Brussels: The Grand Place of Europe

Story and photography by
Nancy & Eric Anderson 

This is a city of people with a sense of fun -- even the dogs have a cool approach to life as we heard from the owner of Bonhome, a 2-year old Border Collie crossed with some breed that sounded, er, foreign when we were introduced to him.

We came to Brussels by train as wide-eyed ingénues, one of the few spontaneous things we’d done as travel writers in years. Sure, we knew it was the capital of Belgium and the home of the European Union but we didn’t know much more though we did remember the 1969 comedy If it’s Tuesday It Must Be Belgium. We were not completely naïve, we always like to have the hotel for the first night nailed down and had done so online at brusselssummerpack.com, a great website that allowed you to choose your language and how many stars you want to pay for in your hotel choice.

We ended up extending our room at the Hotel Dominican for our entire stay; it met all our needs and its location was superb at Rue Leopold 9, a ten minute walk from Brussels Centraal railway station and a five minute walk to Brussels’ famous square, The Grand Place. The Dominican with its complimentary in-room coffee machine and free WiFi including the use of the business center computers and printer, had reduced rates in July and August and those rates are further lowered at weekends and, additionally so, if you book online.

A Dominican abbey stood on this site in the 15^th century. The building then became the home of the French artist Jacques-Louis David best known for his Mars Disarmed by Venus 10 foot high masterpiece he painted in his studio in this very house. The building was gutted except for its outer walls when Carlton Hotels converted it to the 150 roomed Dominican in 2007 but the interior with its lofty ceilings, soaring windows and sweeping archways continues the theme of a medieval abbey. Business travelers on expense accounts will not need to look further for evening dining suggestions than the hotel restaurant. The ambiance is delightful. Ask if you book a room at the Dominican how much extra it might add to include breakfast because the hotel offers as good a cooked breakfasts as we’ve had in any hotel.

Brussels occupies 160 square kilometers, it is larger than Paris that has only 102 square kilometers. Brussels’ center like that of most older cities in Europe has excellent mass transit service, is close to the main railway station and is compact which makes it walk-able but you need to bring comfortable shoes for the cobblestones and, with those cobblestones, you’ll be glad you’ve kept your wheeled luggage light. You will be walking a lot though not far to see the typical attractions in this city. Some celebrated fish restaurants lie alongside a canal about 600 yards west of the hotel in front of St. Catherine’s Church. They were popular with locals who clearly enjoyed the unhurried service but we did notice on the menu, in English, a notation that said the restaurant didn’t serve food without drinks and didn’t provide tap water, just bottled water. This later is not a reflection on the poor quality of city water but rather how European restaurants in general prefer to sell you water than give you a glass of completely acceptable tap water even to the point of misunderstanding your order and bringing you a bottle already opened before you can protest. Picky? Not really when a bottle often costs 3 Euros.

There are other restaurants disdained as “touristy” by some locals about 300 yards to the south on Gretry Straat/Rue des Bouchers (streets are identified both in Flemish and French). We felt this was a great place to stroll in the evening for restaurant choices: one street is Italian, one French and the variety seems endless. They are busy which always is a good sign. We even found an inexpensive pizza place.

Most of the walking you’ll be doing in Brussels is around its magnificent plaza, the Grand Place. But leave your visit there to the end. First explore some of Brussels’ churches and monuments. The Cathedral is impressive – you’ll pass it on your way to the railway station but you probably won’t find the city’s famous statue Manneken Pis, a bronze of a little boy urinating, unless you know where to look. It’s about two blocks behind the Town Hall on the Rue de l’Etuve (that’s the street the Rue Charles Buls becomes). The original stone statue was carved in 1388 but was stolen several times until the bronze one was cast in 1619. The citizens commonly dress the statue in different clothes according to the season or their whim but why such a statue exists is not clarified by the many legends. One says the child urinated on a fuse that was going to blow up the city in the 14^th Century then there’s our preferred one that, in 1142, at the Battle of Ransbeke when the army of the Lord of Leuven was fighting the army of the Lord of Grimbergen, the former army placed their infant Lord Leuven in a basket from a tree to be their talisman and from there he urinated on the Grimergens who lost the battle. A more instinctive story may be the one given us by a passer by speaking, as so many do, in fluent English. “He reflects the irreverent spirit of Brussels, our city’s well-known cynicism,” he says. “And it shows we are free to do what we want in Belgium.” What the Brussels taxpayers are indeed free to criticize seemingly is the megalomania of the nouveau rich European politicians who strut its “capital of Europe” streets as part of the European Union but one hears this story about the EU people from those in every European city. “Those office bearers in the EU believe they are the new aristocracy and behave accordingly,” says an old friend in France, “Yet before their appointments many of them came from mere villages.” Brussels has a population of 1 million and 125,000 are diplomats.

More fun than driving two miles east to see the Versailles-like premises of the European Parliament is to walk the city searching for its best murals showing cartoons. Brussels is one of the birthplaces of the comic strip and 2009 saw a celebration of the 20 years of the Belgian Comic Strip Centre. There are 31 murals all over the city and they are fun to find. Easier than the 2,500 different beers that Belgium reportedly makes.

This sense of enjoyment Brussels people show is particularly pleasing because it is a famous old city, the formal capital of Belgium in, what appears to us, the slightly awkward position (with its French traditions) of being located in Northern Belgium amidst that area’s Flemish culture. But the people of Brussels, the Bruxellois, laugh a lot, seem contented and certainly make visitors welcome whether they are hunting the best chocolates in Belgium or simply the best ice cream in the city. Our guide, Paquita, took us past the Neuhaus store in the impressive Galleries Saint-Hubert built Parisian style in 1847.

“Neuhaus started as a chemist making throat lozenges in 1857,” she says, “then, fortunately, he diverted to creating chocolates.”

“Is he any good?” we ask.

“Yes,” she replies with a look of reverence on her face, “He is The One.”

Nothing however, prepares you for the Grand Place. In contrast to, for example, St. Mark’s Square in Venice which overwhelms visitors with its demonstration of the power of politics and the domination of the church, Brussels’ gorgeous Grand Place displays how the affluent bourgeois showed off the wealth of their guilds to the less fortunate. Jean Cocteau went one better than Victor Hugo who once called it, “the most beautiful square in the world.” Cocteau said it was “the most beautiful theater in the world.” And it is theater as explained by our guide, Paquita, who knows her city. She reads the square like a book. Some of the guilds that built the palaces believed in alchemy -- and the details on the outsides of the homes suggest they were indeed trying to make gold. There were 49 Guilds in Brussels in the Middle Ages and the wealthiest ones built their houses like clubs in the Grand Place. “This is an Art Nouveau hymn to the bourgeois,” says Paquita. No work was done in those immense beautiful palaces; they were like country clubs for the guild members and the guilds were closed shops: no outsider could ever be accepted even if he had the skills.

The French destroyed the square in 1695, the only surviving building being the Town Hal (Hotel de Ville). The reason apparently was that the French had lost the Battle of Namur in the south of Belgium and Louis XIV ordered his field marshal De Villeroy to bomb the square to ruins. The Guilds rebuilt in a mere five years. Brussels was an intermediate stop on the road from Cologne to the port then of Bruges and was well able to afford any expense.

We note the statue of the warrior t’Serclaes, a local hero who was attacked and fatally wounded in the 14^th century outside the city in a “territorial feud.” He was brought to the Maison de l’Étoile in the Grand Place where he died. We wait patiently beside his memorial for our turn to rub his arm since doing so brings luck and suggests you may return to this enchanting city.