The lure for him was not just his charming mother's company. I had half a million frequent-flier miles then, and he knew
that if I came along, he wouldn't have to stay in youth hostels. I'm too old to qualify. So off we went, on an itinerary built around breweries, but with serendipitous finds for me as well: among them, meeting an elderly princess who lives in roughly one-hundredth of her rather daunting chateau, and exploring a lovely town called Poperinge, a place I had never heard of.
We found moments when we were of one mind. We had both recently read Adam Hochschild's "King Leopold's Ghost," about that monarch's bloody takeover of what became the Belgian Congo. We both shuddered during our visit to the Royal Museum for Central Africa in the Brussels suburb of Tervuren. The bombastic imperial pile was built entirely with the proceeds from the "Crown Dominion," which was Leopold's private preserve. A gilded statue of a goddess personifying Belgium, gazing beneficently down on sculptures of grateful "natives," is among my creepiest memories of the place. It must be remembered, though, that Belgians themselves became fed up with Leopold. He was about as popular with his subjects as he was with the Africans he considered his personal property.
Our first stop was India. The 15 rooms in Brussels' Hotel Welcome are not numbered. They are named for various exotic locales, and decorated accordingly. "India" is Taj Mahal-ish, with gauzy hangings in an elephant print and carved wooden doors. The hotel, which is in the city's bustling fish market area and boasts a superb seafood restaurant, La Truite d'Argent, was the highlight of Brussels for me.
The high point for Jonathan was the tiny, out-of-the-way Brasserie Cantillon, a Brussels brewery run by Jean-Pierre Van Roy, the husband of the great-granddaughter of Paul Cantillon, who founded the business in 1900.
