EUROPEAN DIARY:IT WAS "car-free day" in Brussels on Sunday, an opportunity to push the baby's pram down the middle of a grand boulevard and a chance for kids to dart around on bikes and roller-skates.
In a city of grumpy drivers and no end of gridlock, this is one of the highlights of the year. A market opened up for the day in the local square, complete with bouncy castle. The place was packed. A friendly fellow sold champagne in plastic flutes, a saxophonist played the slithery Pink Panthertune and the karate club put on an exquisite display of black-belt wizardry.
It’s on days like this, when the whole of Brussels seems to be on the streets, that we marvel again and again at the mix of nationalities it attracts.
More than a quarter of the population are foreigners like us, leading to a certain convivial jollity when people are out and about. It may indeed be quite a task to meet Belgians, who keep to themselves mostly, but there are legions of other people around from anywhere you might think of.
You’d never think that Belgium itself was in the grip of a political crisis so profound that the country has been without a proper government for 17 months. This scarcely registers at all.
Neither do the upheavals in the euro zone cast much of a pall. In this most “European” of cities, the gruelling campaign to save the single currency seems to make no more than a distant din from a faraway battlefield.
Remember, the economic crisis hit Belgium a little less harshly than other countries.
“In the European context, employment seems to have been left relatively untouched by the crisis,” says the Belgian Economic Review, which is published by the country’s central bank.
By the end of last year, employment was 1 per cent higher than it was before the eruption of the crisis in 2008.
Thus life goes on as normal. A key spur here is the fact that Brussels is home to so many EU institutions. This means the city is flooded with thousands of well- paid bureaucrats, diplomats and people working in the spin-off sectors that feed on the political whirligig. To say this is good for business is obvious.
Yet there is more to Brussels than the European dimension. Some 17 per cent of the population is Muslim and there’s any number of other groups. The woman to our left is Congolese, there’s a Chilean family to the right and Russians to the right of them. There are also Americans everywhere.
You’d never know what you’d hear or see. I recall the soccer World Cup last year. As those long, hot summer days stretched into the evening, I would walk home from work via a residential enclave. From a corner bar at match time would come the sound of yells and cheers. No matter who was playing, there always seemed to some guy smoking just outside the door decked out in the jersey du jour.
One night a convoy of fast cars careered by our house, horns blaring. “What’s that?” my elder lad asked. “It’s the Germans. They just beat the English 4-1. It’s a big deal, for more reasons than one.”
A few days later when the insistent thrum of drumbeats filled the air for hours, he asked the same question. “That’s the Brazilians. They’re about to play the Dutch.”
It was the same all the time. When the Spaniards eventually won, they didn’t stop speeding around the place for days, fellows hanging dangerously from the windows as their flags fluttered.
In a melting pot, however, there is a certain transience. People seem to come and go with astonishing speed. When we arrived almost two years ago, the first party we went to was to mark the departure of new friends who just happened to be en route to Rome.
In the past few weeks, four journalistic colleagues have left to take up new assignments. Another two have disclosed that they too will soon move on. During the summer, two families we came to know well left within a couple of months. They lived just across the road. We miss them.
Looking at a photograph of his class taken only in June, my boy remarks that two friends have already left the school.
That’s the way Brussels is. When people arrive, they tend to settle rather quickly. Some who come stay forever, others make it their own for just a while.
A Spanish pal, who hankers after the searing heat of his homeland, tells of his delight when he discovered a four-way junction with a cafe on each corner. If the sky is blue on Saturdays, he spends the whole day moving his pile of newspapers from cafe to cafe to keep directly in the sunlight.
He has this down to a fine art. It’s as near as Brussels gets to home.
