Brussels Sprouts

I couldn't think of some cute song title for this post, so I made something up instead. Anyway, I have like 30 minutes left to post this one, so I'll try to take less time with it. I'm trying not to butcher these names, though, so I've been using my tour book as a guide.

Anyway, we woke up very early this morning as well. I wanted to make sure we were at the train station on time. Nevermind that we were an hour and a half early. Better than being late and rushing it. Anyway, we woke up around 7:30. We were supposed to be up earlier, actually, but the cell phone alarm didn't go off. Andrew brought his phone and I set the alarm on his phone for back up. Good thing I did, haha. Anyway, it worked out. Our train left at 10:25 and we got to the train station a little before 9. We just sat around and read and/or wrote post cards. Or played DS in Andrew's case.

We took the train over the Brussels. It was relaxing, and kind of fun. I actually didn't notice that we had assigned seats on this train, so we sat down in a random spot that coincidentally happened to be ours. I don't know how that happened, but I guess that worked out fine.

We got into Brussels and were a little disoriented at first (I imagine this is going to happen upon arriving in every train station). We went to the ticket counter so that I could get our ticket from Brussels to Bruges for tomorrow. There was virtually no line for this one, the woman was very nice, and we didn't end up having to get tickets. All was right in the world.

Next goal was to get into the hostel. We took the Metro over to the area and managed to find the Jacques Brel hostel with the bad Metro map and the very much not detailed map in my Europe book. You can check in any time between 8 am and 1 am, but you can't get into the rooms until after 3. Instead, we just threw out bags into one of the safety closets and went back out to explore Brussels. At the hostel, they actually had these amazing maps that are made for younger travelers. It was very detailed, had our hostel on the map, pointed out fun places of interest, and gave insider tips from locals. It's really cool and they have those maps for Amsterdam, Vienna, Berlin, Lljubjana, and Budapest. That makes me happy.

Anyway, we started out our tour of Brussels just walking around aimlessly. Andrew decided that he liked Brussels the moment that he saw a lesbian statue outside of a finance building. Or that's what we think it was. Watch it be something completely different and offend an entire nation of people.

We changed our mind about walking and took the Metro to the center of town. We walked past the stock exchange Beurs/Bourse building and decided to find a place to eat because Gianni was hungry. It worked because we found a place selling pretty epic Belgian fries for relatively cheap.

After lunch, we moved on to visit the Grand Place/Grote Market, which is like THE thing to see in Brussels. It's just this center with the big 15 century town hall. Very pretty, very crowded with tours, but very cool. Mia took a picture with a random guy from London. This was one of the two things I knew we HAD to see before coming into Brussels. the other one was going to be the Comic Book Museum. When everyone else found out it mostly had stuff for Smurfs, they kind of got over it and decided not to make the trip out there.

After we did the Grand Place, we did the other thing that apparently all people who visit Brussels have to do: see the Mannekin Pis. This is this statue/fountain of a little boy peeing. It's very small, but it's one of the big Brussels things. They sell little action figures and corkscrews and bottle openers and shot glasses and shirts with this thing on it. I have a picture that makes it look like it's peeing on Andrew. Lol. :)

We passed by this legit looking waffle stand and got our waffle as well. We all split one because it looked fattening. We brought it back over to the Grand Place to eat it there. It was amazing, but we managed to make a mess and get chocolate and strawberries all over the place.

Next stop was this store that the little Brussels map told us about. The store itself was tiny, so it was very hard to find. We did find this other little cute store before that, where they had this dinosaur robot that you could pet. It was very cute. And I think that sounds a lot weirder than it should. The store that Mia wanted to go to was this little thrift shop that had random stuff in it. We didn't actually end up spending too much time there.

Our next stop was a church. St. Catherine's. It looks a little run down, but it's very pretty on the inside. The reason we stopped there was because you can pee on this church. They have a public urinal set up. We had to see it ourselves. It was weird.

After that, we mostly wandered around. We went to this bar because the map told us that there's a cool bartender there and Mia wanted a picture that she didn't get. We also went to the place that does the map to get free Internet, but it was closing as we got there. They pointed us in teh direction of the one we're at right now, so that worked out.

That's about it. Mia and GIanni both passed out, so I think we're going to go to the hostel and try to call it an early day. Tomorrow's trip will be Bruge and an outdoor concert that Mia wants to go to in this city.