Free Neither Here Nor There by Bill Bryson

which other cities would have inserted a golden cathedral or baroque town hall, sat a parking lot and gas station. Now both of those have been torn down and some new brick buildings – not brilliant architecturally, but certainly an improvement on the gas station – have been erected in their place, and I was assured again and again by locals that the city government has at last recognized its slack attitude towards development and begun to insist on buildings of some architectural distinction, but the evidence of this so far is rather less than overwhelming.
    The one corner of charm in the city is a warren of narrow, pedestrian-only streets behind the Grand-Place called, with a mildly pathetic dash of hyperbole, the Sacred Isle. Here the little lanes and passageways are packed with restaurants and crowds of people wandering around in the happy state of deciding where to eat, nosing around the ice barrows of lobsters, mussels and crayfish that stand outside each establishment. Every doorway issues a warm draught of grilled aromas and every window reveals crowds of people enjoying themselves at almost any hour of the day or night. It is remorselessly picturesque and appealing, and it has been like this since the Middle Ages, and yet even this lovable, clubby little neighbourhood came within an ace of being bulldozed in the 1960s. Wherever you go in Europe, you find yourself wondering what sort of brain-wasting disease it was that affected developers and architects in the 1960s and 70s, but nowhere is this sensation stronger than in Brussels.
    Yet Brussels has its virtues. It’s the friendliest big city in Europe (which may or may not have something to do with the fact that a quarter of its residents come from abroad), it has a couple of good museums, the oldest shopping arcade in Europe, the small but pleasurable Galeries St-Hubert, lots of terrific bars and the most wonderful restaurants. Eating out is the national sport in Belgium, and Brussels alone has 1,500 restaurants, twenty-three of them carrying Michelin rosettes. You can eat incredibly well there for less than almost anywhere else on the continent. I dined in the Sacred Isle every night, always trying a new restaurant and always achieving the gustatory equivalent of a multiple orgasm. The restaurants are almost always tiny – to reach a table at the back you have to all but climb over half a dozen diners – and the tables are squeezed so tightly together that you cannot cut your steak without poking your neighbour in the cheek with an elbow or dragging your sleeve through his sauce Béarnaise, but in an odd way that’s part of the enjoyment. You find that you are effectively dining with the people next to you, sharing bread rolls and little pleasantries. This is a novel pleasure for the lone traveller, who usually gets put at the darkest table, next to the gents, and spends his meal watching a procession of strangers pulling up their flies and giving their hands a shake as they pass.
    After dinner each night I would go for a necessarily aimless stroll – there is nothing much to aim for – but, like most cities, Brussels is always better at night. I walked one evening up to the massive Palais de Justice, which broods on a small eminence overlooking the old town and looks like an American state capitol building that has been taking steroids. It is absolutely enormous – it covers 280,000 square feet and was the largest building constructed anywhere in the world in the nineteenth century – but the only truly memorable thing about it is its bulk. Another evening, I walked out to the headquarters of the EEC. In a city of buildings so ugly they take your breath away, the headquarters of the EEC at Rond Point Schuman manages to stand out. It was only six o’clock, but there wasn’t a soul about, not a single person working late, which made me think of the old joke: Question: How many people work in the European Commission? Answer: About a third of them. You