Brussels and Luxembourg. Part 2.

I haven't actually written up the second part of this mainly due to life being a bit hectic and the second half of the holiday being so busy.

I completely forgot that on day 3 we actually went to a musical instruments museum, which was a good few hours. I don't know why I forgot?! It was a really good museum actually, and the instruments were accompanied by headphone jacks that you could plug into to hear a sample of the music made by each instrument.  The only thing that I would say is that the museum wasn't very well maintained and some of the lights were out, and some of the jacks wouldn't work. I also had to work overtime on translating as most of the labels were only in French and Flemish. I can't really complain though as it was really inspirational and really really interesting and as under 25s we got automatic student rate at only 3 euro each!

I wouldn't really write about the evenings in hotels, but I am sure as you continue reading you will know exactly why I am writing about the night of day three.

We were planning on leaving the hotel before 9am to drive the scenic route to Luxembourg city via. Vianden. We had planned the drive and had settled down for an early nights sleep by 10pm. We heard some commotion in the hallway and someone knocking loudly on the door of one of the other hotel rooms. Martin  was annoyed and the guy was still making some noise so we watched some hour long documentary, and then turned off the television after that. They guy was still out there yelling in French, and we heard him say "enough is enough" in English, so we could only assume that he had been locked out of his room by someone else. Half an hour passed, and he was still keeping us awake so Martin, charged out of the door in his cow print pyjamas and nearly ripped the door of the wall told the bloke to shut up. and walked into the room again.

So they guy shut up for maybe half an hour, but he then went and had a cigarette in the damn hallway. We were annoyed as being freaking suffocated and tried to use the ipad to take a video of him under the door! That didn't work and we couldn't exactly march straight past him to reception and complain so I attempted to ring them. They didn't answer. Damn. We heard other people down the hallway complaining to this bloody idiot, and going back to their room. In the end Martin fell asleep by 1am, which was more important as he was going to drive. I remember still being awake at 3am.

Day 4

The following morning as we left our room and went to check out, the bloke was still standing in the corner, looked up at us, and then looked away sheepishly in to the corner. I guess he was ashamed, and so he bloody should be! He was middle aged so he should know better. We complained to reception upon checkout and they just said it was odd, because there should not be anyone in the room next to us. The receptionist did go up to investigate as we were leaving for the car.

The drive to Vianden was pretty good, some nice views. We were a bit annoyed that there was a lack of "Welcome to Luxembourg" signs. I followed on the paper map, so it was pretty easy. We did however nearly end up in Germany due to Martin forgetting to brake for a bend. xD We drove along the German border, and followed the river. The castle at Vianden was pretty easy to find and we stopped of here as planned for a visit to the castle and a break from the car.

I got to speak German for the first time on the the holiday. Weeeee.

The castle was in ruins until it was restored in the 1980's, it has been restored to the point that most of the upstairs rooms, were in the liveable state of the era. So the rooms were decorated and there was music of the era playing in the background. It was so awesome. I kept on landing in my daydream world and therefore walking off. Haha.

There were some epic sets of armour in the museum part, and halberds! check out this guy.

After the castle we didn't walk around the town as the rain was really damn miserable.

We got back in the car and preceded to drive on to the capital Luxembourg.

This part of the drive was quite interesting, as we had to drive on some crappy flyover type thing behind a lorry over the river as they were building some type of hydroelectric dam. Then no less than 20 minutes later we were directed by the Satnav to go on to a motorway that hadn't even been built yet! They were cutting the tunnels through the mountains! Bearing in mind this Satnav was around 7 years old and not updated, that is a bit odd!

Anyway we got into the city and the Novotel was on the Kirchberg Plateau, which had loads of building work and roadworks, so we drove around for an hour looking for the car park, we could se the hotel and not the car park! Frustrating. in the end i ended up asking the parking attendant of the European court. He didn't speak English so I asked in German and he replied in French. Thanks to his help we found the car park very quickly, but ended up parking in the Novotel suite car park instead of the Novotel car park  but they were not bothered.

Our room had a nice view and a bath! yaaaaay! I hate showers that I am not used to.

We walked into Luxembourg centre, which took about 30 minutes, but we had to walk over the pont rouge (massive red bridge) which Martin was not a fan of doing! We wandered around the centre for ages and then walked down to Grund which was the old town that was right at the bottom of the valley. This was really lovely and is apparently a good place for nightlife?! We ended up eating at Quick burger, and waiting 20 mins for our burgers again, and we went to the tourist office to plan the next day. We went for a fairly early night and caught up with emails and blogs etc... as we had had a very busy day.

Day 5

We got up and wandered into the main town. We had pain du chocolat  for breakfast nom! We then went into both sets of Casements, (underground fortresses) and we looked around the Notre dame cathedral and saw (obviously we didn't go in) the burial crypt of the royals of Luxembourg. The cathedral had some art exhibition in it which was quite interesting. I can't remember where I put the card but I will post the web address on a blog when I find it. We wandered some more around the whole city and saw gringotts! Well not really but the bank of Luxembourg which had underground vaults. We had McDonalds and then headed back to the Kirchberg plateau. we wandered over to look at the philharmonic hall, and then found the art museum which we walked past and got some awesome views and pictures. We went past the 3 acorns redoubt museum, which was closed and had a look at the national park type area, ans what looked like a grassy mastaba (step pyramid). We also found ourselves looking at some old fortress ruins. We then headed back to the car, after debating which church was which, that we could see from the top of the step pyramid.

The drive back was unspectacular, and it only got dark as we crossed the French border from Belgium and the roads only got busy as we reached Lille. We did take a few wrong turns, mainly due to the Satnav not knowing the road layout, but luckily we were able get back on the road I would say that we only lost about 15 minutes. We got to Calais quite early and had to wait for quite a while. The crossing was fine, and we spent our time competitively playing angry birds space.

It was pretty damn foggy in Kent, and again unspectacular and we arrived in Hockley with 40 miles left on the tank of petrol. So all is good. Got in the house at around 2 am :D

Trollbyt out!

Pas de mayonnaise! quelques jours à Bruxelles

Day 1:

4 AM Bank holiday Monday: We get up have a rushed breakfast and leave the house for a 2 hour drive to dover in kent to catch the 7:30 ferry to calais. We actually arrived in Dover early enough to catch the 6:40 ferry, hurrah! one hour early! The fery crossing was fine, but unspectacular. I felt sick all car journey, probably due to my eating breakfast, which I don't normally do. I actually felt better on the ferry crossing, despite the fact that I was dreading it as I was already feeling nauseous. I forced myself to eat a few beans and a slice of toast from Martin's plate. We then went upon deck, which helped blow the nausea away hooray! The drive from Calais to Brussells was also unspectacular, although we did enjoy the road signs and scary, aggressive belgian driving.

Our hotel (Best western) was easy enough to find, our satnav decided to work with about 10 miles to go! I forgot to mention earlier that our satnav was a complete upstart. It's a pretty good jobthat we already knew the route... mostly. We already knew we were right beside the national stadium, and it turns out that we can actually see one of Brussels' best attractions from our hotel window The Atomium.

We parked up in the free street parking immediately outside the hotel, and we had got here at 11AMish. We were able to check in straight away, so we dumped our bags in the hotel room and went out to Mini Europe and The Atomium. We got grabbed by a giant orange tortoise, and had to pose for a picture. After that we took a good wander around the Mini Europe exhibition, which was very good, but it started to rain midway through... this rain was set to continue... and continue... After Mini Europe we headed to The Atomium, which was quite interesting, and there was an exhibition on architectural concrete. TERASBETONI. Just had to throw that in there. it also looked from the inside like a space station of some kind. DEATHSTAR :-3 At the top most "museum ball" they told us that the atomium was only meant to last for two months after the Expo in the 50's, vote of confidence right there. After wandering around the museum areas, and going down an escalator with some funky lighting, w then had to queue for 30 mins to get the lift, 102m up to the viewing platform and resturant area. The resturant wouldn't let us in *grumble* but we got a decent view of brussels, it would have been better if not for the rain. After that, we had  bit more of a wander in the rain, and managed to find a resturant, and after trying to recover my knowledge of the French language from my brain vaults, managed to get a very nice dinner. We then retired to the hotel and watched whacky French language cartoons, because the weather was rather British.


Day 2:

Unbeknownst to us the entire public transport service was disrupted by strikes, due to a colleague being killed on Saturday. We got one of the buses running the skeleton service, and then went on to wander around Brussels center... in the rain. We found the Mannekin Pis statue/fountain near one of the Tintin tour murals (the only one we saw). The Mannekin, was surrounded by hundreds of Japanese tourists, seriously they must come by the truckload! We got yelled at by a Belgian man for some reason? haha. We found a shopping mall by accident, and ate there which was rather nice. After this we walked towards gare du nord, but missed the station, and ended up in Algeria. Well not quite but it very much felt like mini Algeria. After a brief stint here, we found our way back to gare du nord, and a kind Belgian man pointed us back to the main city centre. We did a bit of the touristy thing and some shopping, becaus ethe rain was getting us down a bit. We found our way to Dellerium, a very nice bar. In Dellerium, they had pink elephants on the ceiling, and a very drunk Japanese girl, who proved to be the highlight of our daily entertainment. In Dellerium I managed to drink 500ml of beer without feeling like dying from awful tastes. I tried the Kreik (cherry) and Framboise (raspberry) and Martin tried various Belgian beers. We the decided to pop in the tourist info office to get a decent map, as the one we had was absolutely rubbish. We then got the bus back home, which took 1 hour to travel 100m, and 2 hours to get home which took only about 30mins on the way into town.

Day 3:

Today the metro was running hooray! The first glimmers of sunlight! There were still disruptions but we managed to get about much easier toda, and visit many more places. We visited the botanical gardens on the way out and then we went to the European parliament buildings, and went around the visitors centre which was jam packed with audio guide activities, we coud have spent all day in there, in fact I think we spent two hours in there and we skipped half of the info out. After this we wandered towards the palace, and then to the cathedral. After this we wandered back towards the grand place, and had a drink in a bar, the ate in a place called quick burger, which proved to be really damn slow. This is where the title of this entry comes from, why the hell to they put mayonaisse on everything. I can eat it, but I tend to feel rather ill afterwards. Pas de mayonaisse s'il vous plait! I still haven't had Belgian waffles though, I hope to fit that in before Luxembourg tomorrow.

Sorry if my typing is terrible, my laptop keyboard is awful.