Brussels

In my last adventure out of the country, I went to Brussels yesterday with my friend Kristen from Middlebury. It's only an hour and twenty minute train ride, so it was an ideal last day trip. We arrived in the city around noon and started wandering around in search of the city center. We walked past the royal square and the palace and some beautiful buildings and churches and finally wound up in the Grand Place. There we ate lunch, croques hawaian (croques with a pineapple slice, very creative and pretty good). The sandwiches were pretty small though, and rather unauthentic looking croques, so we decided to get Belgian waffles for dessert. Mine was covered in whipped cream and chocolate and definitely lived up to its reputation. We looked in a few of the tourist shops and the chocolate shops, and vowed to return later, then searched for the tourist office so we could figure out how to get to Mini-Europe, our destination du jour. Unfortunately, the tourist office was undergoing renovations and closed until July, so we had no way of finding the European monuments we came hoping to see. Luckily there was a train station nearby, and the man at the information desk told us which metro to take to get to the atomium and Mini-Europe.

We started out wandering in awe around the atomium, built for the world's fair many moons ago. There was also some sort of Spanish fair going on nearby, so we hit that up too. And then finally, we made it to Mini-Europe. Kristen and I had taken a course on the European Union during the semester, and thanks to our professor's devotion and admiration for the EU, we also became obsessed with it. Thus the desire to go to the European capital, and the associated park. Mini-Europe is literally a miniature model of the continent (although in no way geographically correct). It contains all the major monuments of each EU country and you get a very informative pamphlet with interesting facts about each country. The booklet itself was worth the admission cost and the park was amazing for Euro-dorks like ourselves.

We took our time carefully reading all the facts and figures about the countries and looking at the various monuments, getting really excited to see the ones that we had visited for real. We stayed in the park until we were kicked out at closing time, and then decided to search for the real EU institutions. We couldn't find them on the metro map, and were ready to give up until a nice janitor said good evening to us and we decided to ask him. He gave us the metro stop (named after author of the document that found the EU) and we finally made it to the European Commission building. There wasn't much to see there, except the real thing as opposed to the mini-replica, but we enjoyed it nonetheless. We then returned to the main square for dinner and buying of Belgian chocolate before hopping on the train back to Paris.