Brussels

After Amsterdam, I headed south to Brussels. Although I had some issues getting there after I thought I had left my camera at my hostel in Amsterdam and spent some time being lost in Brussels, I did eventually get to my hostel.

My first full day in Brussels, I started by visiting the Atomium, a sculpture of nine spheres in the shape of an iron crystal originally built for the 1958 World’s Fair. While overpriced to visit, the Atomium is a really impressive structure. I was surprised by how huge it is in person, the view from the top viewing platform was impressive, and the setup of the structure with escalators connecting the spheres was interesting to see.

Unfortunately, while I was at the Atomium, which is about an hour away from the city center, the entire Brussels metro system shut down due to an accident in which a bystander attacked and killed a bus driver. While the accident was very unfortunate, neither the hour long walk back to my hostel nor the subsequent decision of the subway employees union to strike for the subsequent week, leading to me needing to walk everywhere in Brussels (my hostel was a half hour from the city center and an hour from the train station) were particularly enjoyable. I also subsequently read an article that talked about the tendency for the public transit employees to strike around holidays, so I think there were certainly suspicions that the attack was capitalized on to create a week long Easter vacation.

Speaking of Easter, I spent Easer morning going to my first Catholic mass at the St. Michael and St. Gudula Cathedral. While less extravagant than many cathedrals, it was the most decorated churches I’ve attended a worship service in. The mass was bilingual in French and Dutch. To briefly digress, while Brussels is in the French speaking part of Belgium, the city is officially bilingual. Street signs are written in both French and Dutch and most people seemed to know both languages. Since I know English and German, throughout the service, I got more out of the Dutch than the French, although much of the content was lost to me. However, the service was more about the cultural experience than the religious experience. It was also my first Catholic service and the ritualistic aspects of the service were completely new to me. Although not a type of religious service I particularly connect with, seeing how much of Europe and America worships was a really great experience. 

I was a bit tired of going to museums, so I mostly wandered the city looking at a variety of sites such as the Botanical Gardens:

the Stock Exchange Building:

the Parliament Building:

the Royal Palace:

the Town Hall:

the Manneken Pis, the famous, yet tiny statue of a boy peeing:

 the European Parliament:

the Congress Column, which commemorates the founding of the Belgian state:

and Cinquantenaire park which has a triumphal arch. 

In addition to more typically ornate architecture, Brussels has a quirky side too. Due to the large number of comic authors and illustrators from Brussels, there are fun comic book inspired murals all over the city.

In typical touristy fashion, I also ate a waffle. Here’s a photo of my loaded tourist waffle, although I also ate a more subdued traditional waffle covered with powdered sugar later in the trip.

The whole experience ended with another interesting cultural experience.  Based on a map with suggestions from locals, I went to a small independent cinema house and saw a documentary about Japanese experimental music. While the part of the movie in which the musicians were discussing the experimental music scene in Japan in Japanese with French subtitles was lost to me, most of the movie was musicians performing their work which transcends language. Many of the musicians used everyday objects to create music, which was really cool.

While Brussels wasn’t my favorite city to visit, it’s certainly a pretty city with an important role in European politics as the capital of the European Union.

The Hague

While in Amsterdam, I took a day trip to the Hague, probably best known as being the seat of the Dutch government (although not the capital-that’s Amsterdam), and the location of both the International Court of Justice, and the International Criminal Court.

While there, I visited two art museums: the Prince William V Gallery and the Escher Museum. The Prince William V Gallery was originally a group of paintings from William V, Prince of Orange-Nassau’s collection of paintings he regularly opened to the public. Now, the gallery hosts a few 18^th century paintings from the Mauritshuis, The Hague’s larger art museum. I enjoyed seeing some more work by Dutch painters there, but the highlight (and the main reason I went to the gallery in the first place) was seeing Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Johannes_Vermeer_(1632-1675)_-_The_Girl_With_The_Pearl_Earring_(1665).jpg

Since the Mauritshaus, where the painting usually is, is under construction, it was at the Prince William Gallery for a few weeks. It’s one of my favorite paintings, so seeing it in person was really cool.

The Escher Museum, located in a former palace that was used as a winter palace by Queen Emma, holds an exhibition with a large number of works by Dutch graphic artist M.C.  Escher, as well as some information about the palace and Queen Emma. The two exhibits were an interesting combination of information. It was especially neat to see how Escher’s work progressed over time. I was much more familiar with his later work, focused on tessellations and optical illusions, so it was interesting to see the Italian landscapes that dominated his earlier work. Here’s the museum and a few of his more famous pieces:

They also had a kids’ focused part of the museum where you could pretend to be in an Escher painting. So here are two versions of Hand with Reflecting Sphere:

The rest of the day, I mostly wandered through town, seeing the major sites including the Binnenhof, where most of the Dutch government buildings are located:

the Noordeinde Palace, Queen Beatrix’s working palace:

the Peace Palace which among other things is the headquarters of the International Court of Law:

The peace flame in the second photo is actually surrounded by stones, each of which is native to and represents a country.

I also headed to Scheveningen, the part of The Hague that borders the North Sea. It was cold, windy, and sprinkling the day I was there, so there were understandably very few people at the beach.  

Although I didn’t know it at the time, this sculpture is part of the Beelden aan Zee sculpture museum and was created by Polish artist Igor Mitoraj (whose work will coincidentally appear again on this blog in a couple posts).

Overall, I had a really nice day trip. Although The Hague isn’t that much smaller than Amsterdam, it felt less urban somehow, although the lack of people certainly could be attributed to the weather and the fact that Easter was in a few days. Anyway, after spending almost all of my time this semester in some of Europe’s largest cities, it was nice to be in a place that was less crowded with people.