Have power board, will travel
On our last day dad wanted to go see the old town square, he had missed it at his conference when mum and I saw it on the first day, so we took a train out to an original gate tower from the old town. There was a small park with some grass and a couple of benches. There wasn’t much of the old wall left, just the tower. We caught a train back to the city and walked into the city square.
There were a few more places for us to visit in Brussels in our last two days. The first was the Atomium. A huge thing built in 19 something something for the something something. It was built in 1958 for Expo 58, the Brussels World’s Fair. Why don’t we have World’s Fairs anymore as an excuse to build big things? Not that Australia needs an excuse to build more big things, we love a good big thing, but they aren’t in the same scale as an Eiffel Tower or the Royal Exhibition Building.
We decided to go to Bruges on Wednesday looking at the weather for the rest of the week. It was supposed to be sunny and 28, but rain later in the week. After a successful trip on the train the day before we set off again for Gare du Nord to get another train, this time in the opposite direction to Bruges. We sprung for 1st class tickets again, noting the insane number of campers and travellers the day before. Turns out the previous day was a public holiday, while there were still a lot of people on the train the tickets were about 3 times the price!
During my last trip to Paris I was still recovering from something I had eaten about a week before in Hungary, and it was at the end of a long trip. Our hotel was a little “boutique” thing we found on wotif, it was quite nice, but it wasn’t in the best area, within a couple of minutes of Gare du something. I think it was Nord, mum thinks it was Est. Either way, it wasn’t an area we wanted to be out in at night. Still, last trip I did enjoy quite a lot about Paris. I loved the museums, including The Louvre and Musée d’Orsay. I really enjoyed walking down the Seine past the book sellers, and Versailles – seeing that place it is no wonder there was a revolution.
Day 1. Dad headed off to his conference from Gare de Bruxelles-Nord, mum and I headed out of the hotel to look for a tram into the city. There was a tram stop not far from the hotel, and there were a few locals patiently waiting. We asked the hotel where we could buy tram tickets, but we were told we just bought it from the driver when we got on.