Brussels Post

I realize that I have been remiss in my posting. There has been a lot of information about Germany and a few posts of Paris, incidentally to view those you have to look in the June archive as blogger archives the posts and only keeps a certain amount up when you first look, but there really has never been a good post on Brussels. Or Cologne for that matter. But we are going back to Cologne on Thursday for three nights to meet Paty's sister and brother in law, so I will do the Cologne one after that trip. But let me rectify the lack of quality Brussels insight and photos now. Some of these pictures are current, some are from my March trip and some are from Natalie's trip.

First of all, let me comment that I notice that World Cup fever has started to infect the States. Not quite epidemic level, but the US v Italy game got a 5.2 rating. Meaning 5.2% of all TVs were watching the game. That is the highest rated soccer game since the 1998 World Cup Final featuring France and Brazil.

I definitely have the fever, as I have watched mostly in their entirety all but two games so far. Those two we were on the road from Cologne to Munich or Brussels to Cologne. Plus the beer line has probably caused me to miss about one full game in aggregate. Now today is trying even my patience. Togo-Switzerland....Ukraine-Saudi Arabia.....Spain-Tunisia, not exactly the feature day of the first round. Now the real treat starts tomorrow as all the groups will play their third games simultaneously with two groups playing per day. That makes four matches a day, most with implications.

All right, back to Brussels. Basically Brussels is a capital city of a small European country. But it also includes the EU headquarters and NATO's headquarters. That makes it a little more important than just the capital of say, Austria. It also makes it more expensive. It is not a cheap city to live in, but all the 'stuff' is really nice. For example, the food is great and extremely varied. The roads are well maintained. The downtown area is well maintained; free of bums, not particularly dirty or downtrodden, no one peeing on the sidewalks like Paris, etc... So there are definitely advantages to living here. Price is not one of them. Although it is not as bad as say London or even Paris.

And the beer, oh the beer. The Belgium’s are famous for Beer and Chocolate. Both exceed expectations. The beer is as varied as you can get anywhere in the world. And also as strong as anywhere. The 'party crowd' will get one 500 ml can of one of the strong ales and drink it on the way to the club. You are thinking, well that is a big beer but no big deal. Well 500 ml equals roughly 18 ounces and the strong ale is 12%. This is roughly equivalent to drinking a six pack of budweiser.

Living here is pretty easy. It is a French speaking town. All of Belgium is by law Bilingual. French and Dutch (Flemish) are the official languages. But most people speak passable English. And as long as you say hello, please, thank you and a couple other choice phrases in French they will think you are trying and then politely switch to English. But if you act the ugly American and say every word slower and louder in English only, then they will pretend they do not speak English at all. I have seen this happen on more than one occasion.

The heart of the central district of Brussels in the Grand Place, it is a pretty impressive square that has all sorts of old medieval times buildings encircling the square. Here are a few pictures:

They had a lavender festival in the square this last weekend:

The festival was to promote some area as a tourist destination, thus they were distilling the lavender into perfume on site:


More pictures from the Grand Place the Dutch had just won a big game, thus the jersey:

This is a big symbol of Brussels; tons of tourists come to see the Manneken Pis, kind of funny to see all these people with cameras taking a picture of a two foot statue:

There is actually an amazing church right in the downtown core, Catholic Cathedral:

Paty and Natalie on the hill in front of the Royal Palace with the city center and the church behind them:

The same view, only during the day and without Natalie:


The Bourse, supposedly the world’s first stock exchange:

It seems that every city in Europe has an ‘Arc de Triumphe’ Brussel’s version is exceptionally large. I think the two building on either side of it used to be blimp hangers during some of the conflicts. Now they house the largest museums in Brussels and also the automobile museum. I went to that one, it was pretty cool:

This is the Atomiun, it was built for World fair. Kind of their version of the space needle, but this is a lot taller. Pretty impressive really. It was all cleaned up and got a new polishing that was just unveiled this year.

Everyone in this city rides bikes. Not with quite the frequency of the Netherlands, but still quite a bit. Even Paty tried to join in:

So, I mentioned the food in Brussels is exceptionally good. My friend Reid that was here with us said the whole time we were in Germany that he would eat anything. So we decided to get escargot from a street vendor. No, I am not making this up. Here is a picture of me eating my one of the dozen we got. Paty also had one and Reid had the other 10, I guess he really will try anything. The vendor was not thrilled that we were taking all these pictures in front of his cart, but that is what you get when you sell snails right in the corner of the Grand Platz. Some of the other escargot vendors will also sell you a glass of white wine to go with your snails. Yes, street vendors, more than one, sell white wine and snails. Very Brussels like.

\