Brussels

So what’s in Belgium?

I heard this question more than once before we left.

We have family in Germany so we’ve made a number of trips and visited most countries adjacent to Germany. We’ve never been to Belgium.

The day we arrived in Brussels was the worst weather of the trip. It started raining when we left the train station. It was a short walk to the hotel but it was the kind of rain that you don’t want to be walking in, especially with luggage and in an unfamiliar place.

Since I was already inhumanly tired and hungry, the rain was especially soul-crushing and for a few moments I wept quietly to myself and thought: I hate traveling.

But we found our hotel and found food and adult beverages and all was well soon enough.

We slept through the night and woke up at 8:30 thinking we had mastered the time change. (Actually, I think Erin woke up closer to 7am.) We went to the hotel breakfast and attacked the hot beverage machine. Fifteen minutes later, we were fine.

The weather was gorgeous. We wandered over to the Grand Palais which was tourist central. Maybe Americans aren’t going to Belgium but everyone else is. I couldn’t wait to get out of there. We got our city passes (museums, public transport) and wandered off. Visited the history museum. Turns out I knew NOTHING about the history of Belgium. I’m too embarrassed to elaborate.

But here’s a tidbit: King Leopold I looks like Bill Compton

We also did the underground archeology tour which was fascinating but a little hard to visualize.

This is one of those inexplicable tourist things. Everyone needs to take a picture of this dumb statue. It’s a mob scene in front of it. It’s famous for being famous.

As you can see, I took a picture, too.

At the Fine Arts Museum there was this one painting that I thought looked like a totally crazy pants lady with her eyes rolled back. It looked like the cover of a 70’s horror novel. The description said it was a religious painting and explained the symbols. Erin and I weren’t convinced.

The day we were leaving I wanted to make sure we got our moneys worth out of our museum card so we went to the Beer Museum and the Chocolate Museum. If you go to Brussels: Don’t waste your time. At least at the beer museum you get a free beer which I didn’t have because it was 10am and I couldn’t afford to ruin the rest of the day that early.