We made it to Brussels! After a fun afternoon yesterday, we saw the Museum of Fine Arts with an excellent exhibition of Bruegel, including an immersive experience to his paintings. Later that night we went to the famous Delirium bar where we had typical Belgian Beer.
Today we met with Ms. Paula Cordeiro, who works at the heritage office in Brussels. We where guided through the Grand Place, a museum and the town hall tower by her. She told us the history of Brussels and the processes of restoration done to the place from 2004 until 2016. Later we had lunch at the iconic Aux Armes de Bruxelles where we had the Waterzooi dish, traditional in Brussels.
Finally we went to the cathedral of the city where we admired more art works and decorations.
Stay tune for our last day as we will visit the Bozar and explore the history of this venue which our research found it was an auction house of stolen art during the 30s and 40s.
On my way to Luxembourg spontaneously stopped in Brussels for a short stop. The capital of Belgium was a bit of a shock for me. Never have i ever traveled for so long alone and after staying in Bruges, Lille, Brest, Nantes and La Rochelle, i think i was used to small and/or quite cities. Even the bigger cities like Budapest and Bordeaux could not compare to this city. The feeling was totally different. I stayed in a youth hostel in the turkish quarter. I visited all the big places i could fit into my small time frame: Grand Place, Royal Palace, Bourse, Art Nouveau Quarter, the Atom, the Cathedral and the Mont des Arts.
If New York is the city that never sleeps, than Brussels for me is the city that never passes up the chance to celebrate something. In the one and an half days i stayed there they had a free comic festival, a free electronic music festival, a beer fest, a stage at the Grand Place with traditional music and many markets like a flee market and a turkish market. Tom, a local, told me himself that Brussels can be overwhelming, weird and confusing at 
first and that is the way i felt half of the time i stayed there. The wild mix of architecture, from decorative, golden guild houses to big, glass office buildings in the next street. But i also learned to love the people in and their mentality. Tom told me a lot of funny but untrue tales and the special ways the people of Brussels dealt with problems. For example they just covered the river Zenne in the late 19th century with earth instead of cleaning it up. It had become a health hazard because everybody used it as their trash can.
There are more than one origin story of the Manneken Pis statue. The most common one, at least of that i know, is about a little peasant boy. The little boy wandered around out side the city gates as he heard enemies forces approaching and he hid. He saw how they buried dynamite underneath the gates to blow up the city gates and walls. He did not quite understand all the enemies whispered to each other but he knew it was not something good. The boy did’t not know what to do. There was no time to get a adult or warn someone so he got to the end of the fuse and urinated on it. And so a little peasant boy put out the dynamite and saved Brussels.
Other stories take about the little Duke Godfrey III of Leuven, a two-year old that was hung in a basket from a tree to bring the troops luck during a battle in Ransbeke. From high up he urinated on the enemies and they lost the battle. Another legend speaks of the son of a noble man, who left a procession to urinate on the wall of a witch’s house. Furiously the witch transformed him into the statue.
Till this day it is rumoured that you can see at night in the moonlight, a shining golden hand, in which a golden eel twists, rising from the water at where the fisherman vanished. It is as if the devil himself wants to warn the fishermen to stop fishing for eels. Luckily this is not possible, since that day all eels disappeared from the “Reien” (the canals running trough the city) and they never returned.
