The overcast sky over Brussels is doing something generous this morning: it is holding its breath. No rain, no hard sun, just a soft, even light that makes the facades along the Rue de la Régence look like they have been freshly painted. It is Thursday, the sixth of August, my last full day in this city before I point south toward the Meuse and the Ardennes, and I have decided to spend it the way Brussels itself is spending it. Slowly.
I start at a café called My Little Cup near the Sablon, because the Sablon on a quiet August morning is a different world from the Sablon on a Saturday. The antiques stalls are gone, the crowds are gone, and the Gothic spire of Our Blessed Lady just sits there, patient, like it has all the time in the world. My coffee is three euros, which is about the going rate for a decent one at a counter here, and I take it outside and watch the city not hurry.
There is a practical reason I am savouring this. Tomorrow I take the train south, and this week of paperwork and orientation has been my real introduction to how Brussels works, not just how it looks. So today is a day for closing loops. I have my eID appointment confirmed for when I am back in September. I have a bank account and a Bancontact card. I have a SIM card that works on the metro, which is more than I can say for my first two days. And I have a shortlist of flats, one in Saint-Gilles that keeps nagging at me, so I walk that way after my coffee, just to feel the neighbourhood one more time.
The Parvis de Saint-Gilles on a Thursday morning is all bakeries and old men reading newspapers and the sound of a tram bell in the distance. I am told the Sunday market here is one of the best in the city, but today it is just the quiet rhythm of a place that is not performing for anyone. I walk up Rue Américaine past the Horta houses and stop outside the Horta Museum, which is closed, because August is August and even geniuses take holidays. I make a mental note to come back. The Art Nouveau ironwork on the balconies is worth the trip alone.
From there I take the tram toward the European Quarter, because there is something I have been meaning to do all week and keep postponing, and today is the day for it. The Parc du Cinquantenaire in the middle of August is almost empty. The triumphal arch at the end of that long, green sweep is the kind of grand civic gesture that Brussels does quietly, and I walk under it and into the Art and History Museum, which is one of those places that is so vast and so uncrowded in August that you feel like you have discovered it yourself.
The museum is a bargain, and it is the kind of bargain that makes you understand why locals are smug about their city. I spend an hour in the halls of ancient and medieval things, mostly alone, the museum echo following me from room to room. It costs me the price of a coffee and a metro ticket, and it is worth ten times that. I am not going to list every artifact; I will just say that if you are in Brussels and the crowds at the Magritte Museum feel like too much, this is where you go to breathe.
By early afternoon I am hungry, and I have been saving a particular meal for my last day. I take the tram back down to the centre, to a place called Fin de Siècle near the Saint-Géry quarter, a restaurant that has become something of an anchor for me this week. I have eaten here twice already, and I am not ashamed to say I am ordering the stoofvlees again. It is a proper Belgian beef stew, dark and rich and slow, served with frites that are crisp enough to crack. A main course here runs you about fifteen to eighteen euros, and with a beer, you are looking at a twenty-five-euro lunch that will hold you through dinner.
The beer, of course, is the other reason to be here. I order an abbey beer, something dark and quietly confident, and I drink it the way you drink a beer at the end of a long week, even when it is only Thursday. There is a reason Belgian beer culture is UNESCO-listed, and it is not just the brewing, it is the ritual. The glass is specific to the beer. The pour is specific. The patience is specific. I sit in the window and watch the street and feel, for the first time since I landed, like I am not just passing through.
After lunch I walk off the stoofvlees along the canal, which is the most underrated walk in Brussels. The city is a patchwork of nineteen communes, and you feel it here, in the way the language on the signs shifts and the architecture changes from industrial brick to tidy new builds. The canal path is empty in the August heat, just a few cyclists and a barge moving slower than I am walking. It is the kind of place where you can hear the city thinking.
I stop at a bench near the Beco bridge and do the maths on my week, because I know the numbers matter if you are thinking of doing what I did. My rent for a borrowed flat in Ixelles was, well, borrowed, but the real market is not a secret. A modest one-bedroom in Brussels averages about twelve hundred euros a month now, which is steep and getting steeper, but it is still cheaper than Paris or Amsterdam. My metro pass this week was about fifty-five euros for the month, and I have used it constantly. A single ticket, if you just need one, is around two-thirty. Coffee is three. A solid lunch is fifteen to eighteen. It is a city where you can live well on a reasonable budget, as long as you do not expect the rent to be reasonable.
I thought about the Foire du Midi all week, and tonight is the night. The big summer funfair on Boulevard du Midi is still running, right up until the twenty-third of August, and this is my last chance to see it after dark. I walk over as the light starts to go, and the sound hits you before the lights do, that particular hum of generators and music and distant screams from a hundred and thirty rides. It costs nothing to walk in, which is the best price in Brussels, and everything is pay-as-you-go.
I ride the Ferris wheel because you have to, and from the top, you can see the whole city laid out in the dusk, the Palais de Justice looming over the Marolles, the Atomium a distant silver dot in the north, and the Grand-Place hidden in the tangle of streets below. It is the kind of view that makes you remember why you wanted to live somewhere new. The ride costs a few euros, I do not remember exactly, and it is worth every centime.
I walk down through the Marolles on my way home, past the now-empty flea market square at Place du Jeu de Balle, and I think about how this old working-class quarter is the heart of everything I have learned this week. The beguinage in Bruges is calm and beautiful, and the beguinages of Flanders have their own quiet magic, but the Marolles is where Brussels actually breathes. It is messy and real and it does not care what you think of it.
The Grand-Place is fenced off tonight, and I am told the Flower Carpet arrives this weekend, a giant mosaic of begonias and dahlias laid out by volunteers, with light shows in the evening. It only happens in even years, so I have landed in the right August by accident. The square is quiet now, the fences up, the cobbles empty, and there is something poetic about seeing it before the crowds, before the carpet, before the national holiday week turns it into a stage.
I take one last look at the guildhalls in the fading light, and I think about what this city has taught me in six days. It is not a city that performs. It is a city that is. The bilingual patchwork of French and Dutch, the nineteen communes with their different personalities, the beer that demands patience and the frites that demand sauce, the grandeur of the Cinquantenaire and the grit of the Marolles, it all adds up to something that resists a simple summary.
Tomorrow, the Ardennes. Green hills, slower days, abbey beer at the source, and the Meuse winding south as the summer cools toward golden autumn. But tonight, I am exactly where I should be. The Ferris wheel lights are still turning behind me, and the city is holding its breath again, waiting for the weekend. Bonjour, Brussels. I will be back in a few weeks for that flat.
That is it for today. Go see the Flower Carpet if you are here, ride the Foire du Midi before it closes, and give yourself one slow morning with a three-euro coffee. It is the best investment in the city. Tot ziens, from Belgium.