Day trip to Brussels

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Brussels

With one day off (Friday, November 4th), myself and my colleague Élise decided to travel to Brussels for a day trip. A confusing start to our trip while trying to find our way towards the city’s Grand’Place, the sights and shopping in Brussels made for a wonderful day.

We began by visiting the City of Brussels museum, located in the Grand’Place, right across from the beautiful city hall. The museum, held in an old building, had a really interesting exposition with all the outfits available to be worn by their famous Manneken Pis statue (more on him later). He even has a Canadian Habs’ suit!
Afterwards, we went to the Beer museum, where after visiting both an old brewery and a modern one, we each got a glass of beer to sample. Next stop was for lunch (yes, the beer came first) at a quick sandwich shop.

We walked through the streets of Brussels to find Manneken Pis, a small statue of a young boy peeing. Yep, and he’s famous for it! It was remarkable to see the street empty of people and all of a sudden, right in front of the statue, tourists everywhere taking pictures. The boy gets dressed up on special occasions with the costumes we saw earlier at the museum.
Time for dessert now: Chocolate museum! Here we read about the making of chocolate and then had a demonstration complete with a tasting – yum.

Our sweet tooth satisfied, we went on a hunt to find the peeing boy’s counter statue: the peeing girl known as Janneken Pis. Hidden in an alley way, we thought we’d never find her. But there she was behind metal bars and locks.

Having seen much of the city’s sights in a few hours, we decided to take advantage of the shopping available in Brussels (hello H&M!!!). Successful purchase of a few warm sweaters – Nothern France realy is as cold as they say...
Before heading back home to prepare for our Remembrance Day Ceremonies, we decided to walk to the St Catherine Cathedral, supposedly a gorgeous sight. Unfortunately, it was under renovation (just like another statue we had tried to find earlier in the day). So we made our way back, stopped for a quick and stressful supper and walked quickly to the train station.

Brussels is a city with a really bad reputation for being “ugly”. I must say I disagree with this saying: I found Brussels to be very friendly, very diverse and a great place to spend a day or two. I was quite pleased to have gone, especially with our planning being so last minute.

More blogs to come soon, I am late in writting due to technical problems with the site.

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Photos

Manneken Pis
Elise and I

Comments

[deleted_46288]

Welcome Karine :)
On behalf of the moderators here at TravelBlog, I would like to welcome you to the site. Happy travels, wherever they may be. Nick