Belgium chocolate, Belgium waffles and Belgium beer when you get these three at one place and also when you can do this in a one day trip, then why to wait. With this temptation, I planned my trip for Brussels. I thought to have it in August 2018, because co-incidentally flower carpet show which is organised once in 2 years, is planned this year between 16-19th August.
My trip started on Saturday morning from Bercy, Paris on Oui bus at 8. Going through farm land, tall tress and wind mills, I reached around 12 noon at Gare du Midi -Brussels. There are various local transport options comprise of single ticket, group tickets and day pass. My plan was to see all places in Brussels on Saturday and go to Antwerp next day, so I opted 24 hours STIB pass it costs 7.50 Euros per head. This pass allows local transport in metro as well as tram. You can get this pass from any Kiosk near metro entry which is 1 floor down stairs from main station (You can lookout for sign M and reach metro station).
Regarding our stay, I found an interesting theme based hostel in Brussels. Train Hostel near Schaerbeek station, which give you a feel of train compartment. Train world is a unique museum displaying its historical trains, including the oldest steam engine in Europe, which is 100 meters away from hostel. We were in a group of 11 people so we booked 2 compartments having 6 berth each. In order to reach hotel, I took metro M2 till Botanique station and from there tram number 92 to reach Schaerbeek. Its the last station and hostel is 2 minutes walk from there.
For our plan of Saturday, we planned to go below places:
1) Saint Michel and Saint Godula Cathedral
2) Brussels Park
3) Royal Palace of Brussels
4) Mont Des Arts
5) Mannekin Pis
6) Grand Place
To cover maximum of this list, I marked them in map, in this sequence. See the map navigation present below to understand it more. After putting our luggage at hotel, we took tram 92 toward Fort Jaco and dropped at station Parc. At this station take right to reach Saint Michel and Saint Godula Cathedral. It a beautiful roman catholic church with an awesome architecture. From there we moved toward Brussels Park and crossing that, we reached Royal Palace. BSF, Belgium Summer Fest was organised in front of palace ,it was a musical concert. we reached in front of palace and there we clicked some good pics . Then we Step forward towards Mont des arts which is located in front of palace (dist 700 m). At Cross street there were lots of street food shops. Being a foodie girl, I can't resist myself to try different flavors of Belgium waffles and churros. It was yummm!!.
Mont Des Arts - is a beautiful decorated garden, people around there were relaxing and chilling with beer glasses .Also some music were on the beats .As its a tourist place so people around there dancing ,posing around the garden .A very cheerful atmosphere was there.Then moving towards Grand Place, we steps downwards within the street market and there I found Belgian Frites and Belgium beer shops, So we all took a halt there and tried both things .It was the best beer I had in my life and frites were mammaia!! . At 300m we found the chocolate Factory name is CHOCOPOLIS . Inside shop there was a miniature of Grand Place made of chocolate and they also demonstrate how they prepare the famous Belgian chocolate.There was lots of varieties of Belgian chocolates, but I think chocolates were a bit over priced.
From there we moved towards Mannekin Pis, a landmark of small bronze sculpture in Brussels, depicting a naked little boy urinating into a fountain's basin. On the way we found various cartoon characters painted on the walls famous as comic street in Brussels. From there we returned back to Grand Place as it was around 7:30pm. As we reached, I saw a beautiful carpet decorated by flowers. It was a carpet of 77 m x 24 m and is composed by about 120 volunteers, with nearly 1 million begonias in less than 4 hours.
This year, theme of the flower carpet was Mexico. The Flower Carpet is dedicated to Guanajuato, a Mexican region with a particularly rich floral culture and tradition. We booked online ticket to go upstairs to main hall from where you can get the full view of flower carpet. Light show starts at 9:30 Pm, so I will suggest you to go upstairs at around 9 pm so that you can see colorful lights falling on beautifully decorated carpet. During light show, all building in city place illuminated in different color and the view was a memorable one. The light show repeats every 15 minutes and last for 4 minutes with music. After the show, we walked back to station Palais and took tram number 92 to Schaerbeek.
With memories of lots of places visited last day, we woke up early in the lovely weather. Initially we had a plan to do checkout around 9:30am and go directly to Gare du Midi for our train to Antwerp, but we change it to cover another landmark of Brussels, before leave it. Its Atomium, depicts nine iron atoms in the shape of the body-centered cubic unit cell of an iron crystal, magnified 165 billion times. We started around 8:30am and it took around 35 minutes to reach Atomium through M7 from station Princ Elisabeth (Princ.Elisabeth to Araucaria and then Bus T3 to reach Heysel). Princ Elisabeth station was 600m from our hostel. Near Atomium, there was a park called Mini Europe, which is reproductions of monuments in the European Union on show, at a scale of 1:25. Roughly 80 cities and 350 buildings are represented. We stayed there for a while and had some panoramic clicks. After that we took M6 metro which took around 20 minutes to reach Midi Station.
Train from Brussels took around 1 hour to reach Antwerp, a port city of Belgium famous for centuries old Diamond shops. Antwerp central station is considered as the finest example beautiful architecture of Belgium. We read that in 2014, the British-American magazine 'Mashable' awarded Antwerpen-Centraal the first place for the most beautiful railway station in the world. In front of station you can find the diamond street of Antwerp where they will show you cutting and polishing of Diamonds.
We planned to go to Cathedral of Our Lady, Grote Market and MAS museum. Antwerp being a small city, we found that the important things we planned are within 3 kms so we opted to cover these by walk and explore more about this city. Grote market was near to "Cathedral of Our Lady" so we planned to go first to the beautiful Cathedral. Once we reached there, we found a small food festival over there. From here we navigate towards" Museum Aan de Stroom" (MAS), a 60 meter high made of Indian red sandstone and curved glass panel construction. Because we don't have much time to see this huge museum, we went on the top of this building to have the Panoramic view of Antwerp which is free for public. Curved glasses of the building and red sand stone makes this beautiful. From there we walked back to central station and we thought try something from the food street near station. Out of many options, we choose to have Italian Pizza at SAN REMO. Price of all pizzas were very reasonable and the taste was awesome. We ordered Vegetarian Pizza along with Belgium beer and its taste was such good I can still feel that. Near to San Remo, there was an Australian Homemade Ice-cream parlor which serves yummy 2 scoops at price of 4 Euro. After such a memorable 5 hours in Antwerp, we took our train back to Midi Station, Brussels and reached around 6:15 pm.
We had our bus at 7:30pm, so we grab the small but sweet memories of Brussels & Antwerp to reached Bercy, Paris at 11:30pm.
