Uccle, Brussels
4:12 pm

Ok, one more hodge-podge entry for the day. Here's a little geography lesson: the center of Brussels is shaped somewhat like a strawberry, in my opinion. (Or a diamond, or a human heart--take your pick.) Here's a map:

It's difficult to pick out details, but if you look in the bottom left-hand corner, you can kind of make out train tracks. Follow them up until they bend, and my apartment is just northeast of there. Grand'Place is really right in the center (it's too hard to make out on here). The big light blue area on the far right is Brussels Park, with the two palaces on either side. The church is located right at the bottom of the picture where the outline of the road goes just off the map. (Recall that Porte de Halle, right in that area, was a gate to the city in medieval times.)

It's hard to get a map online that's not interactive, but here's the best map of the larger area that I can find (well, of my larger area anyway, within the world of Brussels as I know it; I should know after living in Dumfries the phrase "larger area" around a city means different things to different people):

The map I showed above is all just contained within the area labeled "Grand Place" on this map. My internship is right at the intersection of the two streets northwest of where it says "Uccle" (right under the 's' in mapsoftheworld). The road that comes like an artery out of the heart-shaped Grand Place and goes east/southeast, with Etterbeek just below it, is where all of the European institutions are located. (Schuman is the name of the metro stop right in front of the Berlaymont, headquarters of the European Commission, the EU's executive branch.)

All of that said, Brussels is not a very big city. It's deceiving when you take the metro everywhere how small an area you really travel; I remember this striking me as a missionary when I drove to the center of London in almost 15 minutes when it normally took at least an hour from where I lived at the time. I realized that if London were plopped down on the high desert of southeastern Idaho without the people, I might just consider it like going from Idaho Falls to Rexburg. (Of course, that had as much to do with it being deserted on Christmas Eve as it did the additional time that the Tube required; people density adds a lot of time to travel.) When I started walking around Brussels to sightsee I realized that the metro stops were not very far apart at all. Taking the metropolitan area into account or not, Brussels is very small for the capital of a nation and a continent.

Finally, just for randomness' sake, here are some pictures of a cool modern art feature out near Etterbeek: