When in Brussels…
It is Tuesday and I am in Belgium. I am sitting in my hotel room, which has a view over the Grand Place. A group of Japanese tourists outside are taking pictures of a young athletic woman with a blonde ponytail practicing taekwondo with a chunky bodyguard in front of the Hotel de Ville. A lorry under my window is making horrible noise. I guess Tuesday must be delivery day for the establishments around the square because there at least five big trucks at it in spite of the fact that it is pedestrianised. I like the place. I like the fact that it has so many chocolate shops around, and that they sell strawberries dipped in white chocolate. And that they accept dogs in their restaurants. Coming from a land where I often feel I should apologise for Zuza (my dog) merely touching the sacred asphalt, it is refreshing to see people who don’t mind sharing their lunch with four-legged creatures.
Last night I wandered around Rue de Bouchers, Brussels’ equivalent of Laiki Yitonia. It was bursting with tourists stuffing themselves with every possible kind of sea food, trays and trays of lobsters, langoustines and mussels. After about an hour spent avoiding pushy waiters, I finally went into a restaurant off the main street with chunks of red meat hung in the window in the manner of Damien Hirst’s exhibition. This was a place that didn’t ask people to come inside. In fact just opposite – it was sending them away. It had a tiled dining room with a mural depicting old fashioned mariners and wild seas dating from 1905 and a big round table in the middle of the room where the epauletted waitress would cut and arrange quails on the plates, pour steamy mussels into bowls and add Grand Marnier to crepes suzette. This was a place with tradition that worked like a clock and had a feel of everything being done with an absolute purpose.
I ordered mussels with garlic, cheese and butter, and monk fish in creamy mustard (my non-existent French was not up to anything more complicated), then started starring at people. To my right, a group of four businessmen from Germany and Holland were having blue steaks and beer. On my left, a British couple was silently devouring calamari and huge bowls of mussels. At the big table, a waitress, who looked like a taller version of Afrika’s editor Sener Levent, was whisking an egg yolk for a plate of steak Tartar. At another a depressed Slavic-looking intellectual was cooking a sauce for something that looked like venison.
I ate my mussels thinking how much they suffered when they were killed and wondering whether I should become a vegetarian. I also pondered if there was a veggie equivalent of what I was eating in terms of taste, and whether the vegetables suffered as well while being chewed.
“I should have become a jain (a monk who wears a piece of gauze over his nose and mouth in order not to kill any living creatures) when I was young,” I thought. “I wouldn’t have such dilemmas”
My mobile rang. It was a friend from London with very good Russian connections with whom I had got very tipsy at a Moroccan bar in London the night before. They have this very good drink there called a Momo special – vodka, soda, lime juice, fresh mint and sugar – light and very treacherous.
“What are you doing?” she asked. “I am off to a birthday party of a famous Russian artist who dresses himself as Marilyn Monroe. You should come too. You will have loads to write for your column.”
“Well, I can’t. I am in Belgium thinking about becoming a jain,” I said.
“Are you out of your mind again?” she answered. “Think Jack Straw, think lack of communication. They are all against this veiled teacher here and you are talking about wearing gauze? In your profession?”
I had a crepe and a mint tea (does dry mint suffer when it is being put into boiling water?), a last glimpse at poor corpses in the kitchen and went back to the hotel (gauzlessly) thinking about this week’s column. I thought I could write about new traffic cameras, sexual abuse of women by powerful men and the idea of the government starting to introduce administrative fines for people who enter Cyprus through Ercan. But when I woke up this morning and saw the Grand Place, I thought, “It is Tuesday. I am in Belgium”.