Belgium is the home of mussels, waffles and they invented French Fries.
Brussels also has the headquarters of the European Union.
We got up about 8… because Chugs set his alarm for that time. So we got up and had the free breakfast at the hostel, it was same as every other hostel: jam, bread, OJ etc. Then we got ready and headed out for the day. We decided to follow the HostelWorld recommended daily itinerary, which involved walking around a lot of the city.
We started our day by visiting the Grand Place. It was pretty much in the city centre. When we got there, there was nobody around and there was a very airy feeling about the square. Kind of hard to describe. It was very impressive, all these massive old buildings surrounding the square.
From there we walked around and found Royal Place, after a few wrong turns and side-tracks to see other things… like the “Little Pissing Boy” of Brussels. At Royal Place there was… you guessed it, the Royal Palace! It was quite impressive from the outside. And it was also free entry to go in.
On the inside… wow! It is the most impressive interior I have ever seen, that includes Neuschwanstein! Every room was HUGE and was painted/plated with gold trimming, and had multiple massive crystal chandeliers. There were massive paintings and all sorts in every room. Unfortunately, they take your cameras off you at the entrance and you get them back when you leave, so no more photos. Near the end there was this really cool room (well for us geeks anyway). They had all these hands on exhibitions you could play with. You could stick your head in a guillotine and get it cut off, they had this spindle that rolled up hill, and a lot of optical illusion displays.
After the Royal Palace we were quite hungry, so decided to go for lunch. What else do you get in Brussels? Mussels of course :-P We headed back near the Grand Place, it now felt more touristy with heaps and heaps of people about… we were glad to see it by morning with the airy feeling. We found a place to eat… and have our first beer of the day, which was after beer-o’clock :-( We got a lunch-time deal with was a three-course meal. We all got Mussels-in-Brussels for our main. And the other starters ranged from tuna-salad to escargot (snails, which I had… they were quite nice).
(Mussels in Brussels!)
When we got the bill, we were a bit shocked because they charged ridiculous amounts for the beer… but we figured it was to compensate for the “cheap” meal. Oh well, we learnt for next time :-)
After lunch, we went down to the Palace du Justice… this was the biggest building in the world up until the late 19th century. It was pretty cool… but we were over the sight seeing by this stage… this weekend wasn’t supposed to be too much about sight seeing :-P
We stopped right by the palace and tried another Belgian beer… a cherry one, which was very refreshing.
Back to the city centre to see the Delirium Café. This is the world record holder for the most commercially available beers in the world, over 2000 beers available at any stage! Cool huh. We didn’t stay long because we wanted to enjoy the sun while it was still out.
We wandered to what we thought was going to be a park and grabbed some beers along the way. On the way there was a strange place with urinals on the side of a church… it’s not every day you can say “I pissed on the side of a church”… well most people can’t :-P
It was dinner time by the time we finished our beer. So we found another place to eat. We struggled to try and read the menu which was in French and Flemish. Using Ben and James’ knowledge of French we could get half. With Brad and my knowledge of German, we could half interpret the Flemish menu. It got a bit tiresome trying to figure out what to order… so we eventually asked for the English menu. It was a good 15 minutes entertainment anyway :-) After our traditional Belgian dinner of rabbit, duck and chicken… all with French Fries of course, we wandered to a part of the city which was recommended for its night life.
The streets were packed because the Belgium summer festival was on. There was a live band that was playing really good music. So we drank in the streets and chilled out listening to music until it finished about midnight… then progressed onto one of the nearby bars to continue drinking. Several beers later and a lot of conversation, the outer-bar shut down, we got invited inside to continue our drinking. We stayed until they stopped serving us… because of their liquor license just to be clear ;-)
(The fun of beer stacking in the bar... it was a good idea at the time)
We wandered home, getting a really good kebab on the way. We got home about 4am. James went off to bed, and the rest of us headed downstairs to have a whiskey or two. Chugs even went behind the hostel bar to get some glasses for us :-P
We got sent out of the common room at 4:30 by the guy on the desk, so that was our bedtime.
Pretty good day all up.
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