Brussels

Welcome to the capitol of the European Union! Brussels is a GRAND place--grand parks, buildings, and city scenes everywhere.

There are also loads of intriguing museum options. We went to the Magritte Museum (really great, though no pictures allowed) and the Coudenberg Museum, which gives access to the underground ruins of former versions of the royal palace that now stands above ground.

One thing I kept reading about Brussels is that its main square is perhaps the most beautiful in Europe. That's a pretty tough category to judge, if you ask me, but I'd definitely call Brussels' Grand Place a contendah'!

Perhaps the most beautiful part of our visit, though, was the lovely people we got to stay with and visit. M and her family hosted us in the cozy village of Tervuren, just outside of the city, and took us into the city for a tour...

...that necessarily included one of Brussels's most famous tourist stops: a fountain called Manneken Pis (Peeing Boy). It was hard to get a picture that didn't include twenty other people taking a picture of the same thing. :) At first it just seems like something to giggle at, but try Googling it--there's actually a fascinating history involved.

And we also got to have dinner one night with E, an Italian living in Belgium who I met at the South Pole earlier this year (try to figure that one out) and her boyfriend, F. I love how this picture shows the typically (I'm told) chilly, blustery Belgian weather.

Antwerp

AKA Antwerpen, AKA Anvers...I didn't know anything about this city before coming here, so didn't really have any expectations. But even if I did, I think Antwerp would have wildly exceeded them. Twenty years ago, my friend E was an exchange student here, and when I was planning my trip she connected me with her Flemish Belgian host family--parents and eight (now adult) kids strong. SR and I stayed with N, one of the siblings, and were treated like family by all of the five siblings who still live in the city plus their feisty mother. They took turns showing us around on bikes that they loaned us, had us over for backyard barbeques, and in general just spoiled us rotten and made our visit unforgettable.

One night in N's backyard...

...we had a traditional Flemish meat stew and potato dishes.

SR learned a regionally popular game called korfbal, which is sort of like basketball, and even got to go to a lesson with N one morning.

We saw the Plantin-Moretus Museum, which memorializes a very important Dutch printing company, centuries old.

And in the square outside the museum, a weekly estate auction was quite the morning's entertainment.

We got to see (and ride) the original wood escalator (dating back to the 1930s) that leads to a tunnel crossing under the river on the west side of the city.

Then, walking north along the river...

...we made it to a recently revitalized area of the city, where the MAS museum allows beautiful views over the city.

SO many interesting old buildings, such as this one, which used to be a waterfront warehouse and now is a wedding venue that also houses the city's archives.

N's neighborhood is gloriously diverse, with one of the largest Orthodox Jewish communities outside of Israel...

...plus lots of Moroccans, West and Central Africans, Eastern Europeans. Really refreshing.

And then, the chocolate. Twice, N took me to a chocolate shop that specializes in hot chocolate and every other chocolate-y thing you can think of. Oh. My. Gosh.

The city also has this fantastic little pretend-beach area for the summer ("Summer Bar") where they bring in sand and boardwalks and set up lawn chairs and food and drink stands.

Plus we happened to be in town the weekend when there was a World Food Market. All of the family ladies and friends got together to gorge ourselves on specialites from Turkey, Indonesia, and everywhere in between.

Hard to tear ourselves away from such a fabulous experience in Antwerp, but Brussels (and more amazing hosts--we are TOO LUCKY) awaits...

Belgium!

Without ceremony, passport check, or any formalities at all, our train crossed the border from The Netherlands into Belgium and we soon arrived in Antwerp.

You don't even have to leave the glorious train station to get a hint that 80% of the world's uncut diamonds are traded here.

My next post will be all about Antwerp itself. But before we really started exploring that city, we took side trips to two of Belgium's other gems.

First, Bruges--which I had been repeatedly warned is picture-perfect, but everyone knows it and the tourist hordes are so thick you can barely walk through them. Both these things were true. Even the picture-perfect swans seemed to need a break from having their photo taken.

The streets were clogged with horse-drawn carriages full of visitors and the canals gave boatloads more another way to see the city. We battled our way around on foot for awhile, sharing a Belgian waffle far too early in the day to be able to justify such a thing (but oh, it was good).

And the streets of the town were indeed sigh-worthy.

As were the chocolate shops, as ubiquitous here as Starbucks in NYC. I might have stopped in a couple or a dozen of them and may or may not have purchased and consumed more chocolates than someone who has just scarfed down a Belgian waffle should.

Then we moved on to the less-intense-but-equally-beautiful, larger city of Ghent, which was a little more our pace.

We spent a couple hours just sitting at a café table out in a busy pedestrian area, people-watching and enjoying the atmosphere. (Me eating more chocolate and drinking some too, while SR embarked upon a project of trying as many different Belgian beers as he can during the week we are here.)

Not a bad way to spend an afternoon.

And then as we were wandering back toward the train station, we came upon an ambulance and some crisply dressed nuns, and something appeared to be on fire, and it turned out that we'd stumbled up on the filming of a movie scene! It was for a movie called "Emperor," apparently starring Adrian Brody. So we watched that for awhile before calling it a day. A great day.