Brussels

As mentioned before, the guide books sure do love this city. Possibly because it is the heart of the European Union or because it really does have tons of museums, but it wasn’t my favorite place on the trip. Here are my thoughts anyway:
- The main attraction of this town is a little boy statue peeing. If that doesn’t tell you there isn’t much to do, I don’t know what does.
- I have to thank my former company for sending me all over the USA to work so that I was able to build up some serious hotel points. I used a free night in Brussels to stay at the Hilton and after 15 euro a night hostels it was well welcomed. In fact, we didn’t leave our hotel in the morning til 11:30 am. I know, I know, for being in a foreign city we should have been more explorative. Nope, sorry, sleep rules.
- Sadly there were grandstands set up in the Brussels main square for some kind of jousting competition. I don’t know, we didn’t stay to watch, but it was sad because the buildings are so intricate and beautiful and I didn’t really get a good view of them or any good pictures.
- Another big attraction in Brussels is Atomium. It was built for the World Fair in like 1958 and some liken it to the Eiffel Tower because it really is just a big structure to look at. Here’s the problem though, 1. I had never even heard of it until I saw it on the map, and 2. The name is really hard for me to say, so I just kept calling it the Atrium. It looks nothing like an Atrium, but that’s what I called it anyway.
- We did go to one museum while we were in Brussels and it was the Musical Instrument Museum. They have close to 1100 old instruments on display. You get headphones when you enter the museum and when you stand in front of each instrument it plays the music made by the instrument. Pretty neat really.
- Having not consumed enough Belgian beer while we were in the country, we decided to take a mini-bar crawl on our final night. We went to the bar where the waiters are known as walking beer encyclopedias (and the bar that served us barley seeds that I thought were sunflower seeds and tried to eat them…not tasty, oops), then the bar that has a beer brewed specially for the bar and not served anywhere else, then went to a bar close to the statue of the little girl peeing. A side note on Belgian beer. I can hold my own when drinking just about anything. It sufficiently takes me at least 6 or 7 beers to be feeling good, but this stuff is of a different breed. I literally drank a beer and a half and was starting to feel the effects. Not in a bad way, but I was impressed by the 80 year-old lady in a café drinking a really dark beer at 5pm and another woman in our lunch sandwich shop having a Hoengaarden with her lunch. Rock on Belgian ladies!
- We couldn’t end our trip to Belgium without another waffle, so we went back to the main square and ate at one of the touristy places where I had mine covered with chocolate sauce while my brother had his with speculoos (kind of like gingerbread cookies)ice cream.