Returning Nemo, day two: Brussels

Noodles be praised! There are no snorers in the hostel. Although I was woken by construction work, I woke rested and refreshed because – and I repeat: there are no snorers in the hostel.

The first thing on my list for the day was coffee, and after a shower I set off towards Brussel Centraal so I could time how long I'd need to leave tomorrow morning to get myself from the hostel and onto the 6:23 to Courtrais with a coffee in-hand. I still don't know how long it takes, because the history book on the shelf was repeating itself and I was distracted by other, more shiny things. I was led off in a completely different direction before I came to my senses and set about finding a boulangerie for breakfast.

I paid around 4€ for a coffee (the default Belgian setting seems to be allongé, which suits me) and a very nice pain aux raisins which I chose specifically because I couldn't stomach 2€ for a chocolatine incorrectly labelled as a pain au chocolat. Just as I was getting ready to pay, a table became free and I started looking forward to sitting down for my breakfast, as I believe normal people aren't really designed to eat standing up. Payment done, I was clutching my pastry and waiting for the coffee to finish pouring when a family of Italians came charging through the doors wielding a weaponised pushchair, aiming themselves towards my table which they intended occupy before ordering. I got that pain aux raisins onto that table like a German mercenary would deploy a Schwarz-Rot-Gold beach towel. Absolutely. Not. Today.

Caffeinated and sugared, I felt I could now take on some tourism and so tried once again at my walk-timing efforts, ultimately failing again when distracted by a shop selling sparkly coffee-related wonderment, where I felt compelled to buy some Aeropress filters out of solidarity with the shop keeper. There was no material reason as I use a metal filter, but I felt guilty announcing I was "just looking around" to kill the time when asked if I needed any help by an assistant who had just had to tell someone that no, he couldn't use their wifi, and no, neither could they hot-spot their phone.

The Cathedral of St. Michael and St. Gudula and street art both governed the rest of my morning, one slightly more than the other. I didn't have much of a poke around the cathedral because of time limits, but can say that it is very light and airy inside and has a massive organ; everything looks quite new. I think there was a wedding due.

The street art quest ultimately won and it took me around three hours to walk from the hostel to the Gare du Midi – or Brussel Zuid – through various little quests for things to see along the way. As I left the touristy comfort zone of the centre the smells got less musselly and chippy and more spicy and tasty, but I didn't stop for lunch as it had started raining. Walking the streets in the rain, I had a time to meet Essen Hostess between trains at Brussels Midi, where we were to meet over coffee so she could tell me about her trip to London and its fine museums and galleries. I could show her my new mint-green unicorn backpack and Eurovision wristband. Both puppet and I were moistening by the minute.

I did wonder whether it might be a waste of an afternoon when I discovered a return to Waterloo from Brussels was only 8€ in first (only 1,70€ more than second) on a weekend ticket, but what started as a quick trip out for shits and giggles became a bit of a cultural event in my mind. I was glad that I didn't do it in the morning because I would have had to cut it short and not given it the time it deserves.

My my – at Waterloo the station is quite horrendous. What was once a quirky little brick station building was demolished in 2021 and replaced with a barren concrete nightmare that has no redeeming qualities for passengers at all and is in fact, not the station you want to go to if you're actually interested in Napoleonic history; that would be Braine-l'Alleud, a much nicer proposition one stop further from Brussels. It is a twenty-minute walk, give or take, to the centre of Waterloo proper where I had a look around the chapel before the tourist information office where I ended up being up-sold a ticket for bus W to the 1815 Memorial, or more specifically the petrol station next to it, from whence a five-minute walk brought me to the memorial proper.

Memorial is an interesting choice of word. From getting off the bus I could see the Lion's Mound and soon the rotunda of the Panorama of the Battle of Waterloo, which were both quickly blighted by "a unique culinary experience that invites you to enjoy an extraordinary meal [...] suspended in the air" waiting to relieve people with more money than sense of 325€ for the "experience" of eating a four-course meal while dangling in a glass box from a crane, listening to thumpy music, and looking through the rain at a battlefield they'd have got a better view of if they'd just walked up the 226 steps to the top of the Butte du Lion.

Other prime attractions at Napoleoland include Le Bivouac de l'Empereur (a restaurant) and Brasserie Le Napoléon, but I was infinitely more excited by the historical exhibition: The Legend of Napoleon in Lego Bricks. This is a triumph, and runs until the beginning of 2026.

The site shuts at 6.30pm and I'd been put off slightly by restaurant-on-a-string fairground ride do decided I'd not see the memorial proper today. It will still be there next time, as the 20-hectare site of the battlefields is a national monument and will still be there next time.

The lad behind the counter checked. "Just the Lego exhibition?" he asked, in case I was stupid. I confirmed that he was correct, as I was only doing one thing for practical reasons: by the time I'd got to Waterloo, looked round the church, walked to the tourist information office, and then somehow got almost marched onto a bus to the battlefield, it was already gone four, and it was raining – I didn't have enough time to do everything, but I couldn't escape if I wanted to see something educational.

12€ later I was in possibly the most enjoyable death-related museum exhibit about a massive-scale devastating loss of life that I've ever been to, all portrayed in gay multi-coloured bricks and with some tremendous tongue-in-cheek nods to the observer. Just my kind of deep thought-provoking education experience – how could I ever refuse?

I actually laughed out loud at some of the representations, something I was hugely conflicted about as an artistic rendition of a man missing a leg writhing in agony on a field operating table should not provoke out-loud laughter from normal people, no matter how low-resolution or yellow and smiley the depiction. It was the way his little yellow arm was reaching out for the sky, as if he'd just fallen out of a restaurant, that tickled me, and that someone somewhere deliberately amputated a Lego man's leg in the name of art.

There are around forty glorious models comprising over a million Lego bricks, each model depicting various stages of Napoleon's apparently wondrous life, something which I thought seemed to be massively over-celebrated considering Napoleon did surrender. The most impressive models are those constructed of many thousands of bricks, like the various palaces or battle scenes, but the slightly less grand vignettes are also absurdly brilliant. I never knew Saint Helena had happy bunnies.

Napoleone Buonaparte – Napoleon I to his peasants – was born in 1769 in Ajaccio and promptly named after Corsica's largest airport by his family of Italian origin, descendants of minor Tuscan nobility. At the age of 37 he declared his birthday, the 15th August, to be the Feast of Saint-Napoléon and issued edicts around how France's new national holiday was to be celebrated.

It stayed in place as France's fête nationale until his abdication and the restoration of the monarchy in 1814, at which point it quietly reverted to being a celebration of the Assumption of Mary. In 1880, the 14th July became enshrined in law as France's national holiday thanks to the efforts of Benjamin Raspail, by coincidence named after a métro station in the 14th arrondissement.

The 15th August remains a public holiday, the last in the summer before the three in November.

Ultimately, Napoleon's true genius lay not in his arrogance but in persuading vast numbers of people to kill vast numbers of other people in his crazed mission to recreate most of the Roman Empire, but this time under French – or his – rule. Probably standing on a box. Millions died, and he too eventually was one of them.

Napoleon met his destiny in quite a similar way, in exile on Saint Helena, at the age of fifty-one. The three Domaines français de Sainte-Hélène are today France's smallest overseas territories.

I very nearly bought a Waterloo fridge magnet before I left to catch the bus back to the railway station from whence a train whooshed me to Brussel Centraal, but decided to buy one in Brussels. There was quite a wait for the bus so I had a cheese roll, Speculoos muffin, and a coffee while waiting glamorously in the petrol station for the something-past-six bus wh-ich komme eventually at something to seven.

On arrival I got some more street art checked off then headed for the Théâtre Royal de Toone, the only remaining traditional puppet theatre in Brussels, where my treat was an enchanting and very funny performance of William Tell with puppets operated by six (maybe eight?) puppeteers while Toone VIII Nicolas Géal narrated the story with all the voices.

It was a true puppet spectacular, and during the entr'acte in the museum bar I had a beer while puppet got a photograph on a mini-stage with one of his kind.

The theatre was opened in around 1830 by Antoine Genty, nicknamed "Toone" in the local dialect, as a response to the closure of theatres by the Spanish who worried that theatres attracting large crowds might promote rebellion. Puppet theatre became a subversive alternative to traditional theatre as stories could be performed to audiences in cellars and back yards with little kerfuffle. Its popularity as a form of entertainment grew in the 19th century, and Antoine Genty became a much-celebrated marionettist.

Subsequent marionettists in the dynasty have taken the honorific title of Toone, passed from father to son, or to another marionettist approved by the people of Brussels. In 2003, the mayor of Brussels crowned Nicolas Géal, the current chief puppeteer, Toone VIII. He and his team put on an absolutely stonking show with probably the most appropriate use of accordion and Hammond organ music I have ever heard without needing a bottle of red wine first.

It was late when the performance ended, but I made time for an exquisite falafel of note from a little Lebanese restaurant called Lafeh on the rue de la Fourche. It was quite a long wait and this confused some of my slightly more slurry compatriots who seemed tediously suspicious at every part of the falafel procurement process, but it and they were absolutely worth powering through as the result was very tasty indeed. I might have preferred it more had I asked for spicy sauce, but the texture of the crunchy veg and the slightly crispy bread which held together and didn't drip made for a very high falafel experience score indeed.

In my subsequent last-minute quest to find a splendid Brussels fridge magnet through the waves of weedy, I had a bit of a bounce at an open-air concert in a square (not the square), and eventually a pint of Juliper in my new favourite bar before retiring.