Love Brussels, the City Not Necessarily the Sprouts

We had a few days before Christmas and decided to take a quick train trip to Brussels. It takes about 2 hours on the Eurostar. You barely have time to finish a beer or two, barely. It was beautiful.
Belgium is known for quite a few things - waffles, beer and chocolate to name a few, a very important few. I swear the minute you step off the train you can smell the chocolate. I am fairly convinced that they pipe the smell into the station. We went to the Christmas market right off the Grand Place (the huge town square). They had many booths with decorations, food, crafts and other items. Kiki & Snake got waffles with whipped cream and chocolate syrup from a street vendor. Chizz & I chose more "adult" fare, gluhwein - which I think is German for warm wine. I say it is German for good!! Right up my fair loving alley. The Grand Place had a nativity scene with live animals in the manger. Also, there were projected lighted images on the buildings set to music. Reindeer, snowflakes, bubbles. It was pretty cool to see these images projected on the dark buildings. The buildings were beautiful. The Grand Place is also where the Chocolate Museum is located. It has several floors dedicated to the history of chocolate. I am not sure I would call it fascinating but they did give out free samples. There aren't too many museums where they do that or you WANT them to give out free samples. "Here you go, here is a free sample of a carbon dated rock".

Several blocks away there is another plaza where all the major chocolatiers (is that a word, should be) have stores. We tasted chocolate at Wittamer, Godiva, Neuhaus, Pierre Marcolini, Galler. The kids and Chizz went from shop to shop to shop. I can only eat so much chocolate but it was fun watching.


One of the strangest stops on our trip was to see the statue called Manneken Pis. It is a figurine of a little boy, well, relieving himself.
The statue sits upon a fountain and is believed to be around 400 years old. The statute is very often dressed in some kind of costume. Since our trip was in December, he was dressed appropriately. He is reported to have 600 different costumes including an Elvis costume, a condom he wore for World Aids day and a samurai costume. The costumes are on display at a local museum and there is a society in charge of changing the costume of the statue, usually monthly.

We also took a quick train trip to Brugge, a town not far from Brussels. They also have a Christmas market and a fair. It seems like the entire town is lit up with little sparkling lights. One interesting thing about this town is everyone rides bicycles. Everywhere you look there are bikes parked here or there. This is picture of just some of the bikes parted at the train station, there were three other bike pavilions just like this one Unbelievable.

All in all a great get away. One more interesting item. One thing that we have discovered about teenagers, particularly teenage boys, is that there is some regression as they get older. Just like infants, teenage boys have to eat every 2-3 hours. So we have taken to carrying a few provisions in our backpack for when Snake gets hungry so we don't have to stop at a restaurant or snack bar as soon as we get somewhere. Usually cookies, crackers, fruit or something. This time, I brought a few apples from home. When we were coming back on the train, you have to go through security, customs, immigration just like we did when we left London. Kiki, Snake and I sailed through these checkpoints rather quickly. Unfortunately for Chizz, he was pulled aside when they searched his backpack at the Brussels train station on our return. They found the knife that I had put in the apple bag a few days earlier. No big deal we thought, they will just confiscate the knife. It was just a cheap little knife. Nope. The security officer told Chizz,"Just put the knife in the bottom of your bag." Right. Like Snake said, they would probably tell a terrorist, "Its okay to bring your bomb onboard, just put it at the bottom of your bag". That certainly would be a deterrent. "I would take my bomb out now, but it is at the bottom of my bag and its just not worth the trouble getting it out". It would be easy to mock the Belgian security (which I just did) but the people in London didn't find the knife either. Don't you feel secure? Me too.