Tuesday, January 05, 2021

Travel Tuesday - Brussels


Welcome to random Travel Tuesday.  I have nearly 70,000 photos in the archive, most of them from travels over the past 20 years.  Once a week I will pull up the unsorted photos, give the mouse a long push and see where the pointer stops, select a photo and write about it.  

The image above is along the main pedestrian zone in Brussels Belgium.  The second time that I went with Jay on his quadrennial trip for the Oxford Patristics Conference, we spent a week with friends in Yorkshire the week before the conference, he went off to Oxford and I took the Eurostar to Brussels.  Why Brussels? I had never been there.  I was going back for a second visit to Amsterdam, and Brussels was a good stopping point on the way.  I stayed in a nice Hilton near the train station, visited a transportation museum,  and took the local slow train onto Amsterdam. I liked Brussels. From Amsterdam, I flew to Paris, then encountered a cancelled connecting flight, and took the TGV to Normandy, another adventure, to be written about at another time.  

Should we go back to building buildings with this kind of architectural detail?  

21 comments:

  1. lovely photo! and YASSSSS to decorative architecture! the shit being built these days is SO damn bland and boring and unimaginative!

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    1. Or is it bold and innovative?

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  2. Would be lovely to.....but I bet the money won't be there. A shame everything is all cookie cutter, boring and sloppy sweatpants and tee shirts now. And people wonder why I would love living in the past. Had me have my way...we'd be back in the Edwardian time again.

    70,000!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?! Hum, I think you may want to slip in three or more pictures honey, bwhahahaha

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    1. I will never post them all, and my short attention span wanders when there are a dozen photos on one post.

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  3. I do love the architectural detail. Loved Brussels, too, although I was there in winter and didn't experience the tourist crowds.

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    1. I think it was August when I was there. I took the cheap train from there to Amsterdam, packed with stoned students, that was interesting.

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  4. Anonymous1/05/2021

    You went to Brussels because you could and what better reason. I think now you don't have to stop in Brussels to get to Amsterdam. I've seen a bit of Amsterdam with two visits and it is far from my favourite cities. Smoking doesn't bother me, but walking on a carpet of cigarette butts really does. We only saw the area around Brussels Midi and it was none to clean either.

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    1. Anonymous1/05/2021

      But there was a great image of Tin Tin we could see on a building from outside the station.

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    2. I kind of liked Brussels, Amsterdam is not in my top 10 favorite places.

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  5. I don't have much of a problem with the architecture, but to make it fit contextually, we'd have to also bring back the Austro-Hungarian Empire. And I certain have no problem with that.

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  6. I love that old architecture, but I always love the new futuristic stuff too.

    Tis a puzzlement.

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    1. Both can be really well done.

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  7. I hate that kind of overly decorated, fussy facades. Too much bric-a-brac!

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  8. It would be nice to see this kind of architecture from time to time but I'm sure doing that would be very, very costly.

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    1. Vastly costly, if it is hand cut stone.

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  9. I see buildings like these and instantly smell mildew for some reason. I think this type of architecture is interesting because of the historicalness of it all. It would be a bit tacky if built today, not to mention drafty, with modern mildew. I know absolutely nothing about buildings, I just know what appeals to me, like art.

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    1. You know it when you see it, (a vague reference to Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart trying to define pronography.)

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  10. Fancy, fussy architecture is very high maintenance. It's good to see some of it being loved, cared for and used so long after it was built.

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    1. Maintenance is a challenge, and stone weathers more than people expect.

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