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.
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