I have now been on over fifteen trips to Europe with Meredith over the last twenty-two years or so. In all that time, I do not remember getting sick on the trip; I have gotten sick several times after the trip, but not during it. That streak ended on this trip, but happily, the touring could continue, just at a more subdued pace. I have been feeling off since Monday morning, but today was tougher. I could tour, but got tired very quickly, and so we came back to the hotel twice during the day for me to rest. It was difficult to get up the energy to go out for our evening jaunt, but I managed, and it was a good day of touring.

We stumbled onto a Brussels tradition – Ommegang (Flemish for “walking around”). The Ommegang festival used to be a religious procession, but fell out of favor around the time of the French Revolution, which frowned on such things. It was brought back as a historical celebration in 1930, and now commemorated Charles V and his son visiting the city in 1549. The “king” leads a parade of fourteen hundred in-costume people through the city, ending in the Grand Place (the main square), where they have a two-hour-long show which includes medieval lights and fog machines. It only happens two days a year, and this year that was today and Friday. It seemed as if we should make the effort to catch some of the festivities.

Part of the celebration is a small Renaissance faire in one of the city parks. They have a small “village” with people selling wares, and some people explaining life from the 1500s. They also have combat demonstrations and a jousting tournament. And it was all free (although donations were accepted by individual re-enactors).

Since the village did not open until noon, it left us with some free time, so we headed over to the area to go to the remains of the Coudenberg Palace, which was an enormous palace built over five hundred years, that burned down in 1731. The ruins were torn down to build a new grand square in 1774, and it was mostly forgotten about until the 1980s, when the ruins were excavated. Once the foundations, cellars, and even part of a road were unearthed, the city covered the site with a concrete roof and opened the site up to the public.

In addition to the appeal of ruins underground, there was an advertised exhibition on giants, which sounded intriguing. The website said giants have a special place in the lowland countries, especially Belgium. I was up for that.

The ruins of the castle were impressive, and the cobblestone road that was uncovered shows the original slope of the steep hill that existed before it was leveled to make the new square. That was all interesting to me. What surprised us both were the giants – it is a term used to describe the large mannequin puppet people you see in Mardi Gras parades in New Orelans. It seems they have been really popular in Belgium for a very long time. So we got to see a bunch of oversized people scattered about the ruins of the old palace. It was a bit surreal. It helped explain some of what we had seen around the country; we had seen some giants in the psychiatric hospital art museum in Ghent, and we had seen three of them when we exited the cave near Dinant. We’d thought they were fairly random, but it seems they have an important place in the festivals of Belgian cultures. We even got to see one of the giants being prepared for the parade later in the evening. The Coudenberg Palace experience ended with a small museum, and we were through the whole place in a little over an hour, and so we went back to the park to see how the village was coming along.

Not very promptly, as it turns out. It seems “noon” is a rough time for these sorts of things, so we went back to the hotel for the first rest of the day. We returned to the park around 3:00, and things were more lively. It was a small village, and, different from Renaissance faires in the US, the normal civilians were not in costume – only the actors were. You would think a faire like this in a city that was actually around in 1500 would be bigger, but maybe people are too close to the history Americans don’t have. It was small. We did get into a long conversation with a “monk” who told us how a barber would have repaired a badly healed broken bone (in an unpleasant two-hour operation that involved cutting into the leg, scraping out any fat, moving the muscle, and then manhandling the bone back into place). It would have been for only the rich, and people only survived the surgery half the time. He was fun to talk to, and his English was pretty good.

It was 4:00, and we had found out earlier that the Magritte Museum, which was very close by, was free today after 1:00, so we went there. I had liked what I’d seen of Magritte at the Atomium yesterday and wanted to see more. After blitzing though all three floors of the museum in forty-five minutes, I still liked much of what I saw. Magritte seems to me to be playing with minds a lot – he does things that can’t be seen in the real world, like a painting being half in the day and half in the night, or the background of a painting being full of trees growing upside down. A few paintings were just odd or did not click with me, but on the whole, I liked Magritte’s work.

I looked on the map and realized that to take the Metro required us to walk away from our hotel about fifty percent of the actual distance to the hotel, so we took it as an opportunity to walk the city. We stumbled across a small park that was perfectly manicured, across from the church where the procession would meet up with the “king” later in the day. That ended part two of the day. I got back to the hotel and lay down, and after another hour, it was hard to go back out, but we both really wanted to see the Ommegang procession. Off we went, at a bit of a weary pace.

We swung by the huge and fantastically-named Palace of Justice to look out over the city. We could see the Atomium from there, and the city had even put out lawn chairs for people to hang out on the square. It seemed to be a popular place with the under-thirty crowd. We walked up toward the upper town until we got to the church, where we just caught the various guilds marching into the church. I did not know it was open to the public, so we found a spot on the road to wait for the pageant.

It was fun. The king and his guard led the way, followed by a modern street-sweeper to clean up after the horses. That was followed by a drum and fife group, and color guard throwing flags in the air, and crossbow men and musket bearers and small bands of instrumentalists and lords and ladies and commoners, and, wait for it, four or five giants. That was satisfying. Everyone seemed to be having a good time, and we were glad we had made the effort.

We grabbed a quick to-go supper and ate in our room while watching an obscure American film; we were enjoying the Flemish subtitles.  I’m hoping today will be the toughest day of being sick, so that I can have more energy as we leave Belgium for Paris tomorrow, and then home via Toronto on Friday. Belgium has been very good to us, and I am not sick of it at all.