The EU Quarter
(#16) 📍 Brussels // daffodils and sunshine
On our last day in Brussels, my mum and I visited the EU Quarter. We’d seen the city in neat sections, as recommended by the Lonely Planet pocket guidebook Mum had brought with her. Inside was a fold-out map which we used to orient ourselves.
Being from a different generation, raised on Google Maps and last-minute budget flights, this reliance on a physical guidebook was foreign to me. I found that I really enjoyed the slower pace of travel, and the fact that I was learning about the city as I walked around instead of just doing as TripAdvisor told me.
On the first day, we had visited Brussels’ Royal Quarter; on the second, the Grand Place. Now we were venturing further from the city centre, where the broad, grand streets seemed to belong to a much bigger city. Much of Brussels was like this: on the first day, we’d visited the Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts, a beautiful building stuffed with incalculable cultural treasures, which nevertheless echoed with the footsteps of its few sparse visitors.
But there was something appealing about the city’s empty grandeur, too. I got the feeling I used to experience when walking in the shadow of Hong Kong’s skyscrapers: one of comforting smallness and irrelevance in an enormous world. As we walked past the royal palace, past the statue of King Leopold II on his horse, through imposing columned gates, it felt like Paris without the crowds.
It was mid-March; most of the trees were still bare, but some were fragrant with blossom. The parks were carpeted with daffodils, crocuses and narcissi. I was just getting over the worst of a terrible cold; this was the first sunny day we’d had in Belgium. I found myself not wanting to go home.
The Musée Art & Histoire was another echoing palace of apparently forgotten treasure. Hergé was inspired by the curiosities gathered there from around the world, and some of them appear in the Tintin books. An entire floor was taken up with a Roman mosaic in near-perfect condition. It was like the British Museum, except I’d never heard of it.
Mum and I ate onion soup in the café. We drank herbal tea; most of the other diners had wine.
Out in the fresh air, we wandered through an archway that looked like the Brandenburg Gate, and into a park which had once held a menagerie. On a whim, we decided to visit the EU Parliament building.
All the staff assumed we were Irish. I felt edified and a little bemused. All the information shared over the headset on the self-guided tour was news to me - I didn’t remember knowing this stuff even when Britain was part of the EU. I didn’t know how to feel about any of it.
Afterwards, we ate cinnamon buns in a café that was Scandinavian in its minimalism, all geometric wooden furniture and floor-to-ceiling shelves filled with colourful coffee table books. The two women at the table next to us were listing out EU member states: Greece, Cyprus, Portugal. I wanted to know what they were talking about, what this list of countries signified - but I wasn’t that committed to eavesdropping, and worried that listening in on a political discussion like this might somehow constitute spying.
We didn’t have long until the train home. The sun had started to go in, and my cold was making me tired. We walked back to the hotel (‘Hygge Hotel,’ also Scandinavian in design). I felt that I would miss it there: the pristine white décor, the mobile that hung over the light-filled spiral staircase in the atrium. And this time with Mum: the first city break we had ever taken together as adults, but hopefully not the last.
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Happy memories, beautifully recorded. Definitely not the last! Xxx