We arrived in Brussels very late at night and stayed in a hotel right outside the metro station. The next morning we woke up and found a little market had set up down the street. There were tons of little trinkets and I bought a pair of shoes for 5 euros. I successfully completed the transaction using my high school french. It actually came in handy quite a bit during this trip. We made sure to hang onto our stuff rather tightly while browsing their wares.
We moved on from there and walked down to le Grand Place. Le grand place was quite impressive, it where you can find the town hall and guild halls in Brussels. There was a lot of remodeling going on though so 20% of the architecture was actually covered up by a big canvas with an image of what the building was supposed to look like.
We wondered down a touristy street and Wesley had a waffle. It was as tastey as you would imagine a belgian waffle should be. Nearby the waffle store, there was the Manneken Pis. He was much smaller than I thought he would be. They dress him up for different holidays and we saw him in his white and red costume. If we had arrived a day later, he would have been clad in an American outfit for the 4th of July. We found that he has more outfits than Wesley and myself combined!
When looking at the map, we noticed there was a military museum in a big park ‘not far’ from where we were. It was a beautiful day so we decided to walk over to it. Unfortunately, ‘not far’ meant ‘really far’ and took us about 45 minutes to walk across town to it (this wouldn’t be the last time this happened). Along the way we stepped into a music museum that would have taken 1-3 hours to go through and we didn’t really have time for it, but there were all sorts of unusual types of instruments we had never heard of. We also passed the palace, and took some pictures of some crows in the lawn because Wesley’s family likes birds. We finally made it over to the museum and it was actually really well put together. It covered all military history that involved Belgium. There were a bunch of tanks and planes from WWII, jets from korea-vietnam eras, and countless swords, guns, and cannons from throughout history. There was even a case nine feet high and 30 feet long filled to the brim with military uniform hats. It was pretty awesome, I even pretended to be very excited about a plane.
We left the museum and stopped for a little ice cream before hopping on the metro to head over to the train station. We took the first train available to Brugge.
There and back again 