Day 16 - Belgium

Wednesday of this week was spent in Brussels, Belgium. We went on kind of a whim, never having visited Belgium before and not knowing much about it, but I loved this city. There’s just something great about it, in the atmosphere, the humor, quirky eccentricities, blend of modern and old architecture, and wonderful food. I mean really, what foods are famously Belgian? Waffles, chocolate, beer. And fries. Can’t go wrong with any of that. Evidently lace was always a big export of Belgium, but more on that later. We got up earlier than any other day yet on this trip to metro over to the train station and take the one and a half hour ride to Brussels Midi station. Thalys is the only train that goes from Paris to Belgium, and it was quite comfortable. Mention trains anytime around Kyle or me, and we’ll sing the praises of that form of travel. Seriously, trains in Europe, in our experience are always on time, very efficient, lines are nothing like at airports, and your ears don’t pop.

So we’ve arrived at around 9:30, and find our way through the Brussels metro (a much smaller system than Paris! It’s a much smaller city, very manageable to walk around) to get to the center of town. The Grand Place is one of the most awesome squares I’ve ever seen. The pictures really don’t do it justice. It’s really a big area, but the buildings framing the square are all so big and incredibly ornate, that even standing at one far end, you can’t quite get the other entire end into a picture. But still, check them out for fun and some idea of the detail on the buildings. There’s a tourism office there, and we didn’t have a very decent map, so in the office we were able to purchase a 4 euro guide that included a detailed map, as well as info on everything in town and a walking tour, which I will also reference later.

While Brussels seems to be a city of culture and history, it’s much more irreverent than Paris, much more casual. They have fine art museums, but their main emphases are comics and surrealism, personal favorites of mine. We start at the one place I’d been determined to visit, La Centre Belge de la Bande Dessinee (Belgium Center of Comic Strips). It’s in a former warehouse, but that doesn’t describe the building well at all. There are lots of windows and glass ceiling to let in lots of light to the three open levels of the Center. It’s part museum, showing the process and history of comics (especially in Belgium, with emphasis also on France and the Netherlands), and highlighting some of the comic artists of great influence to the genre. See the pictures of this as well, while there are hundreds upon hundreds of pages on exhibit, there are also large three dimensional representations of characters and settings that make the exhibits a bit more whimsical. We see a lot about what are probably the most famous Belgian comics: Tintin, Asterix, and the Schtroumpfs. If you are unfamiliar with the latter, it’s because they are more known (and pronounceable) across the pond as Smurfs. We browsed everything for a while, and went back downstairs to the bookstore, and also took a peek at the library – the largest collection of comic strips in the world!

A bit hungry, we make our way back around Grand Place to find lunch. There are lots of alleys with nice looking restaurants and decent lunch deals, but we really don’t want to take the time for a three course meal. Luckily, we spot the Frit’N Toast. We each order a Stella Artois (cheap too, since it’s not an import there) and the “Special” which is a large helping of fries topped with mayonnaise, ketchup, and grilled onions. This delicious and filling meal was only about 10 euro for the two of us, and we don’t even finish all the fries.

So, remember the part about Surrealism? Yes, well after the Centre BD and the fries, we walked over the Place Royal, with gardens and a park and such, and we find the Musée Magritte Museum (which, yes, is Museum Magritte Museum, slightly redundant). It has only just opened on June 2^nd, and it’s a steal at 2 euro for students. Regretfully, no pictures allowed, otherwise the picture count for the day would have doubled, but it was great. Rene Magritte, even if you don’t know him by name, you know his work. It’s very common, you can google it. Over four floors there spanned nearly a whole lifetime of work, as well as a room playing a documentary about the artist. We bought a magnet from the gift shop, of the painting of the man with an apple obscuring his face.

Next stop, we absolutely had to see Brussels’ unofficial mascot, the Manneken Pis. I think that’s Dutch, but still, that pretty much gives you an idea of what it is. The Manneken Pis is a fountain in town, featuring a bronze statue of a young boy relieving himself and, well, hence the fountain. He is nicknamed Julien. We’d read about it in the travel book and all day, we’d seen miniature figures of the statue for sale in all the souvenir shops, the same as you see all the little Eiffel Towers in Paris. We even went by the Brussels museum which houses a couple hundred of Julien’s outfits from the last few centuries (true story!). We were damn curious at this point about the real thing. You must read about it first. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manneken_Pis. Okay, so it’s not too far from Grand Place. We walk over, and see the fountain. The statue is only two feet tall! We’d heard that it was a small mascot, but really it had been built up so much that it was a hilarious sight. What a great city, I love that this is what they embrace as their mascot. We took some pictures of and with him and moved on.

The aforementioned walking tour from the guide was a huge, looping path around the whole city that took you along some of the major sights we had already seen, but the main attraction of the walk was comic walls. There are probably thirty to forty giant murals pained on the sides of buildings depicting various comic strip characters. Again, what a cool, quirky town. We decided that we had to find some. Since the city isn’t too large, but the map from the guide was a bit larger than a newspaper, a lot of these walls were much closer together than we’d originally thought. We saw nine of them throughout the remainder of the day, pictures of all are included. Midway through our own mini version of the comic walk, we decided to partake in the classic Belgian snack of waffles, mostly because we had passed so many little walk up places that smelled so good. Since the rain was coming down at this point, we chose one right by the Frit’N Toast that had an actual inside dining area. Kyle got his topped with caramel and I had a whipped cream and strawberry waffle. Both excellent. We also did a bit of shopping, browsing through one of the several lace shops, looking at all the varieties stocked at the Bier Tempel, and of course, finishing the shopping at (where else?) Chocopolis for some good Belgian chocolate. We calculated that we’d spent nine hours walking around at this point. After we finished up the comic walls on that side of town, we headed back to the train station to make the trek back to Paris, tired and wet but very happy.

-Steph

P.S. Aside form the aforementioned national foods of frites, waffles, and beer, the other main commodity throughout the city (really at every restaurant we passed) was Moules Frites.  This would be mussels and french fries on the same plate, in equal amounts, because they supposedly compliment each other?  We didn't partake in eating any Moules Frites but it was one of those little things you can't help but notice.  - Kyle