Finally, the beginning of a never-ending cycle of spring break posts! The basic rundown of my spring break is this: Miranda and I flew to Brussels from Prague on Friday, side-tripped to Ghent and Bruges on Sunday, and flew from Brussels to Nice on Monday, where we met up with our friend Kylee. We spent Tuesday in Nice, and did side-trips to St. Paul-de-Vence and Monaco on Wednesday. Very early Thursday morning, the three of us flew to Paris where Miranda and I met up with our other roommate Lauren at our hostel and where Kylee split off to stay with a friend of hers. We were in Paris for four days and left on Monday. Hopefully that all made sense at least a little bit. Now that you know all this, I'm going to split up all of my pictures and fun informational tidbits into smaller posts--all of which will hopefully be completed by the time I get home in May.
Brussels is a pretty amazing city, and one that I knew virtually nothing about before going there. I knew it was in Belgium, and I knew they like waffles. I did not know, as I now do, that Brussels is home of the European Union, which makes the city an amazing melting pot of different cultures. I also didn't know how good the waffles really were. Seriously, they were amazing.
Miranda and I arrived in Brussels and hit the ground running pretty immediately. After all, it was Miranda's 20th birthday that day (her golden birthday!) so we had to make it good. Basically that first day we just wandered around before meeting up with a really cool guy named Aureliano that Miranda met on CouchSurfing.com. He and his cousin took us around to a few bars that we definitely wouldn't have found on our own.
Day 2 in Brussels consisted of a lot of walking around. I'm proud to say we didn't use public transport at all with the exception of getting in and out of the city from the airport. Our hostel was right next to the Botanic Gardens, so that was our first stop of the day, quickly followed by a waffle and a walk around the Grand Place--the city's main (tourist) square. We saw Manneken Pis, the extremely tongue in cheek fountain that dominates the souvenir shops, and the Belgian Comic Book Museum with a stop in between for some seafood and white wine for lunch. Last stop of the day was the Parc du Bruxelles which was incredibly beautiful before we classed it up for the evening and saw Confessions of a Shopaholic (in English--we weren't even cool enough to attempt the French version). The movie was fairly atrocious, but we had fun anyways.
Day 3 we decided to take a side trip (pictures in a later post) to Ghent and Bruges, which were both pretty cool. Belgium has two national languages--French and Flemish (technically Dutch, but they prefer to make themselves sound cool). The northern half of the country speaks mainly Flemish with the exception of Brussels, so the change to towns where people didn't speak a language we knew even a little bit was striking. The best part of the evening was when we got back to Brussels and went to go see our new friend Aureliano play a show with his band. They were playing on a boat on the canal for a bunch of their friends, and we had a really awesome time and met some cool people. They even gave us a ride home!
Brussels was certainly a success, and we left for Nice Monday afternoon with high hopes for the rest of the trip.
Miranda and the gummy bear boy at the Prague Airport
Side street in Brussels
Botanic Gardens
A non-American fast food joint. Seriously.
Bread. Self-explanatory.
The Bourse
Street in Brussels
Buildings in Grand Place
Very large gothic building
Flower market. This was a big shock, as the morning we left Prague there was snow outside our window.
Tintin mural
Waffles!
Manniken Pis. The Museum of the City of Brussels gives him different outfits every day, all with a strategically placed hole.
Giant crowd around the tiny statue
Souvenirs of all shapes and sizes
Manniken Pis chocolate
Standing room only restaurant where we had lunch
White wine and calimari
Another comic book mural
Miranda heading into McDonald's for her daily ice cream
Smurf inside the comic book museum
Tintin's rocket ship
Tintin in space
Top floor of the museum
Basically talking about why Tintin is the best comic book character of all time
No comment
Scariest. Thing. Ever.
Not a small church
Frites
Big blue brain on top of the Music Instrument Museum
Parc du Bruxelles
Is that Spongebob Squarepants as a waffle? Yes, yes it is.
One last photo of me and Miranda before heading to Nice
Woah, Brussles especially looks really cool. I mean, it could just be that inciting picture of calamari and white wine that's doing it, but I think it's more than that.
ReplyDeleteI'm glad that we're both neatly organizing and systematically posting our respective spring break trips, by the way.