A Day in Brussels

I have not done too much travelling outside of Paris, mostly because six weeks is not a very long time to spend in one city, especially one with so many museums and attractions.  I did however make one trip out of the country, to Brussels, Belgium.  And since they speak French there too, it was a win-win situation for me.

The day started off at around five in the morning, getting ready, taking the first metro to Gare du Nord to take a one and a half hour train to Brussels.  Despite all of this, I really wasn’t that tired when we reached.  When we reached, the first thing we did was find somewhere to get Belgian waffles.  They are as delicious as everyone tells you they are.  This was followed by wandering around the Grand Place, the central square of Brussels.

We took a long walk through a garden, walking around to see the Royal Palace.  We ended up visiting the Coudenberg ancient palace and museum.  This turned out to be mostly underground, but it also had some pretty cool artifacts in the museum area.  We were the only people down there, so to me it was scarier than the Catacombs in Paris, which I didn’t think was scary at all.

After Coudenberg we went to what was probably my favorite museum ever, the Museum of Musical Instruments.  It doesn’t cost very much and you get a free audio guide to listen to several of the instruments.  It was super cool and had all sorts of instruments from all over the world.  I enjoyed it immensely and may have taken a few too many pictures of instruments, but it was well worth it.

The rest of our trip in Brussels consisted of mostly chocolate.  We visited a Chocolate Museum where they had this chocolate machine and the guy that worked there adeptly stuck three spéculoos cookies in and brought them back perfectly covered in chocolate.  And then we watched the chocolate maker make pralines, which were absolutely delicious  I’m still impressed by how good the chocolate makers are at their jobs.  After the museum we visited, and I am not exaggerating, twenty-six chocolate shops.  Some of them had samples, some of them didn’t, but all of them were very close to the Grand Place.  We saw several of them while walking through the Galarie royales Saint-Hubert, which is an outdoor shopping mall.  After finally deciding on some chocolate for our families, we finished out our trip by visiting the museum of comics, some dinner, and then finally returned to Paris by train.