... is the way it surprises you every day. You'll spend an afternoon walking around the quaint garden of hedge mazes next to the Royal Library. You'll go back the next day and there's a hole 30 ft wide cut straight from the garden's stomach.
The spiked punk teenagers - instead of loitering around the mall after school - infest the external stairwells outside the Museum of Fine Arts, leaving their fluorescent graffiti insignia on the grey stone slab walls.
The skies are hung with yellow cranes. The construction kind; not the birds. Their colossal limbs are as much of a "YOU ARE HERE" thumbtack in the city as the Gothic tower of the town hall in Grand Place. Neither move. They just peer down at the people like omniscient guardians.
You'll walk across a makeshift wood plank bridge - over a pool of rainwater from yesterday's sun showers and hail storms collected in the rectangular dirt ditch- and for some reason or other the water is a vibrant magenta colour. It's rippling wildly in the wind beneath the feet of yet another Moroccan mother shaking a cardboard cup of coins as furiously as she's shaking her baby bundled in her arm.
When you have access to one English-speaking television channel (CNN), you need to find different ways to unwind after a long day of exams and school work.
I've found solace in vegetarian cooking workshops and free art museum passes. Today I milled around the Museum of Fine Arts and gawked at an incredible exhibition by a man named Alechinsky.
It was a pleasant way to spend this bitterly cold Wednesday afternoon.
One of the worst things about Brussels... is the way it surprises you every day. But more on that when I'm feeling less optimistic.
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2 comments:
Surprises can be a pain sometimes, but they're necessary. Routines have a way of making us take things for granted. Big or small, significant or insignificant, surprise changes can make you appreciate things a lot more. It doesn't mean you have to like the change or that you're not allowed to prefer the way something was. But if I could wake up and have ever day be just a little different than the one before it, I think I would be much a happier person.
words of wisdom my friend. i'm inclined to agree.
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