Tapis de fleurs 2012

'Tis that time of year again! The flower tapestry in Brussels has returned!

 Here's my post from when Eric and I checked it out in 2010. Since Eric's still recovering from his surgery, I ended up venturing to Brussels on my own in order to do a "smash & grab" type of adventure in order to get some pictures of the tapestry. As much as he wanted to go, it's for the best that he didn't attempt it due to pushy tourists in addition to uneven cobblestones everywhere.

I left bright and early this morning...and if you know me, early and I don't mix well. At least I was able to catch up on some of my reading while cruisin on the train :)

 

Once I made it to Brussels, I waddled my way down to Grand Place since that's where the flower tapestry was waiting for massive hordes of people to "ooooh" and "awwwweee" over it. Keep in mind, the official opening time for it was 9am...I got there at 8:55a and there was already a massive line of people waiting to get into the Grand Place hotel in order to access the balcony for a view. 

This isn't the line...

......this is.

Here's a map to get a better idea of where I was. The red star is the train station, the green is where I walked, the yellow star is the end of the line to get into the Grand Place hotel, and the orange line is...well..the line to get into Grand Place hotel. 

Luckily, the line moved along fairly quick...I think it took about twenty five minutes to get into the hotel itself, so in the mean time, I managed to take some pictures of the buildings and whatever else I fancied.

The fabulous balcony everyone migrated towards in order to get a better view of the tapestry itself:

 

While I was going through and editing all the pictures, Eric really liked this one :) 

Once I managed to actually make it onto the balcony (after seeing a few people get kicked out of the line for not respecting the "no pictures" rule for inside the hotel), I kinda had to fight my way to the front so I could get some pictures of the flowers. 

Oh, and right before I  made my way into the building, I noticed they were selling t-shirts of the whole event...the image was one of the patterns from the tapestry, but in the shape of Africa. Kinda confused me, but I just guess that was the theme for this years' carpet. SO, I hopped online to find some handy dandy information for ya about it and here ya go:

The begonias are traveling!

This summer, you will have the chance to escape to faraway lands, while staying at the heart of our capital city. No need for any philtre or strange potion to get there... The magic will work on its own and when you visit the Grand-Place, you will be transported to the centre of a mysterious continent: Africa! An extraordinary tapestry of shimmering patterns recalling designs from the tribes of Ethiopia, Congo, Nigeria, Botswana, and Cameroun, a harmonious fusion which will carry you away for a magnificent trip.Such a breath-taking result takes months of preparation. Landscape architects, technicians and hundreds of voluntary participants, colour specialists for the occasion, took part in this most unusual adventure. This extraordinary weaving of begonias will be exhibited during 5 long days. A mad challenge for an unforgettable event, which you will be able to admire from the Grand-Place or the balconies of the town Hall. All roads lead to this multicoloured rendezvous...

Why Africa?

This part of the world stands out for the extraordinary diversity of its populations, its landscapes, its cultures and its colours. It has the power to make us dream to the rhythm of its dances, its drums and its performing arts, reflecting age old traditions. And so past and present echo one another, as do the here and the elsewhere, old Europe and young Africa, permanent contrasts. The continent has lessons of life to offer and proposes other perspectives and alternatives to the systems that we have used for so long.It is this diversity, so rich and inspiring, that we want to honour and represent this year: a carpet of flowers, of course, but enriched with an even more enchanting palette. Our artists have combined the begonias with barks, precious materials, sands, soils and pigments...
Come and walk along its borders, wander around the equator of our city. Enjoy recognizing the origins of the beautiful patterns which make up this strange fabric that unfolds before your eyes.
 

A worthy challenge

It's a double bet this year. The first aspect is symbolizing an entire continent, so rich and mulch-faceted, on 1.800 m2. The second is the duration of the display: the flowers and materials will stay fresh and bright throughout the five days. They will enchant you thanks to the attention and care which they will receive over the course of this beautiful event.

Annnnnnd here's a video I managed to get while getting poked and prodded by various tourists smushing in to get pictures:

Alright...why the random door latch? OK, you're not allowed to take pictures within the hotel, but when I was making my way outta there once I was done with the balcony, there was a room on the right hand side that caught my eye. It's a large hall that looks like it's used for ceremonies of some sort. Of course, I couldn't get a picture of it due to the rules (and a guard standing there to ensure people didn't take pictures)...but I was totally enamored  with the door handle because of it's design. Isn't it cool looking? After a little bit, the guard asked me "Do you want a picture of that?"...of course I jumped at the opportunity cause I don't know how I'd go about describing this thing. So, once the coast was clear, I snapped this pic and went on my merry way and the guard gave me a thumbs up for not looking like an obvious tourist :)

Here's another pic once I made it back to the ground level and made my way through the sea of tourists that ended up doubling in numbers while I was in the hotel. 

This kinda gives you an idea as to how packed all those flowers are throughout the entire tapestry. The crazy thing is that they don't get blown all over the place when the wind picks up! Then again, they've been making these sort of tapestries since the seventies, so you'd think they'd have it down to a science by now, ya know?

Oh yeah, and there's an official Hard Rock Cafe now in Grand Place! So, of course I had to make my way over there to get myself a hand dandy and oh so spiffy  bottle opener to go with the rest of my Hard Rock collection :) 

AND, there's this guy who does beautiful beautiful water color paintings from around Brussels.

He was actually working on another painting, so I got to watch him for about fifteen minutes while he was painting the actual flower carpet and then moved onto the sky. I gotta hand it to the guy, he's got some serious patience while he's working! Tourists were asking him everything under the sun, he was selling stuff and painting...handy dandy!

Last time Eric and I were there, we picked up two different panoramic paintings of Grand Place, so this time I opted to get two different styles since we have a thing about getting paintings from various places we visit. Since we wasn't there, I just picked whatever I thought were the prettiest :)  

After all that, I was spent. Totally spent. There's a super hot heat wave here and it's absolutely miserable, especially in Brussels since it seemed like the cobblestone was making it 10x hotter than necessary, LOL. Keep in mind, by the time I was catching the train to come back home, it was 10:15a and it was already sitting at 80*. I wanted to die. Despite being a Californian and all that nonsense, Momma don't do hot. As I'm writing this out, it's 6:44p and it's still 84*. BLUH. I'm sure there's some people reading this and laughing because they probably deal with hot weather all the time. Well, live in Belgium for a bit and then have a heat wave sprung on ya. I betcha you'd be singing the same song as me! lol....SO, when I was waiting on my train to show up, I think I earned a fabulous raspberry / blackcurrant frappachino from the ever so wonderful Starbucks that opened not too long ago in Brussels Centraal station. 

Made it back home, plopped in front of a fan and made it a point to hammer out this post for ya. If you haven't seen the floral tapestry and you live in Belgium, by all means, you should check it out. It's absolutely gorgeous and it's amazing to realize how much time went into making something like that for people to see. I mean, there's folks who travel far and wide to check that thing out. So, if you have the chance to just hop on a train (which you can travel for only 15 euro round trip this month!!), take the time to go do it! Besides, help yourself to an awesome Belgian waffle while you're at it. 

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Tapis de fleurs 2010

**** If you click on any of the photos, you can actually ZOOM in and see 'em in an unedited size (large) ****

This past weekend, Eric and I made our way over to Brussels since the famous "flower carpet" was happening. Sure, it doesn't sound all that impressive or anything, but that event happens once every two years. At least we can say we actually saw something like that, ya know?

We ended up leaving from Neerpelt around 8:30am since the train takes about two hours to get to Brussels. Luckily, some of our friends happened to be heading to the same place... So we had some entertainment for the majority of the ride.Once we reached Brussels Central, we all scattered to the winds since everyone has their own agenda. All Eric & I really wanted to do was check out the carpet, take the typical tourist pics, have lunch at a Chinese joint we found last time we were there, then roll out to Antwerp.

We made our way over to the carpet and the crowd really wasn't all thy bad. I guess I was expecting a total madhouse or something, but it seemed pretty mellow since we got there early enough.

We went over to the Grand Palace Hotel since they allowed people to use their balcony for the cost of 3€, which was pretty cheap, if you ask me. At first, the line looked insanely long, but it only took Bout 20 minutes from the back of the line to the actual balcony. Here's some pics from while we were waiting:

The statues along the building were AMAZING! I loved the detail on the womens dresses / corsets :

 Some surrounding shots of the Grace Palace courtyard..tons of cafe's, lil restraunts and chocolate shops:

Pool statue for the inner courtyard:

I was really diggin' the ironwork for the courtyard:

 Figured this would be kinda artistic looking:

LOOK! An actual picture of the current King & Queen of Belgium!

It was pretty cool since you walked past several different rooms that had to have been from the 1700's or so. Old furniture, carvings in the walls to hold light fixtures , damask tapestry for wallpaper...very elegant stuff! I wish I couldve gotten some pictures of it, but the security in the building wasn't allowing pictures (lame). So, once we got to the balcony area, I was able to find an opening and took some pictures without battling too many people. I was just getting slightly annoyed because some people were literally shoving me from behind to try to move me out of the way... I paid, you paid, we all paid to get here. Chill, people!

Here's some shots I was able to get from the balcony:

 

I went to the official site for this event (www.flowercarpet.be) and found some pretty interesting stuff this whole event. The following stuff is quoted from the site:

A Brief History

Officially, the first Floral Carpet as its present-day form was created in 1971 on the Grand-Place by the landscape architect E. Stautemans, but, in fact, it was the culmination of a whole series created in various towns in Flanders.

E. Stautemans, who was born in Zottegem, and graduated from the Ghent Horticultural College, had been experimenting since the early 50's making simple small carpets, more like rugs, mainly consisting of begonias (in Knokke, Oudenaarde, Sint-Niklaas, Lille…).

He very quickly realised that floral carpets would be an excellent vehicle for the promotion of his beloved begonias which he had always worked with, both technically, economically and aesthetically. After years of attempts and calculations, this architect, who was inventive and imaginative, and knew how to make the most of the numerous resources of begonias, became an expert in the creation of superb floral carpets with sophisticated colors and complicated designs.

His fame spread and he was asked to make carpets not only in Belgium (Ghent, Bruges, Antwerp, Ypres, Courtrai, Hasselt, Tongres, Mons, Durbuy, …) but worldwide (Cologne, Hamburg, Luxemburg, Paris, London, Breda, Amsterdam, The Hague, Vienna, Valencia, and as far afield as Buenos Aires and Colombus, Ohio).

Some of these carpets were bigger than the ones created in Brussels (77 x 24 m), like the 1973 masterpiece at Sint-Pietersplein, Ghent that reached a gigantic 164 x 42 m. However, as E. Stautemas himself says, "Nowhere is the carpet more beautiful and distinguished than in the unique, ancient surroundings of the Grand-Place in Brussels".

Making a Carpet

The actual making of the Carpet is based on a plan worked out in advance, consisting of several stages. Everything starts, often a year in advance, with projects and scale models, illustrating a commissioned theme (such as the commemoration of great events, or the arms and shield of a town, and sometimes the proposals of local horticultural associations).

Once the theme has been produced in representation and symbol, the number of flowers and color combinations calculated and the outlines finally drawn on the ground, then the work starts.The skilful, dedicated work of a hundred experienced gardeners and their enthusiasm enables them to put together this giant floral jigsaw in under four hours.

The day before, the spaces between the floral patterns will already have been filled with rolled turf.  Did you know - that the flowers are packed together one by one, 300 to every square meter of the ground, (+/- 750.000 flowers!) so tightly (no soil is used at all) that they won't be blown away by the first puff of wind, and create their own microclimate? In heat waves, the turf has to be watered to prevent it from shrinking, but if the weather is too wet, the grass can grow 4 to 5 centimeters in 3 days? The wonders of nature!

 Here's some pictures of past carpets:

2008

2006

2004

2002

2000

Educational, hunh? :)

Once we were done checking out the floral carpet, we headed on over to a Chinese restraunt we found back in December when we visited Brussels for their Christmas tree display.

 We chowed down on some awesome food and made our way back over to the train station. When we first got into the courtyard where the flowers were, we spotted some local artists working on some paintings of the area. Eric ended up getting a pretty cool piece that's done in pen and I got a piece that the guy was finishing up of the actual courtyard (I had to wait a few minutes for the paint to dry before he rolled it up for me):

Eric's picture:

Mine: 

We're wanting to get them professionally framed, but since it'd be too expensive to have done here.. we'll most likely wait till we're back stateside. Most of our other pictures have been framed through Aaron Brothers in Monterey, so odds are, they'll end up doing these for us.

All in all, we had a great day between Brussels and Antwerp (all we did in Antwerp was hit up Starbucks and hit up LUSH again). Even though I'm sure some people say "It's just a ton of flowers. What's the big deal?"...well, it's actually pretty awesome to see in person. Not only that, but it's a show of artistic ability to create something like that on such a grand level. 

* Two thumbs up! *

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