Brussels without pissing

I had been to quite a few places in Belgium and arrived in Brussels to fly home from there next day. Hence I had very specific things I wanted to do in the time. I wanted to see the Grande Place for obvious reasons; I had missed the main art museums at Antwerp and Ghent and therefore the Ancient Art and the nineteenth century part of Modern Art were musts. I have had a bit of a thing about musical museums since I went to Ringve in Trondheim, Norway. This gave me another objective. The art nouveau of Brussels is famous and I very much wanted to see the Musée Horta. This journal deals with where I stayed and ate, what I thought of three of my planned destinations, and why I didn't get to the other.

Quick Tips:

I had no map with me. I think a pocket guide would have been worth its weight in gold.

Best Way To Get Around:

Frankly, I found the transport something of a nightmare at first when I arrived at Midi station. There is more on this in my free form entry.
If you ever crack the metro enough to use it (and it is quite efficient, it's just that they don't go in for educating foreigners on its little ways) it will probably pay to buy for five or ten trips at a time. That is, it will pay if you use them all!

I think by the time I found this hotel I might have accepted a pigsty, but it is far from that and I struck lucky.

The rooms are large and en suite with telephone and multi channel TV. It cost me €60 for the night, including a very reasonable breakfast.

The location near Place Louise makes it convenient for the metro and there are innumerable places to eat on the way. On the other hand, it took me less than 20 minutes to walk to the Grande Place.

An unusual feature was that they let me keep my luggage in my room until 2pm. (I was less delighted when I found myself waiting while the lift was undergoing routine maintenance -- my room was on the 6th floor!) Never have I spent so little time at an airport as after this!

I have chosen Dutch nomenclature this time, although I know no Dutch at all, because Brussels is a bi-lingual city. (It was the music museum at Ringve, Trondheim, Norway that got me going on museums of musical instruments.)

This really is a pearl among museums. The entry cost of €5. You can borrow headphones that work automatically wherever you see a headphone sign to give beautiful renderings of old keyboard and other instruments and all sorts of folk instruments. I don't really know what else to say. I am far from being an expert in the subject, but I do know that this is a spectacular collection and that I could have spent far longer there if my flight time had not started to loom.

Technically this is two museums, one for Art Ancien [through the 18th century] and the other for Art Moderne [19th and 20th]. However, one ticket covers both and costs €5 for adults [€3.50 for concessionaries]. In many ways, the different centuries are all independent, as they had their own days of closure and meal breaks. Fortunately for me, the rooms containing Bosch, Brueghel, and Rubens were all conveniently timed, and it was fortunate probably that the 19th-century section was closed, as I should probably have missed the Museum of Musical Instuments, which is also a knock-out.

I was sorry that I could not appreciate Memling properly, but I had no problems with Brueghel or Hieronymus Bosch in that section. In particular, I enthused over the elder Brueghel's painting of the census scene at Bethlehem. As closing time was approaching for lunch I went quickly on to see the Rubens works, and again I found no difficulty in appreciating his works and his development. I had certainly not realised the extent to which he had changed after his visit to Italy.

I preferred the idea of the musical instruments to the 20th-century artwork and left accordingly after enjoying a small self-loaded salad plate in the cafeteria.

I was in Belgium for eight nights and I booked for the first night in Leuven, second in Antwerp, third and fourth in Ghent, and the last in Brussels before I went. The first four nights went to plan. The last was a disaster, and it was nobody's fault. There are obvious lessons for anybody booking B&B by e-mail.
I started badly by getting the date wrong! My almost hostess (ah for short)then made a mistake by thinking I meant August rather than September. She corrected, I corrected, and she accepted the date as corrected. At this stage we were OK and she asked if I could give a rough time of arrival. I said I would phone from Belgium and let her know when I knew myself.
Here we go, or rather there I went, (to Belgium that is) on 8 September. It was on 8 September that an e-mail from ah should have hit my computer but of course it was off during my travels. She was telling me that she had the chance of going away but would come back in time for me if I would give her a time. Having received no reply she repeated with an urgent e-mail two days later and on getting no reply to that either she concluded that I had changed my mind and not bothered to tell her. I find that reasonable enough; people do behave like that and she doesn't know me.
Meanwhile on the day before I was due I left an answering machine message on ah's phone at about teatime and tried again at about 2200, saying I should be in Brussels at 1430 and go straight there.
Ah had of course gone away for her birthday weekend with her husband and did not get these messages.
I reached Midi station at exactly 1427 and struggled with the transport. Her e-mail had said get a tram 80 and get off at Horta. I found the tram. She told me I could buy my ticket on the tram but the driver just pointed aggressively downwards and turfed me off the bus. Someone explained that I had to go to the metro. I went to the metro which seemed as likely a way of getting to Horta as a moon rocket. No, no--what I needed was a number 80 tram. back I went and managed to get into a sort of Franglish conversation in which I learned that the ticket office was closed so I should get my ticket at the metro. I was just going off again when a number 80 appeared and a woman persuaded the driver to let me pay.
This all seemed to take hours but I was actually at the house at 1500. There were three bells, all apparently having a possible connection with ah. Let it be not said that I did not try. I am surprised nobody roped me in for a carrilon school!

I met the next door neighbour who was sure ah would return but could offer no help on what to do if she did not! I waited until 1700, thus losing my chance to go to the Horta Museum which is only open in the afternoon.
I will not go into the nightmare of my search for somewhere to stay. Eventually I arrived shattered at the Hotel Ascot.