Egg hunting in Brussels

Belgium is a land caught somewhere between chocolate hedonism and bureaucratic absurdity. Even though the name of the country is used as a curse in Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, it can be a nice place in the summertime.

Gone egg hunting.

As soon as I arrive, the first stop is to to track down the location for the 1988 video for song Headhunter by Front 242, directed by the master Anton Corbijn, in which the Atomium plays host to a surreal egg motif. Legend says Corbijn misheard the song title as “Egghunter” and leaned into it anyway. I can’t say I’d argue with that kind of bold commitment.

Seeing the Atomium in person is like staring into a spaceship built by mid-century engineers drunk on concrete and ambition. It’s an enormous model of an iron crystal, remains of the 1958 World Expo’s fantasy, frozen in time. The spheres (one now a viewing platform) and connecting tubes (surprisingly escalators) makes me feel both microscopic and overexposed. And wandering around the base, trying to pinpoint where Corbijn placed his eggs, is a secret egg hunt of its own.

Town Hall, Grand Place.

Brussels deserves a night stroll. The Town Hall’s bell tower looms like Sauron’s neglected summer cottage, especially when the evening light show turns the gothic architecture into something out of a bad fantasy. Nearby, the Maison du Roi and other guild houses are made of Belgian limestone so delicate you expect them to fold if you sneeze.

Follow the lemmings down the road and soon you will find Manneken-Pis, that 400-year-old peeing bronze. More recently, Brussels introduced Jeanneke Pis, because even fountains deserve gender balance. So I go the other way and track her down next to the Delirium Tremens Café, an excellent excuse to down a pint or three.

All this walking makes me hungry, so I seek refuge in the cathedrals of chocolate: Godiva, Neuhaus and Leonidas. Each one is preaching its gospel of cocoa and sugar in an unholy union. This holy trinity of Belgium’s finest compete like feudal lords over my taste buds, but somehow I always end up pledging fealty to Leonidas by dusk.