Brussels.

My friend Amber recently went to Brussels, and it got me a bit wistful and talking about Tintin with my parents. My mother had coincidentally torn out an article about Brussels from Elle Decor for me a few days prior.



At first it read like any semi-boring, glossy magazine article about a European city might - romanticizing the beautiful buildings and landmarks that every travelers' guidebook points out. But it pretty quickly took an interesting path, painting the city as a curious hodgepodge mixture of people and neighborhoods. I know very little about the inner workings of Brussels, which is a shame since I was born and lived there for two years. Here are some random facts (some probably more common knowledge than others):

Le Pain Quotidien's original location is there

In the '70s, "Brussels suffered from a flight of the middle classes to the suburbs. This offered an opening for artists, who found one of the few big cities in Europe where they could live downtown relatively cheaply."

It's full of expats

It has more Art Nouveau architecture than any other city (even Paris, apparently, whoah)

The curious hodgepodge I mentioned came out the most to me in the photos (shops and museums that look like people's residences, a restaurant that looks like a train station) and these couple of sentences -

You have to dig a little. People don't show off what they have. You find amazing apartments in completely unexpected places. And it's the same with people. [...] It's hard to get a grasp of the place, because in some ways there is no place to grasp.

It sounds like a larger-than-life-sized cabinet of curiosities; the type of city that you really do strike gold in when you go off the tourist attraction path. I haven't been back since the summer of 1996; fifteen and a half years puts me overdue for a revisit, no?