10.29.10, Brussels-Brugges, Belgium: A Different City Every Night...

We started the day with a trip to the Musee Magritte which was an 8 floor museum. After 2 hours or so of going around, we gave up na. Too much art for our lives!!! STRESS!!! There was even an art installation consisting of like 27 or 30 black tiles on the floor. We were saying pa "Baka art din to ah" and lo and behold. When we got to the end of the piece we found a sign that said it was art :| 

 At a Musee Magritte wall! Cutie!

We didn't want to waste much time and so we went to Brugges already right after and really enjoyed the weather! Not too cold! We had our first meal at this restaurant and they had this souvenir wall and look what we found!

Had a really yummy burger meal with... wait for it... BELGIAN FRIES!!! IN BELGIUM!!! HAHA!

Brugges is a super cutes place!!! We loved it here! The whole afternoon was spent going around all possible places in Brugges :) After which, we finally bought BELGIAN CHOCOLATES. I swear I have so much now!!! HAHA! Hard to eat ah! :))

We had dinner at Taco, an Italian restaurant near our hostel. Super deceitful name! I was ready for some tacos!

Tschuss!!!

10.28.10, Brussels: Life Is Like a Box of Chocolates!!!

For around 9 hours we were traveling to Brussels, Belgium in a train looking like this:

We had a stop at Koln (Cologne) at say 7, 8 or 9 am but that was just for a train transfer. Very uneventful.

Finally received this text from Vodafone at around noon! YAY! A different country! What up?

  At our first (and only) Brussels bus ride

We checked into our hostel and then proceeded to go around Brussels's city center first: GRAND PLACE (pronounced like "Grand Plas")! Really pretty place! 

We first ate at this Greek Restaurant (Greek in Belgium's kinda a weird choice haha)! but since I really wanted me some Belgian Waffles, Fries and Chocolate, I opted to have a Belgian beer instead ... They say it anyways that's one of the must-tries in Belgium.

 Belgian beer!

 Cute Restaurant

We continued to marvel at the Grand Place very pretty and then we moved on to explore the rest of Brussels!

We passed this hotel that a bunch of police were flanking. I think there must've been some politician or VIP visiting and we got curious but never really saw anyone that looked important:)) 

On the way to the Manneken Pis, we saw na sooooo many chocolate shops! No exaggeration, Belgian chocolate really is LOVE! 

We finally got to the Manneken Pis and super labo! We did not really get what the hell this was supposed to be famous but it's here and that's it. Just a Manneken Pissing ... Labo. HAHAHA! 

After that we, just did a sweep of all the nice sights around Brussels in a span of 2 hours or so! We visited mostly all their churches, the senate-congress etc area, the palace-y area and that's that! Mostly all of the must-sees! Good time management and route-planning by Butch Lorenzo! :))

Some people were being so mean and sly trickster-y looking at the over-the-city thing which I have a picture of above. They make you sign this thing, telling you it's a signature drive then bigla the last column is like for the amount of your donation or something! Right then, we realized it's a scam duh! Mean people. I gave them 10 cents. HAHAHA! I could not understand their language but I know the girl was pissed. Serves them right. HAHAHA! 

After the Amazing Race-esque tour around the city, we then went back to the area near Grand Place and Steph and I got ourselves some authentic Belgian waffles! So yummy! I died! I got a banana, whipped cream, melted chocolate one and it was sooo good! 

We sat here while eating and we marveled at the pretty long Grand Place view! 

We went around Brussels more to see it at night and while it's less orderly and clean than Germany, it was nice still! We ended our night with our last stop being the Grand Place once again. I took a video of it since the view in the evening with all the lights is really something but blogspot being weird and I can not post videos for some reason. I will update this entry when I can with the video of it! :)

Tschuss!

10.27.10, Munich: Longest Day of Our Lives!

Today I had my first Business English class at 9 am with Professor Deiderich again. It's the usual English class except instead of discussing research papers, bibliographies and such we just really speak in English but use more business-y words... Easy as pie. HAHA! Then I had Deutsch A1 again with my favorite teacher at the University! Mrs. Susanne Wagner!

We hastily packed our bags the moment we got home and by 3 pm we were on a train to Munich already! Yay!

Steph

Butch

We went to the Euraid booth and then this man here below promptly processed our Eurail 2-month Global passes. Super worth it! This was a glorious moment in our lives!!! We picked also our train for Brussels already. It leaves at 3 am so we had a looooong ass wait in Munich(in retrospect we realized we could've gone home to Ingolstadt and could've taken the train from there... Bobo... HAHA)! 

Getting our Eurails processed

Interesting graffiti on our day lockers at the station

We then ate at KFC at around 7 pm... Got the same meal! Super comforting to eat something that tastes like what we have back in the Philippines!!! But their gravy sucks and their fries are different! Whatever. This is as good as it gets.

My yummy food!

We met a Filipino in KFC also who was living in Koln(Cologne) but is now studying Philosophy in Munich. He was Bisaya so I talked to him a bit also. He told us he was being sponsored by someone from back home. REALLY. LUCKY. Sarap makakita ng Pinoy! as Butch said(or didn't he?) 

Since we had around 6 more hours to kill(we left KFC at around 9 na!), we decided to go to a bar first - the only thing that'd be open in European cities/towns that didn't require you to eat a meal. When the people from France visited Munich a month ago, I took them to this bar called Americanos. Since it was near KFC(It was a coooold night! We dreaded being in the cold for too long!) and the Marienplatz subway(convenient for going to the Munich HBF/Main station), I brought the two there na lang. We met a weird mixture of people: some really nice locals, some super kulit guy from Ingolstadt also and this middle aged guy who kept on talking to me in vain. We enjoyed the music and our drinks til around 12 midnight. SUPER EXHAUSTING TO HAVE TO WAIT!

Butch and Steph

Nice people from Munich

Me

Butch

We then went to the HBF to wait there naman. We were in the lounge for around 2 more hours and then we finally decided to just wait and sleep in the train. REALLY TIRED NA AT AROUND THIS TIME!!! Our only consolation was that we were arriving in Brussels - a different city in a different country - in some hours!!! 

The train!

The longest longest day of our lives!!!

Tschuss!!!