The Manneken Pis is, by most reasonable measures, small statue of a small boy doing something a small boy would do. Yet this bronze figure, barely half a metre tall, has been one of Brussels' most visited sights since at least 1451, and the city has leaned into the absurdity with remarkable commitment.

The legends are entertainingly implausible: one holds that the statue commemorates a boy who saved Brussels from invasion by urinating on an enemy's gunpowder supply. Whether anyone believed this, it captures the mood perfectly. Brussels calls its brand of irreverence "zinneke," and the Manneken Pis is its mascot. The statue has accumulated over a thousand donated costumes, displayed in the nearby GardeRobe Museum. On any given day, it may be dressed as Elvis, a samurai or a Belgian astronaut.

VoiceMap's audio tours connect the statue to its tongue-in-cheek counterpart, Jeanneke-Pis, installed in a nearby alley in 1987, and traces how a city shaped by centuries of foreign rule learned to laugh at itself.