Not exactly the blog title you were expecting to see about Brussels, huh? Not really the blog title I was expecting to be writing about Brussels. Allow me to explain...
This morning actually started at 10:30 pm last night. Having gone to bed early, Bridgette and I were rudely awakened by the smoke/fire/arbitrary disaster alarm at 10:30 pm. We were probably the only dorks in the whole building asleep by then, but we needed to prepare for our early morning and our big weekend! So, we scrape ourselves out of bed, shove our feet into shoes and make our way downstairs, where there is no alarm, but rather a large number of Nido residents going about their Friday night business as usual. I don't understand this building or its fire codes. Apparently, unlike in America, if one floor of a building has a disaster, the rest of the building gets to remain calm and unaware. Strange.
We eventually did get back to sleep and woke up around 5 am to get us showered, breakfasted, and to the train station by 6:15. Just writing this it feels as if this morning could have been a week ago. We get on the train and assume that it, like the National Rail, operates on the "choose your own seat" basis. It doesn't. We were politely asked to scram. Luckily, our seats were just one car down. We had intended to begin learning lines for The Knight of the Burning Pestle, our newest play project directed by Vivian Munn, but we haven't blocked any of the show yet. It is pretty much impossible to just arbitrarily memorize words that have nothing to do with the action of the scene, especially when you're running on ~6 hours of sleep as we were. I ended up napping the majority of the way there and am completely comfortable with that choice.
We arrived in Bruxelles and spent the next hour and a half trying to find our way from the train station to the Grand Place. This included buying a €4 map/guide book in GERMAN from the train station. The pictures were nice, and I thought the map would be helpful. It was not. After being lost for quite a while between our own guesses and Bridgette's Google Maps directions, we stumbled into a pharmacy to ask for directions. Two women, customers, attempted to point us in the right direction, but only spoke French. I told them right away, in French, that I do not speak French. I don't think they believed me, which I guess makes a little bit of sense. That will teach me not to use my foreign language skills abroad! They were incredibly eager to help, but insisted on going on and on in French and were ultimately completely unhelpful. Once we realized we were lost AGAIN, we dashed into a laundromat to see if anyone could give us a hand. In the end, a very friendly, English-speaking boy about our age walked us 95% of the way to the Grand Place. Thank god. It was incredibly nice of him, and we really needed the help.
By the time we got to the Grand Place, it was time for lunch. We looked at a few restaurants and couldn't decide, but I really needed to use the bathroom (Yes, this is an appropriate thing to discuss here because...). We stumbled into the Mozart Hotel to use the bathroom and found ourselves here:
This morning actually started at 10:30 pm last night. Having gone to bed early, Bridgette and I were rudely awakened by the smoke/fire/arbitrary disaster alarm at 10:30 pm. We were probably the only dorks in the whole building asleep by then, but we needed to prepare for our early morning and our big weekend! So, we scrape ourselves out of bed, shove our feet into shoes and make our way downstairs, where there is no alarm, but rather a large number of Nido residents going about their Friday night business as usual. I don't understand this building or its fire codes. Apparently, unlike in America, if one floor of a building has a disaster, the rest of the building gets to remain calm and unaware. Strange.
We eventually did get back to sleep and woke up around 5 am to get us showered, breakfasted, and to the train station by 6:15. Just writing this it feels as if this morning could have been a week ago. We get on the train and assume that it, like the National Rail, operates on the "choose your own seat" basis. It doesn't. We were politely asked to scram. Luckily, our seats were just one car down. We had intended to begin learning lines for The Knight of the Burning Pestle, our newest play project directed by Vivian Munn, but we haven't blocked any of the show yet. It is pretty much impossible to just arbitrarily memorize words that have nothing to do with the action of the scene, especially when you're running on ~6 hours of sleep as we were. I ended up napping the majority of the way there and am completely comfortable with that choice.
We arrived in Bruxelles and spent the next hour and a half trying to find our way from the train station to the Grand Place. This included buying a €4 map/guide book in GERMAN from the train station. The pictures were nice, and I thought the map would be helpful. It was not. After being lost for quite a while between our own guesses and Bridgette's Google Maps directions, we stumbled into a pharmacy to ask for directions. Two women, customers, attempted to point us in the right direction, but only spoke French. I told them right away, in French, that I do not speak French. I don't think they believed me, which I guess makes a little bit of sense. That will teach me not to use my foreign language skills abroad! They were incredibly eager to help, but insisted on going on and on in French and were ultimately completely unhelpful. Once we realized we were lost AGAIN, we dashed into a laundromat to see if anyone could give us a hand. In the end, a very friendly, English-speaking boy about our age walked us 95% of the way to the Grand Place. Thank god. It was incredibly nice of him, and we really needed the help.
By the time we got to the Grand Place, it was time for lunch. We looked at a few restaurants and couldn't decide, but I really needed to use the bathroom (Yes, this is an appropriate thing to discuss here because...). We stumbled into the Mozart Hotel to use the bathroom and found ourselves here:
What an absurd place to stumble into by accident. Really beautiful, but gaudy. I have no idea what it has to do with Mozart.
LUNCH! We decided that anything lunch had to be Belgian waffles, so we got a table at Maison Dandoy. They had a fun menu of 2 different kinds of Belgian waffles, tarts, pancakes, ice cream, milkshakes, etc.
LUNCH! We decided that anything lunch had to be Belgian waffles, so we got a table at Maison Dandoy. They had a fun menu of 2 different kinds of Belgian waffles, tarts, pancakes, ice cream, milkshakes, etc.
Yes, they were absolutely as delicious as they looked.
Next stop...the Grand Place for photos and the Museum of the City of Brussels. The Grand Place is beautiful. The architecture is amazing (see below!). The museum was fine. It has information about the formation and development of the city, which would have been interesting, but none of the information plaques were presented in English. To get the information you had to carry laminated papers with you and reference them the whole time. Not really worth the energy, so we just looked around. The many costumes of the Manneken Pis were quite entertaining.
Next stop...the Grand Place for photos and the Museum of the City of Brussels. The Grand Place is beautiful. The architecture is amazing (see below!). The museum was fine. It has information about the formation and development of the city, which would have been interesting, but none of the information plaques were presented in English. To get the information you had to carry laminated papers with you and reference them the whole time. Not really worth the energy, so we just looked around. The many costumes of the Manneken Pis were quite entertaining.
We then headed over to the chocolate museum for a demonstration and some sampling.
By then, it was about 3 pm, and we decided to head over to our hostel to check in. I don't know how people backpack across Europe. I only had a set of pajamas and one change of clothes in my bag, and my back was killing me.
You can't imagine our relief when we found our hostel.
I mean, how much more perfect could this get? "The Urban Artist's Home." What hostel could be better than this one for a couple of theatre majors traipsing around Brussels? ONE WITH BEDS FOR US! Upon trying to check in at Meininger, we were told that our booking was made for next weekend. AND, they were completely full. For all of our paranoia and double checking, Bridgette and I had both messed up. The man kindly offered us a full refund and began to call other nearby hostels to check if they had any openings to no avail. By that point, we were pretty drained. We had rough ideas of plans for the next day but nothing very substantial. It was going to be an arbitrary day of seeing sights we had never heard of before and didn't care much about, so we decided to go back to the train station to see what Eurostar could do with our non-flexible tickets. The first man kept rolling his eyes at us and sneeringly told us that with a non-flexible ticket all he could do was sell us a new one for $700! That wasn't an option, so we went to talk to someone else, a woman named Birgit, at the other desk. Birgit is a saint. We told her we had no bed to sleep in, she took a look at her tickets and began to assign us seats on the train back to London which left in 20 minutes. After assigning us seats, she then scratched them out and started again. "I'll put you in first class," she said. The next 15 minutes was a whirlwind of passport checking, customs declaration cards, and security. It was like a movie. The station was completely empty except for us and the employees who were cheering us through security and up to the platform where our train in shining armor was there waiting for us. We scurry onto the train and into our huge, plush seats. It was an emotional afternoon, but Birgit not only fixed it for us, she made it better! We made it home in time to go grocery shopping and cook dinner and accomplished everything we really set out to do in Belgium in the first place (waffles and chocolate!).