Brussels a.k.a. Bruxelles

If I talk about the no. of my short trips abroad, I think Brussels will come on top. But as it happens in most of the cases, I don’t have many photographs to show you. Since the trips are very short (sometimes not even a week), they are always very tight scheduled and hence, most of the times I don’t carry my camera.

Not to mention, this post is mostly textual. Of course, you’ll get to see a few pictures shot by me on different occasions.

Brussels, the capital of Belgium and of the European Union, is the second international city in the world if we measure the number of headquarters of international organizations it has. About one third of its inhabitants are foreigners, mostly Islamic immigrants, business people and diplomats working for the many multinational institutions that are located here. The city is officially bilingual (French and Dutch), but almost everybody understands and speaks English. And, for your information, Belgian French is different from regular French just like Canadian French is different from it. :)

Brussels is very well connected to other parts of Europe by air, bus, high speed trains including Eurostar train via the Channel Tunnel.

Name:- The name Brussels comes from the old Dutch Brucsella or Broekzele, which means "marsh (bruc or broek) home (sella or zele)" or "home consisting of one room, in the marsh”.
Do you know besides being capital of Belgium, what Brussels (Bruxelles in French) is famous for ?

OK, here I’ll speak about only those places that I have seen.

First, it has historic market square known as Grand Place. It is said to be the most beautiful in the world. Not my views... I liked St. Mark's Square (Piazza San Marco) of Venice more. About that, some other time. The square here is dominated by the magnificent 15th century Town Hall, with its hundreds of little statues. The most beautiful part of the Town Hall, the elegant tower, and surrounding buildings with their golden inlays. During season, the Grand Place is seen under a carpet of beautiful lavenders.
Every Sunday, the place is adorned by a picturesque flower market and during winters the central place is converted into an ice skating rink. It also is a venue for many concerts & events throughout the year.

Brussels is also famous for it's cuisine (this includes the most divine chocolates), has cafes and pubs that never close, and excellent restaurants.

Brussels has the highest concentration of restaurants in the world and a few minutes walk from the Grand Place is one street called “Petite Rue des Bouchers” (small road of butchers). It is famous for the fact that every house in this street is a restaurant. The street is closed for traffic and this allows the restaurants to exhibit some of their products especially sea-food and fish.
Belgium is also famous for best beer in the world. You can see a wide range of beer, including different fruit flavoured, which you may not have even heard of it. And mind you, they tend to be very strong (between 8 and 11.5 percent of alcohol !!).

Have you ever heard of a pee boy ? Well, before I came here for the first time, I had assumed Brussels is famous only for that !! It is a small bronze statuette of Manneken-Pis, a young boy peeing on the passersby. It is actually a fountain but it looks amusing when you stand under it to get clicked and it pees on you ! A perfect representative of the irreverent Belgian humour.

This is also situated a few steps away from the Grand-Place. The statuette is so popular that it is considered an emblem of the city. Traditionally, the Manneken-Pis is dressed for special events, and he has over 750 sets of clothes. I too have a pee boy made of the same metal, nicely standing in the showcase of our living room but luckily it doesn’t pee. ;)

Now come Japanese tower and Chinese garden.
Japanese Tower & Chinese pavilion are built to order for King Leopold II.

The Chinese Pavilion itself says a lot more about Europe in the 1930s than it does about China but contains some superb Chinese porcelain. The woodwork inside the pavilion is made by specialists from Shanghai.

The Japanese Tower is perhaps most striking from the outside but also contains some interesting decorative items. I have not gone inside this.

As always, click the photos to have an enlarged view and for more photos visit my web album.

Technorati Tags: Brussels Belgium City

Antwerp – The Harbour City

So, that was Antwerp.. the beautiful romantic city of diamonds and silvers. But do you know Antwerp is famous for one more reason ?

'The Scheldt river owes its existence to God, and Antwerp owes its existence to the Scheldt river' is a popular saying that shows how important the river Scheldt is for the city of Antwerp. Yes, Antwerp also has Europe's second largest and world’s fourth largest harbour. And its operating assets such as cranes, buildings, bridges, docks, roads, the electricity distribution network, data and stock management, planning, budgeting, reporting, performance tracking, internal and external outsourcing are being managed by IBM .
The following clip is taken from my colleague’s handycam, showing a passenger ship at the port. Before that day I had never seen a ship in my life, let alone this big. This time I didn’t have my camera so showing only the clips. Audio is bad, bear with me.

Of all the ports on the North Sea, Antwerp is the most central vis-à-vis the largest European production and consumption centers. Although the open North Sea is about 60 km away from Antwerp, the river is so large that sea-going vessels and large oil tankers can sail to deliver their products in the vast port area of the city.

Though the more common language in Belgium is French, this small city speaks Dutch, perhaps because of its proximity to Netherlands. Most buildings are old but a treat to eyes.. total architectural wonders. Many Indian restaurants, one doesn’t feel out of place.

Not as big as the 'Grand'Place' of Brussels, but certainly equally beautiful and crowded is the 'Grote Markt' of Antwerp, also known as Market Square.

In the background the tower of Our Lady's Cathedral completes the magnificent view.

One of the grandest buildings in Antwerp is the 'Central Station'. It welcomes visitors who arrive by train in Antwerp like a modern day cathedral. The part of the station where the platforms are, is covered by an immense metal and glass dome (typical for turn-of-the-century railway stations in Europe).

Following is the clip of a model of Antwerp Railway station stationed inside the railway station and then the real station itself. Got confused ? :))

Antwerp – The Diamond City

This city is called diamond city as world’s one of the finest diamonds are produced and more than 70% of all diamonds in the world are traded in Antwerp. Not going into statistics but do you know who does the major chunk of business here ? Well, one can find many Indians settled in Antwerp mostly from Gujarati / Marwari business community. Sorry, I don’t know the difference between them except that Gujratis are from Gujrat and Marwaris are from Marwar (something like my first logic). :) Someone please enlighten me on this. Needless to say why I was surprised initially when I saw many Indian restaurants there.

In spite of this museum being adjacent to the station, we could manage only about an hour’s quality time inside it. Again this multi-storied museum is the largest diamond museum in the world. According to me, minimum of one full day is required to do justice with it.

It is also called 'interactive museum' as there is an audio-visual guide which enables us to ‘interact’ with the museum in the select few languages of our choice and at our own pace. It is an 'image and sound' system which takes visitors through the entire procedure of diamond processing – from mines to end product including training, teaching etc. at various levels.

On each floor there are some treasure chambers whose wonderful collections of jewelry offer a treat to eyes. They have diamond jewelries from the sixteenth century till the present day including replica of the British Crown Jewels containing two of the world's largest diamonds- the Koh-I-Noor and the Cullinan I. The only other place I saw more realistic replica of British crown was in Sydney.

The museum also has section which shows us the qualities of diamonds, such as color, hardness, refraction of light etc. On some days we can see diamond cutters at work too.

The four C’s – Carat, Colour, Clarity and Cut – determine the quality and value of a polished diamond. Since this is not a place to lecture about diamonds, will tell you very little basics about these four C’s.

Carats - Weight is expressed in carats, each carat divided into 100 points.
Colour - Colourless diamonds are the most valuable ones. The more tinted colour they have, the less expensive they are.
Clarity - Clarity or purity of a diamond is determined by the number, size and location of inclusions or clouds (internal impurities). These can vary from vvs (very very small) to s(small) category.
Cut – Even if a diamond has perfect colour and clarity, a poorly cut diamond will lose sparkle, beauty and value. The cut affects brightness and classified as Excellent, Very Good, Good, Fair or Poor. Some common diamond cuts are round, oval, pear, heart, emerald.

Fortunately we could take some photographs without flash in some sections of this tight security museum.

Antwerp - Silvers all the Way

Next time when I went to Antwerp, I tried to explore a bit more. When you go on such short trips to a city, it is extremely difficult to take out time for doing so specially if it is a weekday. Fortunately, this time I was to go there on a Friday, decided to stay overnight. By the time we came out of office on Friday, it was above eight in the evening.
While going back to the hotel, stopped at the main shopping street, Meir. It is around 1.5 to 2 kms stretch and connects the Central Station to the Grote Markt (No, I didn’t miss an ‘e’, that’s the correct spelling). The houses on both sides are old but gold. ;) We had our dinner in one of the restaurants and went to our hotel to decide on next day’s schedule.

So Saturday was kept to see a few things in Antwerp before returning back to Brussels in evening. Next morning I was to fly back to India from Brussels.
We (me and my two colleagues) short listed two museums to see.. Silver museum and Diamond museum. Both were very big, time consuming but we wanted to give it a go.

Silvers and diamonds.. Hmmm any female will jump with joy. When it struck to both my male colleagues, for a moment they looked at each other and were anxious to know about my likeness for jewellery and my shopping capabilities. :)) Fortunately for them, for jewellery I prefer to do only window shopping. :)

Since Diamond Museum is very near to Central Station from where we had to take the train later for Brussels, we kept it for the afternoon session.

Next morning, we visited beautiful Sterckshof Silver Museum first. From station it took us 20-25 minutes to reach by bus. Surrounded by a lush green garden, on the edge of the city, the museum is a beauty to watch. It is in a picturesque castle called Sterckshof, hence the name. It was a journey to the treasures of Belgian silver production. If I can, I will post a scanned map from the brochure I have.

The museum is full of antique silver artifacts. One floor had beautifully crafted cutlery, knife, spoons, plates, bowls, tea/coffee sets... all of different sizes. The lower floor has different theme based rooms like bedroom will have Clocks, mirror frames, photo frames, clothes hanger etc. Study room would contain different shaped pen stands, cigars, lamps etc. The other rooms had things like a chair, swords, shields.. you name it, they have it. Before visiting the museum, I had never imagined as how many things could be made out of silver.

It also shows different techniques used for processing of silver including how to take care of it.

Inside the museum, for security reasons the photography was strictly prohibited so this was the last picture taken before we made our grand entry to the museum. ;) Note the entrance door - a very heavy metal door of height till first floor.

The main entrance.

But looking at the scant crowd (there was hardly any person), I guess this museum is not very popular.

This is a very small video clip taken from the bus of our visit to the museum. I took it from my colleague to show it to you.

Once out of the museum, we again took a bus back to the station. Had a quick light lunch and went inside the Diamond Museum...

Let's start - A for Antwerp

Antwerp is a beautiful city in Belgium, around 35 - 45 minutes by train from Brussels, the capital of Belgium. Compared to giants like New York, Paris, Sydney or even Mumbai, Antwerp is very small in size but second largest city of Belgium. Have been to this place 3 times, all for very short visits... sometimes a day trip from Brussels. It is pretty convenient, since there are plenty of trains running to and fro throughout the day between the cities.

“Antwerp” - First time when I went there, I neither knew nor bothered about the meaning of this name. I was in a hurry to make it on time and come back to Brussels by evening. Later, when I got to know the meaning, I wanted to go there again. :)

The original name of Antwerp is Antwerpen in Dutch, the local language. Antwerp is its adapted English name. In French it is called Anvers.

Antwerpen = Ant + werpen.
Ant = hand and werpen = thrown

The name is based on some mythological story. It is believed that there lived a giant near the river Scheldt who did not allow people to cross it without paying a toll to him. Those who refused, had to lose their right hands. He used to throw the right hands into the river after chopping them off.

Then one fine day, there came a hero like in Hindi movies (don’t remember his name at this moment) who chopped off this giant’s right hand and threw it far away. It fell at a place where today there is a gigantic statue of a man’s right hand, sitting pretty. It is surely an eye catcher in one of the city's busiest shopping streets – Meir.

People come, sit and get photographed with this stone hand. We did the same when I went there the second time. :) We, three of us had decided to take the last train back to Brussels, so had just enough time to be with giant hand. It was a wintry night, very windy and chilled. From neck to toe I was covered in layers of woolens including leather jacket but my head was enjoying the cool chilled wind. Nose had become numb but spirit was at a new high. After hectic office hours, I felt this feeling quite relaxing.

For obvious reasons, respecting the anonymity of people including me, I won’t show pictures with anyone in it. So, though I have hundreds of photos, the choice for hosting here gets filtered down to a limited few. Also, I had never imagined myself writing a weblog. Tried to blacken out one of my pictures solely for this post.

Quite strangely after that I saw many statues in Antwerp with hand, perhaps only then I had started noticing them.. a man throwing hand, just a hand and so on. Even the cookies and world famous Belgian chocolates were in the shape of hands !! And to think of it, when I had landed in Antwerp first time, I didn’t even know the existence of this hand !!

This hand has become THE symbol of Antwerp.