Fri, 28 Dec 2007

tour 01
since our guide suggests various tours through bruxelles, with
an average duration of three hours, we decided to take tour 01
today. this tour shows all the main tourist attractions one
should see when going to bruxelles and is located right in the
center of bruxelles. as we found out, bruxelles is rather small
so one can go to most important places by foot. yet we con-
sidered buying a tourist bruxelles card, as it includes entry
fees to some museums and the fees for the public transport
system. 

the tour started at the "grand place", a huge place surrouned
by very old and beautiful houses. most of them were old guild
houses. of course loads of tourists were there, and we were
right among them!

 

afterwards we were told to go to the "mont des arts", a little
hill with loads of arts stuff (yep, that's what the translation
means). since we both are not really into arts and crafts, we
have passed this hill very fast, and came to the "place royal",
which is the place for the royals (hard to guess, right?).

 

next to "place royal" is the "palais royal", the royal palace. those
places are rather unspectacular, yet beautiful buildings.

 

afterwards we came by the stock market building and were
drinking a mulled wine and a hot chocolate at the christmas
market there. afterwards we moved on to the "parc de bruxelles",
which is a huge park right in the center of the town. since it's
winter it's not that beautiful as in summer i guess, nonetheless
there was loads of trees, sculptures and shut down fountains.

 
 

located at the end of the park is the the "palais de la nation",
the house of parliament. next stop was "jardin de botanique",
the botanic garden, which includes another big park we crossed.

 

then we came by several impressive buildings. since we already
were a little exhausted, we didn't read on in our guide, but
just were walking and enjoying what we saw. among the things we
encountered was the pissing dog, another statue of the pissing
beings series. our guide says there's a dog, a girl and of
course the world famous little kid - all of them peeing. well,
maybe those belgians have some weird fetish, who knows.

 

we didn't finish our tour as we didn't find the last spot to
visit, namely the st. michel cathedral. but i guess we will have
a look at it tomorrow, since tour two is in the same area as
tour one. instead we returned to the stock market building and
went shopping instead at a very crowded shopping street with
loads of clothes shops (which zombiequeen enjoyed a lot).

 

finally we arrived at the hotel again and were pretty tired.
so we spent the evening watching cool tv series in french, like
knight rider, cartoon seris and at prime time "lord of the
rings" in german, since they offer one german tv channel.

 

day two done, we like bruxelles so far.