Bruxelles, Part 2

The rest of Bruxelles.

We decided to sleep in a little on Sunday since we were aware that everything opens later on Sunday. We ate our (pitiful) breakfast, then headed out to spend our day walking/metro-ing around the city. Our first stop was the Palais de Justice, but unfortunately for us, all of our pictures were marred by the scaffolding that covered much of the building. Very disappointing. After that, we went to the fine arts museum. We both agreed that it was better to see the religious art from the 15th-18th centuries rather than the modern art, since that is, in general, a phenomenon that neither of us gets. See my post on Colmar for further explanation.

After the art museum, we went to see the outside of the Belgian Royal Palace. Unfortunately there were no tours (very sad, we like palaces), so we took a few photos than continued to the park where we finally found another one of Bruxelles' staple foods-WAFFLES! I had a waffle with pistachio ice cream and Jackie had a waffle literally covered in whipped cream. They were both excellent.

After the wonderful waffles, we went on a search for the buildings of the European Union. This was interesting for me simply because I'm a political science major with a focus on international relations and, well, a lot of international relations goes on in those buildings. It would have been nice to at least get to go inside the buildings, but sadly it was not to be. The visitor's center for the European Parliament isn't set to open until the fall.

We went to see the Cinquantenaire Park, which is primarily known for having a very large building known as Belgium's Arc de Triomphe. Contained in one side of the building is an archaeology museum, which covered everything from Ancient Egypt to the Americas to Islamic art to Chinese art. It was very interesting and took several hours to go through even though many of the artifacts were very similar to those I have seen in other museums.

Our last day, we checked out of the hostel and went to the chocolate museum (samples and a demonstration! yay!) and a brewing museum (wasn't much to see there). Then we ate a quick lunch and I boarded my train for my trip back to Mulhouse!