jupilation

Torn between a collage of this, a tourist-couple looking at a map just down from a new development on Mont des Artes apparently just called "Square" (and whose posters therefore make it all sound a little bit like the "PLACE" multimedia resource centre depicted in the Nathan Barley television depiction), a giant traffic-cone sculpture in a small park at the top of the lower town and the view from the hotel of the extreme dilapidation and partial pre-demolition collapse of the buildings at the rear of the same block in contrast to the shiny newness of some form of large office-thing rising behind them. Though forewarned about the mankiness of the area around gare du midi it is very noticeable on the ground even given the tendency for train stations to be somewhat manky by default; warnings about not wandering around there much at night were not really necessary. There were a few other newish-looking developments dotted around the place and a bit of construction a little further out but evidently plenty of deprived streets surrounding the station, fancy (relatively) new Eurostar terminal or no. That bit did seem a little bit kept-apart from the main bit of station and it may not be necessary for any shiny people arriving for important eurobusiness in the expensive bits of the city requiring onward travel from the international terminal to pass anywhere near the scaffy bits of the station at all.

Most of the stations seen over here seem to follow what seems to be a standardish European (at least, not frequently visible in the UK where the trains are usually at ground level) plan of trains on the uppermost level travelling perpindicularly to the main axis of the concourse underneath, with optonal levels of underground local transport system beneath. This was a set of steps up from the underground platform to the main concourse and smelt of a combination of wee and Dettol. From a distance I thought that the two cans were of Jupiler, a brand which appears to be the skanky Tennent's equivalent of Belgium and which is available from vending machines in popular locations including train station platforms. These once contained the similarly-packaged but even cheaper-looking caraPils.

Not potentially featured in a collage was the Atomium, which we popped to in the evening whilst we had all-day travelpasses for the integrated transport system (fine, apart from the usual station mankiness). Although illuminated at night it was mizzling a bit too hard and multi-directionally to be able to get a long-exposure with an up-tilted camera and though there were some sheltered bits in the buildings at the bottom they were a bit to close to get the whole structure in shot. Nicky was starting to get a bit cold and damp so I didn't trot to the other end of the large illuminated boulevard at the end of which the structure sits for a better view of the whole thing. Even though it was shut it was still a slight bonus as I'd written off popping to visit it when it was open partly because it was a wee bit out of the way and partly because it seemed to carry an unstated risk of being a bit child-biased, located as it is so close to the BruPark's indignity of a park filled with scale replicas of various European Buildings Of Note and a cinema which seemed to have a family feel to most of the films on show.

Also not featured though it was very good are any of the instruments in the Musée des Instruments Musiques, a museum filled with musical instruments around which one wanders wearing IR headphones which play samples of the type of instrument in the case one is standing nearby (with only a few glitches or errors). From the premise I thought it was going to have a sound per instrument so that one could listen to and appreciate the difference between a koto and shamisen or a cor Anglais and oboe but they were generally clumped together in cases by family or age (though the bagpipe section thankfully only featured older and less strident bagpipes than those in over-use today) with occasional extras such as displays showing the constructions or workings of instruments (though not of the accordian/melodeon/concertina family which I'd liked to have seen) as well as a bit about the histories of the instruments in their various places of origin, though by the middle of the afternoon most copies of these info-sheets in most languages were missing from the rack. Definitely worth the entrance fee: after looking at everything specifically it was fun to just bumble randomly around each floor getting a quick burst of different music and instrument every few steps, stopping when something particularly intriguing was heard.

Earlier than that we went to a small contemporary art gallery not far from the hotel we had to check out of at noon before travelling to the hotel nearer the station whence the airport shuttlebus departed. There seemed to be a city-wide Chinese art thing happening but tickets were only applicable to each location, this one containing mostly sculptythings and mixed-media wall-hanging things by female artists. Some not bad stuff, but although the gallery turned out to be larger than it looked from the outside the warehouse-sized main space was only sparsely-filled, though with a good thing.