i was going to do this as one post. but it got really long. here’s the philosophical post about brussels. specifics and pictures will come tomorrow. deal with it.
a couple weeks ago when the fam was visiting i finally realized that my main problem with dublin is that there’s very little diversity here. for one thing, 94.3% of people who live in dublin are white. the followingstates are less diverse than dublin (which, if you didn’t know, is a city): maine, vermont, and that’s it. now as all of you know, i love me some maine, but i don’t love it because of it’s incredible variety of people and places and foods and things to do. i love it because it’s quiet, and beautiful, and, you know, because camp is there. and even portland is only 86% white.
the result of this spectacular lack of diversity in people is, unsurprisingly, a spectacular dearth of diversity in food, music, culture, etc. obviously i haven’t been here that long, and i’m sure if i try really hard i will at some point find someone playing some sort of african/jazz/funk/hip-hop sort of thing at some point. and of course, there is a good thai restaurant, and there’s a burrito place (which just opened, btw), and one indian place that doesn’t give you ten days of food poisoning. but the other good places are french, or irish, or french-irish. and they are really good! but they are all the same really good. there’s one good spanish place (so i’ve heard). but occasional music, and one good restaurant from most cultures does not an exciting, vibrant city make. which brings me to brussels.
brussels is estimated to be 56% foreign born. 56%! and boy is it obvious. there’s a huge arab population, a huge greek population, a huge moroccan population, a big central-african population (due to belgium’s colonization of congo and rwanda). and on top of all that, there’s a huge dutch-speaking population and a huge french-speaking population. (almost everyone speaks french and english, at least in the center of the city.) the best story i have to demonstrate this is that on saturday night we were trying to get into a building where they were having an after-party for museum night fever (think first friday on tons of fucking steroids). there was a huge crowd of people in line, it was a little disorganized, everyone was confused, and so at one point, people in the crowd gave up and just started addressing each other in english. there are so many different types of people in brussels that english was the only way to communicate.
the diversity filters down into every part of the city. in the old part of the city, tons of arab restaurants, greek restaurants, french restaurants, and chinese restaurants are all within a couple blocks of each other. along with these come shops and galleries, and more importantly, when one is out at night, there are so many different kinds of things happening. brussels, like most other cities in europe, struggles with racism and xenophobia (even dublin does, which is sort of amazing…more on that in the epic post about cabs), but it’s a very small price to pay. dublin is pretty good evidence of that.