I made it back to List last night after my two-day meeting in Paris for work and three days in Brussels. So I will begin a more methodical summary of the trip now, with more pictures.
Brussels was a fantastic city, I really enjoyed it. French is the language of most of the businesses, and the street signs and such are in French and Dutch. But luckily for me, just about everyone speaks English. I stayed at the Hotel Metropole, which is a famous landmark due to its exemplary Art Nouveau lobby and reception area. It also has very good specials in the summer…check on the big travel web-sites before booking on the web-page, though. The hotel was in a great spot for walking to just about anywhere I wanted to go in the city, and had easy access to the Metro which I didn’t use. I spent the first day doing mostly outdoor things, seeing churches and parks.
You will notice that all the pictures are a bit on the gray side…it was supposed to be a sunny weekend, but instead turned out a little drizzly (occasionally pouring), but rarely so rainy that it wasn’t perfectly comfortable walking around. There were some sunny moments, but not too many.
I first went to the Botanical Garden, which used to be a garden with as many plant species as possible for botany students to study; now the building is used for all sorts of things and the garden is simply maintained as a park without the diversity it originally had (the plants for study were moved outside the city). There is apparently drug-dealing in the park in the evening, but I only went during the day so I can’t attest to that.
After walking around the Botanical Gardens, I visited Waterstones (big English book store), I got my haircut (luckily it turned out well, this was the only time that I encountered a non-English-speaking business…but lots of hand motions and pointing at pictures later, I ended up with a good haircut) and had lunch outside the hotel at the Cafe Metropole. Then I set off for the Parc du Bruxelles, which has the Judicial Palace at one end and the Royal Palace at the other, and beautiful tree-lined pathways and smaller sitting areas in the center. Beautiful and quite touristy, but large enough that it doesn’t feel crowded.
Royal Palace
Walking around the back of the palace, I stumbled on a very cute European house:
I then walked downhill from Parc du Bruxelles back towards my hotel, passing by the art museum and a number of famous churches (those pictures will come later). The Museum of Musical Instruments (in the ‘Old England’ building) is particularly unique looking:
One thing that really struck me about Brussels (and is a problem in Paris as well) is the graffiti everywhere. On statues, buildings (new and historic buildings), any possible surface. Here you can see graffiti on the wall behind one of the gardens on the hill:
For dinner I found a great little Thai restaurant called ‘Thai City’, and having walked about ten miles plus worked out in the gym I called it a night fairly early the first night.
