Notre dernier jour à Bruxelles

Today was our final day in Brussels.

We all woke up a bit earlier to take advantage of our last few hours in Belgium.  We had another great continental breakfast (and packed our bags with mini-sandwiches for lunch), and decided to split up.  We decided to split up, so while Dan and Kevin did their own thing, Chrissy, Melanie and I checked out the second largest open-air market in Europe, which was pretty neat.  They had all sorts of foods, clothing, rugs, and toiletries for sale.  I felt the urge to buy something and the nuts looked particularly appealing, so I decided to pick up some cashews and salted almonds.

After exploring the market some more, we decided to head just outside the city to see the Atomium!  The Atomium is a gigantic, bizarre-looking, atom-resembling structure that was constructed for the 1958 Brussels World Fair.  We all posed and took some good pictures that made it seem like we were holding the monument up with our hands (original, I know).  We walked closer to the monument to see how much it would cost to climb up to the top, which ended up being 8 euros.  We didn’t feel like paying, even though the view of the city from the topmost ball was probably incredible.  We did, however, end up buying a few beautiful postcards to document our trip.

Satisfied, we hopped back on the metro to head towards the city center.  We saw the famous Manneken Pis, which is a bronze statue of a little boy peeing that was built in 1619.   There are many legends as to why and how this statue became so popular.  One of the ones I heard was that hundreds of years ago, a young boy was awoken to put out a fire with his urine in the king’s castle.  Interesting.  Anyway, we saw the statue sans clothing, but apparently they dress him up a few times each week in various costumes.  There is an entire exhibit dedicated to displaying some of the Manneken Pis’ past costumes.

We were feeling pretty hungry, so we decided to grab a snack at a café across the street.  We finally enjoyed an excellent order of frites and discovered what all the fuss was about, warming up all the while.

After lunch, we met up with the boys at Le Moeder Lambic.  The bar had a pretty great beer selection (as most bars in Belgium do), and I decided to try a Tournay Blonde.  It was most enjoyable, although I was confused by the seed-like things (I forget what our waitress said it was…might’ve been barley?) that came with it.

Since we were all utterly exhausted, we finished up our drinks and left for the train station a bit early.  Chrissy was able to catch an earlier train because her original one didn’t have any stops, but since the rest of us were scheduled to stop in a train station in Lille, we weren’t able to.  Regardless, we were pretty excited: our tickets back to Paris were 1st class!  They cost only a couple euro more than 2nd class, and we figured it would be worth it to roll in style.  We managed to catch an earlier train to Lille, but couldn’t catch an earlier one to Paris.  We hung out in the unreasonably cold station for a few hours until our connecting train began boarding.

As I settled into my big, comfy 1st class seat and began to nod off, I remember thinking, au revoir, Bruxelles.