Brussels

Home of the European Union, Brussels has become a bustling centre for bureaucrats and businessmen and is a thriving cosmopolitan metropolis. The buildings in the city are a fascinating mix of architectural styles, and there are numerous museums of interest throughout the city. Within the 14th-century city walls is the compact centre of the old city with the beautiful Grand Place at its heart. Visitors rarely stray beyond the walls of the ‘petit ring’ of the city centre, clearly defined from the newer glitzy quarters by its narrow maze of streets, as this is where the key sights are to be found, along with the best bars and restaurants. With its more than 1000 years of history the city offers many fascinating sights to visit. It boasts the most beautiful historic market square and the highest concentration of restaurants in the world.

Central Brussels is divided into two main areas, the Lower and Upper Towns. The Lower Town comprises the medieval city centre, built around the imposing Grand Place, a former market square. The area is easy to get around on foot, its cobbled streets leading to popular quarters such as Ilôt Sacré, Ste Catherine, St Géry and Marolles. The Upper Town, to the southeast, has a vastly different atmosphere. The traditional base of Brussels' French-speaking elite, it's home to wide boulevards, major museums, chic shopping areas around Sablon and Ave Louise, and monumental buildings including the Belgian parliament.

Brussels offers numerous musea. Special mention deserve the (integrated) Royal Musea of Ancient and Modern Art (with a special section on the well-known Belgian surrealist Magritte), the museum of natural history with its collection of dinosaur skeletons, the museum of Art and History, near the impressive Cinquantenaire arc, Autoworld, which boasts the largest collection of old and new cars in the world, and the Museum of Comic Strips in a beautiful Art Nouveau building. The most characteristic feature of Brussels is perhaps the rather anarchistically distributed architecture, sometimes splendid, sometimes ugly, but never boring, with medieval houses next to futuristic constructions, and with different houses of different heights, widths and styles, fraternally the one next to the other in any street. The endless variety and surprise you encounter when strolling through the diverse quarters will make you understand why Brussels was a fertile ground for the Surrealist movement.

After a slow start, club culture seems to have finally taken hold in Brussels. The city has a number of established meccas playing anything from acid and techno beats to deep house, including the throbbing Fuse with its regular line-up of big-name house DJs, to the sassy Who's Who Land, which often sees crowds of over 1500 and attracts people from as far away as Paris and Amsterdam.

Most venues are in the Lower Town , especially in the area between place St Géry and the Manneken Pis, and in the scruffily hip Marolles quarter just southeast of the Grand-Place. The Upper Town has a only few offerings of its own, and there are a couple of places beyond the petit ring that are worth the trip. If you do venture out of the centre, don't forget that the public transport system finishes at 12.30am and starts up again at 5.30am, so you may have to get a taxi home. Night buses are fairly infrequent. Drinking in Brussels, as in the rest of the country, is a joy. The city has an enormous variety of bars and cafés. Sumptuous Art Nouveau bars sit alongside swanky, Parisian-style, terraced cafés; traditional drinking dens with ceilings stained by a century's smoke nestle next to hi-tech cyber bars; and speciality beer bars offer hundreds of different types of ale.

The city's bars are concentrated mostly in the centre : around the Grand-Place, Bourse and the place St Géry. Recently, the area has seen a proliferation of trendy bars in which the fashion-conscious youth of Brussels drink beer, cocktails and flavored vodkas until the wee small hours. When the weather allows, crowds spill on to the terraces and streets, making for an amazingly upbeat ambience.

Although the Upper Town doesn't have as much to offer, there is a number of smoky, velour-furnished bars near the Toison d'Or shopping area, on the chaussée de Charleroi. Venturing out of the petit ring can also be worthwhile, especially if you head to laid-back Ixelles or St Gilles , where you'll find a selection of fashionable bars and cafés and an almost inexhaustible supply of small local hangouts. The EU quarter around place Schuman also offers a decent selection of watering holes, the majority of them Irish or British pubs.

Brussels has a wide range and variety of goods on offer although it's not the cheapest of cities in which to shop . There are two main shopping areas in the city: the city centre around the Grand-Place , and the south part of the Upper Town . The city centre's main shopping street is rue Neuve , which is home to City 2, the ultimate inner-city shopping mall.

Not far from the Grand-Place, Galeries St Hubert accommodates a smattering of conservative boutiques in stark contrast to the Galerie Agora , which peddles cheap leather jackets, incense, piercing jewellery and ethnic goods directly opposite. Behind the Bourse, rue Antoine Dansaert caters for young, cutting-edge fashion-groupies, housing a number of young designers as well as shops selling clothing ranging from the internationally known to such Belgians as the Antwerp 6 and Raf Simons. Neighbouring St Géry contains rue des Riches Claires and rue du Marché au Charbon which have streetwear shops and vintage stores.

Uptown, the chaussée d'Ixelles has most of the big stores and a lively feel in the African quarter around the Galerie d'Ixelles. The label-conscious will want to shop at the smartest addresses on avenues Louise and de la Toison d'Or, where shops offer everything from DKNY to Giorgio Armani, as well as Belgian designers.

The Grand Sablon has a weekend antiques market and the surrounding area has a good selection of similar shops. For bric-à-brac, it's best to wander down to the Marolles district - the closest Brussels gets to New York's Lower East Side - and the daily flea market at the place du Jeu de Balle. There is a labyrinth of old books in the stores of the Galerie Bortier near Gare Centrale.