Brussels, Belgium, Fri 18 - Sat 19 Sept 09

Travelling by Eurostar makes life so much less stressful! Quick check-in times, minimal security check holdups and a guaranteed good seat. Love it.

Arriving in Brussels and unfortunately my first impressions weren't great. May have been the area we were in but the place seemed dirty, depressing and full of dodgy drunk people. To be honest it reminded me of some places in France.

Thankfully our accommodation made up for it with what turned out to be a nice 2* hotel who had upgraded us to a room with our own bathroom, yay! (we usually book shared bathroom rooms). It was very late at night so we stepped out to get some food (from some dodgy fast food place - not much open at midnight). Thankfully the bar next door saved us with some good cheap drinks.

Finally with content stomachs, we walked to the main centre, the Grand Place, where we saw the main town square all lit up in lights. Very beautiful and finally an area of Brussels I could love. The town hall was simply gorgeous. We picked a bar and found an outdoor seat to enjoy a drink and the view. Nick ordered a beer that came in a mini yard glass, it was very cool.

Saturday was always going to be a long day as we had Brussels to explore in the morning and then we were off to Bruges for the afternoon. Brussels is much nicer in the day time, but there still wasn't much in our area so we headed back towards the main town. There were lots of choc shops (yum!) and I enjoyed some morning chocolates. Ultimately Belgium is all about the food and drink. Good beer, yummy chocolates, waffles and fries. Yum yum!

At the Grand Place we found a small festival thing going on in the square with puppets, waffels, beer and a band with traditional dancers, and some crazy people dressed up as gollywogs (that was kinda weird). I tried an apple beer at the beer tent (yes I was drinking beer!) and Nick had an elephant beer (I'm sure it was called something else but it had a pink elephant on it). I managed half of the apple beer which wasn't bad for me. Nick took photos of me to prove I was drinking beer :)

We noticed little statues of this cherub boy peeing and they were everywhere in souvenir shops etc so we figured he must be popular and famous in Brussels for some reason so we set off to find him. He was called the Mannequin Pis and is a little statue down the road from the Grand Place of a boy peeing into a fountain. Now why this is famous I still don't know as he was a bit uneventful and even worse they'd dressed him up in what looked like a little sailor costume, but I'm sure there is a good story behind it.

We decided to follow one of the walks on our map called the comic strip walk. Brussels is famous for it's comics like TinTin and the walk highlights graffiti comic art on the street and shops dedicated to comics, tin-tin and art. It was quite neat walking round and spotting random art on the walls and buildings around the city and we did see some pretty cool art stores. The walk was huge though so we only did one section of it, as we had to get on a train to Bruges.

Saturday was such a long day I'm going to right up the Bruges part in another post :)