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When we first arrived in Brussels it was quite dreary and we both had colds from walking around in the cold after Pokke Herrie so we just had a quiet night eating pasta and salad.
The next day we went to Mini Europe. We were supposed to go for my birthday but the weather wasn’t looking too promising at all!
At home we had watched a series on Channel V called Backpackers which is how we found out about Mini Europe and the boys on the show loved it so we decided to check it out. The name says it all really...they took important monuments from each country in Europe and built them down to a scale of 1:25. Of course, this was a great way for us to cheat and see most of Europe in one day haha...also we could pretend we were giants.
I don’t really have much to say about it except that the detail of the models was really good and I kept pressing buttons that play the national anthems which I don’t know why I did after a while. You got a booklet which gives you facts about the buildings but our hands
got too cold to open it. We rushed through Mini Europe at the end because it was so freakin’ cold. Mini Europe also happens to be next to the Atomium, which is a model representing an iron crystal, magnified 165 billion times...nerd-a-licous. We weren’t intending to go to that but got some photos anyways.
My Birthday So on this cold, rainy day in Brussels I turned 20. We headed into the city and wandered down to a busy looking street amongst the museums. We got a hot chocolate from a chocolate store, which I unfortunately can’t remember the name of because it was really good. You get chocolate on a wooden stick and they give you a cup of warm milk and you just let the chocolate dissolve then stir it with the stick. Yummm, we realised this is the only way to have your hot chocolate in Brussels when we stumbled across a store that only sold chocolate on the wooden sticks. They had ones with chilli, M & M’s, one with tubes filled with raspberry that you inject into your hot chocolate as it’s dissolving ...now that’s serious hot chocolate.
At some point during the
day, we were on a train heading somewhere and didn’t realise that the train had reached the last stop. Everyone else got off the train but we didn’t. The train kept going into a tunnel and then stopped, engine and all. We figured maybe there was just a bit of a wait for the train to start its route again until we saw the driver walk past us. We started yelling at him but he didn’t hear. At this point I’m thinking we’re going to be left in there forever and I would have to eat the train seats to survive but it turned out he was just going up the other end of the train to drive in the other direction. PHEW! We were only in there for about 10 minutes but we freaked out big time hahaha so lame :P
We went to the town square - Grand Place to see the City Hall, which is decorated with 294 statues from the 19th century. I sound like a text book so I’ll stop now. It was nice as historic buildings always are.
Smic patiently strolled into chocolate store after chocolate store with me but we didn’t
buy anything. We eventually got one of Belgium’s most well known monuments Manneken Pis, which is a teeny, tiny statue of a boy urinating. Someone happened to say exactly what we were thinking out loud “why is this so famous?”...It was funny as to see people lining up to have their photo taken with it and to look into all the souvenir shops and to see hundreds of models of a boy urinating. I think it’s an awesome national symbol for a country though and is pretty unique. They also put outfits on the statue from time to time, he has hundreds of them eg. Santa outfit, the pope etc. Apparently they sometimes hook him up to a keg of beer and hand out cups of it to everyone.
After that we got the best fries I’ve ever had in my whole life...with mayo of course and then went back to the hostel for drinks and spring rolls.
For my birthday night, we ended up going to a pub that was recommended to us by another backpacker called Delirium Cafe. It was dimly lit, smokey, packed and very homely...just like all good pubs I guess. The pub is
decorated with old posters & circular beer advertisements and the tables are giant barrels. They have more than 2,000 beers from around the world and their menu is one of those plastic sleeved folders choco blocked with pages and pages listing the beer. I’ll let Smic tell you what he had but you could get a beer in pretty much any flavour, chocolate flavour, grapefruits (all fruits were really popular flavours actually), caramel...I’m not the expert though so Smicy can finish this. Although pub life is a bit too slow paced for me, I had a very nice night and was going to end a good day by watching Skins but fell asleep.
I’m sorry that I couldn’t be too descriptive with Brussels itself but we didn’t see much of it due to the weather and the fact that the chocolate stores kept me distracted. It was lots of fun though. Yayyyyyyyyyyyy.
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