Noises in the night

There were dreadful noises in the night. I think from the apartment directly over ours. Between 2 and 4am, bashing, thumping, dragging noises. It sounded like someone was being beaten up, or worse.

Gang rape? Murder? Truly awful.

I didn't wake Andrew as there was no point two of us being awake...

I crept out onto the landing outside to see if I could learn anything.

I was - frankly - too scared to go knocking on doors.

Each time it quietened down I drifted into sleep, but it started up again.

What could it have been? A gymnastics class? Furniture removals?

I have no idea. I will tell the landlord if/when we see him... This building (and the apartment) is at the basic level of comfort and provision, and I guess the other apartments are basic (cheap) too.  It's clean, I suppose, and has the absolute essentials, but it's closer to trouble or necessity than I would like but we chose it because it's not too far from the station, and it was available for the three nights we needed.  Also, of course, much cheaper than a hotel when you can make your own meals if you want to.

This trip has had the unexpected theme of 'poverty' - homelessness, beggary, foreign-ness, all dark subjects, and uncomfortable. It's been a strong contrast with the happy-lucky-careless state of mind which comes with going on holiday, being a tourist, travelling in comfort.   We've had a concentrated slice of the truth of our times. People are on the move but not finding welcome. The politics is laden with anxiety and inconclusiveness. The neighbourhoods are changing. Does planting trees prevent terrorism? I will look forward to sleeping in my own bed tonight. We've had some marvellous experiences while we've been away...

As for Brussels and the British love-affair with it... I keep thinking of how Charlotte Brontë came here, and how the architecture and the manners are so similar. Whole districts of the city are very very like patches of London - Great Portland Street, Wells Street, that area especially. I meant to mention the amazing bin-men yesterday... the lorry going along slowly, and two hefty young men throwing huge plastic bags stuffed with rubbish into the back as fast as they could, with another supervising and of course the driver - a gang of 4 clearing the streets at a fantastic pace.  These bags were all outside the dress shops, packaging I suppose.  Our walk back to the flat yesterday was through this district of fashion wholesalers, the cafes populated by dozens and dozens and dozens of men - Turks, Moroccans? No women in sight apart from one cafe where we stopped for a cup of mint tea, and in a couple of local supermarkets (which do not sell alcohol), and where most of the shoppers were men. A very different culture from how it must have been 40 years ago...  and this explains why I did nothing when these noises woke me in the night. I have no idea who lives above this flat, or what language they speak. I just hope whoever was on the receiving end of the fight is ok.

What is seen, what is hidden.....

It was a bit sad to find out we couldn’t go the the tram museum today, as that was going to be Andrew’s chosen venue… but at this time of year it’s not open till the weekend. Instead we went back into town on another interesting walk, going into a couple of churches… Our Lady of Succour was really delightful, made of small stone blocks, and with a scary crack in the cupola.  What interests me very much is that even in an almost-circular church like this, the basic pattern of a nave/tunnel/access and then a triple holy-space is absolutely discernible, just as at Newgrange in Ireland, and that is 7000 years old.   

Strolling along we admired a laundrette with a huge ironing machine...

   

and another of the city's gay-friendly zebra crossings

Then we went a short distance on to the church of St Nicolas. Now this saint is one of my favourites. We have a lot of St Nicolas churches in Kent, all near the sea or rivers. He is a version of our dear old Father Christmas, and has various interesting legends about him including providing dowries for poor girls and bringing back to life some pickled boys.  

There is a super statue of him in the Brussels church, which used to have the River Senne right outside the door (a typical location for a St Nicolas church, btw), till it was all covered over in the 19th century. It has pleasingly ancient origins and a post-war facade on the west front. All good. Not so good was the behaviour of a warden of some kind who not only shouted out for silence in a very aggressive and unnecessary way, but threw out of the church three old people, one in a wheelchair, because he didn’t like the old lady’s phone making a noise.  No service was in progress and this was an officious an unchristian act.

  

However our coffee in the sun was restorative, and from there we went back to the Grand Place and the Tourist Office to find out how to get to a new art centre in an old Citroen factory by the canal.  Our route was past the Bourse (Stock Exchange), a monstrously expensive building now redundant, with huge columns, pediments, stairs, statues etc. All this was paid for by Belgium’s plunder of the Congo, a particularly savage and nasty story. (And yes, I know, Britain hardly has an unblemished record regarding colonialism).

While we had our coffee in the sun, we saw the bike police stopping mopeds in a very efficient trap, and later we saw the car police moving the street beggars on. I suddenly thought, these women are not free, not choosing to beg.  I thought - whatever it looks like, they are part of a gang managed (probably terrorised) into working the various pitches.  I was reminded of the truly horrible begging set-up in Albania, where the gang-masters are fully in view, and the poor women are carrying drugged babies around to rouse the pity of tourists.   I wondered if I would see the same here, and sure enough…… 

 

We had lunch by the Bourse, with a friendly waiter from Bangla Desh pleased to chat. Moules frites was my choice, and I was not the only one!

We strolled through the pretty St Katherine’s Square and on to the Canal… and there in the sun was the Kanal Brut. 

This was in use as a car repair factory and showroom till it was sold to the local authority about 3 years ago. It is HUGE. As part of a project run by the Centre Pompidou in Paris it is now in use as an arts venue, so it has a lot (really a lot) of installations to see - a very long walk round!  It will close in July for a huge refurbishment, and then open again fully in about 2023.  

    

It has some wonderful things on show and for sale (too expensive for me!).  We loved the videos of children's games from round the world, the British chairs, the 3-D printed artefacts, the huge rather sinister Jean Tingueley installation, the OPEN signs....   The main glory is the building itself, which is so pure and industrial, and immense.  

    

I was thrilled to find some Hooked Diamond bags in the shop - again, far too expensive for me, and apparently made by an artist from Morocco... I loved them.  They will be part of future Goddess Exhibitions in Faversham, even if only as photographs.

  

And with a curtsey to the old car showroom function of the building we spotted a classic of French car design.... but not all was as it seemed....

    

We came home on the tram, which was some compensation for the lack of tram museum. We had a Moroccan tea and cream cake, and bought a take-away supper from a fish restaurant up on Stalingrad, and here we are on our last night.  

How we are like the Belgians...

Our apartment is without doubt very basic, but it is in an interesting district. I would say it is poor in many ways, but also bustling, international, with fine buildings and a bit of a sizzle to it.  One side we are in the rag district - colourful retail/wholesale boutiques, little fashion houses. The other way there’s the occasional cafe or antique shop, or more likely a family-run ethnic grocery, with marvellous breads, fruits, meats. There are masses of men standing about - Arabic, Egyptian, Turkish - not many women.  This is an immigrant community with all the challenges and marvels of such places. … If I was going to buy a property in Brussels, this is where I would start to look. FYI the street we’re in is called Rue Lambert Crickx

We had a wandering round day. Taking in the amazing architecture, the absolutely different way things are in Belgium (compared to Austria), the street scenes, the food shops, all that….

I have often thought the Brits are more like the Belgians than any other European country. There’s something a bit disorganised about it all here, scruffy, overweight, practical, realistic. Like us, Belgium had a big fat rich period based on colonial plunder and spent the loot on massive buildings and statuary. They are more religious than we are, and old-fashioned in still being enthusiastic smokers. They have much more street/public art than we do, and it’s great. They drop litter like we do, and live on street food like we do… waffles, chips, masses of sweet stuff.  They wear bundly-looking clothes like we do. They have police horses about the place (like we used to do).  Their pubs and cafes are very civilised, not too obsessed with behaviour like French and Italian ones can be.  They let their roads go to pot like we do.  They’re better at foreign languages than the Brits, but they have no choice: I bet they’d each subside into their French or Dutch or whatever if they were allowed to.   Their parks are scruffy and almost natural, like ours are… quite unlike the formalities of the French. They are more obedient as pedestrians than we are, but there are plenty of places where you can just stroll across the streets, which feels really risky after the strict regulation of Austria.  Anyway, to me, it all offers a delightful mix of recognisable culture and foreign-ness. I like it very much.

  

 

We went to the Grand Place, 17th century swank building by the guilds of the day which is still absolutely knockout.  

    

We talked with a crazy Burmese man, schizophrenic I think, who has machines in his head running his life. He wants to go to hospital.      It's Tintin town, too.... The rockets are gorgeous but about £30 for the small ones, and over £100 for the big ones.  Too too expensive.

  

We wandered off through the St Hubert Arcade (with a charming elderly beggar lady outside beseeching the swanky shoppers)…. 

The arcade is amazing, with such glories all along, worth going to see if you’re passing.   We called into the cathedral, with its Romanesque origins and subsequent decorations … a lovely light interior, and fantastic carving… but I was just anti-church today, and looked with a resentful eye at the parade of no less than twelve MEN on the pillars. One actually is supported by two naked legless armless women. It is impossible to say if this was a St Bartholomew or a St Nathaneal. Ugh.  

   

     

We found lunch among the office buildings - delicious trendy rice bowls and steamed buns, in a place called Mile End.   

Then we searched out some ‘modern art’ - not so easy when they are flogging Art Nouveau and Magritte as being modern… Well, you know, things have moved on since then.  Eventually we went to the Musée des Beaux Arts where we had a special deal being old + also passengers on EuroStar…. to go and see the works of Wim Delvoye, bad boy of Belgian art.  This is partly distributed among the Old Masters, and a weird thing that is.   He is the man who invented Cloaca (a machine which replicates human digestion and produces turds at the end of the process, on a sort of conveyor belt). You can see one on the green strip here....

  

He also started tattooing pigs to give Chinese farmers a more interesting life (and the pigs too). He then had the pigs killed and their skins sold as art works.  The pigs were mildly anaesthetised for the procedures…   Later he clothed pigs in velour...

     

He makes Moebius strips out of wheels, and carves into the rubber to make ornate surfaces… rather beautiful and sinister.   He takes classical statues and recasts them in bronze as swirling twisted shapes.  

      

Seeing all these travesties among the well-known religious and landscape studies of the Flemish schools is really odd.  I had no interest WHATSOEVER in looking at the old paintings, and it make me wonder how they can ever survive as revered works… Their time has passed. 

My sexist instincts seem to have been quite high today.... These two classical pieces are upstairs in the museum a few feet apart.  Both have their left foot forward. I can see he was free to play, while she......

  

My main rage was with the gallery itself. Despite the fact they had searched my bag when I went in, and it had nothing but my sketching materials in it, I had to leave it (twice, as it happened) in a locker and not take it round with me. The bag was a risk, too big.  This is a monstrous, sexist injustice. No man had his pockets or jacket searched.  I was really angry.

Outside again we wandered back towards our flat…  I wondered what on earth this statue woman was actually doing apart from being naked and available. I wondered if there were any similar men lounging about and then immediately saw this bloke trying to fix a fountain ... it seemed a good-enough pairing.  

  

But really there is a lot of very good public art. We bought an ice-cream for Andrew, some beautiful Arabic pastries in a tiny box to bring back for supper. We found the infamous Mannequin Pis by accident, stopped for a beer in a cafe, chatted to the police-horsemen, bought some  fish for supper, and fruit… and then came back to this weird underlit apartment.  We are both tired.  It’s our last day tomorrow.

  

A thousand kilometres by train

Walking back to Edith's house from Attnang-Puchheim station on Tuesday evening showed us another side of life in Austria... the way the suburbs have spread over the farmland creating secret roads and back-ways, the houses and apartments planted on a grid pattern but without the formality of proper roads. Some planted fields remain between them.  We zigzagged through the night between the buildings, with some conversations along the way (a young woman looking for the old cinema), or greetings: Grosse Gott is how you say hallo, not Guten Tag.

In the morning she took us in her car with our tightly packed suitcases and dropped us off at the station for our train journey back towards the north.

Swift train to Linz - earlier than we needed but that way we had a lift.  A wait for 2 hours with a coffee in the sun, buying a picnic from the Spar in the station. Freight trains went through.  Two passenger trains made purely beautiful musical noises in a perfect rising scale as they slowly moved away from another platform... mechanical squeezing, what might have been a grinding noise or brakes unlocking, or something, but there it was D E F G A B C .... wonderful!

On to the big train to Frankfurt - about six hours... We had a map for Austria and could trace our journey for part of the way.   Across the aisle from us was a black woman, beautiful but confused. She and the conductor had various conversations about where she was to get off.... In the end the police came, interviewed her. She either did not understand them or could not answer for other reasons - no passport, no papers, nothing to say. Her voice was almost silent. The policewoman drew on blue rubber gloves and did a light search of the woman's plastic bag stuffed with - what? things. Eventually they took her off the train at Platting, otherwise spelled Plattling. She had been asking the conductor which stop that was.... but the police thought she wanted to get off at Munich - wrong train.  Who knows? A mule? She seemed ill.  I hope she is ok.   It dragged me back to horrible thoughts: racism, Nazism (let me see your papers).... God knows what was in her mind. We were powerless, could do nothing.

We changed at Frankfurt - quite a different kind of station from its twin at Frankfurt Airport.... heavy and over-structured, it looks like, with tall skyscrapers faintly visible through the great demi-lune windows.

    

Thank goodness the delay on the first train did not make us miss our connection to Brussels. We waited for what seemed like ages on the platform before they let us in, to a near-identical train but this one was missing a couple of coaches so it was extremely tightly filled. The door behind us made a weird oomphetty-crunchetty noise every time it closed. The panel under our window had something metallic rattling inside of it, really loudly.  It was first class, but not....

Outside there was a brief but spectacular sunset, then rain....

Brussels Station seemed to be utterly filled with people even though it was ten at night... Outside, the streets were full, there was a traffic jam. The station is surrounded by huge cobbles so pulling cases over it is awkward (and unnecessary).    Our apartment is in a plain dark building and we wondered how to get in - but the owner's son came at that moment with another man carrying mops and buckets, and let us in.

The flat is hilarious...  The contrast with Edith's immaculate and extremely comfortable house could not be more stark.  They have installed a new kitchen and very shiny floor tiles, but the lighting is (not surprisingly) Mediterranean as they are Turkish. So we get small ornate central ceiling lights with not very bright bulbs. The rooms get darker when you switch these lights on.   There is one bedside light but no plug in sight. Luckily Andrew has an extension cable with him.....

  

The sink in the bathroom is sloping slightly the wrong way so the water does not drain down the plug.  The duvets are thin, and covered in a spectacular gunmetal-grey/red/purple shot silky fabric which catches on any rough skin.  The tv only shows Portuguese programmes.  It turns out that floor is lethally slippery after a shower, and the shower itself is perhaps 60 years old - it falls off the wall and is undirectable.   So, our flat is cheap, and central, and we have it for 3 nights, but it would make a great location for a comic movie/farce.

We are in a foreign district, African shops, spherical beggar ladies outside on the pavement....  These beggars are everywhere - a new European phenomenon.  Only in Linz has the problem been tackled - with emergency housing, help back to work, clothing etc. It's a hard problem all round.. I don't like seeing beggars, but my discomfort is nothing to theirs. I want them gone, for my pampered sake, but much much more for theirs.  We saw no beggars in Linz. But outside the window here, there are two woman sitting....  You can see them.... Maybe they are just bored grannies. I don't know.