Brussels, Grand Place

The City Hall (to the left, out of this photo), and other buildings around the Grand Place in Brussels, make it one of the more famous town squares in Europe. In August each year they decorate the Grand Place with thousands of pots of colorful flowers, placed in a very meticulous design. One year we missed the flower show by a few days, but chalk marks, used to arrange the flower-pots in precision patterns, were still on the pavement.

In an antique store nearby, Emmy found a beautiful 18 carat gold bracelet with pearls. She returned to the same store the next year and lucky for me, it was closed. Hey, she bought a beautiful bracelet last year, but could she be so lucky two years in a row?

In a Brussels super market we found a large oven with a continuously moving belt. We placed a “loaf” of dough on one end, and a fresh-baked loaf of bread rolled out the other end, delicious. We have never seen this elsewhere. When we visited in the late 1970s and early 1980s, one store in a shopping mall in downtown Brussels, sold only Marilyn Monroe memorabilia. Lucky for us there was also a Baskin Robbins 31 Flavors ice cream parlor.