Reading this week:

• Stories from Sierra Leone by Farid Raymond Anthony

Ha! You thought our vacation was over but SIKE! My super amazing wife and I decided to spend a day (like 1.5 days) in Brussels, Belgium. That was great.

I of course got to go that one other time, but my super amazing wife hadn’t been, so a) I got to act like I was a big expert on Brussels and b) she picked how we were going to spend the day. I hinted that I would be perfectly happy to visit the Royal Museum for Central Africa again, you know, if she wanted to see all the stuff as well, but alas, she was much too kind and allowed us to go elsewhere since I had already been to the museum. But someday man I will spend more time in those archives.

Arriving in the Brussels airport after a couple short hops in various airplanes, we hauled our mass of luggage onto the train and headed downtown. We proceeded to be those obnoxious tourists hauling our wheeled suitcases over cobblestone streets looking for the place we were staying, but survived intact. We then spent the afternoon and early evening wandering around Brussels seeing exactly how many different chocolate shops we could visit, and eventually fortified ourselves with the obligatory waffles. The serious museum-going would happen the next day.

The first of these serious museums was the Fashion & Lace Museum. It was smaller than I expected and seemed to be split into two parts: fashion, and lace. We did the fashion bit first. When we visited it was entirely an exhibit (the first) on the fashion designer Jules François Crahay. That was good. His stuff wouldn’t exactly fit my silhouette but I liked it a lot. Looking back through the photos he seemed to have a particular shape he favored but definitely experimented over the long course of his career. He also seemed to be a fan of playing around with different textiles. Maybe he tended to default to black and white (which designer doesn’t) but he explored some wild colors and patterns, and then even in black and white multiple layers could give a great effect.

After the fashion part we then descended back down to ground level and entered the lace room. This was not so easy to navigate for us (in the figurative sense) because nothing was in English but it was impressive even without explanation. The Shetland lace is amazing for being knitted and so fine, but this stuff focuses on fine-ness to the nth degree. They had one video on loop of someone putting together lace with dozens of little bobbins and pins and I can’t fathom how you even keep all that straight. They had examples on display from at least the 18^th century and just imagine trying to do that without even particularly good lighting.

Textile arts out of the way, it was now time for Brussels’ other claim to fame: chocolate. Choco Story Brussels is a trip man. It is clearly set up for tourists. Like the admission fee is tourist prices and the first few rooms has that particular Disney-fied hokeyness to it. It tells the story of chocolate, and particularly chocolate’s introduction to Europe and the industry that took off there (even more specifically in Brussels). I do not recall them being too particularly interested in say colonialism or exploitative labor practices. On the labor front though they do have live demonstrations of praline-making. It was only here that my super amazing wife and I learned that a praline was specifically a soft filling (called the praliné) coated in chocolate. We had thought it was just a fancy word for a chocolate.

But back to the weirdest aspect of the museum. As you wind your way upstairs you discover that the museum has to have what is one of the most extensive collections of chocolate-related artifacts anywhere? It was astounding and somehow very much not the focus of the museum? Like okay sure they had them on display, cabinets and cabinets of ancient Mayan and Aztec (and even more ancient!) chocolate-related vessels, but they are all just sorta off to the side? In the more European section you pass entire hallways lined floor-to-ceiling with chocolate pots, which I didn’t even know was a thing? There has got to be just gobs of scholarship possible at this museum and instead they got mannequins harvesting fake cacao pods. They do give you some chocolate though, that’s nice.

Which then finally brings us to the Magritte Museum. Last time I was in Brussels I tried and failed to go, but armed with much more knowledge about how the museum works this time everything went perfectly smoothly. It was nice! Magritte had some good stuff of course. In the museum you wind your way up through a history of his works, and they also occasionally paired his work with contemporary art and I suppose that was an interesting juxtaposition. Like everyone else I was entranced when Magritte uses sky-filled negative space, though now I particularly want to put a painting of a slice of pie underneath a glass cake stand, for real.

An um yeah that was it. Besides all the museums we spent the time in Brussels getting dinner with a friend of ours and checking out places like Tropismes and generally just having a blast getting our feet very tired walking around a European city. We are so lucky to live a life that lets us do that. But all good things have to take a bit of a pause at least, and so the next morning we left for the airport bright and early, our vacation finally over. I can’t wait for next time.