Everything Is Peeing In Brussels (Day 3)

We were unsatisfied with our first tour, so today a group of us accepted an offer from Augustin (Gus) of a second, more in depth tour of Brussels. We met him at 2:30pm in front of the Palace of Justice, a massive building which, from what I understood, acts sort of like a combination of a court and jail. The Palace of Justice is located right next to the oldest area of Brussels, which, according to Gus, used to be much larger until a Belgian king demolished a bunch of old houses and buildings to make way for the Palace of Justice.

 This second tour proved to be far more interesting than the first. We spent well over four hours touring the city, and learned a ton. Gus is an extremely interesting man; he seems to know a bit about everything. He’s had all sorts of jobs, everything from being a lumberjack to working in churches as an organ repair man, and his knowledge of the city is inexhaustible. He even made a valiant attempt at explaining Belgium’s unique government situation to us, which I still don’t fully understand, but I’ll try to explain some of it. Apparently, Belgium’s government is broken down into three basic levels, the federal government, based in Brussels, then into language-based communities, and then also into regions (which are themselves divided into provinces). Its complex, but basically it means that even though Belgium hasn’t had a functioning federal government since June 2010, many of the services that the people depend on are still provided by the local community and regional governments. Or something like that.

Gus also showed us more comic book walls, a beautiful church, and the female version of Manneken Pis, a statue called Jeanneke Pis. Finally, he led us to another peeing statue, this one of a dog, leading him to exclaim: “everything is peeing in Brussels”.

More pictures:

These first two are of the Palace of Justice. Very big, lots of windows and doors.

The Atomium

Belgian waffle covered in warm chocolate. As of this picture, all I had eaten so far in Belgium were waffles and pizza. Also that is, in fact, my foot in the corner.

Some cool flame-like graffiti.

The Basilica of the Sacred Heart, which is one of the only examples of a cathedral built in the Art Deco architectural style. Very cool. 

Those last three were all pictures from a beautiful church that Gus took us to.

Here you see Gus (in purple) explaining the significance of some historical bar. I've forgotten just what is significant about it, but I bet it was a pretty cool story.

More comic book art.

This is some cool graffiti we saw under a bridge.

More cool stuff painted on walls.

Manneken Pis, in a different outfit than yesterday. According to his Wikipedia page, this little guy has over 800 individual outfits.

This was just on some random wall in the city. The pigs are huge; I'm probably not even as tall as the bottom one.

We went back to the Grand Place. If I haven't mentioned this before, it is a truly stunning part of the city.



Also, here's a video Gus found which does an excellent job of explaining the complexities of Belgium government:

Thanks for following!

-cdk