Monday, August 6, 2007

August 2-3,2007 Brussels, Belgium

So my post was supposed to be for just Friday, but since no one had Thursday, I covered both days. What an amazing two days those were. Upon arriving at the Sleep Well Hostel in Brussels, we had a little over two hours to explore the city. Irina, Julia, Mark, Alex, Sunil and I set out together.


While I was growing up, one of the comics I would read were the Tintin series. This series was first published in Belgium, so we set off for the comic museum first so that I could get one of the books in French as a souvenir. After the comic museum we went on a speed walking tour of many architectural sights of the city. Going through the city, we walked past Saint Gudule Church, the Centraal Sation, and various other buildings before buying lots of chocolate and heading back to the hostel for dinner.


For dinner, we rode to an Italian restaurant to meet up with some Brussel students from the U.S. Sadly, our bus driver clipped a car and we had to stop for a while. Dinner was good, but it was a lot of food and very crowded with two groups of students.


It was after dinner that the real fun came in. A Brussels grad student, Frederick, volunteered to give us a tour of the city. I will be the first to admit that this is the smartest man on the planet. He knew everything there was about Brussels. He took us back through all the big highlights of the city explaining all the history of each building. The big highlight was when he took us to the Manneke Pis monument. Now the story behind this according to Frederick is that there are three possibilities. The most probable is that a very rich man lost his son and organized a very large search party. After some time of searching, the boy was found peeing on the side of the street, and in honor of finding his son, he built the monument. The less probable is that when Brussels was under attack, enemies placed many kegs of explosives under the city hall. Seeing the lit fuse, this boy peed on it, extinguishing the fuse and saving the city. The most improbable is that Brussels was surrounded by a fierce army and was outnumbered until this boy went onto the wall and peed on the enemy soldiers, scaring them away and enabling Brussels’ army to win the battle.


On Friday, we had a large tour of European Parliament and a lecture at the European commission with the Brussels students. Sadly, none of the officials were there. However, a lot was learned during the lectures even though some of us were very tired from walking around.
Following the tour and lectures, we had another five hours to explore the city before we came back to Amsterdam where only four people managed to stay awake the entire time.


The YouTube video is just a short representation of the many things to see and do while in Brussels.

Enjoy,
-Jonathan Karademos



1 comment:

Julie Villegas said...

Beautiful job (even though I am shown in a most undignified position!) ;)