Brussels is a city that subsists on eurocrats. This is ABC-level wisdom that almost everyone knows. But how does Brussels "eat" its guests? If you are forced to linger in this city and rent an apartment there, you will encounter many things that do not work but cost a fabulous amount of money. If you have ended up in the thoroughly bourgeois Woluwe district, avoid walking on the pavements covered in wobbly tiles on wet and rainy days, otherwise you will splash yourself from head to toe with the dirty slush that has gathered in the seemingly never-swept streets of this city. If you also happen to trip, you will slide along the pavement amidst fresh dog excrement, which is found at every turn. And do not kick the empty packaging lying about nearby.

 

Perhaps it would be better to hop on the metro and head to the exceptionally dismal European Quarter, wilting in the boring shadow of depressingly gargantuan architecture. After boarding the metro, resist the temptation to give a penny to the master of cacophonous noise who is growling at a bayan accordion pulled from a rubbish bin. He may understand it not as a gesture to go away, but as an invitation from you to make even more noise. Upon surfacing again at Schuman station, watch out for people shoving each other and ready to knock you off your feet with, oh, how politely elegant, the eternal battle cry on their lips: “par-don.” Alternatively, if you get off at Maalbeek station, watch out for the dirty liquid that always drips on your head when passing under the railway overpass before you turn onto the street leading towards the European Parliament. At the entrance to the European Parliament from the Place du Luxembourg side, you will be pounced on by a Gypsy woman on duty who begs there and rattles her tin of coins. The Belgian police do not see this problem and social services do not notice it either; it almost seems that the Belgian authorities and the Romanian mafia have some mutual agreement.

 

Inside the Parliament building, however, there are hundreds of idle security guards whose only task seems to be shooing eurocrats and their visitors through the narrow entrance and exit barriers. Let’s say you have a bicycle and want to go to the cinema on UGC Anspach Boulevard, near the De Brouckere metro station? By no means leave your bicycle on the street, not even if locked and chained. It will be stolen within minutes, just like the author of these lines found out. You have no other means of transport because all public transport is on strike for the umpteenth time this year? It is your own fault for being able to save up money for a bicycle. Monsieur or madame, if you still feel an urge to dive into the adventures of Brussels, go to Café Central with its brilliantly Soviet interior and rough clientele, next to the Chinatown near the Bourse. You can also throw yourself into orgies of greedy consumption, jostling through the crowd that prevails on the shopping street Rue Neuve. Right there by the shabby La Monnaie Opera you will also find the Central Library, but at the other corner of Place de la Monnaie, after passing the clouds of smoke in the hall and the crowds of immigrants, you will arrive at a quite respectable café called Atejpoda brille, in French – La Lunette. But whether you go to have a drink there or at the beer pub Pie pēkšņās nāves, La Mort Subitte, or even Zelta laivā, La Chaloupe d’Or, on the famous tourist landmark Grand Place, which in Latvian could be called Lielais laukums, do not expect the waffles to be crispy like at home; here they are thick and half-raw like pancakes and are heated in a microwave oven. You don’t eat waffles with your beer, but all sorts of savoury snacks? Fine, order them – you will most likely be brought haphazardly chopped products that resemble offal sausage and Russian cheese, but are proudly called: degustation, i.e., "tasting"...

 

Perhaps you would like to drop by the local municipality to obtain a certificate, say, about your place of residence? For example, in the gigantic St. Lambert Woluwe district town hall in a Soviet-style interior with scruffy wood panelling, you will wait in line for an hour for the certificate because it is the only window that has a queue. Bored, you will read the, oh, how Latvian notice on the wall: “We ask visitors to be patient, as service may be delayed due to us having a new computer programme...” If you wait to the end, you might wonder what on earth they have written on that paper... You asked about your place of residence, but it is also written there that you were born in the USSR. In what USSR, surely it is Latvia, you try to explain to the officials; the Soviet Union doesn’t exist, and the Russian occupation in Latvia was never legal. You know, it is just like with Congo, the officials will explain to you, the country changed its name and the residents have problems.

 

Only if you had been born after 31 December 1991, yes, only then could we calmly write in your document that you were born in Latvia... But if you, patient and hopefully compassionate reader, wanted to rent a dwelling in Brussels, a beautiful second-floor apartment in a bourgeois Brussels district will not guarantee peaceful rest and all amenities, as might be written in the advertisement. You will accidentally find out that the tenants in your newly rented apartment have changed every couple of months, but you will not have time to be surprised by this fact, because the half-mad official, your neighbour, will have already started a real harassment campaign to force you to terminate the lease early and pay a penalty to the landlord in the amount of several months' rent – a sum reaching thousands of euros. In the middle of the night, he will try to break down your apartment door, at seven in the morning half-naked he will chase you down the street, threatening revenge for you getting up so early, he will send a written complaint to your workplace about you not laying carpets on the floor in the apartment, etc., etc. You will naively turn to the police, but the police will tell you: we cannot do anything until you have been harmed, pay for insurance and get along with your neighbours!

 

Let’s assume that you have finally found shelter and do not have to wander, like the author of these lines in the hot and stifling August of 2003, through streets where rubbish bags pile up, to find a hotel room on a noisy, criminal street for almost 100 euros a night. The utility company makes you pay for water in advance, perhaps twice as much as the previous tenant, and you are interest-free lending to this dodgy firm. When your water supply goes wrong, the plumber, before even ruthlessly charging for the work, coolly bills you for seventy euros just for "travel"... from the next block! Do Brussels French, just like Russians, not have one rate for their own and another for foreigners? If there are already so many similarities, why wouldn't it be the same in this matter? Next time you will be in a hurry to look for the mythical Polish plumber slandered by Western populists, who will do everything twice as well, three times cheaper and four times faster. And you don’t have to wait long for the next cataclysm. You suddenly have no hot water in an apartment for which you pay the landlord five hundred lats a month in rent alone. The gas boiler in your bathroom whistles, hisses, wheezes and every now and then gasps, but does not heat the water. You are already guessing what the problem is? Has the tap become clogged with sand, rust and other muck from the rusty pipes? Has limescale from the hard water calcified everything? There is a high probability that it is all these woes put together, and you are paying hundreds again. The lack of quality, dizzying expense (no value for money) and cheekiness in the attitude towards foreigners is not a Belgian monopoly; further south – in Italy – it is even more expensive, more inconvenient, more fraudulent and ruder.

 

The European Union is, in this respect, not so very different from the Soviet Union. Brussels really has nothing to fear from Turkey’s accession to Europe, because it has long since become an oriental bazaar where empty chatter replaces both work and humanity, not to mention European decency and order. It unites the eternally irreconcilable opposites: the "Hanseatic genius" of Northern Europe and the Asian caprices of the Mediterranean region, and in the middle Asterix from his comic book with all the Gallic barbarians of Brussels and with the advertised little boy who is peeing on all the tourists at a street corner in the old town and thinks he is extremely witty. “Are you a Slav? Yes, yes, you are definitely a Slav, you have such a barbarian accent!” – instead of thanks, a resident of a Belgian province chirps at me, to whom I have shown the detour to Namur while a Kurdish picket against human rights violations in Turkey is taking place on Schuman Square and several Brussels streets are therefore closed to traffic. On parting, the eccentric lady adds: “I was in Poland just this summer, hospitality, low prices and besides – what excellent plumbers!” Maybe you are not a slave to household chores because you just want to have fun in Brussels?

 

I cannot recommend anything emptier and more tasteless than the Brussels Atomium... I will probably have escaped to some small town myself to spend the weekend in a nicer environment and a pleasant, human atmosphere. Like most Brussels residents who have the opportunity, I will probably have gone on a further holiday trip away from the overly polluted city, anywhere, just away from something as terrible as Brussels. Baudelaire’s *Paris Spleen* has lines about having to flee this world, if only to the Baltic end of it, that is exactly what is written there. But Baudelaire has other prose works too, one of them is called – *Poor Belgium*...
Article first published in the March 2006 issue of the magazine "Rīgas Laiks"