Hej,
I was told to make it a long blogpost so I’ll tell you a little about our holiday in Belgium. It’s my first blogpost on this blog so I’m kind of nervous,
First the plane landed, well if it hadn’t… It wouldn’t have been good. Hanna got her bag, we kissed and then we took the train and kissed some more. We took the good train this time so it only stopped in Brussels North, Brussels Central, Brussels South and Gent. In Dutch that’d be Brussel Noord, Brussel Centraal, Brussel Zuid and Gent; in French that’d be Bruxelles Nord, Bruxelles Central, Bruxelles Midi and Gand. Oh and in case you ever go to Belgium by plane, Brussels is not as ugly as you’d think by judging from what you can see while you’re in the train from the Airport to Brussels. Ok so we finally arrived in Gent and took the bus to my place, the only reason we took the right bus is because I’d taken the wrong bus a week before. So I knew which one not to take. Taking the wrong bus when you’ve time is no problem, but it does feel a little frustrating to see the bus make a giant loop and just return to the place where you got on the bus. Anyways let’s fastforward a little in our amusing story and skip a few things cause my mind is quite blurry.
Let’s pay a visit to Brussels
There were a few things we (Hanna and I) wanted to see in Brussels, one of them was “Manneke Pis”. The peeing naked fellow that’s apparently famous all around the world. well he was a huge letdown for one. They dressed him up in a Venezuelan outfit, for crying out loud we want a naked statue not some politically engaged gnome.
Luckily, I knew of the existence of a female counterpart of Manneke Pis, Jeanneke Pis. She’s not as well-known as Manneke Pis and you have to know where she is or you won’t find her. For whatever reason she was behind bars too, but we managed to take a few shots anyway so that you can watch her pee from several angles. The yellow picture has some explanation on it, it’s in English.
De grote markt, la grand place or the great market is worth having seen too, I’ve found a few pictures to demonstrate my point. The biggest building (fourth picture) is the City Hall in case you wondered. The last two pictures are the best, but that speaks for itself I presume.
In Brussels you can get around by speaking English by the way, there’s no need to even try to speak French as they’ll reply in English anyway. Weird right? The waiters however did speak French but they were slow and couldn’t remember what we ordered, while all we wanted was an Ice Tea and Apple-Cherry Juice. If we ever visit Brussels again we won’t go on a sunday because the stores are closed on sundays (Belgian law, don’t ask) and we’ll see the Atomium from up close. We were pretty close to it yet it was too far away to actually bother to go there, we went to Océade and Mini-Europa instead. Mini-Europa was quite the rip-off but at least we got to see the Eiffel Tower, it taught us that Europe has lots of beautiful buildings too. We’ll make a list and visit them all sometime! It’s quite a different experience from seeing the buildings in real life though, I stood there looking at something and I was like… “ooh, this looks nice.” turns out it was the “Grand Place” in Brussels that we saw earlier, only covered with flowers. Bah?
After that we went swimming in Océade. It’s more of a waterslide park than a real swimming pool though, there’re about six different slides that are a lot of fun. One is incredibly fast and it feels like you’ve trouble breathing inside, you can’t take that slide too much as you’d go home with hurting knees, elbows or a painful back just because it’s so fast. Then you had a big slide where you had to use an inflatable tire in, that was fun too. Another slide dropped you from a one meter height at the end of the slide, it gives this tingly feeling in your tummy! You’ve a familyslide as well, not much to say about that one as it’s only slightly faster than a regular waterslide. We were just too late for the sauna unfortunately, better luck next time. It was nice swimming with Hanna, we’d never swum together before and it’d been ages since we’d last swum even though we kind of like to swim. We shall swim more!
Time to go home, first on the metro then on the train again. The metro in Brussels has this fancy system that shows where the metro is currently at, handy right? We were going to eat something in Gent cause we were really hungry from all the swimming and walking, much to our suprise everything closed at about eleven (even McDonald’s!). So we had to settle for kebab but they didn’t accept plastic money so we had to take out money in an ATM first, all that trouble for a little food… We had fun.
Gent
This was the city that we visited the most, unfortunately there are major public roadworks going on in Gent right now. It messes up the public transportsystem and the view, but in a few years it’ll all be a lot better… Hopefully. It has this pretty castle with tools used for torturing, thumbscrews and a delightful bench where you tie people up at their hands and their feet and then you pour water down a funnel just cause. Onto the boats now, where they told us more about Charles the Fifth and how ugly he was but he had plenty of wives regardless of his looks. If you ever go to Gent, definitely go on those boats and boats are romance unfortunately tourist boats lose some of that romance. They’re located three minutes from the centre of the city on the Korenlei. You’ll learn a lot about Gent and it’s nice to be on the water during summer. We ate in the Patershol afterwards, the gastronomical centre of Gent where you can find a few restaurants that offer all kinds of food. One of the restaurants there offered “Ribbetjes à volonté” which basically means you can eat as much ribs as you want for a fixed price. If you like ribs and you’re very hungry it’s a bargain really, turns out we both like ribs! Awesome!
Wedding
We attended a wedding as well, not much to say about that. It was all happiness and lots of free food. People got married, they had a great time, they paid lots of money for the party but it was worth it as it’s a once in a lifetime happening.
A lot more has happened but what it comes down to is that Hanna is awesome and I love her, I/we had a great time and we’ll have lots more fun in the future.
Hej då!
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