I am sitting on a train back to Freiburg from Frankfurt as I write this. I just dropped Zach off at the airport a little while ago. (Sunday, February 13th)
I am going to take advantage of my downtime in the train and write up next part of the trip.
We left Luxembourg less than 24 hour after arriving. Around noon we left Luxembourg Gare Central en route to Brussels Midi.
Some background on Brussels: Located in the northern half of Belgium, first spoken language French, it’s an anomaly because of its location in the northern half, called Flanders. Flanders is in the Dutch/Flemish-speaking section of the country, yet the primary language is still French. At museums and such, exhibits are generally labeled in French, then Dutch…(no English)
This led to some interesting times in museums, but also piqued my interest into learning Dutch. I find the language fascinating and eerily similar to German to the point I could read a paragraph of it and almost clearly understand everything it says. The lettering (double vowels, heavy use of the letter J, word order) makes me want to study it in the future. Not to mention, my favorite soccer player (Arjen Robben) is Dutch.
Anyway, we get into Brussels Centraal station and search for an information center. In a rare case of getting the “Adam’s”, Zach forgot to print the address of the hotel. We walked around aimlessly for a while before we finally got the answers we were looking for. I had been carrying around this HUGE backpack that Tobias (see earlier posts if you don’t know who he is) let me borrow…. I may have over packed.
Time to change trains in Mannheim, be back momentarily
Ok, where was I…
We find our hotel eventually and check in. This particular hotel wasn’t so great, but one strange thing that I had never experienced before was leaving the key at the front desk when you leave the hotel. You then pick it back up when you return. I guess it helps in not losing the physical key, but I was a little uneasy with someone else being able to use the key to our room. What if someone else had posed as us, gotten the key and taken our stuff.
We head right back to the city center, just a few blocks away from the hotel. It was finally sunny out, the first time since Zach had arrived in Europe the Monday before. We went to the Grand Place (the square where the guilds had their buildings). It currently houses the city hall, city history museum and lots of tourist crap. Just one street away there were all these Greek fast food restaurants, but there were so many and they were all the same. I was unable to choose one because I didn’t want to hurt the feelings of all the other vendors who were looking at me, so I offended them all by not buying any food.
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| City Hall at the Grand Place |
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| City History Museum at the Grand Place |
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| This place on Grand Place is known for once hosting Karl Marx. Now it is one of the most expensive restaurants in the city. Gotta love irony |
We picked up some of the famous Belgian french fries and walked around more. We had a huge list of sights that we planned to see/walk to. As usual, I will post some pictures of them later on in the post.
We walked a bit south to the Mannekin Pis, which is the famous fountain of a little child peeing. It’s famous because they dress it up in a different set of clothing every day. We got to see him in a tuxedo and top hat. Then we went northwest of the Grand Place to the Bourse, the Belgian stock exchange building. It has a very cool façade, which later hosted a communist rally.
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| Mannekin Pis in a Tux and Top Hat |
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| The Bourse (Stock Exchange) |
Many people/tourists don’t know that the Senne River flows through Brussels, but is covered up by all the buildings and roads. However, there is one place where you can see the river (in all its lameness). I won’t include a picture, but I will describe it as a little stretch, maybe 20 meters with lots of litter in it and not flowing at all. Apparently, they use the water to brew the Lambic beers that I will describe later...
We moved on to some of the cathedrals. We were going to dedicate the first day to seeing the more northerly sights and the next day to the southern sights. One famous church has developed a black substance on the sides from tar, I believe. Apparently they have a restroom set up where you can pee on the side of the church in order to let the acidic urine kill the substance. We couldn’t find that part....
We walked further north to the memorial statue for all the carrier pigeons that were killed in World War 2. When in Brussels….?
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| Soldier Pigeon Memorial |
Somewhere in between all of this, we looked for a place for dinner. Zach’s travel book said there was this great Belgian restaurant with some eccentric meals, like rabbit cooked in cherry beer. The most interesting part about this restaurant is they really discourage eating there. It’s like converting to Judaism; you have to pass unknown tests to reach your goal.
I can’t tell you the name of the place, because I don’t know it myself, but here are some strange characteristics that ward off tourists, except us. They do not have a telephone for taking reservations, because they don’t have reservations. There are no menus at the restaurant. You have to look at the big board (written in French) and order from there. The biggest obstacle for finding the restaurant is, THEY DON’T HAVE A SIGN ON THE DOOR!!! The building itself blends in to all the other surroundings and is very non-descript. You have to know where you are going in order to find it. That’s why it is the gem of a restaurant that it is today, not to mention it was delicious.
Afterward, we got delicious Belgian waffles with chocolate, strawberries and bananas. Yummy
The next day we had an ambitious schedule. We started out very far east with the Cinquantenaire, a 50-year memorial to Belgian Independence. Constructed in 1905, it really commemorates the 50 years after 1830. I guess it just took them a while to get it built. It’s a very big monument; a picture will definitely be included.
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| Cinquantenaire |
We wanted to go see the EU Commission and Parliament in south Brussels. We walked there from the memorial, but had a rather strange encounter. Not really sure what was happening at the EU that day, but there were several motorcades within a ten minute period, not to mention huge security measures. It was quite a pain.
We tried to walk past one area, but got stopped by some police. They proceeded to yell at us in French. I pretended to care. Unfortunately, we couldn’t go to either of the EU places, but I did snap an “illegal” picture of the building during heavy security.
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| Shortly after taking this photo, we stupidly tried to walk past the barricades |
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| The building on the right is the EU Parliament (being secretly guarded) I got yelled at in French for taking this picture. Who cares? |
Zach and I had been trying to find some specific landmark, but we got lost completely. I actually read the map right and he was wrong, so we turned back around to find the cathedral. We did find this really cool monument with lions and an eternal flame. It was dedicated to soldiers from the 1830's revolution that led to Belgium gaining independence from the Netherlands.
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| Lions and an Eternal Flame....awesome monument |
The cathedral was pretty cool, some very nice stained glass windows and a rather large organ. I’ll try to include a picture.
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| Stained Glass Windows |
On to the Palais Royale, which is closed, the Old England building and the Magritte Museum. Magritte is a very interesting artist with strange beginnings. His mother committed suicide when he was a child, which could definitely explain why several of his paintings are how they are.
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| Palais Royal de Bruxelles |
He juxtaposes strange objects together, but also abstractly mixes two things together. For example, one of his coolest paintings is of owls sitting on a tree, but the bottom parts of their bodies are really leaves. He had a single man gallery back in the early 1900s, which was very rare back then. He actually held a gallery in Houston and Dallas. This was listed on the timeline of his life. Reppin’ H-Town
After seeing a few more cathedrals, we ironically headed to the last remaining family-owned lambic brewery in Brussels. Lambic beer is brewed a different way than your average brew in a restaurant or bar. During the process, the beer undergoes spontaneous fermentation due to added sugars in the fruit added to the mix.
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| Cantillon Lambic Brewery of Brussels |
They produce several types of beer, but I can put them into two categories, Fruit Lambics and Non-fruit Lambics. The fruit they use are grapes, cherries, apricots and raspberries. Each of those is a separate type of beer. The non-fruit is limited to just two or three varieties, Greuze and a Caramel-Sugar beer. The Greuze is a very bitter, acidic beer, but nonetheless tastes very good. We weren’t able to try the caramel-sugar one, but it doesn’t sound so good to me.
We each bought a t-shirt from the Cantillon Brewery, and Zach bought one large bottle of Kriek (cherry beer) and one large of the Grape (I don’t know the French name for it). He brought these with us throughout the rest of the trip. Eventually, when we went to drink them, they had gone bad…
Lastly, we headed back to the Brussels Midi station to catch our reservations on a connecting train to Köln (Cologne). From Köln, we got on our night train to Berlin. The ride was from 10:28 PM and arrival was 4:28 AM. We were going to get to Berlin pretty damn early. We found our sleeper car, got on and passed out. The room had 6 beds in it, 2 sets of 3 bunk beds. Luckily we were booked on the bottoms of both sets. Thanks Deutsche Bahn!
That’s the second leg of the trip. Hope you continue reading the rest of my journey and enjoy my pictures!
Adam
