Last month my good lady & I escaped the gravitational pull of Scotland and Eurostarred our merry way to Belgium for a few days. It's a country we both love, one that's greatly underestimated, possibly for its general oddness - people know what to think of France, of Germany, of Spain, but of Belgium? It's an altogether more intriguing place, both familiar and bizarre, a worthy subject for Jonathan Meades.
Wifey's already blogged about it all here. We were there to a) see our lovely chums and their wee boy (two months old and an absolute hoot, despite my innate fear of children we got on quite well, particularly when discussing bubbles and their blobulous bulbous bubbulosity) and b) catch the Moomin exhibition at the Belgian Comic Strip Center. We do love our Moomins, and since the exhibition wasn't going to cross the Channel to the UK, the mountain must come to Moomin. Lovely exhibition it was too, really good to see the original artwork up close - Tove Jansson had a mastery of a single ink line that I can only dream of, and the imagination at work in the Moomin stories remains spellbinding. Sadly there were no adorable sproglets singing while we were there, but you can't have it all.
The museum's pretty ace too, particularly when I got to meet one of my heroes who kindly agreed to a photo:
Awesome!
I also got a spot of sketching done on the train journey down (no great shakes) and spent over an hour drawing the Church of Sainte-Catherine, the result being at the top of this post - if you're wondering what the comment below it is about, it's got a very stark appearance, stone that appears bright white covered by what appears to be thick black soot (see Wifey's photo here). Good fun to draw, though as with such buildings it's all too easy to get lost in details, and it'd be nice one day to return with a larger drawing surface and charcoal.
Thanks to our splendid friends we saw more of Brussels and the neighbouring area than a visiting tourist might, first through a fascinating tour by foot around part of the city discussing the history of various streets and buildings (not the obvious stuff either, thereby much more interesting) while marvelling at the inexhaustible variety of architecture, then later heading out of the city and into Wallonia. Beautiful countryside, farming villages that still farm, lovely houses, cycle paths that gave me ideas - perfect! A day trip up to Gent was enjoyable, though much of the city had shut down for the summer. Still, impressive to see just how cycle-friendly such a city can be, and in turn how popular cycling was, I'd never seen so many bikes! It was particularly good to see bikes like this being used by families, though between the road traffic, wafer thin cycle paths and speed demons who think they're in the Tour de France it's impossible to imagine doing the same in Edinburgh. Shame.
It was a lovely wee break, and though the initial focus of the journey had been Moomins the highlight was certainly all the time we spent with our chums and their petit monsieur, especially our last evening there sat outside a local bar with a few good beers and chatting away about things for hours as day turned to night - the 'café culture' that our politicians would so dearly love to see brought over here, if only our national mindset wasn't set to alcoholic-self-annihilation. A votre santé!



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