Just found a few more pictures from our last morning in Brussels. In the middle picture on the left you can see the barriers around the massive building works on Stalingrad were celebrating the life and music of Toots Thielmans, the legendary Belgian harmonica player, most recently brought to the attention of American audiences, perhaps, by Jaco Pastorius (see below).
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All of these were shot at the Place de Brouckere in Brussels, shortly before we left. I’m guessing it looked rather different in Django’s time. Click any image to see them bigger (if you’re seeing this in email you may need to click the post title, above, first).
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“J’Existe,” which I originally imagined to be a plaint of unseen minority or immigrant populations, turns out to be a fashion brand of the artist Thierry Jaspart. We’ll be seeing that name again before we leave Belgium. I’m not sure why some names on the kiosk of artist names have been whited out. Are these the ones who have been ‘canceled’ of late?
Just some more passersby on the way from the train station back to our hotel, mostly on Stalingrad.
The opposite window reflected in the train window on the ride back from Ghent to Brussels and the graffiti as we approached Brussels’ Midi-Zuid train station.
We walked down Stalingrad, past all the Arab coffee houses, to the crowded platform at the Brussels Midi-Zuid train station. “In your own time,” might be the motto of the Belgian train service as only one train we took out of about eight trips actually left on time. OTOH, you can really travel all over the country relatively easily by train, something that can not be said of the US.
Massive map on a sheet of glass on either side of the building. For some context, see the picture below:
Part of the Royal Gallery of Saint Hubert this arcade is almost 200 years old
Another set of postcard pictures taken at the above-captioned cathedral which was stunning. By chance we arrived just before a concert was put on by an English girls’ boarding school (Badminton School).
Parc du Bruxelles. There were a bunch of these whimsical
Since we finished viewing the Fin-de-Siècle on level -8 the way to exit is via an elevator that’s immense with couches like the one shown below on both sides of it. Then an escalator ride and some stairs to emerge again at level 0.
The Magritte show is on level -4. We then descended to levels -5 through -8 for the Fin-de-Siècle museum. Again I was struck by the geometry, space and architecture that museums always exhibit as much as the art they display.
