So there I was with a 70-minute layover between trains, standing in the Bruxelles-Midi train station, with thoughts of the 1958 world’s fair on my mind.
I’m a world’s fair buff, when time allows, which it hasn’t done for a few years now; Brussels hosted the 1958 fair, which had an interesting elegance pervading the Cold War tensions of the moment. And although I’ve never really focused on the 1958 fair as I have on the Spokane fair of 1974 for instance (my favorite), it has always seemed to be one worthy of scrutiny if only for what it can tell me about the circumstances in which it was held. Above all, however, there was the Atomium, a science-themed central “tower” which served as the hub of the fair; most world’s fairs have such a tower—Paris’s Eiffel Tower, the NYC 1939/40’s Trylon and Perisphere, Seattle’s Space Needle of 1962, and Osaka 1970’s Sun Tower come to mind immediately as examples—but the Atomium was strangely clunky-looking by comparison to most of the others I mentioned (Osaka’s being an exception to that).
So I’ve always wondered what the Atomium looked like in person, and what condition it was in after all these years. I had only discovered in the past year or two that it was still standing, whereupon I added it to my list of Places To See. And on that impulsive and unrehearsed Thalys trip to The Hague, as the train slowly transited Brussels, I kept my eyes glued to the train windows, expecting to see the Atomium in the middle of town; I had pretty much given up on it as the train continued toward the Netherlands, when suddenly I spotted the Atomium’s unmistakable form on the horizon, jutting out of the very flat landscape like a minimalist cubic spaceship or cosmic game piece, and I completely lost all semblance of composure as I flung myself against the train window, mouth agape, looking for all the world like some idiot kid getting his first glimpse of Disneyland. “Ho-boy-o-boy-o-boy!” like a Warner Brothers cartoon buffoon…. I made mental note of its relative location in town (north-northeast of Brussels, if I was reading my map right) and promised myself that if the opportunity arose on the return trip I would try to go check it out in person.
Back to the return trip now: me at the train station, with just a hair over an hour to kill, with the Atomium filling my immediate thoughts and the reliable promptness of European train schedules gnawing away at the back of my mind. After all, here I was lugging my bags along and limping badly after that beach-walking excursion of the previous day…not in top form and too heavily encumbered to be thinking of spur-of-the-moment whimsicalities. Nevertheless, the combination of Eurail pass and adventurous spirit kicked in: I walked to an info desk and asked how hard it was to get to the Atomium and was told it could be reached in just under a half-hour via the Métro (underground). I stared at a clock for a couple of minutes, trying to work out what my chances were of successfully pulling this off, and finally I decided to just go for it.
And I made it! But I only had time to get out of the underground, walk towards the Atomium to get a feel for its actual size, and turn back around and catch the next subway train to the train station. Although I would have liked to have really visited it, I did at least establish that it has the same kind of impressive presence that the Space Needle does, albeit with only half the height and placed in what is now an unfortunately cramped setting. Its spheres look tarnished and segmented now, to my surprise, but the official website indicates that there is a restoration process getting underway.
I made it back to the train station and was on my train about 60 seconds before it left the station; a guy across the aisle from me cut it even closer, and we both stood there panting for a few minutes after the departure.
Throughout this vacation, by the way, I was struck by the presence of the English language—not spoken, for the most part, but in print, especially in advertisements. Sometimes it was just seasoning, words sprinkled over French ad copy, but on occasion it really stuck out, mostly when an English word was used because it was clearly the better-known alternative to the French equivalent or when an entire ad was focused on English-speaking French readers. On the Thalys, however, I heard such a jumble of French, English, German, Arabic, and Dutch, I was in heaven…I love multilingual environments like that where no one language dominates and people switch between languages. In this case it was a First Class car with five or six people making business calls on cell phones.
Text © 2003 Mark Ellis Walker, except as noted