Belgium

The Waffles trotted out to the Africa Museum in Tervuren recently. It is largely unchanged since opening in 1910 and it now serves the double function of a colonial museum and a museum of colonialism. It tells you with a straight face how the Belgians saved the Congolese from the slave traders.  It also says that when the museum opened a number of live Africans were imported and put wandering around the grounds for public inspection. It’Â’s a bizarre spot.  It also boasts a number of stuffed animals including an elephant and a giraffe which the Princess took a real shine to. I thought she might be distressed by the tableau vivant showing a number of leopards chewing on an antelope type thingy but I neednÂ’t have worried. This is the child who says “Hello Mr. Quack Quack” when we buy duck in the supermarket; she is devoid of sentiment.

And while I am speaking of museums, I would like to touch on the difficulty of access for handicapped persons.  I know all about this, because when you have a child, or indeed children, in a buggy, steps are much more challenging. I noticed that in the Africa Museum there is a sign on the double doors facing the road, saying “ring here for handicapped access”. As I watched the other day, the vast double doors swung open and a lady in a wheelchair and her husband emerged blinking in the sunlight. I can’t feel that this is the handiest kind of entrance for the wheelchair user. In the Musée des Beaux Arts in town, the handicapped entrance is much less grand and, apparently more practical, just a glass sliding door on to the street. The only problem is that it is routinely locked and you must ring for admittance and wait.

The Palais des Beaux Arts (or Bozar as, in my view, it rather affectedly likes to be known – I read an interview with the director where he said that he was doing all sorts of radical things including the name change to put it on the map and you could now get in a taxi at the airport and ask to go to Bozar and be taken straight there; frankly, I have my doubts) is built on a hill. You will always end up at the Rue Royale entrance when the exhibition is down at the Rue Ravenstein end. I appreciate that the site presented Mr.
Horta with certain challenges but he seems to have decided to make a virtue out of necessity and built the whole place around steps. I don’Â’t think thereÂ’’s a lift either. The staff are very helpful and always offer to assist in buggy lifting and, one assumes, that, if there were a lift, they might have chosen to direct one to it. In a wheelchair? Forget it, I advise. On the plus side the staff are really lovely and they not only carried my buggy around a large part of the Palais Stoclet exhibition but also a) let me use (free!) the phone in reception when I asked whether there was a public
phone I could use (yes, I am the last person in Europe without a mobile) and b) cheerfully and speedily served myself and the Princess with tap water in the rather swish café. I suppose wheelchair users could always just wheel into the café and have a nice glass of water.

My favourite inaccessible location though is the museum
in the Parc Cinquentenaire. Access to this museum is via a long flight of steep steps which, even for the able bodied, present considerable difficulties, if not in peak physical condition. The wheelchair user is directed to a door beside the steps (or at least was, I must concede, I havenÂ’’t been there in about a year). When you ring, you wait. You are then brought by an attendant through a number of dirty corridors past numerous dusty and apparently disused rooms and up in a service lift to the museum proper which is, to be fair, well worth your exertions in getting in. Do you think that the museums here just donÂ’’t want children and wheelchair users to visit? Why would anyone object to small children in a museum, no, really?

I got to write for the Bulletin. My sister asked whether I was abandoning the blog. We discussed as follows:

Me: No, I’m going to post in both places.
Her: The same text in both places?
Me: Yup.
Her: Excellent, that’s the start of syndication where the real money is.

Smoky

Charles Emmanuel, the Baroness’Â’s [our landlady is a Baroness, Belgium abounds in minor aristocracy] current agent on earth, came to install a smoke alarm for us the other day. I had never met him before but when a dashing man in his late 20s wearing a fedora hat and black polo neck while smoking a pipe turned up on the doorstep, I immediately guessed his identity. Charles Emmanuel is, in fact, French not Belgian and was anxious to assure me that his stint as the landlady’Â’s agent was to be brief as he would shortly be going back to Africa. I think he felt that doing the bidding of the Baroness was somewhat beneath him. I said that the Baroness would be sorry to lose another agent and he said, “Oh I havenÂ’’t told her yet”.” I began to warm to him; he was clearly as indiscreet as I am. You will recall that the Baroness and her husband are, to the lasting regret of her tenants, divorced (heÂ’’s the handy one). I asked him whether there was any chance of a reunion. Apparently not, underneath the civil front which their tenants see, the
pair are at daggers drawn.

And while I’Â’m on the subject of Belgian aristocracy (broadly), I feel it worthy of mention that Mr. Waffle’Â’s former bossÂ’’s secretary was a Baroness and she regarded him and his colleagues with the greatest disdain. We met her once in the park and she entirely ignored Mr. Waffle’Â’s civil greeting. He was elated. “Why?” He said enthusiastically that he would now be able to use a sentence which hadnÂ’t been in common currency since the century before last: “The Baroness cut me in the park”.

And, finally, does anyone else watch Place Royale? Look, I come from a republic, I get a kick out of seeing programmes
about monarchies and reflecting that that, at least, is one thing we donÂ’t have to pay for in Ireland – “Point de Vue” anyone? Anyhow, I notice that as a sign of the esteem in which the KingÂ’’s third child Prince Laurent is held by the programme (which remember is largely devoted to Belgian royalty) they sent a trainee to cover his opening of something in a Brussels suburb. Fabulous stuff.

Friar Tuck
on 13 March 2006 at 17:56

Even if I did share it, it would not belong in this post. Doubly sorry.

belgianwaffle on 14 March 2006 at 09:07

FT, yes, you need to get your own blog up and running. What was that about nagging…