Brussels: Grand-Place (Départ et Retour)

(Continued from Brussels: Grand-Place (Déjeuner))

Featured Photo: “Hôtel de Ville Spire, Night Lights”  Brussels, Belgium—2007

Having completed my five-hour layover, I departed Brussels and flew to Strasbourg where I spent one day sightseeing followed by four days in meetings with the European Pharmacopoeia, which was the principle reason for this business trip. I returned to Brussels by plane, then transferred to a train that carried me on to Amsterdam, where I had arranged to meet a colleague who worked at our company’s nearby facility in Haarlem. Both of these trips—to France and the Netherlands—marked my first visits to these countries and along the way, I snapped nearly 1,000 more photos. I rode the train from Amsterdam, returning once more to Brussels for my flight home the following day, which afforded a few more hours to explore the streets surrounding the Grand-Place.

During my first layover, while searching for the Manneken-Pis, I had passed the luxurious Hotel Amigo, where I now had a room reserved for the night.

The hotel occupies the site of a 16th-century prison near the Grand-Place; clearly it has been spruced-up since then. Its renovated interior is Spanish Renaissance style, showcasing a first-class restaurant and a graceful, oval-shaped spiral staircase.

This stark photo looking up the stairs from the ground floor was the only interior shot I took with a flash; the warm ochre of the electric lights produced a much better image, more in line with what I saw. Upstairs were the comfortable guest rooms with deep, soft beds.

I went straightaway to the window and threw it open, taking pictures of the view from my room: the building directly across…

…to the right, toward the Manneken-Pis…

…and to the left, toward the Grand-Place.

I dropped my luggage in the room and headed out for dinner, just as the daylight was fading and the evening darkness approached. The bars and restaurants had illuminated their beacons to guide the thirsty and hungry in their direction. This street scene with the Hôtel de Ville in the background seemed particularly striking to me.

I walked back toward the Galeries Royales de Saint-Hubert but chose to bypass the indoor eateries located there, turning instead onto the narrow Rue des Bouchers—the Street of the Butchers—which despite the name, seemed to be a lovely lane with quiet outdoor tables for dining.

At the first intersection, however, I experienced the true nature of the street, packed wall-to-wall with lively restaurants, each patrolled by insistent waiters calling the throng of potential guests to view their colorful displays of dinner fare, which centered primarily on seafood.

As the night sky grew darker, I avoided the aggressive waitstaff by trying to appear indifferent to the menu offerings while I walked along with other tourists, casually pausing to compare prices and size up which restaurant offered the best view from their streetside tables. I finally settled on La Moules Provençale and took a seat next to the gentleman in the light-blue checkered shirt.

Moules is French for mussels, so you can guess the specialty of the house. That’s right: mussels in Brussels. As with my lunch a week earlier, I ordered another Leffe beer to go with dinner, this time trying their malty, brown brew, Leffe Brune. The waiter delivered my beer, a bucket o’ mussels along with a separate bowl to discard the empty shells, and a plate of pommes frites—I finally got to try Belgian frites—then he kindly offered to take my picture.

The entire meal—mussels, fries, beer—was delicious…even better than I’d expected. When I was finished, I wandered the narrow streets again headed back toward my hotel, catching a glimpse of the Town Hall spire a few blocks away, all lit up for the night.

The street opened onto the Grand-Place, looking magical at night with lights shining on all the guild houses. I took a picture of the Hôtel de Ville, today’s Featured Photo, then got a closer shot of the spire. It took several attempts to get a decent close-up; my other tries were even blurrier than this one.

My photos got worse and worse as I kept trying to capture the wonderful images of the Grand-Place buildings aglow: the Maison du Roi…

…and especially that same corner I had photographed on my first layover in Brussels of the Hôtel de Ville, where it intersected with several guild houses, including Le Cornet, its ship-stern gable set high atop the boatmen’s guild house.

Certainly, these buildings were not brightly lit, but the photo was pathetic; I almost deleted it right after I took it but decided not to as I wanted to recall the golden-lighted beauty of the Grand-Place in that moment. At the time, I wondered whether my beer at dinner had been stronger than I realized, but I would learn later it was not the beer. My shaky photography that night was actually due to the wrong setting for a feature on my digital SLR camera—a feature I was not even aware it had.

I left the Grand-Place to return to my hotel via the Rue Charles Buls, and once again passed the covered arcade with its controversial monument to Everard ’t Serclaes, the alderman and leader of the guilds, who in 1356 led a rebellion that repulsed the Flemish occupation of Brussels. Three decades later, in 1388, he was captured and tortured by troops loyal to Flanders, then brought to the building above the arcade where he died. He is honored by the 19th-century memorial at this site. I took a photo of the reclining figure using only the illumination provided by electric lights on the statue…

…but when I looked at the shot, I quickly took another photo using my flash…

…to capture parts of the effigy that have been polished to a shine from passers-by rubbing their hands along his bronze statue for good luck. The controversy arises from modern Flemish activists, who do not consider Everard ’t Serclaes a hero and view this tradition of stroking his limbs as provocative; they have made equally provocative calls to remove the memorial.

A block farther along, I was back at the Hotel Amigo…

…where I took a picture of the spiral staircase with the interior lighting…

…and another shot looking up—without flash this time—before climbing the stairs to spend my last night in Brussels.

I never imagined when I flew home the next day that I would be so fortunate as to return to Brussels and the Hotel Amigo less than six months later. That trip provided another opportunity for some stunning—and colorful—nighttime photos of the Grand-Place. Unfortunately, the results would again be spoiled by that pesky feature on my digital camera: the ISO setting was still wrong.

(To be continued…)