Excellent Eurotrip: Brussels

Hello friends, family and everyone else! We are back in London and, in a radical departure from established patterns, uploading the photos from our exciting euro-adventure not too long after the aforementioned adventure was finished. I'll try to be as detailed as I can but we've got more than a hundred photos to get through and my macbook battery only lasts so long

We trucked out with our backpacks and travel mugs to the international rail station on the 31st to take the train through the Channel tunnel through France to our first stop: Brussels!

 To be entirely honest, Brussels was never going to be much more than an in-between place for us, but we made the most of the afternoon we had there and tried to see most of the sites.

This, friends, is the iconic tourist magnet of Brussels: Manneken Pis. He's only about a foot tall and peeing into a broad basin. The locals dress him up in different outfits every day. We were super-underwhelmed, and hard-pressed to find souvenirs that didn't feature the peeing little-man.

 We took a stroll to the big central square, admiring the tall ornate buildings. Brussels is a lot like other old European cities in that it has a small core of old buildings and pedestrian streets with classy boutiques and un-classy souvenir shops.
We found a gem of a chocolate shop, though, and couldn't resist picking up some pricey albeit really classy Belgian chocolates

As you might imagine, we were much more excited about Belgian waffles and chocolate than the actual sights.

 I know it might seem like we started with the less-exciting bit. We did. After one day of strolling around Brussels, we felt like we'd seen the essentials. We were up out of bed first thing the next morning to catch the train out of Brussels to Germany.