Day 36-37: Brussels, Belgium

And the grand finale: Brussels!

Saturday afternoon, we left Bruges (sadly) to take the train to Brussels. Choosing the train station to go to for Brussels was a difficult choice, as Brussels has two main train stations (hey, its Brussels!). We decided on Brussels Zuid-Midi Station, as it looked to be a short journey to our hostel. Arriving at Brussels, we were welcomed by the busy train station. We followed the signs to find the street we were looking for, and began our trek to the hostel. This time, we only went the wrong direction for about 5 minutes before we got going on the right track. We walked through the streets of Brussels and realized what an international city it was. We passed Bulgarian Airline shops, French bakeries and Italian Pizzarias. In the other three cities we had visited  in Belgium, the primary language spoken was Flemish (extremely similar to Dutch). However, in Brussels, most people spoke French. Ashley was particularly excited to get back to speaking French after a week of speaking mostly English, and I was grateful for her French fluency....definitely made getting around easier!

We had booked a cheap hotel room, Hotel Mirabeau, for our night's stay in Brussels, primarily because all the hostel rooms were booked, but it  was also nice to have our own place to stay on the last night of our trip! We were so thankful to have our own bathroom at last! We checked into the hotel (well, Ashley did it for us in French!) and put our things in the room before heading out to scope out more of Brussels.

We went down to the Grand Place, a collection of magnificent buildings, and took some nice pictures. The main thing we wanted to see in Brussels was the Frida Kahlo exhibit at the Bozar Museum. Once we finally found the museum, we waited in line for quite awhile and got tickets to the 6:00 showing of the exhibit. They only allow 150 visitors in at a time, since it is a rather small space and it is so popular. We had about three hours to kill before our time, so we went to look around some. We headed over towards a Cathedral spire we could see in the distance and went inside the magnificent building. It was truly beautiful. We also stayed for a few minutes of the 4 o'clock mass and heard the choir sing. It was really neat to hear that and see part of a service in such an old, historical building.

Afterwards, we walked around for a bit and went up to the Warandepark. The park was really beautiful, especially with the sun glistening through the trees. We watched children  and dogs play as we walked through. On either side of the park is a Palace where the royal family lives. We awed at the Royal Palace from the outside for a bit, before heading back in the direction of the Bozar. We made a stop along the way to get some warm drinks. Ashley had a warm wine, while I had yet another hot chocomel with slagroom.

Close to six, we went back to the Bozar to check out the exhibit. I have studied a bit of Frida Kahlo's work in my Spanish and Art History courses in high school and college, and Ashley has studied her work alot. We were both super excited to see some of her pieces up close. It turned out to be a really nice exhibit. They gave each visitor a guidebook that explained a bit about each of the 25 pieces displayed. They also had a brief biographical section at the beginning of the exhibit, which gave the viewer insight into the life of this magnificent artist. Unfortunately, we did not get to see one of her most famous pieces, Le deu Frida, but we got to see some things neither Ashley or I had seen before. I really enjoyed the exhibit and learned a lot through the experience. Of course, at the end I picked up a nice postcard of Frida Kahlo and her work.

We headed back towards the hotel and kept our eyes peeled for someplace to eat dinner. We walked through this one street with a small statue of a "pissing boy". This was a major touristy area, so there were lots of souvenir shoppes and chocolate stores. We went in one chocolate shop to pick up some chocolate. The shop had a statue of the pissing boy made out of chocolate!

Continuing on our way, we came across a nice pizza places a few minutes walk from our hotel where we decided to have dinner. Ashley spoke to the waiter in French and taught me some French food words from the menu. We each ordered a pizza, which turned out to be huge, and enjoyed our final dinner together for the trip. We left with our bellies full and a box full of leftover pizza.

Back at the hotel, we decided to call it an early night, as we were both pretty exhausted from the whole trip. We watched some French television and slept peacefully in our quiet room (with no one else, how nice!).

Sunday morning, we had a nice breakfast at the hotel and headed to the Midi-Zuid Train Station to meet my friend, Mathea (from Slovenia), who had also spent the last two days in Brussels with her boyfriend, Saso, who was visiting her from Slovenia for the week. We made our way through this massive flea market that was going on outside the train station and went inside to find Mathea. The three of us met up and Ashley went to double check on her train ticket back to France, which was scheduled for later in the afternoon. She found out that she was able to take an earlier train than what she had originally booked, so we decided to leave earlier than we had all anticipated. None of us had been that enthralled with Brussels, and there was nothing else we really wanted to do there. So we scurried back to the hotel to get our things (which we had left in their luggage room) and then boogied back to the train station. Mathea and I made it just in time to catch a noon train to Antwerp, and Ashley's train left shortly thereafter for France. It took us nearly three hours to get back to the Netherlands (we had to change at Roosendaal and Tilburg Central), and we were both glad to be back at school!

All in all, it was a very nice trip to Belgium. We got a nice survey of the country in the four cities that we visited. Antwerp and Ghent were smaller towns, but had a lot of nice architecture and shopping. Bruges was a beauty and we got to do some fun things there. Brussels was rather disappointing, as it was touristy, dirty, a bit sketch and "smelly" (according to Mathea, who only needed two words to describe Brussels). But I am really glad that we went to each of these places and saw what we saw. It was a great experience, and it was fun to travel a bit with a good friend from Agnes Scott. And now I can check off another country visited!