Big day in Brussels

Sorry for the late post on Brussels!

We discovered there's quite a bit of a hill in Brussels, as we walked up and down it a couple times. The big discovery of the day was the land of chocolatiers, known as the Place du Grand Sablon. As you can imagine, Jerry was quite happy to find this:


Jerry definitely enjoyed shopping at a number of chocolate stores, I think five in total. And we quite enjoy eating it all ourselves. Just kidding! We'll bring some back for everyone (we hope it survives the flight).

We also discovered Brussels to be the land of weird museums. There's a sewer museum, a lamppost museum, an american civil war museum (known as the confederate museum...), and the ones we went to, the Brewery Museum and the Chocolate Museum.

The Brewery Museum was pretty lame; for 5 euros, we saw the room they had. It had a video of how beer is made, how much people like beer, and how to cook with beer. Yeah, kind of a cooking show. Anyway, the room also had old brewing equipment with some signs as to what it's for. Lame. At the end, however, they did give us each a beer. So, I drank both of them. Not bad, but not great for Belgian beer.


The Musee du Cacao et Chocolat was much better. It had three floors all about cacao, from when it was discovered (and where) up to manufacturing and modern concerns such as environmentalism. Everything was in four languages (everything is at least bilingual, and often trilingual -- french, dutch, and english -- in Belgium). Also, they made some shells for pralines, but then we just ate the shells. I guess the chocolatier did not have time to fill them.

The other museum we went to was the Musical Instruments Museum. It had a wide variety of instruments, and particularly a wide variety of accordians. It didn't have too many truly antique instruments, but the neat part was the headphones. They give you a set of headphones to wear around the building, and in front of each case of instruments, it plays you a sample of music featuring that type of instrument.

One of the important tourist attractions in Brussels is the Mannequin Pis:


Yeah, it's a boy pissing. There are a number of stories as to what this is all about, but in the end, it's just an important spot in Brussels that a huge group of Chinese tourists were in front of.

We also saw the royal palace:


We couldn't go inside, but the old royal part of town is very pleasant. There's also a beautiful royal park:


We had Italian for dinner. One thing I absolutely love about Brussels is that even the most casual of restaurants has beers like Duvel and Chimay on their menu. Here, Leffe and Stella Artois are the boring/cheap stuff. I'm kind of glad that InBev bought Anheuser Busch; maybe they'll make the beer finally taste decent.

After dinner, we spent some time with old friends from grad school who now live out here.

It was a long day, and at the end Jerry was tired (note that it's still sunny at 10pm here):

(He doesn't know I've added this to the post. Ha ha!)

Tomorrow: Paris!