I have just returned from a five-days visit in Brussels at my father's. Since my family is scattered over several countries in central Europe, we usually gather at one particular point, to save time; it so happened that I hadn't been in Brussels (Bruxelles, in French and in "Wallon", the Belgian French dialect) in almost 10 years. I found the city very much changed; i remembered from my last visit that the center of the city was filled with quite annoying construction sites. now the city has been revamped and looks like a modern metropolis, with a character of its own. My father has been living for the last ten years in the rather central neighborhood of Ixelles (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ixelles), which has a very mixed population of rather low income citizens and immigrants, as well as wealthy bourgeois living in splendid 19th century villas and majestic neoclassical pavilions - no need to mention that Israel has none of these, certainly not in Tel Aviv - although Tel Aviv has beautiful houses and residential areas of its own.
On the last day of my visit, after the big family gathering had come to its end, we had a small and quiet walk through the streets of Ixelles and walked into the "parc de l'abbaye de la Cambre", along some of the numerous Ixelles ponds (in French: "les étangs d'Ixelles": see
Abbey of La Cambre).
