stopover

The trip didn't start particularly auspiciously.  Sitting in the departure hall at St. Pancras, crammed in with hundreds of travelers on their ways to Brussels or Paris, I broke with convention and didn't get a coffee and a muffin from Caffè Nero.  I was too tired after four hours of sleep and couldn’t bother to get up.  Earlier, a failing alarm had almost foiled my travel plans entirely, though in fairness I have to say that it wasn't technically the alarm that had failed but my skill setting it.  Thinking that 5:05 might be a bit too late, I had changed it to 5:55.  Luckily, my phone had bailed me out.

On the train, a faded first-generation Eurostar, things started to look up.  Last week's Economist was free, and a lovely breakfast brought to the seat.  "Pain au chocolat?", the steward asked, and later, "Encore un café, monsieur?"  I said yes to all questions, not realizing that the service personnel were lulling me into a false sense of security.  We reached Brussels 20 minutes late.

I missed my connection by two minutes, seeing the tail end of a bright white ICE leaving the station as I clambered off the train.  A service person quickly printed out alternative arrangements.  The next train to Germany was leaving in four hours.  It didn't upset me in the least.

I could have questioned the point of promoting a pan-European railway network when one provider doesn't take another's delays into account.  I could have complained that trains shouldn't be late in the first place if railroads want to compete with air travel.  I could have doubted the wisdom of running trains between Belgium and Germany every four hours only.

In the end, I did none of this.  I didn't see it as a four-hour delay as much as a break in a journey that was too long to take in one go.  I locked up my luggage and stepped out of the station, ready to see the city like a tourist leaving his hotel after a leisurely breakfast.

It was 11 o'clock and noticeably cooler than in London a few hours earlier.  Out of nowhere, I had been given three and a half hours to spend in a city I'd never seen.  I was quite pleased already.  Then I realized I might be able to claim compensation for the delay.  In effect, I might be getting paid to see Brussels.

Getting to the center of town from the station takes a short walk through a colorful neighborhood with a distinctly Moroccan influence.  There were mint tea houses, the patisserie Marrakesh, and a travel agent offering direct services to Kenitra and Meknes, but also a Greek Orthodox church, a business sign in Hebrew that I couldn't decipher and, most hilariously, a Chicken Cottage.  On the left was the Zuid Paleis, a great warehouse/market monolith from the 19th century, and on the right the office of BXL Laïque, an organization providing a nebulous "service of moral assistance".

The heart of the city is Grand Place, the great market of yore and an ensemble of such stupefying outrage that it's impossible to describe.  Lining its four sides are palaces to mercantile success and institutions of civic pride, their architecture wildly over the top in every single case.  Bread Hall is all gothic arches and columns; Brewers' House has gold-leaf decorations.  The façade of city hall is saturated with hundreds of sandstone statues, all in their own ornate alcoves.  Over everything dances a mosaic of a million tiny shadows.  It's totally bonkers.

The streets leading to Grand Place are called Butter St. and Herring St., but these days, the trade is in other flavors.  There might be luxury watches and lace curtains and tourist trinkets, but the vast majority of shops sell artisanal chocolate.  For variety of vice, there are dark beer halls in rich Belle Époque decoration.

One ring removed from Grand Place are tourist trap restaurants with picture menus in four languages.  Confronted with those and local favorites Quick Burger and Hector the Hen, I walked on until I found a small restaurant with tables underneath a vast sycamore tree and a lunch menu for locals.  Lounge music wafted over from the cocktail bar at the corner that had diversified into the lunch business.  A cast-iron spiral staircase led to the first floor where a stage with big speakers and a drum kit hinted at what happens at night.

In the distance beckoned the cathedral, but time wasn't in my favor.  I rose from my table and, entirely by chance, soon found myself next to the Little Pisser, a fountain replenished by a bronze cherub's renal effluent.  It's become a symbol of the city, adored similarly by locals and tourists.  For all the fame, it's disappointingly small.  I continued on my way back to the station and was soon enough on another train and off to other adventures.