Our 1996 Visit to Brussel's "Grand Place"

      The next day we got up at 6:00 to travel to Belgium.  We walked to Amsterdam’s Central Station, and caught the train to Brussels.  Crossing the border into Belgium was a non-event.  The train just continued on to Brussels, and we got out there.   

    Our first impression of Belgium was not very positive, in fact we found the Brussel’s Central Station depressing.   We departed our train underground, whose decor was black walls with dirty yellow trim.  It didn’t help that that the gloomy surroundings were inadequately lit with fluorescent bulbs that didn’t put out much light.   Hopefully, Brussels’ Central Station is more cheerful-looking these days.   Upstairs in the main part of the station, things seemed much more welcoming, until we were charged 10 Francs to use the washrooms.

    It was a day of smells.  The woman that sat next to my wife on the train had body odor.   The dark area where we got off of the train smelled of urine, and there was the smell of sewage seeping up from the grates on the streets later when we were walking around in Bruge.

    We weren’t very well prepared for Brussels and so we found it very confusing to us at first.  We didn’t know where to go when we left the Central Station.  Both the map displayed on the sidewalk and the map in our tourist guide didn’t help us at all.  We decided to just follow the other tourists, and that worked for us.  We eventually found the Grand Place.  I was pretty skeptical about anything with a name like that, but found it very impressive.  I hadn’t realized that “Grand Place” was just a French term for a square.

    The Grand Place is designated as a World Heritage Site.  It is a  large square surrounded by 17th Century Baroque, Gothic, and Louis XIV buildings, with fancy ornamental stone facades.  There were preparations going on for some festival.  Workers were busy marking out a design that would be used for covering the large surface of the square with colorful flowers.

    After being impressed by the architecture of the old buildings surrounding the square, we wandered out onto a street, not knowing where to go or what to do.   We came upon a statue of a little boy peeing.  It was surrounded by a huge crowd of tourists, busily snapping photos.  I managed to restrain myself.

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