Pommes Frites vs. Burrito: Battle of World Cities

Brussels is Europe's L.A. Wait. No. That's saying too much, given my unnatural and disproportionate love for the city of angels, which I covet with a pathetic and sometimes bitter jealousy.

Brussels is Europe's excuse for L.A.? No, not that either. That gives the impression that I do not like Brussels. And I do, really, I do. Despite first, third, and fifth impressions. I assure you: my second, fourth, and sixth impressions brought waves of delight and even awe. This is, after all, the french fry capital of the world. And the battle in my sensorium for supremacy between love for french fries and love for Los Angeles is epic and ongoing.



But I mean, look at this thing: a bona fide french fry sandwich! I didn't even have to ask for it to be made special. I simply saw someone in line in front of me being handed his over the counter and resolved to ask for the same. Although I don't know how it is listed on the menu. I merely said to the portly fry-cook, "Les frites dans une baguette, s'il vous plait." He gave me a quizzical look and repeated "...dans...?" and then gathered what it was that I so sheepishly and inarticulately asked for. He then asked, "Avec de viande?" to which I quickly replied, although in a kind of stutter, "pas... pas de viande."



Also, the espresso is incredible. And ample.



Had I a sweet tooth, well! This would be my Mecca. Alas, the quality that most spiritually alienates me from my fellow man is that I do not; although the waffle I bought from a truck yesterday outside the Musees Royaux des Beaux-Arts was revelatory. ("If only," I nevertheless thought to myself, "it were a roach coach.")

Let's just say Brussels reminds me of L.A. in at least 3 important respects. One, it is a city of 2 nearly unreconciled and irreconcilable languages (French and Flemish). This fact dissuaded me from seeing a movie last night when I realized that the two-letter codes after each title most likely stood for "French voice over with Flemish subtitles" or vice versa. I was too tired to ask so I walked back to my hostel and watched FC Barcelona narrowly beat FC Schalke, a popular if mediocre German Bundesliga team. Apparently Spaniards do not like this greatest of Spanish teams bc I was the only one in there rooting for Thierry Henry (Tee-eh-ree Ohn-ree, or as the British commentators love to call him, Terence Henry) and the gang. Go figure. This is truly a city of surrealities.

Two, the city itself is an architectural mish-mash. Steel-and-glass geometry smashed against decadent Art-Nouveau structures abutting neo-Classical refabs looming over narrow corridors of 4 or 5 story Dutch style brownstones or whatever the Belgians call them. Add to this the fact that the entire city--as much of it as I've been able to traverse--is under construction, scaffolding here and jack hammers there and chain link fences blocking this sidewalk and concrete barriers cordoning off that street. And all of it covered to varying degrees in graffiti--more attractive graffiti that the adolescent garbage you see sprayed all over Marseille, but graffiti nonetheless. There is something disheartening about seeing a building older than Los Angeles defaced by block lettering announcing some meth-head gutter-punk's moniker in day glo colors.

And that's another thing altogether, the ubiquitous meth-head gutter-punk. I saw one peeing in broad day light near the Mont D'Arts yesterday, bottle of Belgium's answer to malt liquor in his hand, behind one of the many temporary walls surrounding one of many old buildings under construction. We made meaningful eye contact. Mine said, "If not for the frites, this city would be Europe's answer to Tijuana." His said, "If I wasn't so damn high, I might feel a small sense of compunction about this trite exhibitionist display." I am certain that this is what his eyes were saying.

Three, in no other city in Europe have I seen a melange of ethnicities so broad as to rival L.A. Arab, African, European, and I swear to god the ladies cleaning the rooms at the hostel were Mexican or South American. More languages are spoken on any given corner here than at the U.N. Or so it seems to my English starved ears. Being in London only made my hunger for English more biting.

Brussels ultimately cannot decide what other city it is like bc it is unlike any other city. Just like Los Angeles. So that makes four.

I arrived on Monday after an easy flight from London, for which I was entirely unconscious. My first impressions of Brussels, therefore, were clouded by grogginess and general ennui, brought on by a combination of travel weariness, early symptoms of London nostalgia, and renewed linguistic disorientation. It did not help that the train from the airport to Gare Nord, a km. or so from my hostel, was lit like a horror flic and showed all the decorative pizazz of a homeless shelter.



All the metros here are like this. Bleak does not describe it. I then attempted to follow the hostel's directions from the station, but I obviously got lost. I did, however, find the erotica shops and XXX cinemas. Backtracking from there, I ignored my inner compass and went the way I was CERTAIN could not be correct, and lo and behold, my hostel. The 2GO4 youth hostel is brand spanking new and has all the amenities, which is nice. The rooms are clean and relatively large and I snagged the top bunk again, discovering my affinity for sleeping up high while in London (there is something nominally private, up against the ceiling), and since I was on the first floor (or in American terms, the second) I was able to use the wireless from bed. What a boon. I passed this first night trying to swallow the sense that I'd done horribly wrong to leave the friends and English of London for this shabby Mexican backwater, and succeeded enough in cheering myself to head over to the Ixelles district--by which I mean, brave the Eli Roth metro for a few stops, ingest a comforting pasta dinner, and choke down a Maes at the pub.

I slept something like 11 hours that first night and awoke to a totally different Brussels. If I remember anything about Brussels at all, I hope it is this first full day.

I already mentioned the french fry sandwich, which is basically how I began the morning, or I should say afternoon since I slept until 11 and only mustered courage enough to leave the hostel around 1. Following Lonely Planet's suggestion, I made my way to Grand Place, which, aside from that huge future-past metal structure that resembles a jack from the game of jacks that we all remember from grade school, and which was built for some World's Fair back in the futurephiliac 50's, is basically the Brussels of postcards. OK. That is not fair. There is also the Musee Bruxellois de la Gueuze (the Beer Museum), to which I will be making a pilgrimage before I hop on the train for a 20 minute ride to Gent this evening. But that little black pissing cherub statue is there, and all the great museums (aside from the Gueuze) and cathedrals are nearby:



I imagine that this guy's photo matches the stream of piss from the cherub dressed in a police officer's uniform behind him to the gaping mouth of his friend. Charming. I tried earlier to do something similar with this poor Asian man:



After the famed FFS (french fry sandwich), I ambled not so much through Grand Place, which I only stumbled upon later, as around it, discovering to my great pleasure the Cathedral of St. Michael and St. Gudula, an ancient catholic behemoth of a church that has been modified and destroyed and rebuilt several times since something like the 10th century. It houses one of the most awesome organs I have ever laid eyes upon (Dad: look for a postcard in the mail bearing an image thereof, as soon I remember to get addresses and stamps for all the postcards I have written and been carrying with me for over a week in a perpetual state of brainfartoplexia). The stained glass windows, too, and oaken pulpits and half-dozen separate chapels each with their own examples of ornate sculptures and paintings of Jesus in various states of repose and suffering and blank-faced authority and youth and femininity and of Mary and Magdalene and the saints, weeping or gazing heavenward, bearing swords and branches and bodies of Christ, being plugged with arrows or crucified or stabbed with long spears or daggers, surrounded by swarming crowds or desolately alone in monochromatic fields. Why am I not Catholic? Why, at the very least, do I not go to Mass at an old church? If I lived in Brussels, in any case, I can guarantee that I would frequent this little oasis of breathtaking solemnity and beauty. That I don't believe a lick of the Bible scarcely matters.




In a state as close to reverence as I get, I wandered out through the anachronistic glass doors at the front and down the steps, blinded by the half-sunlight and a bit dazed spiritually as well, trying to get my bearings back in the swirling secular air. To be honest, I can't remember exactly what happened next, but I know that at some point I made it to Grand Place and stood in a kind of lesser awe before the Hotel de Ville, Brussels's city hall from the 17th century or earlier, which just might be the only building in the city which is in much the same shape as ever. You can see the steeple from almost anywhere in within a km. of the place.



My camera had run out of juice at the cathedral so I have no photos of Grand Place (just this one of the steeple from a few labyrinthine streets over), a fact that I found fascinating and odd at the time--sipping a Grimbergen blonde in the elongating shadow of the Hotel. I had my pocket notebook with me, which has proven very useful in many respects...



... in which I transcribed my sentiments as follows:

camera battery died while ambling in the stained glass wilderness of Cath. of St. Michael and now sitting in Grand Place, w/beer and tall glass of ease, I realize that there are a dozen photos here not to be snapped, and that hence I am in a special kind of void, an unduplicatable series of moments and reflections that I will have n/t but my recollections to recall. This is pure unadorned story. It is a realm of cloud-like imagination, flitting by and almost nonexistent in its ephemerality, its evanescence, its wispy immediacy. Luckily, none of this is exactly true since I am writing about it now, capturing the moments, mediating the immediate, scarcely attending to the sun disappearing behind the high steeple of the Hotel de Ville (I look up and it is actually ducking behind a cloud over the steeple). Nevertheless, this photoless square of time feels suspended and somehow more permanent in its exceptionality, its potential to be lost in the distortions of memory, inexact, but less cold somehow for its warped imagelessness.

There is an absurdity to this plaza, I am just noticing: in the SW corner, just south of the H.d.V., sits a building in mid-renovation, defaced, literally, and refaced w/a several story high tarp on which is pictured what the new facade will look like, TO SCALE, complete with equestrian statue on the roof. And yet the glimpses of the existing building that peer through the gaps b/w the discrete tarp-lengths reveals an overall geometry that scarcely seems to align with the prospectus. For one, the north roof is square and vaguely Dutch, a shingled trapezoid, whiles its photogenerated double is rounded and oblong, like the crown of a large bald man's pate (there are even gabled windows that resemble eyes in this bald man's face).

It gets darker, and colder. The defaced building is called La Maison des Brasseurs, or House of Brewers.

From there I wandered over to the Mont D'Arts, hoping that the Musee Royaux des Beaux -Arts would be open late (it was fast approaching 5), but as I walked up I noticed that while many folks were egressing through the rotating door, only I was entering. The foyer and shop were still open (of course) but no exhibits. I wandered to the right where I spied a wall of pamphlets and periodicals and immediately gravitated toward one called Ars Musica, in which I discovered that tonight, my first full night in Brussels, marked the opening night of the Brussels classical music season, which would be kicked off with a program of soul-crushing contemporary works by the Belgian composers Fausto Romanetti, Raphael Cendo, and Mauro Lanza, none of whom I've heard of but all of whose works as described in the precis sent shivers of elation and excitement through me. In my old age I have found a kinship to all things dissonant, atonal, and strategically frightening. Scarcely expecting there to be tickets left--this is Europe after all, home of classical music and of classical music aficionados--I nevertheless made enthusiastic plans with myself to hop the metro to the Ixelles district again, where the Flagey Theater would be hosting the event (as the friendly museum guard informed me after I showed him the address in the pamphlet), and at least try to get in. To my combined shock and glee, there were a glut of tickets. I chose a seat on the loge in the first row, center stage, and proceeded to wander restlessly among the Brussels-hip with their deep bellied Duvels in the concession area, impatiently awaiting the inauguration of the glorious, world-ending spectacle.




I'll spare you the gory details. Those of you who care enough about such matters will hear it from the horse's mouth. Suffice it to say that I had a great time and could not have planned a better evening. The day began with a french fry sandwich and ended with a proper cone of frites doused in aioli (aside from an apple, all I ate that day), which I proceeded to glop all over my water-but-not-grease resistant jacket as I watched the final 15 minutes of the Arsenal/Liverpool Champion's League quarterfinal match outside a Brit-thick pub a few steps up the street from the theater. The only downside of the evening--aside from the fact that I stank of garlic mayo until the next morning--was that Liverpool crushed the long-suffering Arsenal.

Yesterday I spilled beer all over myself in front of a very hip young patio-full of locals after having drunk a very strong Belgian from a can (a Gordon's) as I wandered about Grand Place at dusk. I copped quite a buzz off that one beer and barely took two sips from my much lighter blanche before clumsily and drunkenly pouring on my pantsleg and retreating in shame after wiping down the table under the sympathetic laughing eyes of my audience.



Last known photo of a dry Adam. The result of this exercise in vanity was that in bringing the camera back to me, I neglected to give sufficient latitude to this very full beer, thereby bringing the beer back to me as well. Splash! Shame. Seriously, I just wanted to mark the moment bc I was feeling very content, despite knitted brow, with the sun on me and Lee Morgan in my ears and a keen buzz and a nice seat in a narrow cobbled street and a cold light sweet beer waiting to be ingested. Oh it was such a moment! Instead of marking the moment I marked myself, the Cain of beer.

So although I did laundry once yesterday, I had to do another load (one pair of pants) today to get the stench of Belgium out. Yesterday I also dragged myself through a very mediocre 19th century exhibit after eating a spectacular waffle, and snapped this scene, which was more compelling than most of the art of the walls:



There were many children sitting on the floor in various rooms at the Beaux-Arts "copying" the paintings and sculptures. It made the ache in my back less irritating to witness it.

... and also saw some old musical instruments in the Old England building, an Art Nouveau structure that is a site in and of itself, even though I failed to photograph it.



Today I am off to Gent where I hope to lose myself in ancient Catholicism again. And drink rather than wear beers.


A tout a l'heur!