Bruxelles, Belgium

Friday February 12th
I woke up at 6am in order to get ready, finish packing and trudge my way through the snow to the train station on the opposite side of town. While walking to the train station I couldn't help but to think that maybe I'd made a mistake by choosing to take my cloth all-star converse sneakers with me, instead of my warmer, more weather appropriate adidas tennis shoes. Considering I was heading further north where it would probably be colder and with more snow, but oh well, too late to change my mind now. My train from Poitiers to Lille was twenty minutes late due to the snowy weather, so I was afraid I was going to miss my connecting train from Lille to Bruxelles, but no worries that train was delayed twenty minutes too. I arrived in Bruxelles around 2:30pm and was greeted by sunshine as I made my way to my hostel to drop off my bag, before heading out to take in the sites. My first stop of the day was "Mannequin Pis" which is a fountain of a little boy pissing (interesting fact: in 2007 he didn't piss for one day as a warning for prostrate cancer). It's the national symbol for the country, but was smaller than I'd been expecting. In basically every chocolate shops you can buy little "Mannequin Pis" chocolate statues. After visiting the pissing statue I started making my way toward the "Grand Place" which is Bruxelles most magnificent square. Along the way I jumped in and out of souvenir shops, chocolate shops and drooled over the waffles that were topped with chocolate, whip cream and all kinds of fruits. When I finally reached Grand Place, I was in awe. The architecture was amazing. Buildings were decorated with intricate statues and symbols and gold. The "Hotel de Ville" (city hall) had the classic gothic architecture going on with tons of little statues and the guildhalls were decked out in gold and statues. From there I continued wandering aimlessly taking in the town. All the streets are made of cobblestone and all the stores are packed with either souvenirs, chocolate or beer (and lots of times all three). Occasionally there would be a clothing store, but they were all tacky and cheap (I hear Antwerp is the town to visit in Belgium if you want good fashion and shopping). I came across the "Galleries St. Hubert" while wandering. It's a strip mall under a glass ceiling. Since it's closed-in it's suppose to help fight against the cold and weather, but it doesn't. It was just as cold walking inside as outside. The galleries connect into a street called "Rue des Bouchers" which is packed with restaurants. Because there are so many restaurants located in one area and not enough customers to fill them all, the waiters (very aggressively) stand outside the restuarant and try to talk to you and get you to eat in their restaurant. Its like walking through a gauntlet. I had actually considered grabbing something to eat there, until I was bombarded by overly-aggressive waiters. So instead I visited the tourist office and then found a little cafe and had some soup for dinner, while I plotted out what I'd do the following day and then I started heading back to the hostel. I jumped into Madeleine Church on my way back to the hostel. It looks really pretty from the outside, but the inside was very plain and dull (and mass was in session) so I didn't stay long. At the hostel I met two of my roommates. Two french girls who study near Paris. They invited me to join them for the evening (dinner and drinks), but I politely refused stating that I'd prefer to go out Saturday night and not Friday (hey, I'm on a budget, I can't afford to go out every night). So I enjoyed my first Belgium beer "Barbar" in Belgium at the hostel bar alone while I continued to read and take notes on my book Utopia by Thomas More (this book takes forever to read. It's so dense I have to reread everything and the man has never heard of paragraphs). After that I turned in for the night, so I'd be fresh and ready to go the following morning.

Saturday February 13th
Upon waking up I continued to talk with the two french girls (in french all the time, of course) and we went to breakfast in the hostel together (the hostel breakfast was actually pretty impressive, usually its just toast and jam but here there were different types of toppings for the toast, two types of cereal, fruit and a large selection of breakfast beverages) and they invited me to spend the day site seeing with them. I was a bit hesitant at first because I actually like traveling alone because I get to see what I want and at my own pace and I was worried about speaking my imperfect french all day with two native speakers, but I decided to go with them anyways. At 10am we left the hostel and headed to an antique open-air market near a park called "Place du Petit Sablon". Antique markets aren't really my thing, but the park was cool. It was surrounded by 48 little statues of men depicting old professions and in the center of the park was a large fountain with two statues of two men who were beheaded for protesting against the catholic oppression by the Spanish Duke of Alba 440 years ago. From there we visited the "Palais du Justice" (courthouse)which was just humongous and way over the top. The Copula is made of gold and it was the second largest (after the Copula in Vatican City) when it was built. The palais sits on a hill over looking the city, so it gives some great views of the town. Next to the palais is a glass elevator that takes you down the mountain, so we jumped in that and headed to our next destination a large flea market located a "Place de Jeu de Balle", like I said I'm not a big fan of flea markets so we had a quick look around and then started heading back into town (we were in the Southwest corner of the city). It was getting extremely cold and starting to snow, so we jumped into a "bio market" (organic food market) to warm up before finishing the trek into town. The Mannequin Pis was the first stop once we'd arrived back in the center of town. Every Saturday the city dresses the Mannequin Pis in the traditional clothing of a different country (this Saturday it was Poland) so we checked it out, snapped some pictures and then began hitting up Chocolateries (chocolate stores). The girls were leaving the following day and wanted to bring chocolate back with them, so I think we visited almost every chocolate store in the city. Which wasn't bad, because lots of them give out free samples or have chocolate fondue fountains that you can dip things in and some having viewing areas where you can watch the chocolate being made. So it was really amusing and tasty visiting them all. During our chocolate hunt we took a break and had lunch in a sandwich shop and then we went to a waffle shop for dessert, where I tasted my first belgian waffle covered in hot fudge and powdered sugar. Yummmmm!! After the girls had finished picking out all their chocolates, they showed me the girl Mannequin Pis named Jeanneke Pis. Yes, it's a statue of a little girl squatting to pee. Then we began wandering to a few other sites like the Opera House, Beer Planet, Passage du Nord (which is similar to Galleries St Hubert, because it's also a covered strip mall but it's walls are lined with statues), then we walked along "Nieuwstraat" street (which was lined with all my favorite shopping stores like H&M, Zara, Pimkie, Promod, etc.) until we reached "Place des Martyrs", then we continued walking toward the Cathedral (on our way to the Cathedral we took a street called "Rue des Comedians" which had some very shall we say 'original' architecture, that is probably hit or miss with a lot of people, but I liked it!). Inside the Cathedral we each paid an euro in order to enter under the church and see the old foundations. After we'd finished looking around in the Cathedral we headed back into the center of town (the cathedral is in the Northeast corner of the city, the exact opposite of where we'd been that morning visting the flea market...we did a lot of walking...helps to burn off all that chocolate and waffles we ate) to visit "Mont des Arts" which is basically a large glass cube you can walk into, but doesn't actually serve any purpose. More cool was the large clock built into the entire side of a wall of a building opposite the Mont des Arts. From there we headed to what I like to call the 'Museum District' because there are museums everywhere, but its also where the "Palais Royal" (Royal Palace) and "Parc de Bruxelles" is located. So we walked by those before making our way back to the hostel and hitting up a grocery store on our way to buy some food and drink for an 'aperitif' at the hostel. After our aperitif we headed out to the bars. The first bar we visited was near our hostel and located in a basement. It had a neat ambiance because it reminded me of an old medieval prison. Then we headed to an Irish bar called "O'Reilly's" across from "la Bourse" (the stockmarket/wallstreet of Belgium), where we met up with our other roommate who was from the Netherlands. We were originally going to go to a concert at a different bar, but when we arrived at that bar we were there less than two minutes before we all mutually agreed that the music sucked and was some of the worst we'd ever heard and walked out (it was some chick spinning horrible remixes of horrible songs). So we passed our evening at the Irish pub and then hit up a kebab shop on our way back to hostel around 3am.

Sunday February 14th
First stop of the day was the train station (located in the southwest corner of the town), which for some reason I decided to walk to, even though it was snowy and extremely cold. I needed to pick up my ticket for my train to Luxembourg the following day. Then I jumped on the metro back into town. The weather was really crappy on my last day. It was snowing all day and extremely cold so by the end of the day my pants and shoes were soaking wet and I was freezing, but I've never let the weather stop me before. Once in town I stopped for some soup to warm up and planned where I was going to go for the day. I decided to trek to the northern part of the city walking by "la Bourse" and the statue of the dog pissing called "Zinneke Pis" (they really like their pissing statues/fountains here). Then I headed to "St. Katerijne Church" where they were preparing for Ash Wednesday, before taking an elevator to the 10th level of a parking structure in order to get a panoramic view of the city. Unfortunately, because of all the snow my view ended up not being as great as I'd been hoping for. After that I walked to the Southern tip of town to visit "Place du Luxembourg" and "Parlement Europeen" (European parliament), this is where the European Union headquarters are located. I walked around this area for a while, but the cold and snow finally were getting to me so I caught a metro back to my hostel and called it a day.

Monday February 15th
Woke up at 6am and made my way to the train station in order to catch my 7:30am train to Luxembourg. My hostel was awesome and had packed me a to-go breakfast so I enjoyed that on the train ride. There was a young woman sharing the compartment with me and she had a cat in a basket that you could tell she was way to close to (she's definitely going to be the old lady with lots of cats in the future). I spent most of the trip staring out the window and watching the snow covered country fly by, until I arrived in Luxembourg City at 10:30am...to be continued in the next post 'Luxembourg'...