0 But the buildings themselves have endured, the history, the meaning\u2026 even if it\u2019s been a bit gussied up for tourists and modern commerce.<\/p>\n

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The Grand-Place has more history than I can even fathom.\u00a0 But two writers\u2019 tales bear mentioning.\u00a0 Victor Hugo had an apartment in one of the guild houses and it was here that he wrote the majority if not all of Les Miserables.\u00a0 And across the square at a local coffeeshop just under that goose\/swan, Karl Marx and Friederich Engels drafted the first pass on the Communist Manifesto<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Remember that lucky charm reference?\u00a0 Well, this guy Everard t’Serclaes was either the savior of Brussels or the traitor of Brussels, depending on your point of view.<\/p>\n

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At least, I think this is right.\u00a0 He broke in and with the help of the Belgian fighters pushed out the Flemish army of the city \u2026 and was later killed by the supporters of the local Flemish government as a traitor.\u00a0 Potato, potatoe.\u00a0 But if you rub him head to feet, you\u2019re mythically fated to return to Brussels.\u00a0 Rub his dog for financial wealth, his knee cap to find true love, and his arm to have a crazy night in Belgium.\u00a0 The most worn, smoothest segment?\u00a0 The arm.\u00a0 Go figure.<\/p>\n

FLAMING PANTS WARNING: First, this is a copy of the original statue.\u00a0 Second, there\u2019s a lot of different superstitions about what to do and what it means and how to make it come true.\u00a0 Or so says the internet<\/a> which is only SLIGHTLY more reliable than Rick\u2019s myths and fables.
\n<\/em><\/p>\n

The Stock Market building stands empty in Brussels.\u00a0 That\u2019s because the Belgian exchange was consolidated into the EU Euronext Exchange in Amsterdam and therefore the building wasn\u2019t needed any longer.\u00a0 It sometimes houses cultural exhibits and remains a focal point of community activities, but right now it\u2019s just an empty shell of a place.\u00a0 There\u2019s something to that as a metaphor for the EU perhaps.<\/p>\n

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I was more intrigued by how Brussels was billed as the capital of Europe and the geographic center of the EU\u2026 right up until some late additions to the membership shifted the spot into Germany.\u00a0 Shades of Belle Fourche, SD, no?\u00a0 I never did ask if Brexit would shift the geographic center any.\u00a0 Huh.\u00a0 Something to research I guess.\u00a0 I did look up the capital claim — the EU has no official capital.\u00a0 Brussels is the de facto capital because a lot of meetings were held here and a number of major EU institutions are based here.\u00a0 As well, no one could agree WHERE the capital should be and Belgium was set originally for alphabetical reasons to avoid the political wrangling of setting some place temporarily.\u00a0 Temporarily has become de facto permanent because, well, politics.<\/p>\n

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The creepier detours of the tour included what has been hailed as the third most disappointing tourist attraction in the world (or so says Rick).\u00a0 The top spot is the Mona Lisa, I suppose because it\u2019s smaller than people imagine and it\u2019s behind some serious plexiglass and then kinda cordoned off from the viewers.\u00a0 The number two disappointment is some statue only visible during certain tides and is just kinda meh.\u00a0 But number 3 on the list of biggest dissapointments is mannekinpis, literally translated as \u201clittle man peeing.\u201d\u00a0 It is\u2026 what it is.<\/p>\n

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Editor’s Note: I’m holding my fingers the European way to signal “3”… or so Rick told me.<\/em><\/p>\n

In 1987 a near bankrupt businessman constructed a female version in his dark alley to attract potential customers to his caf\u00e9\/bar\/side of town.\u00a0 The statue remains but that guy and his business are apparently lost to history (again, so says Rick).<\/p>\n

No Photo Of This.\u00a0 I don’t know.\u00a0 Sometimes you just think, “am I really going to snap ANOTHER peeing statue photo?” and find yourself questioning some life decisions.\u00a0 But the Jeanneke Pis<\/span> fountain was right across the way from the famed Delirium Bar.\u00a0 This place holds the world record for most number of beers available for sale at one time.\u00a0 They broke the record in 2004 with 2004 beers for sale… and each year thereafer they added a beer to honor the calendar.\u00a0 A while later though, some upstart bar topped them by 100 beers trying to steal their thunder.\u00a0 Delirium responded in this escalating beer race by topping THAT amount by 1000 beers.\u00a0 So the record is something like 3117 right now.\u00a0 But that’s only on one specific day.\u00a0 Usually they only have 500 beers available at any one time.\u00a0 Still, their beer menu is like an old Sears Roebuck catalog.<\/p>\n

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Note: There\u2019s also a peeing dog and when I first googled \u201clandmarks\u201d near me, it popped up\u2026 but I misread it as \u201cpeeing hot dog\u201d which I was REALLY intrigued to see.\u00a0 Alas, it was just this:<\/p>\n

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But I digress.<\/p>\n

The Cathedral of St. Michael and St. Gudula has a strong gothic vibe and I almost thought it was Notre Dame-y\u2026 though not quite.\u00a0 There ARE virtual reproductions of Notre Dame around the world (I saw one in Saigon for example) but this is just a big ol\u2019 gothic cathedral\u2026 that took over 300 years to build.\u00a0 So much time, so much money, so much\u2026 MUCH for this.\u00a0 But we all have crazy projects I guess<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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We ended the tour with a view of the Royal Residence of King Philippe I, the current monarch \u201cin power.\u201d\u00a0 Belgium has been a constitutional monarchy since 1830\u2026 and Philippe\u2019s forebears were in fact the first ELECTED monarch that same year when the framers realized they wanted a figurehead to serve as monarch and thus scoured the land for a candidate.\u00a0 Philippe\u2019s ancestors won the election and the rest is Belgian history.<\/p>\n

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Speaking of Belgian history, a new rule came into effect for Philippe\u2019s daughter \u2013 she\u2019s going to be the first Queen of Belgium who doesn\u2019t have to marry or yield to a baby brother.\u00a0 It\u2019s a really good idea as she\u2019s 15 and already speaks 8 languages fluently.\u00a0 They\u2019ll be lucky to have a person of such breadth and intelligence as a figurehead.<\/p>\n

Of those 8 languages, three are \u201cofficial\u201d Belgian tongues.\u00a0 They\u2019re represented on this flag, a three-color square (a square, mind you, not a rectangle.\u00a0 These Belgians \u2013 you can\u2019t always believe everything they say but when you look at the flag, it\u2019s a square).\u00a0 Black represents the German, White the Flemish language, and Red for the French.\u00a0 There are also three regions of Belgium \u2013 the North which predominately speaks Flemish; the South which predominately speaks French, and Brussels itself which is kinda a melting pot of everything.<\/p>\n

A few fun facts on Brussels:<\/p>\n

The word \u201cBruxelles<\/em>\u201d in Old Dutch is literally translated as \u201cHome in the Swamp.\u201d\u00a0 Brussels was literally swampland, situated atop the Seene River (not \u201cthe Seine\u201d please) but in the mid-1600s with a massive outbreak of cholera, the city drained the water and built overtop of it.\u00a0 So its citizens are technically walking on water at all times.<\/p>\n

Having been around for as long as it has, there\u2019s an odd mixture of architecture.\u00a0 The City Hall I mentioned above has \u201cerrors\u201d in that one side is longer than another, the front door isn\u2019t centered under the massive central column, and one side is more ornately statued and designed than the other.\u00a0 This isn\u2019t because of a last-minute rush job \u201cmyth\u201d that Rick first told us about.\u00a0 It\u2019s because the second half was an addition to the building 50 years later when architecture styles and materials changed.\u00a0 The door isn\u2019t centered because once they did the addition they had to knock out a few load bearing walls and needed to resurvey; so just like home ownership today, additions cause all kinds of headaches.<\/p>\n

The City Hall\u2019s mixed styles are nothing compared to the city proper.\u00a0 Medieval cathedrals sit next to modern monstrosities of art deco, bland late 1990s squares, and even a renovated Spanish prison that now ranks as a three star hotel (The Hotel Amigo if you must know).\u00a0 There\u2019s apparently even an architectural term known as \u201cBrusselism\u201d <\/strong>or \u201cBrusselization\u201d that conveys the juxtaposition of old and modern styles in close proximity and dichotomy.\u00a0 I\u2019m pleased to say that this is true and not just a made up thing.\u00a0 I so wanted it to be real.\u00a0 It\u2019s just a great detail.<\/p>\n

Editor’s Note: I have failed miserably to shoot the juxtapositions that exist strolling down the street.\u00a0 But here are some shots of the city anyway.<\/em><\/p>\n

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Blah, blah, blah, right?\u00a0 This is how I spent my afternoon.\u00a0 As for my evening?\u00a0 I enjoyed a one euro waffle.\u00a0 You could put all kinds of toppings on it \u2013 fruit, whipped cream, Nutella, etc.\u00a0 But Rick had warned me that they pretty much roll the waffle in sugar so it\u2019s already plenty sweet plain.\u00a0 And he wasn\u2019t kidding \u2013 I think I developed two cavities just within the first bite.\u00a0 But I have no regrets.\u00a0 Well, one regret.\u00a0 Should\u2019ve had another one.<\/p>\n

But after all, tomorrow is another day.\u00a0 And another waffle awaits.<\/p>\n

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BTW – That’s Tin Tin behind me in the mural.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

September 28, 2017 – A Free Walking Tour Of Brussels Upon checking into my hotel, a hotel which offered a room not much bigger than the cupboard under the stairs in Paris, I thought I\u2019d wander Brussels for a bit.\u00a0 You\u2019re supposed to leave your key at reception when you go out (as a fire […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17189","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/runkevinrun.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17189","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/runkevinrun.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/runkevinrun.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/runkevinrun.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/runkevinrun.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17189"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/runkevinrun.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17189\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/runkevinrun.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17189"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/runkevinrun.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17189"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/runkevinrun.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17189"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}