Weekend in Belgium: Bruxelles

Grand Place, Brussels

After spending a weekend in Paris, I am excited to get to visit another new country.  This weekend, I took a trip to Belgium to visit a couple friends that I have there - one was my roommate from Spain in 2010 and the other was a classmate of mine at Michigan.

If you follow European music at all, you probably have heard of Stromae.  Well, Stromae is a Belgian singer from Brussels.  He first hit the charts bigtime in 2009 with a single called "Alors on Dance" ("And So We Dance").  This song was crazy-popular while I was in Spain in the summer of 2010.

Now, Stromae has a new album out with a hit song called "Formidable" ("Wonderful").  The music video for that song is shot in Brussels around the city.  The days I spent in Brussels were also a bit rainy, so the video can give you a decent taste of how some of the busy central parts of the city look and feel.

My Genevois coworker loves Stromae and his lyrics, explaining to me that his lyrics are well-done in French and are complex, especially when juxtaposing their subject matter with the music and generally up-beat dance rhythms.  For example, "Alors on Dance" is described by New York Times author Scott Sayare as a "mournful anthem that evokes unemployment, divorce, debt, the financial crisis and a sort of resigned hope 'to forget all our problems.'"  As Stromae (aka Paul Van Haver) explains, "It's just a desire to be realist...And it's not about saying that everything's going badly, because that's not what I say in my songs.  But it's not about saying everything's fine, either.  It's life."

Stromae is also compared to Jacques Brel, especially in the way he rolls his r's in "AVF."  My coworker also recommended listening to some Jacques Brel for a taste of really good French-language music.  Apparently, Brel is also extremely famous in the Francophone world, even if from a while ago.  After watching this video of one of his most famous songs, I can see why.  You can clearly see all of his emotion and passion pouring out through the lyrics and the rough way he sings them.

And just because I love Stromae's new album, Racine Carrée, I am including another music video for another great song off the album.  The song "Papaoutai" is told from a child's perspective who is trying to understand and come to terms with his father's absence.  The theme mirrors Stromae's own life, as his father was Rwandan, largely absent during his childhood, and was later killed during the Rwandan Genocide of 1994. 

In any case, back to the trip and time in Brussels itself.

I landed in Brussels (Bruxelles in the French spelling) late on Thursday night (February 27th) and found my hostel from the metro station.  On Friday morning, I got myself organized and then made my way down Rue Antoine Dansaert Straat to head into the heart of historic Brussels - the Grand Place, known as Grote Markt, in Dutch.  That's the first interesting thing that I noticed about Brussels is that the streets often seem to have both a French name and a Dutch name.  The Dutch words can be a bit similar to German, but are even harder for me to pronounce than the French names.

Death of Saint Sebastian

The Grand Place is beautiful.  I was lucky to be able to see it during the day on Friday and then lit up again on Sunday evening.  On Friday, I visited the City Museum and saw some beautiful sculptures from Brussels and stainglass windows with different shields of various provinces and famous cities.  

Cain and Abel

Saint Michael

I also learned more about the Manneken Pis, a really famous statue that is part of a fountain.  The statue's name means "Little Boy Pissing," and it now makes sense to me where those plaster statues that people buy at Home Depot originally come from.  I still do not understand why this statue is such a big tourist attraction.  Neither do my Belgian friends, although the explanation they gave me was that Belgians have a good sense of humor.  The City Museum actually has a whole section dedicated to Manneken Pis and all of the outfits that are put on the fountain for different holidays and events.

Belgium keeps it classy.

On Friday afternoon, my friend took me to see the Magritte Museum, an entire museum dedicated to the famous Belgian painter, René Magritte.  Along with the art museum in Basel, the Magritte Museum is definitely one of my favorite art museums that I have ever visited.

You have probably seen his famous painting of the man in a bowler hat with the green apple in front of his face (it's called "Son of Man"), but the museum had several other fascinating Magritte surrealist paintings.  

Son of Man, 1964

As explained by the Museum, surrealism began as a literary movement but in 1924, the Belgian art scene led a full-fledged surrealist movement.  Surrealism's roots rise out of feelings of revolt and aversion to the atrocities of World War I, and the movement preferences spontaneity, the subconscious, and play, as opposed to a rational realism.  Surrealists use these techniques to offer positive alternatives to the horrors of the past.  Other famous surrealist painters include Salvador Dalí, Giorgio de Chirico, Max Ernst, and Joan Miró.

Giorgio de Chirico

Joan Miró, Spanish Dancer

Max Ernst, The Celestial Army

The entire exhibit was very well done and in between the paintings, famous quotes from Magritte's writings were displayed in French.  I have included below some of my favorite quotes and paintings from the museum.

"Progress is a preposterous idea."

Melancholy on a Beautiful Day, 1913

Woman on Horseback, 1922

"There is no choice: there is no art without life."

Palace of Curtains, 1935

September Sixteenth, 1936

"Surrealism is the immediate knowledge of reality."

Georgette, 1937

The Traveler, 1937

Poster Project for the Organization of Belgian Textile Workers, 1938

The Return, 1940

"The surrealist is to banish the notion of deja vu and seek out the not yet seen."

Paul Delvaux, Pygmalion, 1939

Homesickness, 1941

"I did not have an idea, I only thought of an image."

Companions of Fear, 1942

The Blaze, 1943

"The world and its mystery cannot be remade; it is not as if it is a model you can just copy."

Black Magic, 1945

The Thousand and One Nights, 1946

Memory, 1948

"The art of painting is an art of thinking.  Its existence emphasizes the importance of the role played by the human eye in life; indeed the only sense with which a picture is concerned is that of sight."

The Fair Capture, 1950

"The real value of art is measured by its capacity for liberating revelation."

Almayer's Folley

Words v. Images, 1954
Here, Magritte gets into some semiotics stuff, where he is saying that the picture of a pipe is not a real pipe and that words and their meanings are arbitrarily assigned by us.  Hence, we can change the meaning associated with a particular arrangement of letters if we so chose. 

"We musn't fear sunlight just because it almost always serves to illuminate a miserable world."

Empire of Light, 1954

"Rebellion is a reflex of the living man."

Domain of Arnheim, 1962

"All that I desire is to be enriched by intensely exciting new thoughts."

The Human Condition, 1962

"I saw the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, it's not bad but it's better on a postcard."

The Search for Truth, 1963

"I don't like money, not for itself, nor for what it can buy, as I wish for nothing that is known."

The Search for the Absolute, 1963

One Fine Late Afternoon, 1964

On Sunday, March 2nd, I returned to Brussels and was able to see more in the city.  We first stopped by the Supreme Court, a huge, beautiful building which sits on a hill overlooking the city.

After enjoying the views of and from the Supreme Court, we took an elevator down the hill to visit a flea market in a plaza.  From the flea market, we wandered over to see a church and a park nearby, enjoying the beautiful weather along our way as we walked through the city.

The church is called the Sablon Church and is beautiful on the inside.  It also has a mausoleum for the family of the man who invented the international postal service.  The mausoleum was beautiful and extremely ornate.

Across the street from the church is the Little Sablon Plaza.  This plaza is filled with statues of famous Belgian authors, philosophers, military figures, statesmen, scientists, and others who opposed the Spanish Inquisition.  It was a great little taste of Belgian history.

Brussels is actually quite a fun city, and even in the short time that I had in Belgium, it was nice to be able to see many beautiful places in it.  I hope to come back soon!

Beurs/Bourse (Belgian Stock Market)

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Posted in: 3L,Belgium,Brussels,Bruxelles,English,J-Mad,Magritte,Manneken Pis,Museum,Sablon,Smurf,Stock Market,Stromae,Supreme Court

Week Five: Down to the Wire

This was my last week of my internship.  By this afternoon, I will be back in my hometown with two weeks before moving into law school and what is sure to be "1L" of a year (sorry for the terrible pun).

On Tuesday, we had a ton of spare time because it's the last week of our internship and because the Senate is in recess.  So, we wandered over to the Dirksen Senate gift shop.  Apparently, there is no sales tax there so we had some fun.  They had a lot of random and cool stuff, but at the end of the trip, I walked out with some postcards, a Senate key chain, and a Senate shot glass (original, I know).  

On Wednesday, I woke up really early to go to the State Department's Authentication Office to get one of my high school friend's application to teach English abroad apostilled.  I got there really early, but the office was already full.  There was another person about my age there getting her teaching application apostilled too, but most of the other people there were people who are paid to get documents authenticated on behalf of private clients who don't feel like doing this themselves.  I only had the one document to take care of for my friend so I was done shortly after they started seeing people at the counter.  I was able to catch the Circulator Bus back to work and made it only 15 minutes late.  Because I got up so early to get to the metro, I also realized that the Capitol complex looks really beautiful with the sun coming up in the early morning around 6:00am.  I met up with another fellow for lunch in one of the House cafeterias and it was nice to chat about law school and everything.  

After work, the interns from my office and I went to McDonalds for dinner and then to the Smurfs movie at Chinatown (by the way, that McDonalds is by far the shadiest McDonalds ever - the cops had to stand inside & outside the restaurant).  During our internship, one of the interns always would talk about her food cravings and one day she wanted McDonalds so she brought back a Happy Meal with a smurf toy in it.  The smurfs thing caught on in our little intern office and we all had our own smurfs.  The movie was obviously not that great, but it did explain why certain smurf toys that we each had were doing what they were doing.  It was also good to be able to see people relaxing a bit outside of work.

Since this was my last week in DC before going back to start law school, I met up with my former organization for a happy hour at Ozio's.  It's a pretty cool place with nice lounge areas inside and a lounge/bar/dance floor on the rooftop.  We had a whole section reserved for our group on the roof.  We had fun but when the DJ decided that after three requests from our group (we were the only ones dancing too) that he would not play our "theme" song, "Black and Yellow" by Wix Khalifa, we left.  However, we learned that Moby Dick's Kabob House closes really early at night.  We ended up wandering a few blocks to a new place called Friends Kabob which was just as good and open late.

Friday, August 12, was our last day of the internship. Early this morning, like 6:00am, I met up on the Capitol complex with another intern that lived nearby so that we could take pictures of the buildings in the morning when they look really pretty with the morning sun.  At 6:00am, it was already 70 degrees.  It was nice though because no one was around aside from a few security guards.


In the afternoon, I met up with another fellow and one of our friends to give a tour of the Capitol building.  It was cool because the other fellow worked with a House office and I was with the Senate so our friend got both sides of the tour.  We were able to go pretty much everywhere, including the hideaway office.  That afternoon, four other interns and I took our smurfs and did a Capitol Hill tour for ourselves and to take pictures.  A few times, tourists saw us and asked if we were part of the Cult of the Smurf.


After work, I went home to change and then headed over to E Street Cinema, a really cool movie theatre that plays a unique film selection, to see "The Devil's Double."  The film is based on a true story but also highly fictionalized with more "Hollywood" added to it, but was a really interesting, graphic story about Udday Hussein's body double.


After the film, I headed back to Clarendon to go to Liberty Tavern and Clarendon Ballroom for the last time (for this trip) in DC.  I even got to practice more Spanish with someone we met at the bar.  After we left the club, I hopped on the metro back to Capitol South to go home and pack up all of my stuff.  I had done part of the checkout before I left so I really just had to clean the room and throw things back into the suitcase.  I finished packing around 4:00am.  One of my friends in the building was flying out the same day I was but we had different flight times (her cab left at 6:00am), so right before her cab left, she stopped by my room to say goodbye.

When I took my cab (an EnviroCab - if I can, I prefer to take a hybrid cab), the driver and I talked a bit about DC and then got to talking about soccer and the Barçelona - Manchester United game from a few weeks ago.  He said that the entire stadium was packed for the game so he and his friends had to watch from a tv in a bar.  We started talking about club soccer teams and when I was talking about Real Madrid, he asked if I was part Spanish, which made my day (and made for a larger tip even though there's no tipping cab drivers in Spain).  Even though I am really excited to go back home to see family and friends and do some kayacking and play some tennis, I'm going to miss DC.  But, it feels like I'll be returning soon anyway.

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Posted in: Capitol Hill,English,J-Mad,Smurf,Washington DC