Brussels

Belgians seemed to be a quirky old lot; I liked them and their capital city. But as I wandered about today, I noticed a particularly odd theme cropping up repeatedly.

It started when I passed a tiny statue of a dog pissing up against a lamppost. Bizarre, I thought, but perhaps not when compared to some of the other art dotted around the city. A little later on, I then passed a public urinal which had been installed against – of all things – the wall of a church. My utter lack of respect for organised religion is by no means a secret, but even I thought this was going a bit far. But when considered along with the dog statue and some of the aromas of various corners of the train station I had arrived into yesterday, I could see a pattern forming, piss by piss.

Of course, in Brussels the icing on the urinal trough cake goes to the world famous little pee man, better known as  Manneken Pis. The little bronze tyke has been constantly evacuating into a pool in central Brussels for centuries (the original statue was erected as early as 1388). I hadn’t expected him to be so, er, small; at less than two foot tall and viewed from the back of a crowd of excited, even giggling tourists, I didn’t linger, instead taking more of an interest in the people browsing the Manneken Pis t-shirts on sale nearby, fascinated by what kind of person would desire to purchase clothing imprinted with an image of an incontinent infant.

I strolled onwards on the tourist trail to the Grand Place, an expansive square lined with  beautifully detailed UNESCO-protected buildings and dominated by the Town Hall’s tower. Later on, another more random street threw up a nice surprise in the form of a  comic painting on the side of a house, which luckily had nothing to do with urine apart from the fact it was painted by a chap called Frank Pe. I took my time admiring it by taking a pew in the window of the pub opposite and sipping on a Belgian beer new to me, the deliciously sour and cider-like gueze.

I’d come to my last night on the road for this leg of my journey. Having had enough of bunk beds for a lifetime, and with an early start to catch the Eurostar tomorrow, I had decided to splash out with a night at the Hilton. I put on my best creased shirt, shaved off the more haphazard parts of my beard and turned up to check-in with all of the air of self-importance I could muster. As expected with a last-minute deal, they assigned me a plush broom-cupboard, but it was warm, comfy and had BBC World, which in hotel room terms is about all I need.

That and a toilet, of course.