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"Brussels is the only European city where European refers to people from somewhere else. As unofficial headquarters of the European Union, the Belgian capital hosts a motley collection of Maltese agricultural attach\u00E9s, Swedish experts on chemical weapons, and Hungarian translators, all of whom the locals call Europeans and who reside alongside the more standard immigrant populations\u2014Turkish grocers, Congolese hairdressers\u2014in a city forever divided by squabbles between the Dutch- and French-speaking populations.  A mainly Francophone city surrounded on all sides by communities of Dutch speakers, Brussels is a perennial sticking point in the debates about whether to divide Belgium along linguistic lines: The two sides would surely have gone their separate ways decades ago if anyone could figure out what to do about Brussels.  Click here to see the gallery for &amp;quot;ELLE DECOR Goes to Brussels.&amp;quot;   But while the politicians consume themselves with such questions as whether the secretary at the tax office in the suburb of Halle-Vilvoorde should say &amp;quot;All\u00F4&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;Hallo&amp;quot; when she picks up the phone, Brussels&amp;#039;s heterogeneous residents, many of whom are foreign-born, have used their diversity to invigorate an old and fascinating city. Each of its 19 municipalities, like the boroughs of London or the arrondissements of Paris, boasts a distinct personality, proving how myopic are the attempts to reduce the place to mere bilingualism.  The never-ending conflict means that nothing can happen politically, and Brussels hasn&amp;#039;t undergone extensive urban renewal for decades. There&amp;#039;s no fancy new museum here \u00E0 la Bilbao or Doha, and no massive Ferris wheel, as in London. The city is littered with architectural codpieces, buildings meant to project machismo but that suggest anxious overcompensation instead: The neoclassical constructions of the 19th century have something almost Stalinist about them, and the equally massive buildings hosting the European Union, in their zeal not to appear Stalinist, look as anonymous as suburban corporate campuses. Big projects seem to come to grief here, which is a boon for a city with so much street-level charm. The best parts of Brussels are small: intimate neighborhoods, cozy restaurants, off-the-beaten-track galleries. The obvious spot to get a feel for the city is the Grand&amp;#039;Place, surrounded on all sides by towering Baroque buildings. For a few days every other August, the entire square is covered by an intricate carpet of flowers (about 800,000 were used last year), and from May to October, it&amp;#039;s home to a flower market. But there&amp;#039;s more to downtown Brussels than seasonal blooms and the cute but inexplicably world-famous Manneken-Pis, a fountain on a street corner featuring a little boy peeing. The streets around the Gothic church of Notre Dame du Sablon form Brussels&amp;#039;s most browsable antiques district, with shops ranging from the eccentric\u2014Daniel Traube, for example, which specializes in old walking sticks\u2014to the classic Costermans gallery, housed since 1839 in a magnificent townhouse. If, after picking up that Louis XV commode, you&amp;#039;re feeling like something more contemporary, head for the rue Antoine Dansaert, the most stylish street in town.  With local landmarks like Le Pain Quotidien, the original location of the now ubiquitous bakery-caf\u00E9, Dansaert seems like the SoHo of Brussels. But unlike the New York neighborhood, which has been increasingly taken over by shops you can find in any city on the globe, Dansaert is not an open-air mall: It proudly emphasizes the best Belgian designers, artists, and chefs. Here&amp;#039;s where you&amp;#039;ll find boutiques carrying clothes by most of the Antwerp Six, the designers who put Belgian fashion on the map in the late 1980s. It&amp;#039;s also where you&amp;#039;ll find innovative galleries like Jan Mot and the unassuming \u00C9tablissement d&amp;#039;en Face.  Click here to see the gallery for &amp;quot;ELLE DECOR Goes to Brussels.&amp;quot;   As Esperanza Rosales, an American writer and former director of another nearby gallery, D\u00E9pendance, explains, the resurgence of Dansaert is a recent phenomenon. Like many large Western cities in the &amp;#039;70s, Brussels suffered from a flight of the middle classes to the suburbs. This offered an opening for artists, who found one of the few big cities in Europe where they could live downtown relatively cheaply. Even today, says Rosales, &amp;quot;Dansaert still has an edge. Rue de Flandre only cleaned up over the last five years.&amp;quot; Now it and the neighboring rue L\u00E9on Lepage are the kinds of places where Cut Me, a hair-salon-slash-exhibition-space, can fit only one customer at a time, but where clients can check out the couturier Martin Margiela&amp;#039;s flagship store while waiting for a haircut.  If Dansaert is the equivalent of New York&amp;#039;s SoHo, then avenue Louise is the Madison Avenue of Brussels\u2014but it&amp;#039;s the Ch\u00E2telain district, right off avenue Louise, that&amp;#039;s become the coolest new area for &amp;quot;Europeans&amp;quot; and natives alike. Wednesday is market day in the place du Ch\u00E2telain, from which the area takes its name. &amp;quot;People enjoy a glass of wine, Italian antipasti, Thai snacks, even Champagne and oysters,&amp;quot; says journalist Deedee Derksen. The Ch\u00E2telain boasts some of Brussels&amp;#039;s Art Nouveau masterpieces, the most famous of which is the swirling, curling house that Victor Horta, one of the movement&amp;#039;s founders, built for himself in the opening years of the 20th century. Brussels has more Art Nouveau architecture than any other city, and one of the pleasures of walking here is finding these wild buildings sprouting, like exotic orchids, on the most ordinary streets.  But despite the Ch\u00E2telain&amp;#039;s popularity, it hasn&amp;#039;t lost its individuality, Derksen says. &amp;quot;Even though it&amp;#039;s a very popular area and a lot of expats live here, it doesn&amp;#039;t have that antiseptic feeling you get in some newly hip neighborhoods. The stores, especially the ones selling clothing and furniture, are extremely varied. You find everything from tiny shops to the superpretentious.&amp;quot;  Click here to see the gallery for &amp;quot;ELLE DECOR Goes to Brussels.&amp;quot;   A result of the endless governmental wrangling that has come to define Belgium as much as chocolates or lace is that Brussels&amp;#039;s infrastructure is aging, and away from the tourist areas the city lacks a municipal guardian angel. When you start to long for a more perfect world, jump on a train. You&amp;#039;re only an hour from the floating medieval world of Bruges, a dreamlike labyrinth of castles and canals that seems untouched by the big-city problems of Brussels. But Bruges isn&amp;#039;t just Hans Memling and Jan van Eyck: It boasts lively cultural programs and one of Belgium&amp;#039;s three-Michelin-starred restaurants, De Karmeliet, where you&amp;#039;ll discover why many consider Belgian cuisine the best in the world.  But Brussels, unlike Bruges, is not an outdoor museum, and its charms are not as obvious. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s a city that reveals itself slowly,&amp;quot; says Amadeo Kraupa-Tuskany, a German gallery owner. &amp;quot;You have to dig a little. People don&amp;#039;t show off what they have. You find amazing apartments in completely unexpected places. And it&amp;#039;s the same with people. The city is divided into all these little cells\u2014 uptown and downtown, European and local, French and Flemish\u2014so it can seem bigger than it actually is.&amp;quot; Because of the city&amp;#039;s unclear, undefined political status, Kraupa-Tuskany says, &amp;quot;there&amp;#039;s no vision of what it could be or should be, because there really isn&amp;#039;t any decision-making body that could come up with that vision. The lack of direction makes it seem melancholic and even surreal.&amp;quot;  Appropriately, one of Brussels&amp;#039;s most successful attractions is a museum honoring the Surrealist painter Ren\u00E9 Magritte. The Magritte Museum (not to be confused with the Ren\u00E9 Magritte Museum, which preserves his house and atelier) places Surrealism at the heart of the city, next door to the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium and the Royal Palace. His work strikes a nerve here, the Belgian-American writer Luc Sante has written, because only in Belgium does it seem realistic: &amp;quot;the veneer of civilization, that gray surface stretched like a skin over the chasm.&amp;quot;  Kraupa-Tuskany regrets that people don&amp;#039;t usually spend enough time to get past that veneer. &amp;quot;For a lot of Europeans, it&amp;#039;s a place to work during the week, and they don&amp;#039;t stay long enough to develop a connection to the city,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;They fly out at the weekend.&amp;quot; Click here to see the gallery for &amp;quot;ELLE DECOR Goes to Brussels.&amp;quot;   That&amp;#039;s what Boy Vereecken, a member of the artists&amp;#039; collective Slavs and Tatars, likes about it. Having grown up in Ghent with an American mother and a Belgian father, he feels at home with the city&amp;#039;s mixed heritage. &amp;quot;There are so many people from somewhere else and so many people who are just passing through. It keeps it interesting. You don&amp;#039;t have an identity forced upon you, like in Antwerp, which is so overwhelmingly Flemish. It&amp;#039;s the only city in Belgium where I could live.&amp;quot; Brussels doesn&amp;#039;t fit in with Belgium either: &amp;quot;Nobody wants to give it up,&amp;quot; as Vereecken says, &amp;quot;but nobody wants to pay for it.&amp;quot;  Its multiple worlds touch in unusual ways. Unlike most big cities, increasingly segregated by class, Brussels&amp;#039;s mixtures are surprising. The Ixelles neighborhood, split in half by the avenue Louise, is one of the city&amp;#039;s poshest\u2014and it has an entire African village at its heart. Called Matonge after a market in Kinshasa, capital of the former Belgian Congo, the area is as colorful as the European Quarter, on the other side, is drab.  &amp;quot;People in Brussels are proud of their oddness,&amp;quot; says Kraupa-Tuskany. It&amp;#039;s the capital of Belgium and the de facto capital of the European Union, &amp;quot;but it&amp;#039;s not really a capital, and it doesn&amp;#039;t want to be. And it&amp;#039;s close enough to the real capitals that it doesn&amp;#039;t need to be.&amp;quot; Indeed, with the high-speed Thalys train line, the trip from Paris to Brussels isn&amp;#039;t much longer than the commute from Paris to some of its own suburbs.  &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s hard to get a grasp of the place, because in some ways there is no place to grasp,&amp;quot; Boy Vereecken explains. &amp;quot;But that&amp;#039;s what&amp;#039;s so great about it too. You can choose what you want it to be.&amp;quot;  Click here to see the gallery for &amp;quot;ELLE DECOR Goes to Brussels.&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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