Which speeds along language learning if you know one or the other. And, having some French, it means I was picking up some limited Flemish.
On our first morning, I got up early, headed for the metro to learn the subway system and, then, wander about the city. Lots of laws, I found out, against photographing people in public without their permission...a whole different approach to the boundaries between public and private.
But in rounding some corners I caught sight of a mammoth building on a high level of the city...and, then, and public elevator which brings people up and down between these levels.
So I took the elevator up. Lots of police around the building...and no name plate outside...looked fairly forbidding...immense and forbidding, but I went up to one of the policemen and asked, in somewhat halting French, what this was. He said "le palais de justice"...the Palace of Justice. He pointed to an entryway for the public, saying that I had to go through security. Security looked a lot better than the airport kind, so I went in.
I was totally blown away. I had never been in such a colossal interior space (well, maybe, the old Pennsylvania Station in New York that was patterned on the Baths of Caracalla before it was torn down to build Madison Square Garden...but that was decades ago). Designed, I guess, to make us feel so small amid the huge columns and dome that seemed miles away above our heads.
I guess I had always thought of justice as being more small scale. Then I saw it had been built by King Leopold II, the master of the Congo which was his "private" land. The funds to build this must have come from his enslavement and rape of that African country (it was finally "taken away" from him by the Belgian government owing to the tremendous abuse of the Congolese people).
So justice? Seemed such an irony.
The Palais is ranked as the largest building constructed in the world during the 19th century. The style is classified as "Assyrian-Babylonian", that is, ancient Iraq. The exterior is surrounded by scaffolding...it has been being renovated for the past 15 years and a current controversy is that the scaffolding has deteriorated and needs to be renovated. And it is unclear who is going to pay for that.
At any rate, it is interesting how when you are not seeing all the "official tourist sites," you can come across places without anticipation...allowing you to experience the surprise and sometimes astonishment of discovery.
Location:On the train to Hamburg
