Belgium - Brussels

The Ugly Stepchild

Aside from Grand Place in the center of the city there is nothing, and I mean nothing, to like about Brussels.  I saw all I needed to on the first of my fourteen days there and spent the remaining thirteen transporting myself elsewhere on a river of their strongest beer.

It's a dreadful, grey, dirty assortment of post-modern concrete-poured blocks.  The primary schools look like mini-prisons and the people shuffle around in a daze, staring at the ground.  Most days, the security guard at our hotel spent his time chasing the neighborhood kids after dodging a shower of rocks.

Though situated in a bombed out carcass of a neighborhood, our offices made the most of an old customs house.  They hadn't done much to it - put in some wifi, arranged some tables and chairs, added a coffee machine or two.  The light poured through the massive glass roof making you feel as if you were working outside.

Stranger than strange, Anna, my upstairs neighbor in Brooklyn happened to be in Brussels.  She and her husband Keith live in the Belgian countryside and she was there to renew her US visa.  We met up for lunch and she posed for a photo with her frites.  She asked that I send the photo to Dodo to be shown to her husband.  Apparently, the only thing he missed about Belgium was the fries.