Mulholland Wanderings

Brussels is the home of chocolate, fine beer, mussels, waffles and antiques. All of which we managed to squeeze into our first half-day in the country ;-) We arrived late Friday night on Eurostar and spent Saturday exploring the city.

A collector would need a week - there are countless antique shops in Brussels and a fabulous daily flea-market - but it's not really our thing so we were happy just wandering past the shops and ducking into the occasional Biscuiterie.

We chose to go in December mainly for the Christmas markets. After much wandering about we did manage to find them but I was a little disappointed. They were not as good as I remembered them being in Germany, but that's perhaps just my faulty, nostalgic memory. We did buy a few things but found that a lot of the stalls had the same things we'd already seen elsewhere. Hot wine was FAR cheaper than they're flogging it for here in London though so we relieved the vendors of some!

On Sunday we took a day trip to Bruges - in the Flemish north. After becoming complacent about everything being dual language (French and Dutch) in Brussels it was a bit of a shock to find everything written only in Dutch. Luckily most people spoke English and I found that I could figure out menus etc based on my knowledge of German.

Bruges is a lovely medieval canal town and we wandered around for ages just looking at the beautiful buildings and testing the quality of the local chocolate. So far, we had been very lucky in the weather as you can see from the photos. It was cold (about 7-8) but not windy and very pleasant walking around.

On Monday we took a trip down to Waterloo which is now a suburb of Brussels, about 30mins by train. The weather was foul but we braved the rain and wind and climbed the Butte de Lion - a monument to the Prince of Orange built on the battlefield. The area was almost deserted but there were some interesting displays and a wax museum with very informative voice-over. In Waterloo itself we found the old inn which Wellington stayed in the night before the battle - it has been converted to a museum and has great displays, and once again very informative audio commentary.

Three days was enough for Belgium for us, there wasn't a great deal more that we would have done if we'd had more time. Probably just eat far too many waffles :-) It's a perfect weekend destination though and we had a great time.