On Friday April 1st, my 2 roommates Christine and Kelly and I, left Prague really early and arrived in Brussels, Belgium! The weather wasn’t the greatest and the day was overcast, but we made the best of it. Kelly had a friend from college who was studying abroad there so she showed us around the city.
Brussels was extremely different from Prague. The city made you feel like you were in a small cute town somewhere, some parts of the city reminded me a lot of Hoboken, NJ or Montclair, NJ. Brussels reminded me a lot more of home, which is why I think I liked it so much. In Prague, everything is extremely old, nothing can be developed, everything is larger scale and there is literally a castle or super old church or monument around every single corner. Brussels wasn’t like that, while it did have important old historical things here and there, the city was cuter with small little streets with cafes everywhere. The streets had restaurants with outside seating and little houses all lined up in a row. Rather than a city, Brussels felt more like a little town.
This is Sablon Square, which was one of my favorite parts of the city. It has little cafes, antique stores and chocolate shops.
This is the St. Gudule and St. Michael’s Cathedral, it started being built around 1226.
We decided to stop for coffee and tea at the top of the Museum of Musical Instruments. Although we didn’t go through the museum ourselves, it’s supposed to be really cool, plus the view from the top was beautiful!
After walking through the windy little streets, we came across Grand Place, or Brussels’ main square. We weren’t expecting it, it kind of popped out of no where! In the main square was the Hotel de Ville (Town Hall) and the Maison du Roi (King’s house).
The best part of Brussels was the food: Macaroons, waffles, ice cream, French fries with 20 different sauce choices and Speculoos (it’s a type of cookie that tastes like Teddy Grahams, they are delicious… kind of like a cross between a graham cracker and cinnomin and ginger snaps?.. yum). We ate a lot of speculoos ice cream and tried to bring back jars (they take the cookie and create something with the consistency of peanut butter) with us on the plane… but they were confiscated by security. Between the 3 of us … we had 5 jars.
On Saturday we went to Bruges for a day trip with Kelly’s friend’s study abroad program, CIEE. So Sunday we were back to exploring Brussels more.
We went to the Atomium, which was built for the 1958 World’s Fair. Each ball has a different exhibit hall and the tubes connecting them house escalators. The top ball has a panoramic view, however, it’s a bit outside the city and so the view isn’t exactly of the main parts of Brussels. However, we decided not to pay the expensive fee to go inside and just looked at it from outside, which was cool by itself.
We came across a park called Parc du Cinquantenaire (French for Park of the Fiftieth Anniversary) or Jubelpark (Dutch for Jubilee Park)… the country speaks 2 different languages. The triumphal arch at the end of the park was planned for the National Exhibition of 1880 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the independent state of Belgium. The park was really beautiful and really green… and the speculoos ice cream on my waffle made it even better!
After that we found the Berlaymont aka the Berlaymonster… which houses the headquarters of the European Commission, which is the executive of the European Union.
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