The Land of Chocolate, Belgium

So last weekend I went to Belgium.  “Why?” you ask me, well….because it was cheap!  haha.  Me friend and I found a cheap flight to Belgium back in October for the weekend of Thanksgiving and we figured we’d go!  I had no idea what there was to see there, but little did I know that it was a hidden gold mine!  There’s actually a lot to see in Belgium and we spent almost all of our time out and about exploring all that Brussels, Brugge and Ghent had to offer.  Brussels is the capital of the European Union, so there’s a lot of international people there and pretty much everyone speaks English, which is really good because we don’t know Flemish, Dutch or German (all the languages they speak there).  On the plane we had an awesome person sitting with us though.  We met Pieterjan (PJ) on the plane and we spent the whole two hours talking with him about what we should see in Belgium, and talking about languages.  He even offered to show us around Brussels because he works there and had nothing to do that afternoon!  We were so excited that we’d have a local showing us around, but then we found out that we had different means of getting to the actual city and he could no longer come with us . :(  Camille and I flew into Charlatoi, which is an airport an hour outside of Brussels, but it’s much cheaper, so we had to take a shuttle bus into the city, and PJ was taking a train…traiter!…so we couldn’t meet up, but he did give us some great advice.  He told us to go to Gent, and Camille had never heard of it but I recently head about it so we said, okay! and worked it into our plans.  So we parted ways after the airport and headed into Brussels.  Unforunately, we couldn’t check into our hostel until almost 6:30, and since we arrived at 2:30, we had almost 4 hours to kill before we could go.  Luckily, Belgium is very organized and offers lockers in their train stations to store your things.  So we used a locker in the train station, locked away our backpack and suitcase and went out to explore Brussels!  We were actually able to see almost everything we wanted to see in Brussels in that afternoon, which is good because Saturday we planned on going to Brugge and Ghent all day. 

Me at the Grand Place (Main Square) in Brussels. 

 

We walked down this gallery where they sell some of the most expensive things in Brussels.  It has all the expensive chocolate stores, and clothing stores, it even had a postcard store!

 

And down the galleria we found this chocolate store.  Where apparently every piece of chocolate is good enough to have it’s own pedestal….

Then we decided to go find the Manneken Piss, the peeing boy!  Don’t ask me why there’s a statue of a boy peeing in Brussels, I’m pretty sure people don’t even know why he’s there, but he’s an anomoly and the locals take great pleasure in dressing up the peeing boy for the holidays and other occasions.  Unfortunately he was not dressed up for Christmas yet, although I’m pretty sure they do dress him up as Santa as it gets closer to Christmas.  Either way, we found our way to the peeing boy, and, I hate to say it, but I was quite underwhelmed.  It’s a very small statue, and it’s kind of just a regular statue.  It’s not made especially nicely, there’s no crazy architectual details that astonish me, he’s just a fountain of a boy made to look like he’s peeing into the pool of water that’s underneath the statue.  Maybe it’s just me, maybe I don’t appreciate the humor in it, or maybe he’s just that underwhelming.  

Either way, after that we wandered back to the Grand Place to see it all lit up and we found out that they have a winter light show that started later that evening, so we decided to collect our things and head back to the hostel.  Once we were settled and effectively offended the owner of the hostel by not using his wonderful crappy map, and asking if he has towels we headed out to eat dinner at one of his excellent outrageously priced recommended restaurants.  So we ended up at an Italian Restaurants and effectively offended them by asking about the price of water and then walked out.  So THEN we ended up at yet another overpriced but more accommodating Asian restaurant where I had my first real Thai food.  It wasn’t bad, but it certainly didn’t fill me.  After an evening full of frustrating at finding decently priced, good food in this city of overpriced things, we headed back to the city center to see the Grand Place light show!  Oh my goodness was it worth it!
It’s a light show was amazing and is a light and music show where it tells the history of Belgium through classical music and they light up all the buildings in city hall.  It’s amazing and certainly worth standing outside in the freezing cold.  It was so good that we actually went back the following night to watch it two more times because Friday night we spent it taking photos and videos, so we wanted to enjoy it better.  Then we ended up eating our waffles the whole time, so we sat and waited another 15 min or so to see it again.  It was playing from 5:30 to 10:30 all night long every 30 min but lasted 15 min so it essentially was playing every 15 minutes. haha.  We felt very lucky because if we weren’t in Brussels during the Christmas season I’m not sure if they would actually have this show, I’m pretty sure it’s only a seasonal thing, so we felt very fortunate. 

But then that was pretty much all the time we spent in Brussels.  Sunday before we left we went to see the Atomium, a giant atom magnified like 650 billion times, that was created in the 1958 for a conference that was held in Belgium.  When the guy built it he believed that atomic research was going to save the world and make great advances, and it did, but it certainly hasn’t been the saving grace that I think he hoped for.  So that was really cool to see, but we didn’t go inside it like we wanted to because we were more interested in seeing the world’s largest collection of instruments at the Music Museum they have there.  The Music Museum was also really cool and totally worth our Sunday morning before we headed back to Huelva.

  Some cool instruments from Africa I think

This one is the instrument of the month!

Really pretty harmonica from Italy

On Saturday we spent the day outside of Brussels, much to our hostel owners dismay, exploring the beautiful cities of Brugge and Ghent at the recommendation of our friend PJ from the plane.  I’m so happy we did because it was 100% worth being outside of Brussels away from the metropolitan feeling.  The next blog post will be what we did in Brugge and Ghent!

Me at the beautiful light show