Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
brick buildings - not brilliant architecturally, but certainly an improvement on the gas station - have been
erected in their place, and I was assured again and again by locals that the city government has at last
recognized its slack attitude towards development and begun to insist on buildings of some architectural
distinction, but the evidence of this so far is rather less than overwhelming.
The one corner of charm in the city is a warren of narrow, pedestrian-only streets behind the Grand-
Place called, with a mildly pathetic dash of hyperbole, the Sacred Isle. Here the little lanes and
passageways are packed with restaurants and crowds of people wandering around in the happy state of
deciding where to eat, nosing around the ice barrows of lobsters, mussels and crayfish that stand outside
each establishment. Every doorway issues a warm draught of grilled aromas and every window reveals
crowds of people enjoying themselves at almost any hour of the day or night. It is remorselessly picturesque
and appealing, and it has been like this since the Middle Ages, and yet even this lovable, clubby little
neighbourhood came within an ace of being bulldozed in the 1960s. Wherever you go in Europe, you find
yourself wondering what sort of brain-wasting disease it was that affected developers and architects in the
1960s and 70s, but nowhere is this sensation stronger than in Brussels.
Yet Brussels has its virtues. It's the friendliest big city in Europe (which may or may not have something
to do with the fact that a quarter of its residents come from abroad), it has a couple of good museums, the
oldest shopping arcade in Europe, the small but pleasurable Galeries St-Hubert, lots of terrific bars and the
most wonderful restaurants. Eating out is the national sport in Belgium, and Brussels alone has 1,500
restaurants, twenty-three of them carrying Michelin rosettes. You can eat incredibly well there for less than
almost anywhere else on the continent. I dined in the Sacred Isle every night, always trying a new restaurant
and always achieving the gustatory equivalent of a multiple orgasm. The restaurants are almost always tiny
- to reach a table at the back you have to all but climb over half a dozen diners - and the tables are
squeezed so tightly together that you cannot cut your steak without poking your neighbour in the cheek with
an elbow or dragging your sleeve through his sauce B￩arnaise, but in an odd way that's part of the
enjoyment. You find that you are effectively dining with the people next to you, sharing bread rolls and little
pleasantries. This is a novel pleasure for the lone traveller, who usually gets put at the darkest table, next to
the gents, and spends his meal watching a procession of strangers pulling up their flies and giving their
hands a shake as they pass.
After dinner each night I would go for a necessarily aimless stroll - there is nothing much to aim for -
but, like most cities, Brussels is always better at night. I walked one evening up to the massive Palais de
Justice, which broods on a small eminence overlooking the old town and looks like an American state
capitol building that has been taking steroids. It is absolutely enormous - it covers 280,000 square feet and
was the largest building constructed anywhere in the world in the nineteenth century - but the only truly
memorable thing about it is its bulk. Another evening, I walked out to the headquarters of the EEC. In a city
of buildings so ugly they take your breath away, the headquarters of the EEC at Rond Point Schuman
manages to stand out. It was only six o'clock, but there wasn't a soul about, not a single person working late,
which made me think of the old joke: Question: How many people work in the European Commission?
Answer: About a third of them. You cannot look at all those long rows of windows without wondering what on
earth goes on in there. I suppose there are whole wings devoted to making sure that post-office queues are
of a uniform length throughout the community and that a soft-drinks machine in France dispenses the same
proportion of upside-down cups as one in Italy.
As an American, it's interesting to watch the richest countries in Europe enthusiastically ceding their
sovereignty to a body that appears to be out of control and answerable to no one. Did you know that
because of its Byzantine structure, the European Commission does not even know 'how many staff
members it has or what they all do'? (I quote from
The Economist
.) I find this worrying. For my part I
decided to dislike the EEC when I discovered that they were taking away those smart hardback navy blue
British passports and replacing them with flimsy red books that look like the identity papers of a Polish
seaman. This is always the problem with large institutions. They have no style.
I don't know much about how the EEC works, but I do know one interesting fact that I think gives some
perspective to its achievements: in 1972 the European Conference on Post and Telecommunications
called for a common international telephone code for Common Market nations, namely 00. Since then the
