For the long weekend of 28.04.07 to 01.05.07 I went to Belgium. I visited Brussels, Waterloo, Ghent, Bruges and had a short stopover in Antwerp to get some chocolate.
I visited Brussels and Waterloo during the first two days and Ghent and Bruges during the last two.
One big lesson learned from this trip...do a little research before you leave..I booked a hotel through an online hotel booking service in Brussels, and truth to be told , I was wondering a bit why this hotel was like half the price of most of the other ones..but all the reviews on the site were really glowing. Turns out this hotel was in a really slummy area of Brussels with smashed up cars and garbage everywhere...with angry immigrants shouting things as you walked down the street. I had a room facing the street, so half the night I would be listening to angry men quarreling in Arabic on the street outside. On the other hand..nothing happened and the hotel was very cheap...so..
I spent some time trying to negotiate the trams of Brussels, but in the end I learned my lesson and kept to the metros. Trams in Brussels are overcrowded, they don't run on time, they are generally messy, and they don't announce which stop they're at..making it sort of painful if you're nowhere near the windows. These where the most tightly packed trams I have ever been into. Metros are fast, convenient and leave with fairly good regularity, although they don't go everywhere the the trams go, notably not to Beurse.
Saturday the 28th I arrived in Brussels, found my hotel, and walked along near the city center. I also went over to Schuman and looked at the buildings of the European Commission and the European Parliament. Took a small stroll in the Park du Cinquantenaire before returning back to the hotel.
Sunday the 29th I took the Metro to Heysel to look at the Atomium and some of the royal palaces in Laeken. Turns out this was the day for the national jamboree of the belgian scouts, so all trams, metros and parks were jam-packed with screaming kids. There also were a lot of older scouts teaching the kids to scream as loud as possible. Never having been a scout myself, I don't know much about it, but it seems to involve a lot of screaming, blowing with whistles and playing with balloons. When I finally made my way to the royal palace, I noticed the several hour long line in front of it. I decided to skip the palace, and took the train to Waterloo on an impulse trip instead.
This turned out to be a bad idea. Only my guide book thinks going to Waterloo by train is a bright idea. The train station is about 1.5 km from the Wellington museum, which by the way is a sucky museum. Not a lot of exhibits, and a bunch of unrelated stuff to beef up the exhibition. I also went into the Eglise St. Joseph, and that was a fairly powerful experience. You walk around looking at the ages of the soldiers' gravestones there, and then you realize that this was just some of the officers, and there could be like 50.000 more of these. Sort of beats the beaches at Normandie for sheer numbers.
After the church I took the bus to the battlefield, only I exited the bus at the wrong gas station, so I had to walk for a couple more kilometers. (For reference the correct one is the Esso). Finally got to the battlefield and took the full tour, with the multimedia show, the film and the panorama, finishing up by going up the Butte du Lion. Great view of the area from up there. I took the bus back to Waterloo, the bus driver spoke only french, so I had only a general idea of where I was going and ended up walking a couple of kilometers back to the train station. Waterloo is a backwater station, so the trains back to Brussels only runs once an hour. Of course I ended up coming into the station five minutes too late. Kinda worrying to stand around and wait for a train that may or may not come, all the timetables were in French, and they were generally confusing (with lots of exceptions and whatnot), the station had no displays telling what trains were going where and Belgian trains do not list directions on the front, nor on the side.
In the end I got on the right train and made a mental note to learn some basic French for later...
The main site of the waterloo battle can easily be done in half an hour. I ended up using five and a half hours with all the walking and waiting and doing the full tour. For reference: The bus marked "W" goes from Brussels Zuid every 30 minutes and stops at the Esso-station next to the battlefield. This bus also returns to Brussels every half hour. This information would have been good in the friggin' guidebook.
For the rest of my journey, I took the train from Brussels to Ghent, spent a couple of hours walking along the city center, and then I took the train to Bruges and spent the night there. There's a lot of nice architecture too see in these towns. I liked Bruges, as a lot of the houses are like miniature versions of what you would see in Brussels, Ghent, Antwerp or even Amsterdam. In Ghent I walked around in the city centre and entered Het Gravensteen - the old fortress protecting the city. In Bruges I went up into the Belfort and looked at the view of the city. There were 366 steps to the top, and the top stairs were really narrow, so people had to queue up to get in either direction. Overall, I liked Bruges the most, although it is really touristy. I got bored after a day, though, so I don't know how good these towns are for longer stays...
Other than that, these are some images that will stay with me from this trip:
- Small boys(4 or five years or so) doing boy scout salute to passing trains
- People smacking up their kids in public
- People fighting on the trams - several times
All in all - Belgium was nice, but parts of Brussels were really crowded, even by Dutch standards...
Pictures are here and here.
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