Mini Europe

Frequenters of my blog will know how much I love a French chateau - but you'd have to be only an inch high to visit this one because guess what....

.........it's only a model!  This Loire Valley 'Chenonceau' is just one of the iconic landmarks at..........

......Mini-Europe, in Brussels.


Good luck identifying the buildings and cities - I was scratching my head at some of them.
 

You can't help laughing!

See the giant silver ball seeming to drift behind the Eiffel Tower and the roof of the Pompidou Centre?  That's part of the Atomium which I posted about a while ago. It was from the top of the Atomium that I spied Mini-Europe - wow, I MUST go THERE - I LOVE model buildings!!

Some of them really are unbelievably realistic and well made like this Corbusier Notre Dame du Haut

That's Justin, my other half, I wanted some 'human scale' in the shot - he said not to mention him when I wrote the post, but too bad, he doesn't read my blog much anyway!

LOVE the people - so busy busy.

This P&O ferry must have taken a rather bizarre route across the English Channel as it's now drifting in front of the Royal Crescent in Bath (you can see the back of the terrace)

Look at the road - so cleverly done.

I think what's really funny is when iconic buildings get mixed up with other random places - here for example is the Houses of Parliament bang next to a North Sea Oil drilling platform.

What ARE these guys doing??

Above and below, the Grand Place, Brussels. Brilliantly made. I'd love to have seen the workshops where all the models were made. I think it took them quite a few years and they had to keep adding new models when the European Union kept expanding. They must have thought, 'Oh no, not ANOTHER country, I thought we were done!'

It was a November afternoon and it started to get dark - but then all the lighting got switched on which created a fantastic atmosphere.

I absolutely love model buildings so this was a very exciting visit for me and I just wish I'd had longer - I was madly rushing around snapping before they closed.

I don't know quite why I like architectural models so much - maybe it's because when a building is so reduced in size that you can see every facet, it becomes a very sculptural object.

See my other posts on model buildings:

mini-buildings

model chalets
architectural models