How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Belgium

Having returned from my little Eurotrip on the 9th, I thought I'd write a big brain-dump here - mainly for my own benefit, but if you all enjoy it then that's a happy bonus.

I started with a day and a night in Luxembourg, where I had a surprise rendez-vous with fellow assistant James and his girlfriend, who also happened to be passing through the little Duchy at the same time. Despite the rain, we were all taken with the place, which was generically European in the best possible way - windy streets, chocolate-box architecture and delicious local beverages (Bofferding in this case, the national beer). We each drank a pitcher's-worth in a really cosy but vibrant bar called Banana's, and so it was with open-minded gregariousness that I met my host for the night, a 48 year old naturist called Hubert who I'd met the night before on CouchSurfing.

Having saved me from my last-minute accommodation dilemma, I felt it only polite to indulge his request that I "share his lifestyle" when in his home - a chic, all-white, minimal apartment whose décor did not lend itself to naked bodies. Neverless, I stripped off with a zealousness which surprised Hubert, who remarked that his previous guests had been far less keen. My lack of hesitation was simple - despite making it quite clear that naturism was, for him at least, about the desexualisation of the naked human form, I knew that no-one could fail to be impressed by my slight muffin-top, excessively hairy torso and middling genitalia. After a fairly pleasant - if awkward - demonstration of his massage training, I slept soundly on his sofa and woke up refreshed and with a feeling of liberation.

Next on my list of countries was Belgium, and my next host was far more familiar - Daphne! Daphne is a fellow French student at Edinburgh who I got to know through our beginners' Catalan classes last year, and who now lives in Liège in eastern Wallonia as an Erasmus student. As the economic centre of a formerly-prosperous industrial region around the river Meuse, Liège's story is one of faded glory, but it has grasped the opportunity to rebrand and is now a gritty, neon-lit party town; a little cobbled Vegas heaving with local students and bankers from Brussels and Luxembourg. We stumbled out of a club for a brief burst of fresh air and met a guy from South America who, having had his pick of Europe, had chosen Liège for his new start and now ran a business here. The place is what I love most about travelling - somewhere barely-known at home that you can stumble across and find a throbbing hive of life and culture. The excitement of finding such towns is second only to the knowledge that there are more yet to be found, although for now Liège is possibly one of my favourite discoveries.

Next on my list was Brussels, which despite several visits to Belgium I had always managed to avoid. Brussels is a town which has been squatting on my brain for a long time - I study the European Union, I like it, I am passionate about it, and of course Brussels is the place to be if Europe is your business. It seems more and more likely - for better or for worse - that Europe will be my business, and so it was with a keen awareness that I may be entering my future home town that I arrived in Brussels for the first time.

By its very nature, straddling the Walloon/Flemish no-man's-land, Brussels is a city used to multiple identities - each street has two names, and districts like Schaerbeek, Saint-Gilles and Anderlecht sit side-by-side. On top of the bilingual base sits even more complexity - much of west Brussels is densely populated with Arab immigrants, and walking near the Place de la Sainte Catherine was the closest I have ever felt to being in the Middle East. On the other side of the centre is the European quarter, where the thousands of NATO and EU employees live and work in a vast swathe of towering offices and utterly lovely townhouses. There's the bohemian quarter turned gastronomic paradise of Saint-Jacques, which has more Michelin stars than Paris, the hip SoHo-esque zone around the Place du Grand Sablon, the fashionable Rue Dansaert... naturally, I'm totally in love with the place. And I haven't even talked about the stunning Old Town!

The main criticisms of Brussels which I've come across are that it's dirty, dangerous, and - perhaps most fundamentally - that, by its very nature, Brussels is transient place; a town where people from across the globe come to work but where nobody comes to live. I read a blog where an ex-pat wrote scathingly that "Brussels has no culture of its own... there is no genius loci." Although my time there was fleeting, that certainly wasn't my impression. Brussels is many different cultures at once, which is either your thing or it isn't, and that in itself can be the mark of a place. Just look at London or New York! I've already written about France's somewhat staid monoculturalism, and Brussels is the invigorating opposite of that. I have a feeling I'll be back.

This takes me up to half way in my trip, so I'll write the rest later. The picture above was taken in the Parc du Cinquantenaire, and the triumphal arch you see stands at the head of a lovely park which was built to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Belgium's independence in 1880. Today it overlooks Brussels' Grand Mosque, and there's talk of converting the attached grand buildings into the headquarters of the European Council. Talk about an ever-changing city!