Brussels

After leaving plenty of shopping dollars behind in Amsterdam we headed off, by train, to Brussels, our final destination.

First stop was the Grand Place, Brussels’ magnificent bedazzling centre square. 

The incredible City Hall spire 

Detailed study of City Hall

One of the gilt Guild Halls in the Grand Place

 

We then strolled through the Galeries St-Hubert admiring the many beautiful cafes, chocolateries and other boutique shops. It was apparently Europe’s first shopping arcade.  We returned on our final day to have Belgian waffles at one of the cafes and to buy some of those Belgian chocolates. 

 

On Tuesday we went into Paris for a day of socialsing.  We were very lucky that Kathie and Jack had just arrived in Paris for their annual month long winter sojourn, so we met them for lunch.  They had already been in France for some weeks and were in Lyon when the attack on Charlie Hebdo took place.  They described the confusion in the Lyon cafes and bars as everyone, including the media, were trying to make sense of what was going on.  They attempted to join the ‘Je suis Charlie’ march in Lyon but said that they had to retreat from the Metro station because you couldn’t move and many trains weren’t stopping because they were so full.  Eventually Kathie managed to join the march by walking back onto the streets.

Before and after lunch we did a lot more fantastic shopping.  We made our pilgrimage to XOOS to buy our shirts and we paid appropriate homage.

In the evening we met Penny near her and Alex's place at Place de la Republique.  After a few kir royales we headed off to dinner for a marathon chat fest.  Their flat is near the Charlie Hebdo offices, and they arrived back from a visit to Australia on the day of the Je suis Charlie march in Paris.  They had to get the taxi to drop them off a couple of kilometres from their apartment and then joined the march with all their luggage.  It took them 2 hours to get home.  We went across to Place de la Republique the following morning and there were many moving tributes still in place although the flowers had largely been cleared away.  In both Paris and Brussels the Jewish areas were very under very heavy military guard.  We have often stayed and shopped in the Marais and have never seen so many heavily armed police as we did this time.

We stayed overnight with Penny and Alex and headed back to Brussels on Wednesday morning. 

After depositing all the shopping in our hotel room we walked across to the Old England Building, which is one of the many classic art nouveau buildings for which Brussels is renowned.  It also contains a fascinating Museum of Musical Instruments.  You get an audio guide that lets you listen to hundreds of different instruments.  It was most enjoyable although I don’t want to list to the sound of another bagpipe.  There is an especially large collection of bagpipes from all over Europe.

Another big church

Dale especially liked the name of this Theatre

The Old England Building

 

We had lunch in the café on the top floor

The wonderful lift and hand rails

 

We went to the Musees Royeaux des Beax-Arts, which is actually 3 museums in one but we just focussed on the Musee Magritte and the Musee Fin de Siecle, where we discovered another Seurat.  After visiting the museums we swung by the incredibly small Manneken Pis.  We almost missed it and were wondering why so many people seemed to be congregating at this particular street corner doing nothing in particular.

 

 

We finished our sight-seeing with coffee and hot chocolate at the Falstaff Café, another art nouveau master piece.

Our final day was devoted to more art nouveau architecture and to cars.  There is a great Autoworld museum in Brussels that has an excellent collection of early 20^th century cars.  This may be the subject of a separate blog entry.

Park Cinquentenaire.  The sun even peeped out for a little bit, but not enough to warrant taking the beanie off.

 

 

Maison Gauchie

Maison Horta is the home of art nouveau architect, Victor Horta.  We weren’t able to take photos inside the house but the dining room and interior stair case were even more stunning than the exterior.

One final travel experience that we hadn’t had before was sitting on the tarmac in Brussels for 3 hours while it snowed.  There seemed to be a merry go round of cleaning snow off the runway and de-icing the plane.  

Well that’s the end of another sojourn and, malheureusement (sadly) we are back at work starting to plan, and pay for, the next vacance.