Belgium (Brussels, Ghent and Brugge)

We got to Brussels on a Thursday night and took the metro to our hostel. We went out that night to walk around, we went past the Royal Palace and other important buildings and then found the Grand Place - a huge old plaza. One of Brussels’ most popular attractions is a fountain of a little boy peeing, called the Mannekin Pis. We saw some signs for it so we followed them and almost walked right by the statue because it’s really small. It was just a statue of a naked boy with water spouting from his penis. His image is on t-shirts and postcards everywhere. It’s a tradition to dress him up so there are posters everywhere of him wearing all kinds of different outfits. We were kind of disappointed; we thought it was a big fuss over a stupid little statue. We went back to the hostel and hung out there, there was a nice bar full of young people that sold a bunch of different Belgian beers.

The next day we wanted to do a day trip to see some of the old Flemish towns in northern Belgium. We walked to the closest of the city’s three train stations and discovered that it is right in the middle of the red light district. It was a gritty old neighborhood, not as quaint as the canal-lined red light district in Amsterdam. We got off the train in Ghent, Belgium’s third largest city that was one of Europe’s biggest and most important cities during the Middle Ages. We got lost in the new part of the city and eventually found our way to the old part, which had some really old churches, monasteries and a castle along a river.

We got sandwiches and fruit for lunch there, and some hot and fresh Belgian waffles. We took another train to the town of Brugge, which was recommended by other travelers as a really beautiful city. We could see a tall church from the train station so we decided to head towards that. It was in the middle of a complex of monasteries, gardens, old footbridges and statues. There are two old plazas and the Basilica of the Holy Blood. Everything in Brugge was cool. We cooked dinner back at the hostel and then took the metro to the east side of town where all the European Union buildings have been built. It’s mostly a bunch of office complexes and there is a lot of construction to expand the administrative buildings as the EU expands. We found the parliament, which is the only well known building. We went back to Grand Place and the historic center and walked around there some more. On Saturday we went to the train station so that I could book a ticket on the high-speed Thalys train to Paris. We went to Grand Place because we had missed the beer museum there. It was really hard to find and when we finally did find it, it turned out to be closed. The chocolate museum nearby didn’t interest us as much.

The European Auto Show was going on in Brussels so we went out to the convention center to check it out. It was a huge car show with lots of European cars that are not sold in the US. I sat it one of the SmartCars and to my surprise I fit, though there’s not much headroom and the rear door is just inches behind the front seats. Besides the Ferraris, Bentleys, and Porsches, one of the coolest cars we saw was a Tour de France station wagon with the Discovery Channel team bikes on top. We walked through a shopping area and theater nearby and then took the metro back to the city. We went to a big grocery store where Charlie got chocolate and beer to bring home and we walked down a busy shopping street. There are lots of winter sales were going on. We cooked a spaghetti dinner and both spent time packing, Charlie had to get ready to go home – he left early the next morning and I took a late-morning train to Paris.