Le weekend, pt. 3-

After a good night’s sleep, surprising because our room was on the street side and because the only covering was a comforter so it was all or nothing temperature-wise, we got up with plans of getting to the 13th-15th century belfry in the Markt Square, which is accessible via a set of 366 stairs, before the crowds set in. Our breakfast of juice, coffee, pastries, rolls, sliced meat and cheese, and fruit arrived around 8:30. We ate the pastries and planned on making a picnic lunch with the rest later on in the day.

The people across the hall from us took the opportunity of the free bathroom to spend an hour in there. Together. Not sure what the deal with that was, but I was pretty steamed about their disrespect for the unspoken rules of bathroom sharing. We ended up getting a later start than we were hoping to, but the line for the belfry wasn’t very long in the end. The spiral staircase to the top is interrupted at various points by rooms, the first of which was the treasury, which housed the town’s important documents behind a series of wrought iron gates. The gates had 9 keys that had to be opened simultaneously, and each guild had one key in its possession. I believe the documents ended up being destroyed in a fire, probably because the guy from the brewer’s guild who had the key had a tiff with the blacksmith guild guy and wouldn't be caught dead in the same room with him or something. Seems like a bad system, if you ask me.

The interesting thing about the spiral staircase was that there was a number of switchbacks in it, so that you’d be plodding along in one direction for a while and then suddenly you’d be forced to…um, spiral in the other direction. It was nearly motion sickness inducing, but fascinating nonetheless. The second stop from the top contained the works for the clock and for the carillon. The bells are operated via a giant wheel with prongs in it to activate chains that lead to the hammers for the individual bells, similar to the way a music box works. The top floor contained the bells themselves, which went through their quarter-hour routine while we were there. The view was fantastic, and someone had thoughtfully taken the time to chisel the direction and distance to various points from the tower. Brussels: 89 km. London: 230 km.

Following that we checked out the Beguinage, which at one time housed the flirtatious nuns that provided the inspiration for the song “Begin the Beguine”, although now it contains contemplatives. It was a very peaceful place, as there were signs all over it exhorting visitors to be quiet. We didn’t actually see any nuns, although we did see some random non-nun people hanging out around the buildings as if they were staying there, leading us to believe that they have really loosened the requirements for entrance into convents these days, allowing men, children and attractive women in. One thing they apparently didn’t condone was weak ankles, evidenced by the round cobblestones that were a sure recipe for disaster if you weren’t careful.

Our last stop of the day was the Church of Our Lady, which housed a Michelangelo sculpture of the virgin and child. We checked out the statue and then noted the fact that the folks who had been buried in the floor directly in front of it, surely a prestigious spot, probably had not anticipated that their tombstone inscriptions would be rubbed into oblivion by the feet of many visitors. There were also tombs of Charles the Bold and Mary of Burgundy (aka Duchess de Bourgogne, who has a delightful beer named after her that Jack had at that beery restaurant), which had lifelike effigies of the deceased in brass on top of them. They had excavated some tombs under the church which contained early frescoes. In an amazing feat of prescience, there was not only a fresco containing the image of Bobby from the show King of the Hill, but also a painting of the visitation by the three wise men, one of whom looks remarkably like Congressional Representative Eleanor Holmes Norton. Creepy. We lit a candle to a statue that resembled St. Francis, and Jack wanted me to wish for a future free of robot invasions, but instead I wished for a peaceful end to the war in Iraq.

After a beer overlooking one of the canals to prepare us for the journey home, we headed off to the train station, where we discovered much to our delight that there was a train waiting for us. Apparently the fact that it was already running 45 minutes behind schedule wasn’t a good sign. We got seats even though it was mostly full, and started up a few minutes later. The platform at Ghent was packed with people, and soon after they boarded an announcement was made that led the passengers to let out a collective groan (the announcement was made only in Dutch; they switched to Dutch and French after we entered Brussels). We could only assume that another delay was anticipated. We made an unscheduled stop at a station for about a half hour, and once we started up there was another announcement and another groan: it appeared by the lack of familiar landmarks that we were taking a different, more roundabout route to get into the city. We didn’t even know if we’d be stopping at the train station that we left from, since there are three and we were heading closer to the northern one than the southern one we started from. But everyone knows that the train system in Europe is amazing, so we made a lot of turns and ended up back where we started. Back into the heat, up the hill, and home.