The capital of Europe ...

Brussels. It's the Adelaide of Europe. Both of them so desperate to be mainstream and accepted by the masses as an "it" destination but unwilling to let go of their quirks and idiosyncrasies that scare the ordinary people but make me so very happy. Mind you we arrived during the Brussels Summer Festival so it was very Adelaide Fringe except for the fact that when in Adelaide if you have no idea what the strange arty people are doing, you can at least speak the same language or read what they have written down. Here we just had no idea. Seriously no idea. I challenge someone to block their ears then go find some art installations at the Adelaide Festival and see how hard it makes it, sometimes it's poignant but mostly it's confusing and pointless...

Why did we go to Brussels? Well we were trying to go to Pukkelpop and Brussels was the closest place to be. It was only supposed to be one night or two before heading off into the wilderness with 100 000 people. Unfortunately for us the weather and the dates involved became a little to constricted and we were unable to go. Not that it matters because I heard through the grapevine that it was shit like Splendour in the Grass was for those that went. The up side of this is we had more time than expected in Brussels.

What kind of quirks does it have? Well, to begin with it's a massive comic book nerd. It doesn't look like it at first glance, it looks all serious and political with the big EU building, it's serious statues and business type buildings around the edge of the city. But once you scratch the surface (and you don't have to go deep) the nerd is there. And here's why. Tin Tin, the Smurfs, Astrix and Oblix were all created by Belgians. Plus they have hundreds of other iconic heroes as well. They have a museum celebrating Belgian Comic Books otherwise known as the 9th Art. They have murals on random walls through out the entire city centre 39 of them to be exact. They take up 3 stories and some of them are ginormous. We spent an entire day walking around Brussels looking for these murals, didn't see half of them but did get to see some areas of ill repute and questionable integrity. So it wasn't a total loss. In fact it was a highlight, we would have probably seen them all if there hadn't been a slight "incident!" which we will mention later. Needless to say it cost us a few hours.


Tin Tin


Another cool one!!

Second quirk is it's obsession with strange statues and urine. Mainly the worlds obsession with fountains of little boys taking a leak into a pond begins here with their "unofficial" national symbol the Mannequin Pis. It's been around for 500 years, they have 700 different little costumes for him to wear so it's rare that you see him fully nude. We saw him dressed up as Elvis taking a leak out of a jump suit and dressed up as a university graduate complete with sash, gown and mortar hat. Granted it was purple and pink and had something to do with a beer companies 10th anniversary of being the worlds best beer but he was still dressed up. Not to be left behind the girls have their own squatting girl, stashed down a little alley next to a couple of absinthe bars. It's quite strange, a little odd to look at and detailed. But you girls want everything equal so judge for yourself... Onto other strange statues, there was a guy with the best ever handle bar moustache. I don't know who he was, what he did or why he sits in a fountain but he does have the best handle bar moustache i have seen in statue form. If i die, i want a statue of me erected above my grave with a handle bar tache like this, even though i can't physically grow one i want to be remembered that way. So does Melissah (I think, I haven't asked her but I am sure that's what she would want!). What else? Well a guy on a donkey, there was a statue of Gaston (one of the comic books) but he was in for repair. Finally for the weird statues was the bell ringer on the roof. He had no advertisement, no plaque, no hint that he was there. You walk around a corner and there is a guy standing there on the edge next to a bell. No rhyme no reason. It's the Belgian way.


Pissing Boy


Smoking Nanna!!

We visited the royal palace, which was actually a lot better than the Austrian one. Mainly because it didn't bore you to death although no cameras were allowed so i have no evidence to what i saw but most of what I'll describe was actually there. There was secret doors that were clearly not secret, they had gaps cut in the wall paper and it was pretty obvious. There was a golden spittoon, in fact, there was gold everywhere, so much that it was actually on the wall, the architrave, the skirting and the door stops. There was so much it was going out of fashion. Finally there was a room and i shit you not the whole thing was green and i thought to myself "Fuckers.. there's opulence and then there's just being a dick." I figured they had taken the wizard of oz emerald city and covered a whole room in emeralds. I had to eat my words and they take it very seriously in palaces (a little guy writes them out on rice paper and then a mean guy forces you to eat them without any condiments). Turns out it was the wings of over a million bugs from Thailand (I still question the cost. And this time also the impact of de winging millions of Thailand's bugs; they'll be on Australian shores clinging to life rafts if Little Johnny gets his way. The spin generated would blow your mind. Granted there is an environmental cost to emerald mining but that's a long established industry and a few stinging words from me no matter how well worded they are will change that) Anyway back on task... So it was a massive room, think ample parking for a fleet of cars, Greg Norman could probably park a boat in there. It was big. It was bright green even the chandelier was bright green. The green was bugs wings, they do things differently here. That all happened.. I didn't lie once well except for the spittoon, that was ceramic but everything was true ask Mel.

Do you remember way back in the third paragraph I mentioned an "incident"? Those that are experienced with my stories will remember, as you have learnt to write stuff down as you go so that it all links together later, those that are new remember that for next time. Melissah has a version of this story that is so outlandish its impossible to believe but you can trust me... I'll give you the facts as they happened. We were doing our comic book tour around the city and I had the map in my back pocket, seems normal enough, map in back pocket in a city we are unfamiliar with. We were walking in front of Brussels Central Station and I took the map out of my back pocket, checked the direction and set off. Such an innocuous little event. Five minutes (ten at the most) I realised that my wallet was in the same pocket as the map and by "was", I mean it used to be in the same pocket as the map. It had fallen out somewhere since lunch (about an hour before) and we had no idea where. So we back tracked hoping that against all odds it was still sitting there (it worked with Melissah's jacket in Africa) but to no avail. It was time to do the walk of shame down to the police station to report that some one had stolen my wallet, I refuse to admit that that it was lost, someone had taken off my person somehow. Upon arrival at the station it gets a little embarrassing, strolling sheepishly through the front door portraying the figure of a hard done by tourist, the 6 ladies behind the counter all yelled out "ALLAN" "ALLAN" and started saying things in French which I loosely translated as "He looks better in person than he does in his picture" and "What a sweet piece of ass". Someone had handed in my wallet (which they had all had a good look at) with the 20 Euro still in it. Personally, I would have taken it as a tip. Anyway Melissah makes this seem much worse than it really is, she has now taken all credit cards and any sums of money off me ... it's a bit of an overreaction, it's not like I lost the passports!!! (Mel's note: but it is the second time he has lost valuable things out of his back pocket, and the second time that he has lost his wallet ... I should have taken if off of him ages ago!!)

Well lets finish this in an unstructured random way as opposed to the rest of this blog. I don't have the patience or the desire to write paragraph's on these things they didn't rile me up enough nor did they amaze me enough to warrant a paragraph but they were deemed worthy of at least a mention. So in no apparent order here are some other things that we found in Brussels. Firstly, Chunky Custard are still together, they have moved to Europe and are doing they same shit covers but are now singing in French and Flemish. Not only are the ABBA cover group massive here but all our cover groups are popular, I was keeping my eye out for a Zep Boys or The Yellow Submarines (the Australian Ringo Starr Cover Band) show at the local pub. The next thing which is probably why I am fairly mellow to these things is the beer. Melissah ordered a heavy for me and light for her not being specific has worked so far but what we got sort of twisted the definition of light and heavy. The light was 5.5% (so you can see where this is going already) the heavy i got was 11.5% and it could have stripped paint. It was heavy, I drank it and decided that moving was not high on my list of priorities. Neither was talking. I felt more productive after two nights in Amsterdam. This didn't stop trying a "midi" which at 8.5% was apparently for pussies. Well pour me a saucer of milk and scratch me behind the ears... I couldn't drink more than one heavy and that hurts me to say. Finally are the vacuum cleaners. We walked down this random road (Melissah had us lost) on a Friday night and a shop had an extension cord run out the front and vacuum cleaner running. Odd was the common thought It's going to take a lot more than that to clean this street up!. Then we looked up the street, along the whole thing was vacuum cleaners, all plugged in and running. Some had rubber gloves on the end, a lady was singing opera along with one, there were vacuum cleaners on street signs and billboards. All running. Now my environmental record isn't smashing (air cons and lights etc.) but surely this was a bit of a waste. I know that it was supposed to be "art" and these guys have a lot more renewable energy than we do but still some art I just don't get. I mean if i grease myself up and tie my body to a lamppost people will think i am some twat on a bucks show but do it at the same time as a festival and its considered subversive and intellectual. I am still a nude guy any which way.