What a difference a day makes. Neighborhood street yesterday.
And today.
I always enjoy roaming a foreign city on a Monday. Tourists, if they even bother to venture out, don’t clump up and clog. With a lot of restaurants closed, sidewalks empty. Buses have available seats. Everything seems basically more relaxed.
We decided to visit a few neighborhoods we hadn’t been in. First there was Saint-Gilles to the west. In the center where food trucks were starting to set up for lunch was the Beaux Art Hôtel de Ville Town Hall. Built around 1900 in a neo-Flemish Renaissance style, it seemed to be an administration building where people were being taken care of by the local bureaucracy.
Leaving the Hôtel de Ville, we took a gander at a statue of a woman who symbolically looked like she’d been fleeced by the government and was fleeing into the woods.
So why not check out the woods? A couple blocks away was a park where we could brush by the lime trees one more time.
And on the streets surrounding the park we could take in a beautiful variation of Art Nouveau exteriors.
I spotted a bus stop, so we took the # 54 north to the Matogne neighborhood. We had discussed it earlier in morning wanting to visit the area of Brussels where the Congolese settled. There were busy streets with African markets.
And gorgeous fabric shops.
Tucked between tiny storefronts, three was an anti-Capitalist museum which unfortunately wasn’t open.
I reflected on how at the height of the Belle Époque the Art Nouveau influence that Belgians were so proud of spread throughout the world. And then WWI smoked Belgium and there went what little was left of the empire. The Art Nouveau posters that were ads for the empire now decorate bathroom walls.
In countries as different as Argentina, Japan, and Belgium I’ve noticed how the images of American dominance that I’ve seen on bathroom walls are Hollywood stars from the 1950s. Black and white prints of James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, and Marlon Brando appear to be an enduring legacy. After that, Nam and a history no one wants to repeat.