On the church steps

I have never encountered as many people from Finland as in the last few weeks. At the end of April,  I posted  a portrait of Anna and her friend, both ex-au-pairs from Finland who returned to Brussels for a visit after ten years.  The two young women in the picture are also from Finland. Did a travel agency in Finland suddenly put Belgium high on its list of places for its clients to visit?   
Where are the young men from? No idea.  All I know is that they enjoyed the attention.

Opera and dance

"Je est un autre"  a sentence which literally translates as "I is an other". French poet Arthur Rimbaud used these words in a letter,  "Lettre du voyant" ("Letter of the Seer") to his friend Paul Demeny in May 1871 to explain his philosophy.  

The poster advertises the new season of La Monnaie / De Munt,  the Brussels Opera House.

Anne Teresa De Keersmaker is a Belgian choreographer. Her piece "Rain" ran until a few days ago in Palais Garnier, the Paris Opera house. De Keersmaeker and her company, Rosas, have been working together for twenty years. the last eleven in residence at the Théâtre de la Monnaie in Brussels.
http://nymag.com/nymetro/arts/dance/reviews/n_9540

www.rosas.be

www.demunt.be and www.lamonnaie.be

Svetlana

Svetalana is a native Russian who was educated in St. Petersburg and Leiden. She has lived in Belgium for over 10 years now. She is an exceptional woman. Her house near Leuven is filled with Russian decorative art and other treasures.

She created EsSAy, a project which promotes current Arts and Crafts inspired by the artistic and technical heritage of craft-masters of the past. She has an impressive collection of fine designer clothes in Russian Modern style which has been exhibited in various European museums. 

www.essay.be

http://www.spaceconnect.com/services/en-team.html

Segway

Yesterday the TV-news had an item about the desirability of having the Segway available for use in the city. The machine is shown here on a quiet Sunday morning a week ago in the Chancellerie street in Brussels. In order to make them very safe for the user, the organization renting them in Brussels has blocked the speed of the engines to 30 km per hour. Their use in some cities is apparently controversial. In Bruges, the person at city hall responsible for tourism is not a great fan. He is in favor of individual use of the Segway but is strongly against their use for group excursions. He thinks that in the city they hinder pedestrians, shoppers, tourists.

According to http://www.segwaybrugge.be/en/: "The Segway is very environmentally friendly. It is not only noiseless and energy-efficient, but it does not produce any harmful substances either.  Very convenient to ride around in the city, where enough emissions are produced already, as well as outside the city, where you want to harm nature as little as possible".

Lost wheels

An abandoned grocery cart in the middle of the city is a surprising sight - even more so because the orange handle bar carries the inscription "Sarma" which went out of business years ago. Sarma was a department store chain, and the letters stood for "Société anonyme pour la revente d'articles de masse" (corporation for the resale of mass articles). Funny how a cart like this just sits there years after Sarma ceased its activities. As the bike did not have a lock and was unattached, I decided that it too was lost.

Hannah

Hannah, an American student in art history, on her student job.

Belgian Magnum photographers

As announced in my previous post, here are pictures of three of the four Belgian Magnum photographers. They engaged in an interesting exchange of ideas on documentary photography and the life and travails of belonging to the elite group of Magnum photographers.  The discussion was moderated by journalist Jef Lambrecht (photo 1), book signing by John Vink and Harry Gruyaert (photo 2) and Carl De Keyzer, shown here being filmed (photo 3).