Life in Brussels

I wanted to bring you all up to date how my search for an apartment is going. So far, it is not going well. It has reached the point where I am considering the possibility of seducing someone, moving in with them, and then breaking up with them in January when it's time for me to go home. And when that's a possibility, you know you are pretty far gone.

While waiting, I am in transit. Very much so. It's a very nice transit lounge (extremely nice transit lounge), because my parents' friends are living it up in Brussels, and they are 10 minutes walk away from the Faculty, and there are four servants. But still, it's not a place I can call my own. And the bathroom is so space age and complicated I'm afraid to enter there.

When one is in transit, you can't really enjoy yourself. I feel like I'm in a sort of dream that I can't wake up from. I go through the motions, go to classes, try to find an apartment day after day, but any spare time (and there is a lot when you are waiting) is taken up reading, or watching TV. I'm still reading Jane Jacobs, though I picked up Nabokov's Lolita as well, and I'm about halfway through that. I'm also reading Belgium for Beginners, a small tome that kind of makes me thankful that Canadian constitutional theory, for all its many, many shortcomings, isn't quite as messed up as the Belgian constitution.

This Sunday, after spending several hours on the house computer trying to find housing and just generally surfing around, I was feeling more numb and out of it than usual. Since Brussels had decreed it a no-car day, I decided to take advantage of this fact and go for a walk.

Figures, a no-car day and I almost get run over by a bicycle. Because I crossed the street without looking both ways. Because it is a no-car day.

I decided to go walking to the place Flagey, the hip, trendy, avant-garde neighbourhood of Brussels. Apparently, no one told the construction crew that this was an extremely hip, trendy, avant-garde area, because the entire square which is the centrepiece of the area had been dug up and pulverised by construction crews. So, between the dirt, the dust in the air and the unattractive road crews in their orange blazers and hard hats, the atmosphere was enough to make anyone's latte go sour.

So, I went on a tangent (this message aside). Two blocks away from Flagey, I was in the heart of the Portuguese district. There were barbecues out in front of the cafes and the brasseries. Pretty soon, I heard the sounds of a protest. Never being someone to give up a chance to gawk at people being sprayed with tear gas, I went. I was vaguely disappointed to discover that it was not a protest, but a celebration. Sure, there was one guy with a fair trade T-shirt on, but I think that was more of a coincidence than anything else.

The paraders were celebrating the day of the dead. The centrepiece of the celebration was a 20-foot tall skeleton with bulging eyes, flanked by several people on stilts. One of the men on stilts, who seemed to be the ringmaster, sported a Dali mustache and was dressed as Death. Another was a juggler, judging by the three pins she held, but she alternated actual juggling with glasses of port as she teetered unsteadily on her stilts.

The parade also comprised several revellers dressed in trashbags colourfully spray-painted, a woman wearing a tutu and a man in a suit walking a fish. The parade was closed by a little man driving a go-cart gleefully who seemed to take a perverse pleasure in colliding with the ankles of the person in front of him. All around, there were children, on the bicycles, accompanying the group and there number swelled as the parade swept down the street.

Most of the revellers seemed to have some sort of musical instrument. In many cases it was trash lids banged together, although one of the revellers had two cowbells to a length of pipe and periodically hit them with a stick. There were a couple of tambourines, and the woman with a tutu (who seemed related to the man with the Dali mustache) was playing an oboe.

The procession wound its way down Flagey place, and ended up at the Abbey at one end of the square. The Abbey seemed the only building untouched by the renovations that were taking place along the main part of the square. The procession stopped at a man. I was unsure whether the man had been accompanying the procession or whether he had been there all along waiting for them to arrive. At any rate, he was a stocky man, with dark skin. I revised my assesment of the neighbourhood and decided that it could be Brazilian rather than Portuguese.

I couldn't see the man's face. It was covered by a large wicker mask. The mask had a grotesque face painted on it, with a mouth slit cut into the wicker. The woman in the tutu walked up to the grotesque, gesturing for quiet. Rather gradually, silence spread through the crowd, which was remarkable in itself, as the crowd, by this time, consisted mostly of children between the ages of 10 and 14, as well as some curious onlookers. The woman in the tutu reached inside the mask's mouth, and pulled out the beginning of a roll of paper. She then handed it to the person next to her, and he pulled on the paper. The paper stretched out and rolled and extended, as it passed from hand to hand, until, by my reckoning, it had reached the end of the procession about a block away. The other end remained in the grotesque's mouth. The whole effect of the experience was entirely surreal, and given my earlier feeling of lack of substantivity, I felt even more as if I were in a dream-like world.

The paper had small, neat cursive writing on it. It was in French, but the paper passed by so quickly I was unable to decipher most of it. It was something about invoking something, and the portions that were intelligible alternated with bits that were onatomatopaiaic sounds. There was also something about silence.
At this point, I tore myself away from the spectacle. It was almost dinner and it would never do to be late. I quickly took the path back to my apartment. The day had ended, and cars once again took over the streets. I kept to the sidewalks. The last thing I needed was a message about silence. I get that enough already.
Well, I don't quite know what was the purpose of that little story, Vreugde, but it was nonetheless interesting, and I hope you enjoyed it. I also rented a movie tonight called "Le cout de la vie". It was quite good and it got me thinking a bit.