Yesterday was our last full day in Brussels. We spent the day down in the city center, under a massive triumphal arch. It was ordered by King Leopold II in 1880 to commemorate Belgium's 50th anniversary of independence. Apparently what was built was crap, so the King had it demolished right after the celebration and work begun on a new one. This second arch had one goal- be bigger than Paris' Arc de Triomph. Finally completed in 1905, it succeeded in that regard. It definitely is an imposing sight from a long ways around.
Built around the arch were four massive exhibit halls. One of these was designated for Belgium's military history museum, which was our first destination of the morning. It is not laid out like any museum I have been to before. Our tour guide, Dirk, said Belgian tradition was to display every last artifact they have in public view, so the museum was row after row of glass cases. There were enough muskets, bayonets, canteens and medals there to supply an army today. The only thing saving the exhibition from becoming too overwhelming was the fact that Belgium had less than a century of existence when the museum was opened in 1905.
Adjacent was another wing featuring Belgium in World War I. We were unable to see this section as it is currently closed for renovations. It will re-open later this summer to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the start of the Great War. So we skipped ahead to their newest section, a more familiar Smithsonian-style presentation on World War II. This was very well done, and included a lot of important relics from the war to help tell the story. In addition, Dirk (a retired Air Force officer) led us the whole way, stopping to set the stage and provide detailed information.
Finally, we went into one more wing and saw an aerial collection to rival the Smithsonian Air & Space museum. Devoted to the cold war, the collection includes everything from an F-16 to French and German aircraft, and a Russian Mig-23 and Hind attack chopper. The Mig had an interesting story. At some point in the late 1980s a Russian fighter plane malfunctioned and lost engines. The pilot was ejected, but the plane actually re-stabilized after he was out, and resumed bearing and heading west over Germany. Eventually it reached Belgian airspace, and fighters were sent up to intercept it. Finding no pilot in the cockpit, the air force did not know what to do. There was no protocol for how to react to an unoccupied plane! They ended up doing nothing, and sadly the plane crashed on a house in a Belgian town, killing a girl. It was the only "attack" on Belgium during the cold war, and after the fall of the Soviet Union the Ukraine government offered the Mig that is now on display in the museum as a gift to the people of Belgium in response to that incident.
One other interesting story from the museum that I did not know about related to the V2 rockets that Germany as launching at London near the end of WWII. These rockets were wildly inaccurate, but the point of them was to simply rain destruction wherever they landed, and they were nigh on impossible to stop. The explosion they provided was so large that any aircraft close enough to shoot them down ended up enveloped in the blast. Pilots began to get creative, and took to flying alongside the bombs and using the wings of their aircraft to nudge the wings on the rocket to send it off course. This worked for awhile, until the Germans found out and began putting trigger devices on the wings. Then the airplanes would try to fly directly ahead of the rockets and create enough turbulence through maneuvering to again knock them off course. The real breakthrough came in the form of proximity missiles, which the United States developed near the end of the war (I did not know about this), so that ground anti-air guns could shoot at the V2 and only need to come close, rather than score a direct hit. By the end of the war, the American units put in charge of defending Belgium were experience a 100% intercept rate against these attacks.
By early afternoon everyone but me had had just about enough history. So we took a little break for lunch, and everyone scattered to one of the few food places in the neighborhood. I stopped at a little place that has pre-made refrigerated food, and found Sasha and Barb already inside. You pick out what you want from the cooler, then take it home with you or stay there and they will heat it up and serve it to you in a small dining area in the back. So I was able to have some spaghetti for lunch for only a couple Euros.
After lunch we went back to the Arch. In the exhibition hall across the way from the military history museum is Autoworld, a museum devoted to all things cars. This was less interesting to me, but more up the alley of much of the rest of our group. We only spent an hour here, but there were a few neat sights and some cool historic vehicles on display.
Afterwards we headed back to our neighborhood with the rest of the evening free. We got off the subway near a market district so everyone who wanted to could buy some chocolates. I wandered around trying to find an H&M that my phone insisted was somewhere it wasn't, when I stumbled upon a used bookstore connected to an antique map store. I popped in and perused the collection for awhile. Eventually the old man running the place saw I was looking rather seriously, and came to help. I ended up picking up a map of Belgium and Holland from the early 19th century, after the Netherlands had gained their independence but before Belgium got hers (she belonged to the Dutch for those 15 years).
I was going to slum it on my own back at the hotel, but one of the girls came and asked me to go out with their group. So I joined about 6 others and we went to a little Italian cafe not far from the hotel. I had lasagna for dinner, and just realized now that means I had Italian twice in one day. After returning to relax for a little bit, I joined Sasha and Barb and about a third of the students in another trek down to the town hall to look at everything lit up once more (many of them hadn't been down at night yet). And that more or less ended our Brussels experience.
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