Thurs 27th Nov.

Paul has a business meeting today, so I head off on my own. My aims are to look at a couple of possible restaurants for tea, go to the Museum of Modern Art, see the Grande Place, and check out a potential lunch eatery. Oh yes, and to find a bank machine, as I have no money! And so I wander. Lovely areas of cobbled streets, interesting shops, NO BANKS. And so I keep on wandering. I find one of the restaurants from my list, which describes it as not 100% vegetarian. It looks interesting, but the veggie food isn’t vegan, so that won’t do this time. I reach the Grande Place, which is a stunning square surrounded by extremely grand old buildings. Still no banks! Going off into the side roads, I eventually find a bank machine. This unobligingly spews out 50€ notes, so I then have to go to the counter to change them. Even as I approach the counter, I can’t remember the French for “note”, but – phew – it comes to me just in time. Right, now I can relax a bit more.

I arrive at a veggie lunch bar just in time for lunch – handily. The now-familiar discussion ensues about what I can and can’t eat. There’s an amusing misunderstanding where the woman serving food thinks I don’t want to eat eggs or garlic (milk=du lait; garlic= de l’ail. But is my pronunciation really that bad?). We finally establish, however, that I can eat the Thai tofu and vegetables with rice. (More rice!) And jolly tasty it is too. Again, what do they do to the tofu to make it so good? This place fills up very rapidly, as did last night’s restaurant. There’s obviously a demand for vegetarian food in Brussels.

Refreshed, I carry on and go and look at a fully vegan (according to the list) restaurant and the health food shop beneath it. At the shop I buy cereal bars (without honey) and seitan sausages. Seitan is a meat substitute made from wheat gluten. It’s used particularly in Asian cuisine for “mock duck, pork, beef” etc.

The restaurant upstairs doesn’t appear to have a menu on show, so I give up and head back to the Art Museum. I’ve been here before, about twenty-five years ago, and remember thinking then that the huge modern art paintings were wonderful. It turns out that the ones I remember are no longer there, but I still like lots of the exhibits. Half of the museum is for Ancient Art, and I’m surprised by how much of this I like too. I’ve never been too inspired by old religious paintings before, but some of these are wonderful; the colours are gorgeous. Maybe it’s partly due to the setting. The building is huge and grand, though not over ornate, so I suppose the pictures are given the space and background to stand out as they should. One of the things I like about these older paintings is their depiction of well-proportioned women. Even the Virgin Mary has a good pair of sturdy hips on her!

Anyway, I’m there for about three hours and then Paul and I meet up and he shows me the bars of Brussels and introduces me to strawberry beer, which slips down frighteningly easily. We can’t be bothered to walk to the vegan restaurant over the health food shop, as it’s a bit of a trek, so we settle for a nearby kebab shop, where I have falafel, chips and salad and Paul has something carnivorous, chips and salad. He would have had the “Houmous Platter” but they’d run out of houmous. Replenished, we return to one of the bars. Paul does seem to know his way round the bars of Brussels rather well. Walking home, we pass through the Grande Place, where the Christmas Market stalls are set up but not yet open. Luckily, however, just a short distance away the Rotary Club are running a cheap Gluhwein stall. All along this street are huge candles in shallow pots on the ground. They look great, and really add to the atmosphere, but, come on, how do they get away with it on Health and Safety grounds?! And this is Brussels, the heart of EU Health and Safety regulations. You have to admire them.

This time the burglar alarm doesn’t go off until six o’ clock in the morning.