Wiels

This WE a new centre for contemporary art opened in Brussels. It's called Wiels and it's housed in the former brewery of Wielemans Ceuppens, a beautiful modernist building from 1930 by architect Adrien Blomme. I went to have a look.

I saw some beautiful tiles, that would go well in my new bathroom:

There were several contemporary art exhibitions. I particularly liked the piece by Saâdane Afif called 'Le Bar des Héros' which had a sound installation with pieces of music which played in a bar in Marseille in 1999, and flashing lights like in a club, and this poem:

It reminded me of Marseille, a city I love.

A day out in Antwerp

Last Saturday I went to Antwerp. To start with, we went to see an exhibition of Flemish paintings at the Museum of Fine Arts.
After that we were pretty hungry and went to a fantastic Japanese place nearby, Izumi.

Edamame, boiled fresh soy beans, is something that I learned to eat with my sister at her favourite Japanese restaurant in London.

I was curious about this spinach with sesame seed and it was delicious!

Of course we had miso soup.

We also tried fried chicken

and fried tofu.

Never had this before: gyoza, a kind of dumpling, first steamed I guess and then fried...just gorgeous!

And we also had some sushi.


After this terrific meal we took a little digestive stroll and came across a few beautiful buildings.




Nearby we discovered a cook's walhalla: a bookshop only with cookbooks!! We couldn't believe our eyes. The selection was incredible, we just didn't know where to look. Because we still wanted to do some shopping and we didn't want to carry heavy books, we took the wise decision to come back later.
Then we did some serious clothes shopping, after which we needed a rest, so we went to the bar of the Fashion Museum.

We continued our shopping until the stores closed and then we needed a drink.

We ordered negroni's. They didn't quite look like the ones we had in the north of Italy, but they tasted good!