In Aachen the shops closed midday on Christmas Eve and were closed on December 25th (First Christmas) and December 26th (2nd Christmas) so we needed to find something to do somewhere else for the 26th. We wanted a place we could get to easily on the train and that wasn't too far away so we could be gone just for the day. Both Belgium and the Netherlands are close but the Netherlands also has the 26th as a holiday so we decided on Belgium. Brussels sounded like a good choice because it was an hour away on the train (on the ICE, the fast train), it was a bilingual city (French/Flemish) and there was a lot to see.
Though the choice of city was done quite in the analytical "Bonnie" way, the trip was a very "Vladimyr" Trip. We went to the train station that day and bought tickets. We arrived in Brussels without a map and only a general idea of where the things we wanted to see were. We made out way through the city in a bit of a meandering fashion and eventually found the main tourist area, through the Vladimyr method of city exploring.
The Grand Place/Grote Markt
We got to go into this building, it was at one time the King's house, it has a museum in it.
We saw some of the other main tourist attractions, like the "Manneken Pis," a small statue of a boy peeing, which is, for reasons that I don't understand, a big thing to go see. They even put costumes on it and part of the museum we went to was a gallery of the costumes (over 800 different ones). We went to see it to see if there was a costume on it, it turns out there wasn't and the fountain wasn't on so he wasn't even peeing. It was weird. There was a huge crowd to see it too. Strange.
Then to the Cathedral
A bit of Vladimyr-style wandering around found a lot of different things:
A part of an old wall
On the map that we eventually got, this was called the "Hallepoort"
This was a strange statue in the "Parc de Bruxelles"
The garden by the "Mont des Arts"
There were lots more little cool things that we saw through out the day. It was a fun adventure.
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