We've broken it down into sections so you can take it in a few smaller bits corresponding with each video we've done or do it all in one sitting if you wish. so here it is:
So we bought 240 euro for the trip which cost us just under 200 pounds. our plan was to spend no more than 30 euro each per day on food and other stuff. This turned out to be somewhere between 50 and 100 euros under what we really needed.
Monday (London to Brussels)
So this was our first time on the Eurostar. It was extremely easy to get. We had ordered our tickets, accommodation and tour online so all we did when we got to St Pancras international was stick our credit card in the machine and the tickets printed out for us. We arrived about 1 hour before the train was due to depart, this allowed us a bit of time for a coffee before embarking. Checking in was really easy and passport control was very quick. After a quick bag scan and a stamp on our passports, we were off!
We were both carrying a backpack and also had one small weeled suitcase. we found this was heaps for a three night stay, and even allowed us a bit of room for souvenires.
So as we pulled out of the station, it started snowing. Even though we were missing out, we didn't mind of course - brussels without snow would be better than London with snow, we were sure! The train took about 20 mins to get to the chunnel and I estimate about 30 minutes to go through it. I didn't really take note of the time that we came out so I'm not sure exactly. after about 1.5hrs we made a quick stop at lille and then another 20 mins and we arrived at Brussels midi.
Now, I'm ashamed to say it, but the first thing that we did on arriving in Brussels was to eat at their equivalent of Mcdonalds..... they call it "quick" but it's pretty much the same as the golden arches. Now that I think about it, I didn't see a McDonalds anywhere during our stay!
Next was a short ride on the local trains ("The Metro") which were like London's tubes, but not quite so tube-like.... this was very easy, the ticket guy at Brussels Midi spoke good english and gave us a colour coded map and some good directions to where we wanted to go. Probably about 15 mins on the train and we arrived at Centraal Station. The stations were suprisingly close together, and as we found out later on, Brussels, despite being the capital of Belgium and the headquarters of the Euorpean Union, it is actually a really small city. Its population is only 1.1 million. That's about half of Brisbane, and 1/14th of London.
Arriving at Centraal, we came out to street level and it was snowing!!! Debbie took some video at this point (shown in the first video below). I need to explain why I was looking so exasperated in the video: We had just been on the train for two hours from London, had the stress of taking a local train with everything in either French or Dutch (it was easy, but still stressfull), we were carrying heavy backpacks and I was carrying a heavy suitcase which I just finished dragging up a flight of stairs. It was cold and wet and debbie was standing in the open with our expensive video camera and getting rained/snowed on. I just wanted to get to the hotel room, I told debbie that she could stand in the snow all she wanted to AFTER we put our bags down, but no... she wanted to video it right there and then.... I guess it did make good footage, and I guess it was our first real experience with snow, so if she can forgive me for being tired and stressed, I can forgive her for being over-excited :-)
so... We saw snow! this is our first time actually walking through snow! unfortunately I was too focused on finding the hotel to really enjoy it. Debbie kept walking really slow and stopping every now and then to try to find where we were. I had memorized the map from central to our hotel so I was getting more frustrated every minute.
"it's this way! come on..." I would say
"hang on... how do you know, are you sure?" debbie would reply
Andrew: "for the third time... yes! we're looking for the curvy building, can you see a curvy building here?"
Debbie: "well, no.."
Andrew: "that's because it's around the corner"
*a very very short distance later*
Debbie: "this area is kinda curvy"
Andrew: *Exasperated stare* "Debbie... are ANY of these buildings ANYTHING like the curvy one we saw on the map?"
Debbie: "... uh... not really...."
Andrew: *storms off in the correct direction*
Neverthless we did end up going past a really cool church, but we didn't stop for photos. We figured we'd go back later on when we weren't carrying backpacks and the sky wasn't raining ice.
Anyway, we eventually got to the hotel and checked in. When we got up to the room we were amazed! it was on the top floor on the corner of the building so we had views of Brussels in two directions! out of one window we could see the big building that forms part of the Grand Place - it was absolutely spectacular.
(Normally at this point I'd put in a picture, but now that I look through all the photos we didn't actually take any from the hotel room until the night time. but there is a video from the room of course :-) )
Hotel reception gave us a note from the tour organisation that we had arranged to go with for a day trip to Amsterdam on tuesday. it said that unfortunately due to the fact that we were the only people booked on the trip, the tour had been cancelled and we would recieve a full refund. They offered us a free tour of Gent and Brugge as concilation. In hindsight, we were both glad that we went to see Gent and Brugge rather than Amsterdam because the tour was exausting and going all the way to another country would have brought us back to our hotel at about 9pm. We'll go back to Holland another day.
So Next we went out to the streets and headed to the Grand Place. the 'A' in each of Grand and Place is pronounced like the 'A' in "bark". so we instantly saw that we made a very good choice of Hotel. we couldn't have picked one closer to the centre of town. We walked through allyways, arcades, squares, The shops were mostly Chocolate shops, lace shops, waffle places, tourist-type shops or local resturants. there was the occasional clothing shop and there was a whole section of about 6 or 7 shops in an arcade that only sold leather clothes. the highlight of course was that it was still snowing!!! woooo!!! we were so happy (even me, seeing as we had put our heavy bags down) We took lots of photos and some video, the architecture is absolutely amazing. It's almost overwhelming - you can't just stand there staring at one beautiful building because there are three others just as beautiful next to it and even more if you turn arround! it's hard to know where to start! Be thankful though, this blog is shorter than it would have been because we don't know anything much about the history of brussels or the Grand Place so we've got nothing to write on this subject, just photos. :-)
here's a google map of the place:
here(click me)
some cool buildings:
and some photos of us having fun in the snow:
Debbie doing her "Rock on" pose:
me doing my "I'm trying desperately not to look boring in photos" pose:
my second attempt at not being boring:
a not very good attempt at a couple shot:
anyway, we were hungry and I'm really ashamed to admit that even with all these local coffee shops and resturants, we went, yet again to a "Quick" and ordered chicken nuggets.....We just wanted a snack to keep us going, I know it's no excuse.... We went to see some of the local markets in the square and we eventually went to the Mannekin Pis which was about 100 meters away from the Grand Place. it was much smaller than we were expecting... it's really not all that spectacular, it's just a small kid sized statue of a small kid urinating into a fountain.... so of course we took photos and video etc, like all the other people that were crowded arround. :-)
after that we kept walking to see what we could find away from the central bit of the town. it kind of gets a bit boring when we started getting into the CBD part, modern boring looking buildings. we did find another fountain though:
here's a typical allyway:
You'll see on the first video that we go into an arcade, this was about 100 meters long (you can see it fairly clearly on that google map if you go to the east a bit. it's the long blue-roofed thing.) and consisted almost entirely of chocolate and lace shops... still we found a solitary coffee shop and sat down. Debbie had a hot chocolate and I had a cuppachino rather than my usual latte, mostly because neither of us could really read anything on the menu and I figured that asking for a latte would probably just get me a glass of milk... the cappacino wasn't very good though, the coffee was burnt. we did get some free nougat with our drinks though - mmmmm nougat.
After the coffee break we went back up to the hotel for a bit of a freshen up before dinner. It was so good having the hotel there so close, we never had to look around for a public toilet, we just went up to the hotel room.
After Debbie had a shower, we went back to the arcade to have dinner. halfway through the arcade, it branches off to a narrow allyway with heaps of local resturants. nearly all of them had displays of mussels and other seafood outside. all of them had at least one waiter standing outside encouraging people to come in to eat. a lot of them had set menus on display with three course meals set out. We picked one that we had seen while walking through earlier. the main reason was that it had Escargot on the menu.... Inside, there was an open fireplace which were seated close to. the waiter gave us the menus and we picked a three course meal for 12 euro each. Which brings us to the Howie Associates London Branch Travel Tip One: often these set menus work out much cheaper than ordering individual food from the menu.
We both had escargot for entree, mussels for mains and Chocolate mousse for desert. Neither of us had eaten escargot before so it was a good experience. Debbie had quite a bit of trouble getting the slippery little suckers out of the shells, and I think that she actually may have pushed two of them in so far that we couldn't get them out. so I ate my 6 and debbie unfortunately only had 4. They really weren't all that great honestly. the sauce that they were in was kind of a pestoish thing, which was really nice, but the snails themselves tasted really bland. their texture was sort of like non-chewy calamari. The mussels were really good though. they were in a sort of onion-soup type sauce which by itself would have made a very good entree, it had onions and celery and all sorts of yummy stuff, and of course the mussels had been cooked in it so they had soaked up it's flavour and tasted absolutely wonderful. We're used to the mussels at Belgo (the belgian resturant in Covent Garden) which are generally in a thick sauce, but these ones tasted more... seafoodish. We topped it off with a small bottle of rose. Total meal cost: 42 euros - not a bad amount. the wine was 18 euros so it could have been a very reasonable price, but hey, as our saying went: "We're only in Brussels once.... this year."
We also found that despite the official languages being French, Dutch (Flemish) and German, most people actually understood English, even if they couldn't speak it well. this is a great bonus, it would have been hard had we not been able to communicate with anyone. Often, when walking into a store, the shopkeeper would say "Bonjour! Hello!"
So anyway, About here would be a good time to watch the first video as this is where it finishes.
The videos are edited a bit better than the Japan one - I'm getting better at using Microsoft's movie maker software and we're getting better at taking video... I think... Debbie mostly had the video camera during our time in Belgium and I mostly stuck with old faithful still shots. We've interspersed our talking on the video and some pumping techno in other parts. This is because our mood wasn't a relaxed one it was more excited and energetic throuought the whole three days so the music reflects our mood really :-) I'll also have to warn you that I was attempting to grow a beard over these three days, I've since shaved it off though, I didn't really like it. oh, and I do apologise, it was dificult to get the audio levels consistant and so some bits are quieter than others.
anyway, here it is (it's about 20mb so when opening the page, you may want to press the pause button and go make a cup of tea or something :-) shouldn't take more than 5 minutes or so to download):
Andrew and Debbie Invade Belgium (the movie!) Part1
oh - and when debbie is taking the video at the start and she says it's a beautiful church, it's not actually a church, it's another building of some sort, but we don't really know.... one thing about the towns in Belgium is that normal buildings get made just as beautifully as churches in other countries, and the churches in Belgium are staggeringly beautiful.
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