Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
5. Brussels
I got off at the wrong station in Brussels, which is easy to do if you are a little bit stupid and you have
been dozing and you awake with a start to see a platform sign outside the window that says
BRUXELLES.
I
leaped up in a mild panic and hastened to the exit, knocking passengers on the head with my rucksack as I
passed, and sprang Peter Pan-like onto the platform just as the train threw a steamy whoosh! at my legs
and pulled out.
It didn't strike me as odd that I was the only passenger to alight at the station, or that the station itself
was eerily deserted, until I stepped outside, into that gritty drizzle that hangs perpetually over Brussels, and
realized I was in a part of the city I had never seen before: one of those anonymous neighbourhoods where
the buildings are grey and every end wall has a three-storey advertisement painted on it and the shops sell
things like swimming-pool pumps and signs that say
NO PARKING - GARAGE IN CONSTANT USE.
I had
wanted Bruxelles Centrale and would have settled for the Gare du Nord or the Gare du Midi or even the
obscure Gare Josaphat, but this was none of these, and I had no idea where I was. I set my face in a
dogged expression and trudged towards what I thought might be the downtown - a hint of tall buildings on a
distant, drizzly horizon.
I had been to Brussels a couple of times before and thought I knew the city reasonably well, so I kept
telling myself that any minute I would start to recognize things, and sometimes I even said, 'Say, that looks
kind of familiar,' and would trudge a quarter of a mile to what I thought might be the back of the Palais de
Justice but which proved in the event to be a dog-food factory. I walked and walked down long streets that
never changed character or even acquired any, just endless blocks of grey sameness, which Brussels
seems to possess in greater abundance than almost anywhere else in Europe.
I hate asking directions. I am always afraid that the person I approach will step back and say, 'You want
to go
where
? The centre of Brussels? Boy, are you lost. This is
Lille,
you dumb shit,' then stop other
passers-by and say, 'You wanna hear something classic? Buddy, tell these people where you think you are,'
and that I'll have to push my way through a crowd of people who are falling about and wiping tears of mirth
from their eyes. So I trudged on. Just when I reached the point where I was beginning to think seriously
about phoning my wife and asking her to come and find me ('And listen, honey, bring some Yorkies and the
Sunday papers'), I turned a corner and there to my considerable surprise was the Manneken-Pis, the
chubby little statue of a naked boy having a pee, the inexpressibly naff symbol of the city, and suddenly I
knew where I was and all my little problems melted. I celebrated by buying a Manneken-Pis cake plate and
a family-sized Toblerone at one of the 350 souvenir shops that line the street, and felt better still.
Fifteen minutes later, I was in a room at the Hotel Adolphe Sax, lying on the bed with my shoes on
(disintegrating into a hermitic slobbiness is one of the incidental pleasures of solitary travel), breaking my
teeth on the Toblerone (who invented those things?) and watching some daytime offering on BBCl - a panel
discussion involving people who were impotent or from Wolverhampton or suffering some other personal
catastrophe, the precise nature of which eludes me now - and in half an hour was feeling sufficiently
refreshed to venture out into Brussels.
I always stay in the Sax because it gets BBCl on the TV and because the lifts are so interesting, a
consideration that I was reminded of now as I stood in the corridor beside an illuminated Down button,
passing the time, as one does, by humming the Waiting for the Elevator Song ('Doo dee doo dee doo dee
doo doo') and wondering idly why hotel hallway carpet is always
so
ugly.
Generally speaking, they don't understand elevators in Europe. Even in the newer buildings the
elevators are almost always painfully slow and often lack certain features that are elsewhere considered
essential, like an inside door, so that if you absent-mindedly lean forward you are likely to end up with one
arm twenty-seven feet longer than the other. But even by these standards the lifts at the Sax are exceptional.
You get in intending to go downstairs for breakfast, but find that the lift descends without instructions
past the lobby, past the underground garage and basement and down to an unmarked sub-basement where
the doors open briefly to reveal a hall full of steam and toiling coolies. As you fiddle uselessly with the
buttons (which are obviously not connected to anything), the doors clang shut and, with a sudden burst of
