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Saturday, September 03, 2005

Bruxelles le 1er

First off a caveat: I'm writing this more than a month and a half after the actual events, so you'll have to excuse much of the missing details. What follows is the best recount my fallible memory can muster at this time.


Where I last left off in Cologne, the solo portion of my journey was coming to a close and I was just getting ready to meet up with my fellow Georgetownian best friends Brad and Julie (who were doing their own UK/Europe trip).

Brussels Day 1

The train ride from Cologne to Brussels covers most of Germany, and all of the afternoon. I had arranged to meet Brad and Jupo at the train station, and after an unplanned delay in their chunnel journey (someone on the train had a medical emergency) we finally meet up. Its really really nice to finally see some familiar faces. We chat about our trips thus far as we make our way to the next in a series of never-ending hostel adventures. This place is massive and actually occupies a series of buildings up and down a side-street. We check-in and discover that our room is actually in an adjacent building on the 3rd floor. En-route to our room we are shell-shocked to witness a fairly serious motorcycle and car accident. Instantly a crowd gathers, but us without phones or knowledge of emergency telephone numbers we can only stand back and survey the scene. Fortunately several other people are instantly on the phone, and an ambulance and police car arrive within minutes. A very freaky start to our Belgian adventure.

After much grunting and heavy lifting, Brad and Julie successfully haul their stuff to our room on the third floor. The accommodations here are pretty average as far as hostels go, but for the amount of time that we end up spending there, they definitely do the job.

We decide to walk into the center of town and check out the grand palace. Its really ornate looking and reminds me of the plaza San Marco in Venice. I pull out my camera and snap a few pics, only to find that when I pull it out next, it fails to open, and I can hear something rattling inside the body of the camera. Oh no! I had gone this long without anything bad happening on my trip, and then my digital camera decides to call it a day. It had served me so well over the years, and had seen a lot of places (BC, Alberta, Wisconsin, Japan, Korea). Fortunately Julie also had a digital camera, so pictures from Belgium and the Netherlands should still appear (once I get around to getting those pictures that is!)

We walk through narrow streets and end up at the Mannequin Pis. This tiny bronze statue is exactly what it sounds like. Yup, its a little boy taking a leak into a water fountain. One legend has it that this unknown boy saved the city of Brussels from fire by extinguishing it with uhhh, his own firehose. Every single shop in the city sells trinkets and corkscrews featuring the Mannequin Pis, and when you actually see the size of the real statue, it seems quite bizarre that this would become the focal point of tourist trappery in Brussels.

From there we literally stumble into an out of the way small bar that is teeming with chatty patrons. We order cheap pints of Hoegaarden and the locals (including a toothless harmonica playing old timer in the back corner) mistake our citizenship and serenade us with the stars and stripes. We quickly clear up the confusion and we learn that this bar was a major hangout for surrealist painters in the 1920's and was where Magritte had his first exposition. Our pints consumed and our bellies aching for food, we head over to Pitta Street, for some really excellent... Pitas!

Its getting late, so we had back to the hostel for a nightcap. Brad and I play pool, then the 3 of us play cribbage and down pints of Stella. I go to bed feeling happy that I've managed to sample one prong of my personal Belgium trinity... beer! We make plans to satiate the other two starting with waffles for breakfast, and chocolates for dessert.


Brussels Day 2:

Day 2 is actually only a half day or so in Brussels, as we have to catch our train for Amsterdam in the early afternoon. We peck a bit at our crappy hostel breakfast, served highschool cafeteria style, then make our way into the center of town for real breakfast. Belgian waffle huts can be smelled before they are seen, and with noses at the ready, we successfully locate some not too far from the Mannequin Pis. The belgian waffle is really more of a dessert than a breakfast proper, but we don't complain as we gobble up sugary-sweet soft waffles topped high with bananas, strawberries, chocolate syrup and whipped cream. Julie and I both end up wearing part of ours, in our overzealous excitement, but Brad remains unscathed. Julie does some gift shopping (as an aside, I had no idea that Belgium was the birthplace of the smurfs... yet another useless trivia nugget to add to my collection!) and Brad and I split a box of delicious belgian chocolatey pralines, that disappear even before the 3 hour train ride to Amsterdam finishes.

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