After a 8 hour drive from Berlin to Brussels, we reached the city at around 5 in the evening. Our service appartment was in the centre of the city and that was really convenient in terms of access to restaurants, cinemas, the underground network etc. Most of the restaurants were shut on Christmas day but we managed to find one pub which was open and enjoyed the nice Belgian beer!
The next day was sunny so we set out to explore the city on foot. Its a really beautiful city to walk through, full of statues, colourful architecture and buildings and squares. We stopped for chocolate at a small chocolate shop, at a comic store for the hubby to purchase Asterix and Tintin figures and admire their comic collection. Do you know Tintin was created in Brussels and so were the Smurfs. They are crazy about comics there and there is a comics musuem also, which we unfortunately did not have time to visit. We walked all the way to the main city square where there was a huge christmas market on. Lots of ferris wheel and carousel rides, and churros and waffles later we made it back to our hotel.
The next day was raining so we made it a musuem day. We went to the planetarium in the morning, where there was a show in English (much appreciated after only German shows here in Zurich) and we learnt all about telescopes and how Gallileo had seen Jupiter through a primitive telescope and mistaken Saturn's rings for ears :) In the afternoon we went to the toy musuem which was a bit of a disappointment. They had a huge collection of toys, but the musuem was dusty and many of the toys were broken, or in a bad state.
The next day we decided to pack even more in. In the morning we set out for the Atomium, a famous structure comprising 6-7 huge spheres, held together by steel bars. I've not described it that well, but there are really big spheres which house restaurants etc inside. Its a tall impressive structure but the queue to go inside was too long so we decided to skit it and go to Oceade (an indoor waterpark) nearby instead. It was a lovely waterpark, with a lazy river, slides, wave pool etc and four hours later we emerged happy and hungry. We then booked tickets for Dhoom 3 (why not!) for the night in the cinema nearby and after a very late lunch realised we still had 3 hours left for the movie. So we took a long nap in the car, went to a nice Italian restaurant in the same complex for dinner and then went for the night show of the movie. Well the less said about the movie the better, but S liked it and its been ages since we saw a Hindi movie in the theater so it was an interesting experience.
The last day we drove out to Gent and Bruges. Bruges was amazingly beautiful, the main city square had a lovely christmas market with an ice skating rink, all the beautiful structures lit up and more of the waffles and thick belgian fries to gorge on. I love walking around the christmas markets, its fun to see so much merriment and the beautiful things on sale.We squeezed in a visit to the beach (about 1/2 hour drive from Bruges because the hubby was overcome by an urge to see the sea). It was of course very cold but nice to walk on the sand and collect shells.
In between all these activities the hubby took S to see Gravity and she enjoyed that too. 3 movies in 2 weeks, lucky girl :)
The next day we left for Paris and more about that in the next post.
