Brussels, part 2

Saturday was a "see as much of the city as possible" day.  The weather was sunny and mild.  Rick Steves' guidebooks have become our go-to resources, primarily because he provides walks around a given city that cover most of what you would want to see, and we like to see cities on foot.  Rick gave us two walks.  We started with the "upper town" walk (upper in the sense of "uphill"), because it contained the museums, and we wanted to get there before the crowds.  Brussels houses three museums in a single building.  We started with the Old Masters, of which there were plenty, but none we found notable (I tend to like the non-religious art of the Dutch masters, but this wasn't particularly compelling).  There is a (minor) Rembrandt here, but it was out for cleaning.  Probably the best were the Bruegels (father and son).  My advice would be that unless you love this period of art, this museum could be skipped.

The Fin de Siecle museum had Impressionists and others of about that time period and some absolutely gorgeous Art Deco furniture. glassware, etc.  The impressionists were ho-hum, though this was my first introduction to James Ensor, who mostly painted slightly macabre people in masks, and I found him interesting.  There were quite a few pointillists, if that appeals.   But the Art Deco stuff made it worth the time.

But the best of the set was the Magritte Museum.  Three floors of his life.  I wasn't particularly familar with his early work or his work during the war (limited in many ways by the Nazis), so that interested me.  He got his start doing posters, book covers and other advertising, very different style than his later work, but intriguing.  He also met his wife when she was 14 and he was 17, I think, and they were together till he died.  This covered the first two floors.  The final flour was the work he is most famous for -- the oddly juxtaposed items that seem to be either a puzzle or a joke.  Few of his really famous pieces are there.  I remember one that shows a nest on a window ledge with two eggs, and the mountain seen through the window is in the shape of an eagle.  There was another one showing a window, where the glass is broken as if a rock had been thrown through it, and the image you see through the glass is painted on the glass, but it is the same image that you see when looking through the broken areas.  And while his famous "this is not a pipe" painting (of a pipe) was not there, a later painting of a pipe, labelled "this is still not a pipe" was in the collection.  Magritte is one of my favorite painters -- I love his sense of playfulness -- so I obviously enjoyed it, but so did Jay, who is not a rabid Magritte fan. 

The rest of the upper town walk was to visit various buildings, churches and gardens.  We walked through the Sablon neighborhood, which seems to be one of the ritzier parts of town, based on the number of high-end chocolatiers and clothing stores.  In one garden, where Brussels' "home boys" were honored with statues, we had to take Jay's picture next to Gerhard Mercator, as Jay is funded here in Germany as a Mercator Fellow (Mercator was from Brussels, but lived much of his adult life in Duisburg).  Here they both are:

The lower town walk takes you through some of the older parts of town (the upper town buildings are mostly from the 19th century).  We started with the famous Grand Place, the big square that is really the heart of Brussels.  Here is a picture taken on our way home from dinner,showing it at night:

Of course we had  to see the famous "Mannekin Pis", the statue of a peeing boy.  It was erected in 1619 to provide drinking water for the neighborhood.  When we arrived he was dressed in some sort of Belgian regalia (this is a regular occurence; Rick Steves says that he dresses as an Elvis impersonator on Elvis's birthday, and on Prostate Awareness Day, his flow slows to a trickle); however, before I could get my camera positioned, a guy came and removed his uniform.  So I just captured him al fresco. 

We walked through the Galeries Royales St. Hubert, which is the original enclosed shopping mall.  The enclosed walkway is about 200m long (we were looking for a specific cafe and almost gave up before finding it).  We also viewed the Church of St. Nicholas, where there are shops (primarily jewelers) built into the wall of the church.  The Jewelers provided the money to rebuild the church in the 1700s and in return were given this prime real estate in which to live and set up shop (I presume they don't live above the shops any more). This facade (the church entrance is on the left) looks pretty unchanged from that time, though most of the others have had major modernizations.

Rick Steves pointed out this lovely bar that still has its Art Deco decorations. 

And we encountered this poster, which gives you an idea of what Belgians think of the US these days.

It's captured through a shop window, so maybe a bit of description is in order: this is Trump as the Statue of Liberty, with a broken Scales of Justice in his right hand (clearly broken by too much money being put on the scales) and a nuclear warhead in his left hand. 

To give you an idea of how much ground we covered, fitbit gave me credit for 13 miles.

The next morning was the Daylight Savings time shift for Europe, so we slept in and went directly to the train station.  The trip home was uneventful.