Weekend in Brussels

I know this post is very long overdue, and I'm sorry for that! Everytime I tried to sit down and finally blog about my trip to Brussels I was either distracted or just not quite in the writing mood. Anyway, here it is!

Friday morning I had quite an early start as my alarm went off around 6:15 AM. After triple-checking that I had packed everything I needed, I left my host family's house around 7:15 and made my way via-metro to the Eurolines bus station at Gallieni across Paris. I met up with my friends Alex and Melissa at 8 and we checked in and waiting for our bus to leave around 9:00 AM. The bus ride was a quick 3.5 hours and strangely enough they didn't even need to check our passports to get in to Belgium... I guess the border between France and Belgium isn't very strict. My first experience in Brussels was with the lovely Brussels metro/tramway/subway system, which, unlike Paris, is not very easy to figure out. The other bizzare thing is that you don't actually have to swipe a ticket or a pass to get on, it's all done on an "honor system". If a metro worker catches you without one, you can get big fines, but most people didn't seem too worried about this as we saw very few actually validating a ticket. We got 3-day passes anyway, just to be safe.

Finally we made it to our hotel, Hôtel Saint-Nicolas right in the center of town. It was such a cute place and the room was very clean, very nice for a pretty inexpensive price! We walked over to the Grand Place in the center of town, which is known for being one of the most beautiful places in Europe.

And it was! The square is so big that I had to take a lot of pictures to try and get everything, you can see the rest on my webshots page (link to the left). We walked around this area for a little while and then stopped for lunch where I had Belgian sausage and fries, yum! After we could not resist but to stop for a traditional Belgian waffle covered in melted chocolate: absolutely delicious! You can get them with all different toppings as we saw walking past many waffle stands:

mmmmmmmm... :)

Since we just couldn't get enough chocolate, we made a visit to the Musée du Cacao et du Chocolat. Here they showed how they make chocolate pralines and where chocolate comes from all across the world. We also got a couple tastings of their chocolate which was, as expected, also delicious. After the museum we headed over to see one of Brussels' most famous monuments, the Mannekin Pis. It's a statue/fountain of a little boy peeing... I know, kind of weird. There are a lot of different legends about the origin of the Mannekin Pis who supposedly saved the city from enemies. It's a lot smaller than I would have imagined, but cute nonetheless. They also dress it up for holidays and celebrations!

Mannekin Pis

Next we stopped into a small pub to try out some of Belgian's famous beers, which were delicious! More on Belgian beer later in the post. For dinner that night we had another of Brussels' most famous foods, Moules-Frites or Mussels and Fries. As a huge lover of mussels, I was really excited about this and they did not disappoint. My tummy was very happy in Brussels!

Since we were wall pretty tired from the early start, we headed back to the hotel after dinner to get some rest for the next day. Saturday after breakfast we visited another of Brussels' famous monuments, the Atomium. Built for the 1958 World Expo, the Atomium is a giant replica of an atom that you can go inside and see different sciency-related things. Lots of fun! From the top you get a great view of the city and the inside has a lot of cool little exhibits.

Next to the Atomium is Mini-Europe, which sadly was closed for renovations. We could see it from the top of the Atomium though and it looks pretty cool! It has all of the famous monuments of Europe in miniature size. Pretty cool!

Can you spot the Tour Eiffel?

After the Atomium we went to the Cantillon Brewery, which is a traditional family-owned brewery in Brussels. At this brewery they make a natural beer called Lambic. It is natural because instead of adding cultivated yeast to the beer to encourage fermentation, the beer ferments naturally due to the exposed yeast and bacteria that occurs naturally in the air in the region. Because of this, it can take up to six years to make the beer! They also have to do it during "brewing season" which occurs from October to May due to the lower temperatures. The beer itself is almost more similar in taste and appearance to wine than to beer, because it is not carbonated. It has almost a sour taste, but good! I also tried a framboise beer, or raspberry flavored! It wasn't very sweet but still really good. Overall I loved the visit at the brewery and had a ton of fun! I recommend it to anyone visiting Brussels!

After the brewery we walked around Brussels a little, seeing some sights such as the Palais du Justice and the World Wars monuments. We had a late lunch/early dinner and headed back to the hotel to wash up and then headed out to a bar/club where we tried some more flavored beers (all of which were great!) and overall just had a really great time. The club played a lot of American songs so we had a lot of fun!

Sunday morning Alex and I went to an English mass at the church near our hotel where the priest was from Dublin! Afterwards we decided to visit the René Magritte museum, who is known for his surrealist art. Unfortunately we went 30 minutes out of our way because the website told us the wrong location! There were even signs on the street pointing to a museum that didn't exist. This made me very frustrated with Brussels. Finally, though, we found the museum and it was very cool . Surrealist art can sometimes be a little confusing to me but overall I liked it. Afterwards we visited the Museum of Musical Instruments, which was awesome! You are given a pair of headphones that play the music of the musical instrument shown as you walk past. The music keeps changing as you walk through the museum which makes for a really cool experience! Definitely a different kind of museum that I really really enjoyed.

This basically concluded our trip, as we had to go back to the hotel to get our bags and head to the train station to wait for our bus back to Paris. Finding the bus stop was pretty frustrating as the sign for it was a tiny piece of paper on a telephone poll, but luckily we found it in time! The bus was also about 20 minutes late but the ride home was quick and overall a good experience. We were pretty excited to get back home to Paris after the long and tiring weekend! Brussels as a whole was a lot of fun and a really cool place to visit. We heard a lot of French spoken there, but the accent is much different than in France. It's also a much smaller city than Paris, so it was pretty easy to get to know. All in all I had a great time and suggest making a trip there if you ever get the chance!

That's all for now, in a few days I'll make another post about my past week and weekend talking about my visits to other cities in France!

À bientôt!