Brussels, Brugges and Ghent

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After 5 days in Northampton we caught a late afternoon flight to Brussels where we were spending 2 nights. As we had been to Brussels before we didn't have any specific plans on what to do or see but just wandered around the city, had dinner in the tourist strip near the Grand Place and generally took it easy. We were there on a Friday and Saturday night and it was unbelievably busy in the centre with tourists and locals crowding through the streets looking for somewhere to eat.

The Grand Place really is a picturesque square, and we both thought it was probably the most impressive square we had seen in all of Europe. The buildings surrounding the square were impressive and it was big and clean. It also looked spectacular at night. We also walked around to see Mannequin Pis, the small statue of a boy relieving himself which is a symbol of Brussels, and we found that he was all dressed up for our visit. It is amazing how such a small statue can command such attention but he was beseiged by tourists - and we added to the crowd despite having seen him before. We then wandered around the chocolate shops buying some of the chocolates which, whilst very nice, were very expensive compared with Switzerland.

The Saturday was a beautiful sunny day and after wandering around the centre we caught the train out to the tourist area of Heysel where there are a couple of attractions; namely an Atomium (not really sure what it is - some kind of museum or something like that) and a theme park "Little Europe" which is home to scale models of all of the main attractions in Europe. We didn't go into either (Little Europe looked interesting but it appeared to be more of a kid's park so we decided against it).

On Sunday morning we caught the train to Brugges where we spent two nights. Brugges was a very pretty little city, and is often called "Venice of the North" as it is has a number of canals running through the city. We took a boat cruise around the canals, which was made more interesting by the driver who obviously had a liking for Australians as there were 5 of us on board and he made us all sit up the front and cracked jokes the whole way around (which only we could hear) in between his official commentary.

On Monday we caught the train to Ghent, which is around 30 minutes from Brugges, as we had been told by some locals that it was less touristy and more authentic than Brugges. Ghent was a nice place but unfortunately the weather was very ordinary and we had to continually take shelter from heavy rain. So we didn't see that much of it, but what we did see was nice and it did look more real than Brugges.

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Photos

Ghent
The weather wasn't good