Art Nouveau
Spent the morning in Mons catching up on a few things Steve wanted to see including St Symphorien Military Cemetery which contains the graves of the First English soldier killed in WWI and the last one - just an hour before the Armistice.
I then spent the afternoon tracking down an Art Nouveau house that I had seen in a picture. As it was a little out of the city, I decided to drive in rather than attempt to get public transport out to it. It's Sunday, so the traffic wasn't too bad and with Natasha's help, we made it relatively easily. As much as I like Natasha, she's sometimes a little inaccurate with her directions and sometimes just too late... "Please turn right now". 5 seconds warning would have been nice - now let's just go round the block...
The house was stunning and the photo doesn't do it justice at all.
(I Googled Art Nouveau and Art Deco and now I know the difference!)
There were more and more interesting houses around the block so I went for a wee walk. I also wanted to visit the Comic Museum so I asked Natasha for directions and she told me it was 2.2kms roughly south. So I took a mental picture of the GPS and set off. Even though my legs had not quite recovered from the previous two days effort, I reckoned I could manage 2.2kms.
South turned into west, then north then east and at one stage I ended up where I started. I tried following the maps off the bicycle stands but they had no reference points - like Central Station. Nor did the street tourist maps which were more than useless because they didn't even tell you where you were - so how could you possibly find where you were going. The map on my phone doesn't allow you to search street names and again, it didn't give me Central station as a reference.
My kingdom for a good ol' fashioned paper map!
It didn't help that all the streets have dual names but mostly only one is listed on a map. The road I was searching for had a completely different name altogether so it was no wonder it took me nearly two hours to find it. I looked it up later on Gmaps and I had actually walked 8 kms - 7 sides of a hexagon!
I found the Comic Museum and it was mildly interesting but the building itself was worth all the hassle of getting there. It was another Victor Horta design and had been a haberdashery and fabric shop for many decades. It was quite stunningly beautiful. (I wonder if the BOSS will let me decorate our place AN style?)
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