I saved the best for the last.
I had to vacate the hostel room by 10 AM. I freshened up, took a bath, repacked by big rucksack for one last time and headed off to the reception. The free luggage storage facility was super handy. My bus was at 10:20 PM and I had the entire afternoon and evening to spend.
A visit to the Hergé Museum
I had already planned my afternoon. I bought a return ticket for Louvain-la-Neuve to visit the Hergé museum. As a Tintinologist, it would have been great shame if I wasn’t able to go there. I was greeted by Tintin multiple times at Brussels-Midi station.
There is a Tintin sign visible right outside at Brussels-Midi station.
This panel is at the entrance of Brussels-Midi, towards the left.
And this one, straight on near the entrance.
There weren’t any direct train on weekends, so I had to change trains at Ottignies. The train journey lasted for about an hour. The museum itself is very close to the train station.
Hergé Museum.
I must have spent an entire afternoon there—playing the audioguide and reading, observing every detail. There were a lot of original panels drawn by Hergé and his assistants. I knew those images by heart but here I had a new appreciation for the creator’s work.
All the named characters of Tintin.
Edward P. Jacobs did this panel. Hergé had a scaled model of the ship made so that the drawings could have been accurate.
From The Explorers on the Moon. See the use of white gouache that has been used to erase a larger, different perspective of the spacecraft. There were other forms of editing, too. The cover of Explorers is actually constructed in fragments and then taped together.
This is the museum of oddities. Models and paraphernalia found in the albums.
The museum not only focuses on Tintin but also Hergé’s other works. Not many original panels remain but still, the foundation was able to source a lot of things from the Joe, Zette and Jocko era, the old drawing books and some published sheets from Le Petit Vingtième, where most of Herge’s earlier works were published.
Hergé posing in front of a market in Brussels.
This is Hergé with Zhang Chongren, who would inspire the character Tchang from The Blue Lotus and Tintin in Tibet.
Herge’s drawings of cats. Despite giving Tintin a dog as a sidekick, Hergé was more fond of cats.
And finally, the room of albums. I was disappointed to not find a Bengali edition in there.
I got back to Brussels and wasted some time at the Christmas market before heading back to the hostel to pick up my rucksack. My bus departed from Brussels-Nord and dropped me in front of Amsterdam Schiphol airport at 2:00 AM. It was snowing heavily. I was headed for a warmer climate in a couple of hours.
