14February1996

Wednesday afternoon.

My dear folks,

This is the future. It is happening at 300 kph on the EuroStar, a needle-nosed silver, blue & yellow streak that conveys one effortlessly between European capitals in the wink of an eye. I confess I enjoyed a wink of something over an hour, as I was seriously short of sleep. I dropped off as we were still chugging sedately through the Kent countryside & woke again as we exited the Chunnel, catching a fleeting glimpse of the twin shotgun barrels through which trains hurtle out from beneath the sea. French fields dance past, effortlessly receding into the distance. One feels like a cossetted visitor to a foreign planet, in it but not of it. Jones has prepared the most scrumptious smoked salmon sandwiches to keep up our strength & we've a renewable Rusty Nail to sustain our spirits.

It's as close as I've come to flying without actually taking off. The train has a gently undulating pneumatic ride, tucking into corners & sweeping out of them. It's very comfortable, tailored & trimmed like an aircraft with much the same amount of space for the economy traveller. The crew are smartly turned out in aircrew-style uniforms . And the international section of Waterloo station looks more like a space port than a rail stop, a pristine creation of aerobatic steel & swooping glass. Jones points out that large articulated metal fish hang from the ceiling where they seem to swim in the breeze. If it sounds kitsch. It's not. It's actually very impressive. 2001ish!

Now we're deep into Belgium and the fields are lightly dusted with snow. We're clearly going to have a chilly arrival in Brussels where we have booked ourselves into what our hostess described over the phone as a studio. We'll see!

Wednesday night: Brussels:

This is not an easy city to arrive in, at least not unless you're being met in one of the big Mercedes we saw sweeping past with police outriders. Needless to say, we were not. We left the train at the South Station terminus, negotiated the passport control & made our way downstairs to the subway. There, with some puzzling & some help, we worked out the route to North Station, our destination. The Brussels subway works on quite different principles from that in London.

North Station is a sprawling complex with several exits which give on to an intimidating multi-lane road system. It's not pedestrian friendly. We were armed with several maps but struggled to reconcile them with the concrete jungle confronting us. Nor were the first several Belgians we encountered of much help. It was also very cold. Each time we stopped to squint at the fine print on the map, our gloveless hands froze in the windchill. We could easily have hailed a passing taxi but felt this would be an admission of defeat. We wanted to be visitors & not merely tourists, prepared to undergo a modicum of suffering. Eventually a helpful Belgian explained the mysteries of the road system (we had to navigate a road tunnel & then double back on our tracks) & we arrived safe & sound at the Residence de la Sabloniere.

Our "studio" is an elementary double bedroom en (half) suite, plus fridge & sink. It is clean & the bed is large & firm. It will do well enough. 9 channels of Eurocrap are available in French, Flemish, Italian & German on the corner TV. One becomes aware that Brussels is more at the centre of Euorpe than of Belgium and that the country's 10 million people live in an area the size of your average Australian sheepfarm. At least, the Flemish language is close to Afrikaans & easy to understand. And we have the sanity of the BBC World Service in English to fall back on.

Thursday evening:
It's hard to know what to make of Brussels city centre. The square kilometre of old town is charming enough, a warren of little streets leading off the "Grand Place" (the central square ringed with guild houses) which is both the heart & pride of the city. The surrounding lanes are lined with restaurants & expensive shops. The former specialise in shellfish & mount spectacular exterior displays of shellfish on beds of crushed ice which lasts all day. The temps are low - in the wind it's wicked.

One emerges from this clutter into the broad boulevards & busy traffic. There's an insistent background clatter of tyres on cobbles. Every now & then one can duck into a old church & find another world, another age. The several we tried we all filled with piped plainsong or organ music, the ecclesiastical equivalent of the muzack that thumps away in bars & shops. Towering buildings ring the old town, with facades of stone or mirrored glass. A sky-bridge, some 20 storeys high, links 2 of them. We scuttled across one street, ahead of a demonstration of noisy, flag-waving students who were blowing whistles & yelling slogans in an attempt to assert their rights, presumably to more money.

Guided by Jones's tourist bible, we stopped over in the Cafe Falstaff, a huge art-nouveau cafe bar done out in hard wood panels & arches that merged with wood-coloured walls & ceilings. It had more brands of beer on the menu than you'd find whiskers on a cat. Several were produced by a Trappist monastery at Chimay. I tried their "Blue" & was not much impressed. It was dark & heavy but seemed lacking in taste. Jones liked it better. We skipped the White & Red which were also available.

A second stop in an ancient (highly recommended) bar, here called an "estaminet" proved more lucrative. The first beer we tried, a light, slightly fizzy white, was hardly overwhelming. But when I asked (in Afrikaans) about the alternatives, our hostess suggested a Leffe, a dark brew that arrives from the cask with a white head & tastes like nectar. I liked it so much I tried another. Our hostess informed us that it was very popular & very potent & needed to be assimilated rather than swallowed. She wasn't joking. We continued from there to the galleries of classical & modern art where I found it necessary to take a discreet nap on one of the chairs provided. I pointed out, quite truthfully, to Jones, that this had more to do with my abrupt reversal of working & sleeping patterns than 2 glassses of beer. But the latter certainly played its part.

Friday night:

The air was a mite warmer & damper when we stuck our noses out this morning. We went well nourished by the excellent breakfast brought to our door once again by our landlady, a repast suppemented with our own supplies of butter & jam. We'd thought about spending a day in Antwerp but Jones thought, & I agreed that there was more than enough to occupy us for two days in Brussels & that Antwerp should be another trip. So we set out on another of the walks detailed to the last footstep in her book. This tome has proved so trustworthy a guide as to become Jones' bible & she quotes frequent passages to me. It has provided valuable insights into the history & character of the city. We set out once again on foot. Central Brussels, once contained within the city walls, is small enough to walk comfortably, about an hour from end to end or 3 hours around. This time, the area chosen was the Sablon, a word deriving from the old sandy marshlands that had once fringed the city.

It's an area that was taken over by merchants & has developed into the arty quarter, now lined with smart terraced houses, expensive antique shops & small salons. It's full of character & has some imposing gothic churches. We explored 2, both of them lovely & each with a vast carved wooden pulpit overhung by a wooden canopy. We stopped for morning coffee in a delightful cafe, the meeting place of Brussels' Sloanes, as Jones observed. It even had the day's (French, Flemish & English language papers available to clients.) If we could not afford to eat in the best restaurants, at least we could take coffee in the best cafes & indeed we did.

The law courts, the Palace of Justice, are situated on rise overlooking the city. The hilltop was used for centuries for the public execution of the condemned. The surrounding area, known as the Marolles, was a maze of tiny dwellings occupied by the poor & artisans. One thousand of these dwellings were destroyed to make way for the Palace of Justice, a vast building whose designers (Jones's bible informs us) has used every classical device to impose its grandeur on the elfish populace. The interior is equally imposing, focussed on a giant central hall which is cris-crossed, lego-land-like, with a series of vertical pillars & horizontal links habouring rooms & balconies.

We also discovered during the lunch hour, when it started raining, one of the vast covered shopping centres where Belgians gather in winter. It was a maze of a place on at least two floors, occupied mainly by expensive clothes shops where nobody seemed to be buying anything. But it was a great place to stay out of the rain & take coffee & do some serious window shopping.

Jones's book has a whole walk dedicated to art noveau. It's not one we will find time to take this trip. But there was time to visit a single house which had been turned into an art nouveau museum, an extraordinary place whose every feature & article of furniture, every door handle spoke the inspiration of the age. The place was light, elegant & comfortable & had clearly cost a fortune.

It was raining again when we left mid-afternoon & we found a corner in a dept. store to consult the book. A snooty shop girl made it plain that she resented the interruption to her thoughts required to serve us. Pisses me off, that does. Jones had in mind a beer museum - Brussels has some 70 museums on offer - on the far side of the city. We settled instead on an art gallery closer to hand, one highly recommended in her "bible". It was great, had a collection of Matisse's & it stayed open late, a boon.

The institutions of Brussels tend to open late & shut early. Nor do its people rush out of bed in the morning or hang around in the evenings (an impression borne out by statistics indicating that they work 25% fewer hours than the Brits). For all this, they seem to achieve an enviable standard of living. Smart clothes & smart cars abound. Your pedestrian is worse off. The pavements are wretched, either cobbled or covered in small paving stones which jut out at every angle. The one city guild which remains active, if invisible, is the guild of graffitti artists which has managed to daub every building & wall. May they perish.

And while I'm on to city peculiarities let me add that we were surprised, nearly bowled over the first time, by the arrival-activated escalators. These lie frozen in a crocodile like state of immobility until a second before you step on to them - when they spring into life. We'd never come across them before. The situation is complicated by the occasional non-functioning escalator which one is prudent to approach tentatively several times until one is sure that it really is dormant & not about to carry one off.

We set out each day fortified by the excellent breakfast which our hotelier, Mrs Brand, brought to the bedroom. Thereafter we picnicked on Jones's sandwiches which remained fresh to the last. For dinner we sought out a local restaurant of which there were many, although the majority tended to serve only lunch, closing in the evening. One night we supped at a small place where the wife cooked & the husband served. Another at a creperie, across the road, where Jones ate apple pie which she declared to be among the best things she had ever tasted. We also made a small purchase of Belgian chocolates of the made-in-heaven variety. As in France, I found prices generally high, a reflection on the anaemic pound rather than local standards.

Saturday morning:
We are back on the Eurostar. This time, the train is full. For the past hour we have been cantering through south-western Belgium. Neither Belgium nor Britain has the track which the train needs to stretch its legs. Only France has made the necessary investment. The "train manager" has introduced himself & the train's facilities in French, Flemish, German & English. The refreshment trolley has been past & we have bought cups of coffee which we have reinforced with a few drops of liquid amber from Jones's bag. We have also extracted this morning's breakfast croissants & our travelling butter & jam for an early lunch. After the briefest stop at Lille, we work up speed for the first time, tucking into the corners & hurtling through the fields on either side. The conductor informs us that (he has been informed by the train driver that) we have reached the maximum speed of 300kph. There is no sense of exhillaration, no whistling wind through the hair. Just an effortless, economic covering of distance.