seby wrote: Wed Jan 17, 2024 2:26 pm

zorg wrote: Wed Jan 17, 2024 6:25 am

seby wrote: Wed Jan 17, 2024 12:47 am

Having lived in Belgium for a couple of years there, I can assure you that this is true of the whole place.

In Brussels it seems like they are mostly trying to fatten you up. I have never seen as many chocolatiers, bakeries, waffle shops, etc...
Didn't dig deep but Ghent, being a college town, seemed much more cool and welcoming however.

Ghent, Antwerp, and Brussels are definitely the best spots : )

had a really magical day off in Ghent one time in the 90s. have wanted to go back sometime and see if it was a fluke

Gramsci wrote: Mon Jan 15, 2024 3:19 pm It sucks how the city has basically become separated by if you own or rent. A big part of that is the ludicrously weak rights for renters here. The weak as shit labour laws also mean people in the UK generally earn less than comparable European economies. But… the rest of the country keeps voting for a bunch of ghouls that deliberately make most people’s lives shit to protect the interests of their donors…

I can’t see a solution without radical change.

Mrs MH and I have been exploring the rest of the country in a "if not here, then where" state of mind and we've been depressed how tacky, miserable and expensive (for what you get) the rest of the UK is, so I've been counting my blessings a bit more as a result.

The thing w/ renting laws here is they're designed on an old model where it's just a temporary stop-gap while you save for deposits / stay for a year or two, so the laws and culture are woefully ill-adept for long-term renting (in contrast to say, Germany).

It's a profoundly dysfunctional place on practically every level. And every marker I see makes me think it's going to get much, much worse over the next 3 - 5 years.

I was only there for about 2 days back in 2017, but I enjoyed it. Liked that it was pretty easy to get around on the tube. Did a lot of touristy stuff - British Museum, Tate Modern, Tower of London, checking out Big Ben, walking by Buckingham Palace, etc. One night I saw Oxbow and Sumac at the Roundhouse, that was a good show. I'd definitely go back.

seby wrote:Ghent, Antwerp, and Brussels are definitely the best spots : )

Back to the Brussels sidebar: I spent a day there in 2001 and didn't much care. But I spent a week there, perhaps a decade later, fully expecting it to be some kind of anonymous hell designed for EU bureaucrats, and I was so pleasantly surprised. Plenty of grit, lots of great immigrant culture, and an overall good time. The screamingly obvious tourist corridor around the Grand Place is thankfully small, and so the rest of the city just goes about its business for you to enjoy. Mostly hung out in Matongé, Les Marolles, and  Sainte-Catherine. And a little in Ixelles, where we stayed. Ate and drank stupidly well. As for elsewhere in Belgium, Ghent is cool, although it's been decades, and I also had a fine time in Namur. Bruges is certainly pretty, but obviously, quite touristy (although less so on cold, drizzly autumn days). Although for all I know, everything re: these cities could have changed drastically post-pandemic.

eephus wrote: Thu Jan 18, 2024 9:50 pm

seby wrote: Wed Jan 17, 2024 2:26 pm

zorg wrote: Wed Jan 17, 2024 6:25 am

In Brussels it seems like they are mostly trying to fatten you up. I have never seen as many chocolatiers, bakeries, waffle shops, etc...
Didn't dig deep but Ghent, being a college town, seemed much more cool and welcoming however.

Ghent, Antwerp, and Brussels are definitely the best spots : )

had a really magical day off in Ghent one time in the 90s. have wanted to go back sometime and see if it was a fluke

I had a magical day there in 2015. Ghent still has it. Also, made me depressed that I went to a suitcase school in the Midwest and not the university in Ghent.

I lived in London for most of my life, and felt a pang when I left it last summer despite also feeling exhausted. MH’s description is an accurate one: it has become unaffordable for most in the long term, completely destabilised by homes being treated as investments rather than places to live. Yet still I love it.

To what others have written, I’ll just add a gentle corrective to a couple of posters’ contention that the city lacks beauty: to me, London is rich with it. Taken as a whole, it’s disjointed and marred, but I think it always has been as a metropolis, and the street-by-street collisions of the functions, anachronisms, ugliness, the weird, and the sublime is a large part of what I love about the place. FM Gramsci’s point about it being a collection of villages is accurate (and how my dad’s always described it). The churches alone - of all eras - are worth the visit (Hawksmoor’s my obvious favourites); similarly for pubs, bridges, brutalism, po-mo nonsense, etc etc. For those interested, Nairn’s London is a purchase you’ll never regret, even if half the buildings he described have gone!

Brussels: another city I love, not least because I have dear friends there. They once took me on a guided cycle tour of art nouveau buildings, which I recommend without reservation. The Tintin/bande dessinée museum is a fantastic example, formerly a fabric factory built for absurd quantities of natural light in that overcast city. In the old forum, others extolled Jonathan Meades masterful <30 minute documentary on the city, and I am compelled to throw it back up here, where he makes a convincing argument that René Magritte was only a surrealist by accident, being a social realist whose reality happened to be Belgium. This observation is accompanied by my all-time favourite visual pun, to appreciate which one must know that “pipe” is French slang for blow job.

sparky wrote: Fri Jan 19, 2024 3:42 pm I lived in London for most of my life, and felt a pang when I left it last summer despite also feeling exhausted. MH’s description is an accurate one: it has become unaffordable for most in the long term, completely destabilised by homes being treated as investments rather than places to live. Yet still I love it.

To what others have written, I’ll just add a gentle corrective to a couple of posters’ contention that the city lacks beauty: to me, London is rich with it. Taken as a whole, it’s disjointed and marred, but I think it always has been as a metropolis, and the street-by-street collisions of the functions, anachronisms, ugliness, the weird, and the sublime is a large part of what I love about the place. FM Gramsci’s point about it being a collection of villages is accurate (and how my dad’s always described it). The churches alone - of all eras - are worth the visit (Hawksmoor’s my obvious favourites); similarly for pubs, bridges, brutalism, po-mo nonsense, etc etc. For those interested, Nairn’s London is a purchase you’ll never regret, even if half the buildings he described have gone!

Book ordered. Great tip I can’t believe I’ve never had it recommended before considering what I do for a living.

London, if we dial back from the hellish cost of living and look at the places and people I love it here. Easily comparable to New York or São Paulo in terms of metropolitan scale and diversity. But it is far more fractured than most “World Cities”. There always opportunity to go somewhere you’ve never been, even after years in the city.

Yesterday we met friends and walked from Canning Town in the east of the north bank of the Thames to Canary Wharf (somewhere I used to work and know.) That part of the river has a weird island now gentrified and still with old industrial memories scattered around. Walking back to CW you go past a giant windowless building that doesn’t appear on maps. It the central switching and server building for the UK’s internet. It has an iron security area around it and looks like something from Bladerunner.

Last weekend we dragged the kids around a Hampstead, where we live next to for a forest walk on the Heath that has a view over the whole city, then into the very suburban surrounding streets to explore the fruit shops that sell Dragon fruit and Mamão from Brazil. You can rinse and repeat this every weekend and you’d never get to the bottom.

Even in the centre. Around The City ( A weird private corporation that owns central London, that the King can’t enter without permission) and Westminster after 20 years here my favourite thing is to get out at Bank Station, leave my phone in my pocket and just get lost walking medieval streets.

If you a tourist do the tourist stuff in a day or two and find an up to date “Secret London” book and pick somewhere unexpected.

Everything Gramsci posted is right. Am I him?

Gramsci wrote: Sun Jan 21, 2024 2:32 am Even in the centre. Around The City ( A weird private corporation that owns central London, that the King can’t enter without permission) and Westminster after 20 years here my favourite thing is to get out at Bank Station, leave my phone in my pocket and just get lost walking medieval streets.

Especially this. The City on a weekend is an amazing place to get lost in. Even though most of the medieval buildings have gone, property rights made it nearly impossible to change the bone structure of the place.

I was in London last week for a day, and on a whim decided to check out the Liberty store. An amazing place, made from two ships.

sparky wrote: For those interested, Nairn’s London is a purchase you’ll never regret, even if half the buildings he described have gone!

Ooh, purchased.

pldms wrote:

sparky wrote: For those interested, Nairn’s London is a purchase you’ll never regret, even if half the buildings he described have gone!

Ooh, purchased.

Gramsci wrote:Book ordered.

Great! I hope and am confident that you will both enjoy it. He haunts a few old scratchy TV clips on YouTube, a dark favourite being one of him at the Oktoberfest, absolutely furious. He’s not furious because people are drinking; he hates how incompetently they were drinking. A dedicated boozer, he’s almost in tears.”I probably get through more alcohol in a week than most of those bastards get through in a year!”

Yesterday we met friends and walked from Canning Town in the east of the north bank of the Thames to Canary Wharf (somewhere I used to work and know.) That part of the river has a weird island now gentrified and still with old industrial memories scattered around. Walking back to CW you go past a giant windowless building that doesn’t appear on maps. It the central switching and server building for the UK’s internet. It has an iron security area around it and looks like something from Bladerunner.

Well, balls. I worked round there for over a decade and, taking scenic routes home via Beckton and the Greenway, I probably have passed this more than fifty times, yet I never consciously marked it. Something to come back for.

If, for some weird reason, you have an urge to scoot behind the ExCel centre during weekdays, more often than not a greasy spoon caravan opens to serve divine rolls and French sticks with bacon and eggs. (Note they’re French sticks *not* baguettes.) It’s called Truckers Bliss - no apostrophe, and I like to think that’s a deliberate evocation of lorry drivers just blissing out in cholesterol heaven.

There’s a bit of foreshadowing in that clip considering he died of alcoholism.