Our last meal in Brussels

We ended up back at the Cheesecake Cafe and once again it proved to be a real winner. Since we had yet to consume enough waffles, we decided to go to Haagen-Daaz for dessert. Yesterday it had seemed too expensive. But this night we decided to file this experience under 'tourist', whereby many expenses can be excused.

Jordy is sad that she has no photo of herself at Haagen-Daaz but the ice-cream was melting and someone was chomping at the bit to consume it.

Now that we were fortified with chocolate ....

We headed home for a bit to unload our purchases. It was still a little early for dinner so we went for a bit of a meander which led us to "THE BASILICA OF THE SACRED HEART" -(Basilica of Koekelberg).

The walk there was very interesting. We had obviously passed into the 'Gastarbeiter' area. There were lots of youths loitering on street corners. (Why do they always loiter on street corners? What's wrong with the middle of the street?) But what was so strange was the complete lack of females. There were lots of cafes, but they were all packed with men.

As for the Basilica, it was closed. We had arrived at the perfect time, so we had a lovely walk around the church as the sun was setting.

Brussels:In search of chocolate.

Sad to say, I forgot to take a photo of our chocolate experience in Brussels. In my defence, i think we were all tired and footsore and just glad to take a load off.

It's not hard to figure out that Belgium is famous for it's chocolate. It's a bit hard to miss the streets of chocolate vendors. Several of the stores were running chocolate fountains which is pretty cunning because they waft out enticing scents of chocolate which are almost impossible to resist. Unfortunately for them, the prices for their chocolate were not so enticing.

Actually we had resisted the chocolate call for the whole of the 2 days we spent in Brussels and now we decided it was time to do the tourist thing. Again luck was with us, and we discovered the best chocolate store in Brussels. Only 2 mins from the beaten track. Not only did it have many specials, but any drink you ordered here came accompanied with chcolates. We must have had a plate with at least 9 handmade chocolates on them.

As much of a chocoaholic as I am, sadly I do not really have the connoisseurs palate. Lucky for me cos it means I can enjoy almost any chocolate. However due to our chocolate museum demonstration, I do now totally understand why they charge so much for hand-made chocolates.

Brussels:Day 2

It was so nice not to have to rush and catch a plane/train anywhere. Royal Museum of the Army and of Military History opens at 9am and it's free. This would be my number 1 best pic of the trip. It has a huge aviation section with cool helicopters in it like the Hind. And some cool tanks. Another plus is it houses a very nice cafe with very a good menu and great tasting food. There were some other interesting things there but we didn't get to see them because those areas got closed off when the staff there went to lunch. Egal. It's the European way.

Next stop-Chocolate museum.5Euros each. It's actually quite small and easy to miss as it is housed in an apartment. You get a free biscuit
dipped in freshly melted chocolate to start and finish with a demonstration of hand-made chocolates. It couldn't really measure up to the Cologne chocolate museum but it was worthwhile; Cologne was mostly manufactured chocolate and this was handmade chocolates.
The Mannequin Pis
After all the hype, it was rather disappointing that it was so small. Almost not worth a photo but we're
tourists so...whatever.
Maison du Roi which holds the historical city museum-2.50Euros. Number 2 or 3 on my list of must sees. It houses the costumes of the Mannequin Pis. There are lots of legends about this little statue. A true story is that at one stage a french platoon stole the Mannequin. They were made to return it. Whereby the Mannequin was knighted.Which meant that henceforth, whenever the soldiers walked passed the Mannequin, they had to salute it.

This bit of history suddenly made the statue more interesting and worthwhile for me.

Reoccurrence of the stupid family roam.

The one good thing about the "roam" is that you actually get to see a bit of the city. At times we have covered quite a lot of ground in the eternal search for a reasonably priced traditional meal. Sometimes we are unable to satisfy our desire to eat traditionally but we have never failed to drink the traditional beverage which of course in much of Europe is beer.

The other good thing about the roam is a tendency to walk in circles which means you start to get familiar with the landmarks. Of course it doesn't help me much. I recognize landmarks, but it just makes me incorrectly confident that I know where I am going. Thank goodness I have Greg. He is almost freaky the way he can find things.

We ended up walking down a narrow alley that was completely jampacked with restaurants. It had a really nice festive atmosphere. And they all seemed to be serving seafood. It looked nice but when you're from NZ, not much else is going to measure up. We thought the mussels they were serving liked like more effort to eat as they were so tiny. I was feeling quite smug about our NZ mussels until I found out that seafood is very susceptible to temperature, hence the reason the ones here were so small. They're not usually that small.

Only the waiters put us off. They kept trying to entice us by saying, "What you want? We have seafood, we have meat etc..." But none of them would tell us how much. When we mentioned prices, they suddenly couldn't understand us or hear us. Grrrrr!

Nevermind. We did find a very nice place just around the corner. We kept trying to leave a tip, but the staff just kept giving it right back to us.

...............and then and then and then

By now it was time to head back to our backpackers and check-in. On the way, we passed numerous waffel stands and since Greg seemed to oblivious to their tantalzing aroma, and the looks of longing on his families faces, in the end Jordy and I just stopped still in front of a stand and salivated until Greg took pity on us and fed us waffles.

We had booked a 4 bed dorm but ended up in a 6 bed dorm. We decided it was fine and it would be a good experience for Jordy. Especially as she has plans to backpack around Europe. We were fortunate to be in with 3 lovely young people. (Yes I know I sound like a grandma. Hush!) 2 young Americans who were a little homesick as they had been away for soooo long-a whole 4 months. And a young Irish man who was here getting experience as an interpretor at the Council of the European Union. I thought it was pretty funny that his job was to interpret English to Irish but I guess it makes sense. Especially with some of the colloquisms and idioms and even cultural differences.

Now everywhere you go, you see these postcards of the "Mannequin Pis", so of course we had to go see what all the fuss was about. Our overriding feeling was, "I thought it would be bigger." We thought there had to be more to it. We finally found a placade that said that the "Mannequin Pis was built by a grateful father. Apparently he had lost his little boy. Embarrassingly enough for the father, when he did finally find his little boy, he was peeing in a very public place.

I thought there had to be more to this story. Things didn't seem to be quite adding up. But that was all that was written there.

and then and then

A simple rule of thumb for Brussels seems to be the lower the admission price, the better the tourist sight. Unfortunately for us, most of the museums etc were closed on a Monday. Which made it easy to decide where we would head to first. The Atomium.

The Atomium is a model of a crystalline metal molecule, magnified 150 billion times. Apparently it was intended to `symbollize faith in scientific progress and peaceful cooperation among nations´. It does provide a bit of a view. There is also a restaurant at the top but good luck trying to find out how much anything costs. Our recommendation is see it but save yourself 9 Euros and spend it on beer.

Happily, there is just the place to go, about 100m down the road. Right next to the "Mini Europe", which you get a good view of from the top of the Atomium. (I would also put that on the "give it a miss" list but hey it's your 12 Euros.) There are plenty of cafes and restaurants to choose from. As you can see, we were very happy. Jordy didn't get to be in the pic because she chose to drink lemonade. Tsk tsk.

And then......

The eternal question-eat or explore. Neither, find our lodgings. Even though the maps I had downloaded weren't the "be all and end all", they were sufficient to navigate our way to our backpackers which was thankfully located quite close to the city and food. Everyone had said that Brussels was really expensive but apart from the chocolates, we didn't find it so.

Happily, we didn't experience the stupid family roam. It only took us 10 mins to find somewhere to dine. We couldn't very well walk past "the Cheesecake Cafe" now, could we? Although they didn't actually have any cheesecake on the menu, the food was mmm-mmm. Jordy and I had burgers and fries, and Greg had an omelette. Fries came with just about everything and I indulged myself as in Vienna, fries only came with Schnitzel..sometimes. So I had been feeling very grease deprived. Ahhh. and the beer...For the first time in my life, I understood why people long for a beer when they are extremely thirsty and hot.

Brussels here we come

As a valentine's gift, Greg surprised Jordy and I with tickets to Brussels and Paris. Jordy had made it quite obvious that Paris was an absolute must. I have to admit that I was more excited by the prospect of Brussels than Paris. I guess Brussels sounded more exotic to me because more people seem to go to Paris than Brussels.

We had thought that for once, we would have a nice leisurely start to our journey. Lucky we checked our tickets the night before we left. Apart from the availibility of free water, the inflight snacks and drinks offered seemed to be reasonably priced.

Having arrived at the Brussels airport, we then lived up to the "crazy tourists" label by having races down all the travellators. My only defence is "Jordan started it".

Eventually we found the train into the city. Like all the other tourists who were there and had no idea, we hopped onto the first train that arrived in the blind hope that because everyone else got on we must be on the right train. It was. We did hop off in the wrong place but the train dallied long enough so we could hop back on.

I don't know how I felt when we finally reached the city and we were really there. I guess the same way I felt when I arived in Vienna. Disbelief and a sense of unreality. And hungry. Very hungry.

Innsbruck:part2

Greg is often amused by the things that tickle mine and Jordy's fancy. BUt we thought it was cute that you could get fresh eggs from a vending machine and milk as well. What you can't see is that this vending machine is out the front of the actual farm and hennery.





The Golden Roof - Which was a must see apparently, and okay it was nice but I'm sorry, it didn't really do anything for me. It's just an apartment with... a golden roof. So why did we take photos of it? Because we're tourists.












I just thought this sign was funny. But I guess someone must have visited the church in their togs otherwise why else would they think to include it on the sign?



If you want a nice meal and good beer, the places to go seem to be the Brauhaus's. They seem to have a standard priced menu, good variety of choices, good beer and good food.

Innsbruck;part1

Innsbruck seemed to be another one of these towns where people really only go for the walks, bike paths, etc....Greg would have loved to have done one of the walks but as there had been a forecast of snow this last week, including for the day we travelled there, we decided it would be prudent to wait for another day.

We were surprised to see how quickly we saw signs of snow after travelling not that far out of Vienna since we had only received 1 day of snow out of the 4 days predicted. Salzburg looked so lovely snowkissed, that we were tempted to disembark and spend a few hours there.

Schloss Ambras-It was a 2.5km walk from the main train station which we all enjoyed, after the 5 hour train ride, plus it was a lovely sunny day. We weren't able to find a free tourist map so luckily we had already downloaded a map off the internet.

We were very pleased to find the grounds still covered with some snow. This peacock seemed to be every bit as taken by Jordan, as Jordan was taken by the peacock. Lovely lovely grounds. Inside was a collection of suits of armour which was very impressive. Especially once we realized that these weren't reproductions. They were the real armour worn by king so and so when he was killed in that battle, all dents and dings being completely authentic. The schloss also housed the "Chamber of Art and Curiosities" which looked cool from the postcards but that's as close as we could get because that bit was closed until summer. We missed out by 2 days. Sigh. It also had a few modern art exhibits which weren't so bad but we were surprised to see. I wondered why the giftshop gave me a paperbag with "History of Art Museum" stamped on the side.Duh.

Jordy and I tried our hand at making our own "installations" with twigs and snow as our medium. No photo sorry because "someone" banned us from installations and therefore did not want to waste precious camera space on....."that stuff".

Bregenz

Basically Bregenz is right at the other end of Austria, so of course we had to go there. Even though it meant we would be on the train for a total of 15 hours, and we would only be there for 2 hours. All our friends thought we were mad, but they did agree that we should go whilst we could as it is usually so expensive to travel there.

We didn't have much time to do much but that was okay because there really wasn't that much to do and we didn't really feel inclined to do much either. How anyone manages to keep up this tourist stuff for longer than a week is beyond me.

Bregenz has a crap free tourist map. But they did have very nice ice-cream, a lovely lakeside promenade, and equally lovely lake. We went to the Taxi's and Thurn Palais which turned out to be a modern art gallery. We almost didn't enter but it was only 1 Euro each, so whatever. Which pretty much summed up our attitude to the "art".

Cool shark eh? Originally we thought it might be a real one, but it's wood. It was hanging in one of the gates to.... I think it was Martinsturm. Which was a cool little monastery.

Graz Stadtpfarrkirche

Thanks to our Lonely Planet guide, we discovered this little church, with it's unusually themed stained glass window. If you look at the top right-hand corner of the window you will spot 2 historically significant figures. Recognize them? Hitler and Mussolini.

A bomb explosion in Word War II destroyed, among other things, the Gothic stained-glass windows in the chancel. Albert Birkle, an artist from Salzburg, was commissioned with making new ones. The new stained-glass windows by Albert Birkle made headlines in the fifties. It was considered "degenerate art".

Degenerate art-Entartete Kunst, was a term adopted by the Nazi regime in Germany to describe virtually all modern art. This art was banned and confiscated on the grounds that it was un-German or Jewish Bolshevist in nature.

Grazer Kunsthaus

Nicknamed the friendly alien for obvious reasons. Initially, we actually had little interest in this modern art museum, as modern art has so far left us very unimpressed. "Installations" have had all the appeal, and yet been of less interest than a steaming pile of cow manure. However, we were runnung out of things to do and it was only 7.50 Euros so we figured what the hell.

There was one exhibit which we quite enjoyed - Werner Reiterer -Auge lutscht Welt.
My favourite type of modern art has always been the interactive kind. A hangman's noose that started moving when you walked past it, 4 big speakers that entreated you to come closer until you encroached on it's "personal space";at which time it started yelling obscenities and screaming at you to get away, you're too close. Some poor unfortunates unwittingly walked by them and set them off straight into obscenity mode. It gave them a hell of a fright and everyone else a good chuckle as we could all commiserate. One installation was just a piece of paper sellotaped to the wall, with the words, "shout as loud as you can". By complying you would then trigger the lights(for the whole floor), to flash on and off to the sound of someone hyperventilating. Jordy was entreated to join in with a few other young adults. At that time I was too shy to join in, but after seeing what little else the museum had to offer, I was determined to "get my 7.50Euros worth", so yelled myself silly until my vocal cords and Greg's patience had had enough.

Greg very sweetly planned ahead, so we could walk past the museum on the way home so I could see it at night time.

Graz;part2

3.20pm We at the armoury which was touted as the largest in the whole of Europe, displaying 300 exhibits. It closed at 4pm, cost 9.50Euros and you could only visit if you took the guided tour....the last of which had already left. So that put paid to that. Guided tours suck anyway.




The Glockenspiel-can be easy to miss as the building it's in is small and not so grand. The giveaway that we were indeed in the right place, was the tourists hanging around. Quite a few songs were played as these 2 figures twirled with their beers in their hands. So although it was sweet, it wasn't so exciting.

Graz:part1

For a change I found the view from the train quite picturesque, on the way to Graz and we were blessed with nice sunny weather. We were further very pleased to find good free maps of the city at the train station. Generally we tend to arrive around lunchtime so it was fortunate indeed that our first tourist destination was the Murinsel which is apparently meant to be a mussel. We had intended to order drinks and sit inside but couldn't bear the techno crap that was playing. But that was okay because we'd made our lunch already so we sat outside, in the amphitheatre bit and enjoyed the sun, and planned which tourist attractions we would visit.

Graz is actually perfect for tourists as it is small enough to get around to see all the sights, but still big enough to have "sights".

Schlossberg seemed to be the best place to start. Start with the views. I voted for taking the Schlossbergbahn up, and walking down for obvious reasons. The tickets turned out to be a measly 1.70 Euro, which covered 1hours travel. The views were fab, we enjoyed the ride immensely which was further enhanced by Jordy getting a bit freaked(though she won't admit it) by how steep the ride was. (yes Jordy does often complain about her parents being mean, but that's obviously just because she's a teenager and nothing to do with us being mean.)

The Schlossberg had very pretty grounds and of course some cool history. But no castle. That's okay, we consoled ourselves with ice-cream. After 40 mins we had pretty much seen everything there was to see so we were still able to use our ticket to go back down. I was torn though with wanting to walk down through the romantic gardens and paths but in the end Greg's bung knee made the decision for us.