Europe Trip: Belgium

Our next stop was Belgium.

Our first stop in Belgium (well, technically we'd been there already in the trip since that's where my sweet husband was for his work trip and that's where I met him, but our first stop the second time...)

was to Bruges.

It's a pretty little city.

The main square of the town revolves around a bell tower.

We climbed to the top.

 Around and around and around until we reached to the top.

 It was pretty overcast that day, but I think this picture looks pretty neat.

 All the red roofs reminded me of my sweet mother-in-law, one of her favorite places has a bunch of red roofs (it's a requirement in that particular city). I'm not sure if it is in Belgium too, but it sure looked pretty.

 Bruges has a ton of canals, like Amsterdam (as you will see later), I didn't know that other places used canals so much too .

 Pretty much everywhere we went in the city always led back to the main square.

So that is where we ate lunch, with the bell tower in the background.

 Belgium professes that they are the champion of three things:

1. Chocolate (and we must agree)

2. Lace

3. Beer (we have no idea about this one)

This map is made of lace!

 Can you tell that I loved the canals?! They were SO beautiful!

 They had a TON of chocolate stores, this picture is a sneaky picture. We took a picture of my sweet husband eating chocolate, but the real reason we took the picture is right behind him... crazy Belgians.

 We went to a chocolate museum.

 These purses are made out of chocolate!

 As is this family, the caption said this was a cannibalistic family.. if you look closely you can see the one standing is eating her hand. 

 Chocolate molds

 Belgium is an interesting place because half of the country speaks Dutch and acts like the Dutch and

half of the country speaks French and acts like the French.

Bruges is in the Dutch half of the country.

So bicycling is a major form of transportation.

So we took a bike tour of the city. 

 This was a neat bridge, we stopped for a while so my sweet husband could check it out

 I'm the person on the bike..

 See what I mean, beautiful!

 Our guide book told us about an all you can eat ribs place,

and since my sweet husband LOVES ribs, we of course had to check it out!

PS that bottle of wine was not ours, it was just on the table, all the tables had one, I promise.

 He ate a lot of ribs!... lol

 These next two pictures are pretty silly,

I loved our little hotel room there, the shower head lit up! It changed colors with the temperature of the water! Green right when you turned it on, blue for cold, and red for hot. It would have two colors when it was in between (blue and red for warm, etc).

The next day we went to Brussels, Belgium.

We started off the day at the European Union building. 

We were hoping to get a tour, but for some reason they weren't doing them at that time.

So we went to the Parlamentarium instead.

It was pretty neat, it taught us all about the EU 

(or reminded us about it since we both took a class on it back in college).

Then we took pictures of ourselves with the EU building for our PolSc 150 teacher,

he would be so proud.

Our next stop was the main square.

Our guide book told us this funny story,

apparently Belgians have a pretty funny sense of humor.

They like to say that these three women statues look angry because they smell a fart and are blaming the man on the horse.

He then says, "It wasn't me, it was him." 

He points across the square to this fellow,

who says, "No, it wasn't me, it was him"

He points across the square 

(sort of, it's a little bit of a reach, it took us a while to find him, but funny nonetheless)

to this fellow, who hangs his head in shame because he was the culprit.

Then we had lunch, this pub was behind us, I thought it was a pretty funny name for a pub.

The Belgians' sense of humor is also displayed by their famous little peeing statue,

apparently the guy that put it up did it as a bit of a joke, but then when someone tried to take it down the Belgians insisted that it stayed up.

Behold, Manneken pis. 

They love this little guy, we went to a museum that holds all his costumes, he has over 700 costumes!

Then we got a Belgian waffle, please excuse my scary face.

And people watched.. lol

Then we couldn't really figure out anything else to do, so we headed to Amsterdam.

To be continued.