Brussels, Belgium Part III

"I hope there's lots of food in our next adventure." -Tum Tum Ninja Turtles

 

CHOCOLATE! This particular chocolate store had a chocolate fountain where you could go and take a piece of fruit (provided by the store) or bread and dip it into the chocolate fountain.  Chocolate is everywhere in Belgium!

   FIRST WAFFLE!  The waffles are fresh - made right in front of you.  You can choose from different fruits, chocolate sauce (which hardens if you wait long enough - I chose not to wait), and/or homemade ice cream.  I got chocolate sauce and
ice cream - BEST WAFFLE EVER.  In the picture from the left - Abby (from NY), Meag (from Connecticut goes to school at Villanova), me, Maura (from Illinois and goes to school in Wisconsin), Leslie (from California and goes to school at Cornell), Ale (from Michigan, goes to school at Purdue), and Sara (from Minnesota and goes to school there).

 
Grand Place or Grote Market; central square of Brussels.  Most older European towns were built from the inside and gradually built outward.  The entire city is not on a grid (like NYC for example), so roads will turn ever which way and you may stay on the same road or turn once and end up where you started - makes it very hard to get to know which road goes where!

Fun Fact: Recently voted the most beautiful square in Europe.

Fun Fact: Anyone living in Belgium who wants to get married must get married at the Town Hall or else it does not count.  (Town Hall is the building above with the Belgium flag).

The CIEE program brings us many places, one of them being the Comic Strip Museum!  To the right is Anna and I posing like the Comic Strip Character.  For this trip we received a 3 course meal consisting of bread, creamy tomato soup, chicken waterzooi (a Belgian favorite), and chocolate ice cream pudding. Yummmmm.  We also received a private tour of the museum and learned alot about Herge who is the father of the best well known Belgian comic strip TINTIN.  He also created Suske and Wiske - known in Enlgish as Willy and Wanda.

Parc du Cinquantenaire - a large park which consists of many statues and large architectural pieces.  We climbed the arches to the top via steep spiral staircases (available for free to the public).  The view from the top looking towards the center of Brussels is to the right.  We were able to see all of Brussels.  It was gorgeous.

 
Belgian Cats:  I was exploring my neighborhood one day and spotted this.  The two cats in my host family's house are very special also - they tend to climb the backs of our chairs while we're eating dinner and they "talk" a lot and seem to understand French.  Maybe it's because the Piette family feeds them chocolate.