Belgium is not exactly the country that’s considered the most exciting in the world. The climate isn’t exactly tropical, with more rainy and cloudy than sunny days in a year. The landscape is rather flat, besides the hills in the Ardennes – you really cannot call that mountains. Belgium has one of the highest, if not the highest tax-rates in the world, and probably the world-record of a democratic country without government after elections. It took the different parties no less than 541 days to form a new democratic government.
All this however doesn’t mean you shouldn’t visit Belgium, as all the participants of the International Porsche 356 Meeting can witness. We reported you about the splendid time they had on Friday in the south of the country, when they drove scenic roads to the Abbey of Maredsous for a great lunch, and back to the headquarters of the meeting : the exquisite La Dolce hotel in La Hulpe near the belgian capital Brussels.
Saturday the tour went to Brussels, with a visit to the Atomium, one of the remains of the Worlds’s fair that was held in 1958 in Brussels too. The Atomium is a monument designed by engineer Andre Waterkeyn and architekts Andre and Jean Pollak. it stands 102 m (335 ft) tall. Its nine 18 m (59 ft) diameter stainless steel clad spheres are connected so that the whole forms the shape of a unit cell of an iron crystal magnified 165 billion times with a museum in the interior.
1958, the year of the expo, and the year some of the wonderful Porsche 356’s present at the International Porsche 356 Meeting left the factory for a life probably nobody would have expected to last till now. Hard to imagine a more appropriate place, especially when you know there is a exhibition right under the atomium about 2 of belgian’s most succesful sportsmen ever : Eddy Merckx and Jacky Ickx, Mr. Le Mans.
Many of the participants spent time at the exhibition that we honoured with a visit some time ago. Other visited the city of Brussels. And they all had a splendid time.
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