Brussels

Over this past weekend I went to Brussels, Belgium with some of my roommates.  I was not really quite sure what to expect so I bought a European guidebook to get some ideas of where to go.  Being in Belgium was a completely different world from Italy.  The architecture is much different - there is old style gothic buildings next to new modern buildings.  The houses look much more northern-European rather than Mediterranean as well.  In Brussels they speak French and Dutch.  In Southern Belgium I heard that they speak German as well.  I took French in middle school and high school so luckily I was able to use some of that to follow directions.  The first thing I noticed about about Brussels was that it seemed like a melting pot of cultures.  There was both French and Dutch cuisine but there was also a lot of Chinese, Mexican, Greek, and Italian restaurants as well.  In Rome it is really hard to find anything that isn't Italian food.
The first thing we did was go to the Grand Place which is a 15th century market square in the center of Brussels.  All of the buildings were amazing.  They are gothic style and had so many tiny details on the spires and windows.  There was a flower market in the Grand Place and tons of really good restaurants.  People were just sitting on the stairs near the buildings, eating at the restaurants, and walking around having a good time.  It had a really great atmosphere, at night too, and it was definitely my favorite area of the city.

Later on Friday, we went to the Museum van de Geuze which is a brewery museum.  The brewery is family run and everyone was really friendly.  We did a self-guided tour through the museum, looking at the different machines that the beer is made in and the barrels in which it is stored and then at the end we got to taste two kinds.  The brewery specializes in a type of beer called Lambic beer which is a more sour-tasting beer.  They have fruity variations of the Lambic beer such as well that are sweeter.  I tried the basic Lambic beer and a Raspberry Lambic beer.  I thought that the Lambic was pretty good, considering the fact that I don't really like beer.  I really liked the raspberry beer though.
On our way back from the brewery we stopped at the Mannekin Pis, or "Pissing boy", which is a fountain with a tiny statue of a little boy going to the bathroom on top.  It is known as the Belgian national symbol and tons of people were crowded around this tiny statue.  The stores on the street sell models of the Mannekin Pis in any form you can imagine - shirts, key chains, statues, even chocolate.  It was pretty crazy.

Mannekin Pis

On Friday night we went to a French seafood restaurant.  I got grilled salmon which is great since it is one of my favorite foods and I haven't had any since being in Italy.  The waiter was kind of weird though and he kept asking if we were the Spice Girls.  I assumed he was kidding but then he kept bringing it up and then gave us each free glasses of sangria so we starting being unsure.  After dinner we went to the Delirium Cafe which is a bar that sells the Belgian beer as well as over 2,000 other kinds of beer.  It was really fun and decorated with vintage signs and the tables were just huge barrels with stools.  I tried a beer called Floris Cactus which is apparently made from a cactus flower.  It was light green too.

  Cactus Beer

The second day we walked to the Royal Palace which was beautiful.  We couldn't go inside but it reminded me of Versailles except with less extensive gardens.  After we walked over to a huge Gothic cathedral where the prince and princess of Belgium were married years ago.  It was really nice inside and there were people singing but it was a lot plainer than the Baroque and Renaissance churches in Rome.
After that we decided to take the metro to the end of the line to see the Atomium.  The Atomium is a huge model of an atom that was left over from the World Fair in 1958.  It was one of the weirdest things I have ever seen.  It was just giant silver globes connected by huge metal rods.  The information sign said that it was a model of an atom that had been enlarged 165 billion times.  You can go inside the Atomium but we decided not to because there was a long line.  I heard that the Belgian people have mixed feelings about the Atomium.  Some think it is really cool but others think it is a huge eyesore, kind of like the glass pyramids in front of the Louvre.

 Royal Palace

Atomium

We went to the Brussels' Chocolate Museum as well which had a ton of free samples as well as a demonstration at the end.  Everyone crowded into a small kitchen that smelled like chocolate and an old man showed us how they make different shapes with the chocolate using molds.  He told us about all the different kinds of chocolate as well and at the end we all got to taste it.  It was definitely one of my favorite parts of the trip.

The second night we decided to try Dutch restaurant so we could see every kind of food they have in Brussels.  The food was a lot heavier with a lot of different meats that I had never even heard of.  I decided to try chicken that came with salad.  When it came out, it was actually an entire 1/2 chicken!  It ended up being really good but I had to carve it myself and it came with a sauce that was similar to tartar sauce.

I would definitely want to take another trip back to Belgium since there are so many other cities there that we didn't get to see such as Bruges and Antwerp so hopefully that will happen sometime in the future.  This is an unnaturally long post but I just really wanted to get everything in.