Off to Europe : Belgium : BRUSSELS BLOOMS

BRUSSELS, Belgium-- —  Great food, great beer. Great art. All this city really needs is a good-natured international heaping of abuse.

It seems to work everywhere else in Europe. London is assailed for its filth and traffic, Paris for its attitude, Rome for its disorganization. These and other capitals endure everything short of--no, including --bombing. And yet, having their various riches to offer--cathedrals and castles, ancient avenues and venerated gardens--each continues to draw so many millions of tourists that waiters may sneer with impunity and entirely unremarkable hotels may ask $250 nightly. In a World Tourism Organization listing of top destinations, France counted 55.7 million international arrivals in 1991; Spain, 35.3 million; Italy, 26.8 million.

And Belgium? Belgium runs far behind the heavy hitters, somewhere under 15 million, derided by the neighboring French for alleged unrefinement, not much discussed by anyone else. Here’s Brussels, not only the capital of Belgium but the official capital of Europe, the New World hub of Old World Western civilization, a city alive with 16th-Century spires and the gracefully curving lines of art nouveau architecture. Yet who’s impressed? Its burghers operate in obscurity, struggling to bind the 12 unruly nations of the European Community together, satisfying well those travelers who do find their way into town. For their trouble, Brussels and Belgium get overlooked and left out of all those jokes about hell in which the English do the cooking.

It’s been 24 years since Americans chuckled at the one Eurojoke this place has gotten in on--the movie “If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium”--and even that line played on this place’s anonymity. All these years later, we’re still casting blank glances at that portion of the map immediately north of France and west of Germany.

Hmm, we think. No leaning towers. No Oktoberfest. No philandering royals . Just a small statue of a urinating child and . . . Generic Europe.

By the millions, American travelers disdain Brussels. By the millions, it turns out, we are in error.

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And so to the Grand Place.

Our visitor approaches from the main thoroughfare of downtown Brussels, Boulevard Anspach, and turns east at the Bourse, the stone-faced palace of finances. A horse-drawn carriage idles outside while a violinist saws away for spare change. Farther along, Mercedes taxis and Andean buskers jostle for position in front of the Greek bars and Chinese restaurants. A shop called Euroline vends umbrellas, watches, T-shirts, postcards, chocolates, flags, ties, cuff links, boxer shorts, perfume and all manner of trinkets, each bearing the European community logo of 12 yellow stars on a field of dark blue.

Of the roughly 1 million people who live in Brussels, as many as one in four is said to be foreign-born. Some 15,000 are bureaucratic cogs in the intricate machinery of the European Community, come from their various nations to ease trade barriers, to reconcile currencies, to simplify passport controls. Though the last year has been rocky for the movement toward European unity, the Eurocrats of Brussels are in this for the long haul, and their presence steadily pushes the city to new heights in cosmopolitanism. On the streets downtown, the Belgian national languages of French and Flemish (Dutch, basically) collide with Italian, German, English and so on.

These collisions are accompanied, quite often, by pets. Dogs in particular are welcome almost anywhere in Belgium, churches and most restaurants included. To reach the Grand Place on this day last summer, our visitor steps past a streetcorner settlement of five full-grown Saint Bernards, two or three baby carriages and a tangle of parents and companions. Just beyond them, the center of Brussels gleams and teems.

In the estimation of many old Europe hands, the Grand Place is one of the most beautiful squares on the Continent. Its central area is about the size of an American football field, and the perimeter is crowded with buildings that date to the 17th Century, some earlier. All drip and bristle with ornamentation. Town Hall (which includes an office for tourist information) sends up a 298-foot spire, topped by a 400-year-old weather vane. The 10 buildings that were once medieval guild headquarters stand shoulder to shoulder, the brewers by the butchers, the archers by the boatmen, each earthy profession more elaborately fronted than the last. The King’s House, across from Town Hall, holds a city museum. There’s fancy stonework, flapping flags and gold trim on all sides. Flower merchants, outdoor cafes, lace shops and artists. A chocolatier. A beer museum. Tides of tourists, workers, performers and locals wash through at all hours.

Every Sunday, there’s an open-air bird market. On summer nights after dark, a young crowd gathers to hear recordings of classical music resound through the area while a 20th-Century light show plays against the stone flourishes of the aged walls. And every even-numbered year in August, revelers carpet the square in flowers.

It’s all as agreeable as can be. But if abuse is what it will take to get this city attention, there are possibilities. Brussels: A City Stinking of Flowers . Brussels: Where Pets Are Spoiled.

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Just outside the Grand Place, the restaurants begin. Dozens line narrow Rue des Bouchers (streets of the butchers) and its offshoot, Petit Rue des Bouchers, where mussels are a specialty. Iced seafood displays add color to the scene, noble headwaiters add tuxedoed authority and aged establishments like the 100-year-old Chez Leon de Bruxelles restaurant add venerability. The food is not cheap; with so many expense-account-fed business travelers around, the hotels and restaurants of downtown Brussels can, and do, ask hefty prices. But the bright lights and seductive smells are free to strollers-by. And though this restaurant row may seem at first glance a strictly tourist spot, that’s not entirely true. It takes a good restaurant to survive such competition, and residents of Brussels regularly brave the masses to dine out here.

“It’s a great place for people who like to eat well,” says one local man, waiting for dessert at a homey downtown restaurant called Chez Serge & Anne. He is a retired petroleum company executive, English-born, and well aware of Belgium’s non-reputation.

“My company moved me here,” he says. “I was not terribly pleased, because I was in Paris at the time. But we came and we stayed . . . It’s an easy city to live in, a relaxed way of life.”

How long has he stayed? Nineteen years.

At this point, another diner joins the conversation. He is Walt Pieck of Chickasee, Okla., in town on business, and he, too, is impressed with Brussels. But for different reasons. He can’t understand how the city is kept so clean, and he wants to know, with all these open windows and moderate summer temperatures, why there aren’t more flies and mosquitoes. No one has an answer for him.

“It boggles my mind,” he says, peering out the open window to the tidy street. “I just don’t understand it.”

Brussels: Hell for Entomologists.

All told, the tourism people say, Brussels has more than 1,800 restaurants, specializing in dishes such as mussels, waffles, fried potatoes (the Belgians invented “French fries”) and chocolate, not forgetting pheasant and eel. But this country also offers some 400 varieties of beer, and one does not necessarily retire right after dinner. Recognizing that, our visitor descends after dinner into a basement club called L’Estaminet du Kelderke.

Earlier, the idle bartender advised that the evening’s entertainment would be “Two musicians. Or three musicians, or four . . . “ Now, standing until a chair opens up, the visitor finds that bartender hard at work and a portly pianist pounding out jazz, flanked by a drummer and stand-up bassist. The pianist closes a tune in Count Basie fashion--three tidy chords and a final barrage of sound--then mops his forehead with his shirt, revealing a whale of a belly.

Down in the front sits a boy of about 10, dressed for church, a violin case at his feet. The bass player’s son. Closer to the bar lounges an American woman named Lori, who, after a certain amount of lobbying, is invited to take the microphone for a song. The poor Belgians, the visitor thinks. They’re being polite to this pushy American, and now we’ll all suffer for it.

Then the band launches into “The Girl from Ipanema” at breakneck pace, and Lori soars into pitch-perfect song above them, tossing out grace notes and scat phrases as she goes. Before long, the boy is reaching for his violin case, taking up position at his dad’s elbow, and bringing down the house with a fiddle solo. Then another violinist arrives--the stringy-haired fellow who was playing for change on the street that afternoon--and then an electric guitarist plugs in. At any moment, it seems, anyone in this audience might step forward and demonstrate virtuosity. When Belgian harmonica wizard Toots Thielemans celebrated his 70th birthday, a sign on the wall notes, he came here to play. The music rages on until at least 1 a.m., when our visitor runs out of stamina and crawls back to his hotel.

*

Back to the urinating child.

There’s no avoiding him. The Manneken Pis, a statue of a young boy with running water, has stood for centuries at Rue du Chene and Rue de l’Etuve, a few blocks from the Grand Place. An early version is said to have been created in the 1400s, but the current bronze work is traced to 1619 and the artist Jerome Duquesnoy. The artist is otherwise uncelebrated, and it’s hard to figure how this undistinguished bronze came to be so beloved. But beloved it is.

More than 400 tiny costumes have been created for the 2-foot-high boy in the buff, including a 1745 outfit of gold brocade that was contributed by Louis XV. The statue’s costumes change regularly and are stored in the city museum. Tourist literature, available at the well-stocked trinket shop across the street, lauds the child as a symbol of the individuality, or informality, or irreverence, or tenderness, of the citizens of Brussels. If tour groups have only an afternoon in Belgium, they come here to form their impressions. In the land of Hubrecht and Jan van Eyck, Pieter Brueghel, Peter Paul Rubens and Rene Magritte, this is most widely known artwork. (Less known is the addition in recent years of an elder sister. She can be found, doing the same thing he is, at the end of a dead-end off Rue des Bouchers.)

In its capacity to induce perplexity, the Manneken Pis is rivaled only by the Atomium, another prominent city landmark. It looms north of town on the Heysel Plateau, surrounded by convention and trade fair facilities. Built for the 1958 World Fair, the spheres and connecting tubes of the Atomium were designed to represent the molecule of an iron crystal magnified 165 billion times. It’s made of steel and aluminum, weighs 2,200 tons, and this can be said for it: At least they didn’t magnify the Manneken Pis 165 billion times.

But in the catalogue of sights to be seen in Brussels, the immodest statue and enormous molecule are extremes of strangeness. Inspecting most of the city’s other landmarks, our traveler feels a happy, creeping familiarity.

The Cinquantenaire Arch, built to commemorate Belgian independence in 1830, puts Paris in mind. Some crooked, bohemian lanes of the central city recall some corners of London. The Galeries Saint Hubert--an 1846 glass-covered shopping arcade that makes a fine place for ice cream and people-watching--will remind some people of the much-admired steel-and-glass Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in Milan, even though the Belgian mall was the first of its kind in Europe.

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In the shadow of the Atomium, a 4-year-old theme park called Mini-Europe offers perhaps the ultimate pan-European spectacle: about 100 detailed models of Euro-landmarks, each at 1/25th scale. With 18 holes and a few retracting drawbridges, this could be the world’s greatest miniature golf course. But it’s fine as is. For a $12 entree fee ($9 for children under 11), visitors can tower over the windmills of La Mancha, stand half as tall as Big Ben, and peer down with a blimp’s view into the bullring of Seville.

For a more first-hand experience, a lazy traveler can lounge at the Place du Grand Sablon, southeast of the Grand Place, while pedestrians stroll past art galleries, pause at sidewalk cafes and perhaps admire the 16th-Century architecture of Notre Dame au Sa- blon church. On Saturdays and Sundays, one of the best-known antique markets in Europe takes over the plaza. On a typical weekday, luthier Antoni Jassogne labors in his shop, carefully repairing an old violin. Upstairs, someone is practicing the cello. And in the shade of a sidewalk cafe’s umbrella, while a fashionable woman at the next table delicately fingers a green-stemmed glass, a fortyish man in slicked-back hair is looking over his sports page--and publicly flossing, with great savoir faire . Only a European could do this.

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Then there are the museums. In the Museum of Ancient Art, the peasants of Pieter Brueghel the Elder (1525-1567) stand frozen forever at their chores, joined on the walls by the full-figured females of Rubens, the telling portraits of Frans Hals, the deranged 16th-Century humanoids of Hieronymous Bosch and hundreds of further canvases that make up a mother lode of Flemish painting from the 14th to 18th centuries. In the immediately adjacent Museum of Modern Art, the works of Chagall, Picasso, Dufy, Klee, Matisse, Leger and, most prominently, the surrealist Magritte, fill eight floors and stagger the unsuspecting. (Instead of rising from the museum lobby, the galleries descend down the side of a hill, so that even when one stands on floor “-7” the room is filled with natural light.)

There are some 70 other museums in the city: a car museum, a musical instrument museum, a military history museum, a lace museum, a museum dedicated to Victor Horta, the turn-of-the-century architect who founded the curvaceous art nouveau style that sets apart many of the city’s most-loved residential and commercial buildings. Further museums celebrate public transportation and comic books. ( Brussels: Too Damned Many Museums .)

There is also a great, white-columned opera house, a spectacular glass-domed former botanical garden that houses a cultural center for the French-speaking commu nity, and the Bois de la Cambre and Foret de Soignes, a contiguous city park and forest that cover about 11,000 acres, including lawns, lakes, a beech forest and a 14th-Century church abbey.

The forest ends about 11 miles south of town, by an old battlefield that a few readers will have heard of. This is Waterloo, where in 1815 Wellington defeated Napoleon, 40,000 soldiers died, and the course of Western civilization changed.

The most striking feature in the pastoral landscape is the Lion’s Mount, a 120-foot knoll topped by a 28-ton, cast-iron lion, built by the Dutch, who governed Belgium at the time.

If the traveler feels like driving a bit further, the cities of Antwerp (designated the 1993 Cultural Capital of Europe), Brugge, Ghent, Leuven and Tournai lie in constellation around Brussels, none more than 60 miles off. Beyond, there’s Amsterdam, 122 miles off; Cologne, 125 miles; Paris, 181 miles.

But why bother? The point here is that Brussels is a destination in its own right, that one day the place will have its revenge on its more-often-visited neighbors.

This is how I see it: Our traveler will book a two-week stay in Brussels and scorn all else on the Continent. He will see much, eat much, drink much and follow his itinerary of city sights faithfully. One morning he will approach the gates of Mini-Europe. He’ll stand before the piddling Tower of Pisa, the tiny Pompidou Center, the Lilliputian Acropolis, and consult his calendar.

“If this is Tuesday,” he will say, “this must be the rest of Europe.”