Easter Adventure Day 6

I am actually quite tired from work today but I am determined to finish this series of posts because I have been procrastinating for wayyyy too long and I have so many other things I want to blog about~


Almost at the end of our trip... On the 6th day of our 7-day holiday, we left the beautiful Bruges to the bustling Brussels.

The generous breakfast spread that the owner of the Airbnb we stayed at provided us~

That was probably the only day we had a proper breakfast lol She even made us tea and coffee!

Apologies for this blurry photo but I was in a rush to take the photo and didn't realised it turned out like this. This is probably the first thing you notice when you walk into the dining area of the house - a world map with lots of pins on them where the pins represent the home country of each visitor that has ever stayed in this Airbnb! It's mind-blowing to imagine the vast amount of people that has stayed in this Airbnb before us, just look at the number of pins on that map!

At around 7am, we bid our farewells to the owner of the house and started our morning walk to the train station. 

This is Brugge Station. After a one-hour train ride, we arrived in Brussels' Midi Station~

The train ride was so nice as we got to just chill and enjoy the beautiful scenery of the Belgian countryside. Once we got to Brussels, we had some trouble finding our way to our Airbnb but luckily a kind soul decided to stop (when he saw my worried/troubled face) and help us get an idea of which direction we were supposed to walk towards. Thankfully, we found our way and once again, got to the apartment earlier than our check-in time, but the owner of the Airbnb was very flexible about that, so we just left our luggage, got some info from the owner, got our maps and left to explore the city!

First thing you'll notice in Brussels, the street-art! And you'll notice Tin Tin all over town because the cartoon was created by a Belgian cartoonist.

Miniature carvings of Brussels' Grand Place.

We then walked to The Grand Place!

We were so lucky to experience great weather on our first day there because according to the owner of our Airbnb, it's usually quite gloomy and rainy in Brussels. 

Brussels' town hall!

Just look at all those fine details~

All these guild houses never fail to amaze me. I guess I just love their huge glass windows, and how narrow they are!

Too bad this part of the grote markt was going through some construction/refurbishment.

€1 (plain) waffles everywhere around the tourist sites!

This is where I bought some chocolates~ I didn't buy a lot of chocolates because there were too many options/shops and I just couldn't decide, but I read online that this chocolatier Leonidas is a popular one.

This weird statue which I have no idea why it's so popular. I should google that and find out.

I couldn't be any happier at that moment.

When this photo above was taken, it was probably still around 1pm only. So we had lots of time to walk around and enjoy Brussels. Thus, there's a lot more photos from Brussels coming your way in the next few posts!

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Easter Adventure Day 5: Bruges Part 2

To continue on from the last post.....
After walking the main tourist areas of Bruges, we walked towards a quieter area and visited the Choco Museum! We were both very excited to go to this chocolate museum, even when we were planning the trip, but I honestly think it wasn't as interesting as I expected to be. At one point, we entered a dark room where we could sit down and watch a video relating to the history of making chocolate (or something like that) and I fell asleep. Maybe because it was very boring or I was really tired lol.

We walked past this florist on our way to the museum and doesn't it look cute?

Chocolate tin boxes with pictures of the Belgian royals.

HAH!

I really don't have much to say about the museum, there was a lot of information about the history of chocolate and cocoa and how it was mainly for the Gods and rich in the past and stuff like that, but if you're not interesting in reading all the info they provided and just look at all the stuff they have on display, you can actually get through the museum very quickly and get to the most exciting part (which is at the end)! At the end of the tour, you get to see a chocolatier demonstrating how to make chocolate! And the best part is that you get a free piece of chocolate, which was soooo good. 

After the museum, we walked back to the main town centre and continued appreciating all the medieval buildings around us under the sun!

This is their town hall. How glorious is it? Just look at all those small windows on the roof!

We were struggling and failing at taking good photos of the beautiful town hall because it was so hard to fit all those huge buildings into one frame.

The belfry tower.

LOL

We walked around a little bit more and bought some souvenirs (I only bought postcards to add to my collection) before we got tired and hungry and needed to sit and rest and fill our tummies. 

One thing I hate during travelling is to find a good restaurant to have a meal because most of the time, you would either walk into one that has really expensive food (and you know the food isn't worth that money and you don't feel comfortable walking out after being seated), or you would go into one that serves really bad food (and you eat and wonder how they can survive till now). But luckily, we went into a really decent place this time! 

We were along this street that had a few different restaurants and from outside, we saw that this place (I can't rmb the name of the restaurant) serves Mediterranean food which didn't look too bad; prices were reasonable as well, so we decided to go in after walking up and down that street two times lol. 

  

All these sauces were so good. We could not stop taking both of the spicy ones~

I ordered a chicken sandwich (I think they called it a sandwich) and I know it looks like there's mainly vege but there is a fair amount of chicken underneath lol.

After our nice meal, we headed back to our Airbnb~ This is how it looks like from outside and we once again stayed on the top floor. The both of us really liked this place as well; the whole house was nice and clean; it had everything we needed; and the lady owner was super friendly. She was very direct about the rules and what to pay attention to while using the bathroom and she was very organised as well. She discussed with us what time we had to leave so that she could prepare our breakfast before we had to leave and told us exactly what time breakfast would be served. 

She also told us that she used to be a gymnastics coach so she was encouraging us to walk to the train station instead of taking the bus (but we were planning to walk anyway, because we cheap kekeke). 

the view from the skylight in our cozy room.

I chose to sleep under that sloped-roof and no, I did not hit my head.

All in all, walking through the cobbled streets of the city of Bruges was like walking back in time; it was mesmerizing.We were a bit worried at first when we got there that we wouldn't have enough time to do everything we wanted to do on our itinerary so we rushed through the first two museums (we were also scared the choco museum would be closed by the time we got there), but we ended up having quite a lot of time after the choco museum! By 5+pm, we were just walking aimlessly around the city. Maybe we should have taken a relaxing boat ride around the canals... I guess I kinda regret not doing that. However, aside from that, I really loved Bruges and enjoyed our (short) time there.
When we were planning this Easter trip, we initially planned to go to Luxembourg instead of Bruges but when I was talking on the phone with my uncle about my trip to Belgium, he strongly suggested we visit Bruges so I suggested it to Joon Tian and she agreed! I think it was good decision made (thanks to my uncle) because it was quite expensive and time consuming for us to travel to Luxembourg and it's really a city worth visiting at least once in your life.

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