our last day wasn't too exciting at all. we checked out the hotel, drove to the airport, waited several hours there, plus an additional hour for the delayed departure and finally got home to austria. here are some pictures of this wonderful trip to bruxelles.

today we slept long (breakfast is until 10:30 here at the hotel, which is pretty cool), and went to town after having our "petit dejeuner", to go shopping. the only thing we really planned was to see the female part of the pissing trilogy. we already saw the boy, the dog, so there was still the girl to find. our guide said it is located in a dead-end street somewhere in the centre of the town. since the girl is not on the tourist-guide signs one can see all over the town - and they help tourists really very much when doing sightseeing - it was a bit hard to find her first. additionally, when we got there, there were only two japanese and three italians in the very narrow and dark street, so not really much people searching for the girl, as it seems. the fountain with the pissing girl unfortunately was locked away by iron bars, and the statue itself was a squatting girl with spread legs, but it was not pissing. guess it was because it's winter (although the boy actually was pissing). je suis tres triste! shopping was - of course - fun, though we didn't really buy too much. most of the cloth shops here are the same as in austria, like H&M, esprit, zara, pimkie, C&A (yeah, i bought a trouser there - wohoo!), nafnaf, benetton, etc. after several hours of pure pleasure we returned to the hotel again and had loads of fun with tv series and movies again. so far we had fun with "friends", "knight rider", louise de funes movies, "buffy", "CSI miami", "CSI [someother-place]", "naruto", "pokemon", etc, etc. - if you think we're watching loads of tv, you're wrong. later that day we made use of the hotel's shuttle-bus that drives from the hotel to the centre of bruxelles to get something to eat. zombiequeen ate a quiche and i had a burger. both things were very good.

as already planned in 2007 we started our fourth tour through brussels. this time - according to the guide - the "european side" of the town had to be explored. first stop was the old railway station "gare du luxembourg", or, to be more precise, the front of the building, as the rest was knocked down to make way for some EU-buildings. and that's exactly what you get in this district: huge new skyscrapers like the EU parliament and the building that houses the council of europe. fortunately there are loads of parks too, so it's not only concrete and glass, but also some green spots here and there. additionally there are really very run down houses too in this area, so that's a really weird mix you get there. on the way to "parc du cinquantenaire" one passes very old art nouveau houses, which really look cool. in the huge park there's also the military museum and the museum for art and history, which both were closed today. additionally there were huge old buildings (monuments) there, which we didn't know what they were for, but they very as impressive as big. one of them reminded me of the brandenburger tor in berlin somehow. after that we passed another EU-building and drove home, as the weather was not that good today and thus the buildings and parks were not that impressive but rather dull and drag. besides that we were pretty tired from our past tours, so we went home and enjoyed again some tv series and movies in original versions (some english, some french, like an original version of a louise de funes film, which we both enjoyed pretty much). no plans are yet made for tomorrow. i guess we will go shopping and have a relaxing day in bruxelles.