A couple of days ago I celebrated my first two months here in Brussels. I don't think 'celebrate' is the right word, I would rather use something like 'commemorate' or 'mark'.
Many people have asked me about the Belgium and the Belgians, about their culture, habits and national identity. I found myself unable to give proper answers to all the doubts and questions people have on this rather small but so diverse country. Therefore, I have decided to dedicate this post to whatever I have been able to grasp about this tiny (yet great) nation.
I want to start with Magritte. Exactly, Magritte, the great and much celebrated Belgian artist (to whom a very interesting museum here in Brussels is dedicated. I highly recommend it), whose work is sometimes difficult to comprehend entirely. So often I have found myself in front of one of his painting wondering how someone could ever think of such an absurd subject, until I have arrived in Belgium. Then I realised that ONLY a Belgian could have ever possibly produced such works of art! Don't get wrong, it's definitely great art but sometimes a bit too difficult to grasp!
Magritte was a product of a rather 'absurd' country where everything is left to chaos. The first that really struck me was the way all the signs were arranged! If you follow the signs in the street you can be sure you'll get absolutely lost!
To give an example of what I mean I will tell you exactly what happened to me this weekend when I was trying to catch the bus for The Hague. First thing I do, I check Google maps for the itinerary; it looks like that if I take the metro I get directly to the bus station in 15 minutes. So I leave my house around 12.10 to make sure I could catch the bus at 12.45. I get to the station and I find out that the sign for the line and direction I have to take. It looks like I have to go upstairs and that I have two options: stairs or escalator. I decide to take the stairs but once I am up I find myself on the street! I was so angry and I immediately thought: Belgians!! I turn and I see the stairs going down with the directions for the metro, I go down and I find myself in the same place where I started!! So frustrating! Suddenly I realise that I didn't notice a small note indicating that the platform was downstairs! I get onto the metro but I have already lost 10 minutes in a goosechase!! Finally I get to my stop where I have to change for the train going directly to the bus station. 5 minutes to find the right direction. It turns out I have two options: one is getting out of the station and then back in again or take a deep and dark tunnel towards the platform. When I finally reach the platform I can't understand which line i have to take because three different lines leave from the same platform! Eventually I understood that my train was the last to leave and that I would have had to wait another 15 minutes meaning that I was going to miss my bus!!!!
This is not the end of the story though. When I finally got to the bus station and ran to get to the bus I still had to go through an absurd sequence of events. I did the check-in, they gave me a ticket that said I was supposed to get on bus no 3. I walked to the deck and I couldn't see the bus number until someone stopped me, took my ticket and told me to get on a bus. I got on, despite the fact that the destination indicated on the front of the bus was Milano Malpensa! I was sitting on the bus wondering why someone wanted to go to Milano Malpensa with a bus from Brussels just to catch a plane. The only explanation I could give myself was that the bus was probably old and that no one wanted to go through the hassle of changing the sign on front of it!!
Another really weird thing is the new 'public toilet' they installed on my way to work, just outside Gare Central. The thing (no other way to describe it) is standing in the middle of the street and it is like a cone with four 'toilets' attached to it and men stop, have a go and then keep walking! Could you imagine the smell and the disgust? Everything is basically 'en plein air'! I think it is the council brilliant idea to counteract the common habit of peeing against any standing wall! This is a common practice in Belgium and that is probably the reason why the city mascotte is a peeing child!!
There are many funny things that have happened to me since I came two months ago and the list will be too long. Just to name a few: it's difficult to pay with a credit card, almost impossible to find a cash machine and the trash is collected only twice a month... I could go on for ages!
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I just want to share with you one last and probably the weirdest thing I have ever witnessed to. It is something that explains the picture above. One rainy evening, around 7pm, I was walking up the street that from my place leads to Le Sablon. The purpose of my wandering at such a late (!) hour was the irresistible need for chocolate mousse. I came to the crossing and I noticed something very peculiar: an umbrella was attached to the handrail that separates the road from the pavement and a nice big loaf of bread was lying underneath it as someone cared so much about that loaf that wanted to keep it sheltered from the rain. At first I was absolutely puzzled and I stopped at the crossing staring at the umbrella when I realised a sock on top of the umbrella as well! I couldn't believe my eyes and so I gingerly took another quick looked at it. People next to me didn't seem that interested in this peculiar arrangement and I was asking myself if it was supposed to be a work of art or that was just a normal way of keeping the bread dry in Brussels. Anyway when the road was clear I crossed, went to the shop and bought my chocolate mousse. But when I reached the crossing with the mousse safely in my bag and a big smile on my face there it was a again the umbrella, the sock and the bread. I stopped to look at it carefully and suddenly a man all dressed up in a nice suit, tie and raincoat appeared standing next to me. I looked up into his eyes and I could see he thought I was going to steal his bread, so I decided to walk away. Immediately I thought about Surrealism; Magritte or Dali and so I got convinced that I had found the answer to why this artistic movement was born in Belgium. The Belgians are so absurd and creative in their absurdity that paintings like the ones by Magritte probably just represent their normal everyday life!
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