When I last left you, I had just emerged from the the glorious dark of Star Wars: The Exhibition. Standing in the parking lot of the exhibition hall, I spotted the elusive chrome sphere far off in the distance. Without much deliberation, Nick and I decided that Hell yes, of course we’re going to walk to the giant silver marbles that crest the distant horizon. It’s probably a good thing we didn’t spend much time on deliberation, because if we had, we might have realized just how fucking far away the thing was.
We set off much the same way we did for the Star Wars exhibit: with only a rough idea where we were going, though unlike the exhibit, we could see our destination far off in the distance. On our way, we passed an abandoned car with flowers growing out of the hood and some cool typeface that Nick decided to take a picture of. Crucially, off the top of my head, it occurred to me that I had previously been miscalculating when the last train for Amsterdam out of Brussels was going to leave. When I bought our tickets, the clerk at the ticket desk informed me the last train left at 20:15, and I incorrectly took this to mean 10:15pm. It wasn’t until we were walking toward the marbles that this struck me as wrong, and we realized we were going to have two less hours in Brussels than we thought.
As we walked, our destination continued to remain illusive. Several times we said to each other, It’s gotta be just over this next hill, and each time we were proved wrong. At the same time, we became increasingly aware of how far away from the train station we were venturing. After much toil, however, our perseverance was rewarded and we arrived at the bottom of what I will call Atomium Hill. We stood at the bottom of a gentle slope, the top of which loomed our silver marbles, christened Atomium by various signs pointing to the attraction. Roads lined with cars led up the bizarre monstrosity. A wide median of well-tended grass divided the roads. An inexplicable yellow edifice sat in the middle of the median, and as we walked closer, we discovered that the oddity was created entirely of Jupiler beer crates. Its purpose never revealed itself to us. Beyond the beer-crate building a wedding was being held. Why anyone would choose to be married in the shadow of Atomium is beyond me.
Atomium itself is comprised of nine massive, stainless steel spheres ostensibly arranged in the shape of a unit cell in an iron crystal. As Nick and I had walked toward it earlier, I had mentioned that it appeared to be just the kind of useless, batshit insane construction that cities would build during World’s Fairs. It reminded me oddly of the giant gold sphere (apparently known as the Sunsphere) that loomed over the Holiday Inn that my Odyssey of the Mind team stayed in when we attended the 2000 World Championships in Knoxville, Tennessee, which I imagine has lost much of its former glory. Why Knoxville was ever chosen for a World’s Fair I will never understand. Also, why don’t we have World’s Fairs anymore? They seem awesome! Though to be fair, I guess the public can only see so many exhibits about the flying cars we’ll all be driving JUST FIFTEEN YEARS IN THE FUTURE before they begin to understand that it’s never going to fucking happen. Tangent aside, it turns out I was exactly right about Atomium: it was created for the 1958 World’s Fair in Brussels.
[note: Apparently World's Fairs still happen. Who knew?]
Nick and I stood in awe beneath Atomium, snapping pictures of the oddity. We contemplated taking a tour up to the top sphere which would have undoubtedly offered an unrivaled view of the entire city, but when we discovered the wait was about an hour, we decided against it with the knowledge of our dwindling time in the forefront of our minds. We began to wander away from Atomium, sure that we didn’t want to walk all the way back to the train station, but unsure of any other way to get back. We passed a small amusement park located right next to Atomium, a park that boasted both a water slide and an attraction they called Mini-Europe. Apparently the park’s many guests were unaware of the irony of visiting Mini-Europe while they were standing in the middle of life-sized Europe. Past Mini-Europe were a number of sports complexes of various sorts all adorned with the Olympic Rings, and it occurred to me that we might be in the middle of Brussel’s Olympic Village. In any case, we passed the main stadium which had clearly seen better days. Soon we arrived at a metro station and after much deliberation and hemming and hawing, we decided on the appropriate mode of transportation to take us to Brussel’s Central Station. We had taken the train into Brussels North, but we could depart from any of Brussel’s three train stations, and since the metro went to Central, we decided just to depart from there.
[note: Apparently Brussels never hosted the Olympics, though Antwerp did in 1920. I can't explain all the Olympic logos]
After some excitement on the metro when it departed the station in the opposite direction of what we expected, along with a women who spoke only French, yet continued to attempt to offer us advice on what stop to get off on, we arrived at Central Station, only to discover it was only a metro stop and no trains left from there. Confused and a little lost, we wandered around a square outside of a cathedral as though we were in a daze. We needed to regroup. We found a map and discovered that we weren’t really all that far from our original train station at that point, so we set off walking back.
Back at the train station, we checked over the departure schedule and realized we had more time than we had originally thought, so we ventured out to grab some dinner. After lots of walking and not much luck finding a place, we settled on an Italian-style pizza joint where we were the only customers. Enjoying a welcome beer and pretty decent pizza, we finally rested our weary legs. After dinner, we decided to find some of Brussels’ famous chocolate. 
Friends who had visited previously had raved about the chocolate shops on every street corner, about how they bought more chocolate than they could carry, about how delicious and enticing every delectable morsel appeared. Surprised that we had yet to see an single chocolate shop in our extended tour of the city, we decided to specifically seek chocolate out. This venture proved fruitless, as even after walking through what appeared to be Brussels’ main shopping street, we were greeted with a noticeable dearth of chocolate. We eventually gave up and returned to the train station where I bought a chocolate shake from the Quick Quality Burger.
Thus ended our journey to bizarro Brussels.
0 Responses to “Brussels: What the Fuck?: Part II”