April 2023
This trip took place as part of a Benelux euro-tour for my birthday, during which I visited:
Sinsheim - Karlsruhe - Ausfahrt - Luxembourg - Namur - Liège - Brussels - Dunkirk - Antwerp - Leidschendam - The Hague
Brussels greeted us with drizzle and immediately set a sad mood. We didn't expect anything good from Brussels in advance either, bloggers claimed there's only blacks and it's dirty
From the first second it became clear the city is actually fine
Buses exist
Beauty exists
Silence exists
Trams exist
Meeting of old and new exists
Guy on horse exists
Trees from Karlsruhe exist
Street signs in two languages
At the same time only tourists spoke Dutch here. Brussels - is a French-speaking city
Rent apartments in French
City oddities - everything is somehow big
Plastic disposal day, we're lucky with these
And also, EU grandpas hang out in Brussels
Can walk around and stare
Flags, concrete, glass
This - is Europe
And this - is a free EU history museum. At the entrance they ask you: "Where are you from?". Correct answer: "From Czechia", because they ask to give you a tablet in your official EU language. Russian isn't one, just FYI
Museum's fine. Another obvious Brussels minus - traffic in places
But sometimes you come across this
Green
Green things
Anyway, bloggers were right: everywhere stench, dirt, drugs and prostitution
Or not?
Actually yes, when you enter the center of the center
Here it's actually scary
People like in Prague
As usual, for silence you need to turn into random alleys
And then Brussels becomes again depraved, dirty, black
I always call such places "cs_italy", nobody gets the joke
Taxi drivers - worldwide taxi drivers
Belgian Asians, by the way, slightly more fashionable than ours
And Brussels, almost wherever you point, is cool
Here we went into some "not great" neighborhood. As I understood, there's a refugee/migrant center, there were many migrants
They looked unpleasant for one simple reason - they stood around kicking dicks. It always seems that a bunch of people with nothing to do during the day - are somehow strange
Button in two languages. Nobody understands or intends to understand the top one
"The blackest neighborhood I could find"
Came out to modern center
Straight up New York
Never been to such places yet, country boy
Impression of the day - race of two motorcyclists on a circle about 20 meters in size.
Main thing in Belgium - to not be like everyone else, so license plate font is red. From afar on roads it looks black
And it was time for us to leave
Conclusions about Brussels: whoever shits on it - is a bum themselves. The city is top, everything for life is there, London and Paris two steps away
Took the train home to the hotel in Namur. Train was late, overcrowded. I sat with a woman who decided to talk to me immediately in French. My knowledge was just enough to say I don't speak French well, but that didn't stop her. Life hack - if you're white in this region, everyone's happy to see you. In Czechia, for example, this won't work, here you specifically need good language. Common mistake of beginning emigrants - thinking people don't talk to you because your language, accent and upbringing aren't right. In reality, almost always your appearance decides and what stereotypes your appearance triggers in the local. In Benelux I'm everyone's most desired conversation partner, and people will calmly start conversations themselves, in Eastern Europe in 2023 - not always, often have to start yourself and prove you're - not an idiot, which almost always ends with the fact that you're actually - an idiot, because you don't need to prove anything to anyone.