Mussels in Brussles and the Manneken Pis Miracle

This past weekend, we headed to Brussels at 7am Saturday, getting an early start and not paying for a room Friday night. After getting lost for the first hour, we stumbled upon the Royal Palace, only open for one month a year, with some of the most gold filled rooms this side of Versailles, and a room covered with 1.4 million beetle shells, shining a bright greenish blue.

After lunch of Belgium waffles, we went to see the Manneken Pis, a fountain of a little boy pissing, a statue that has been around since the 1600s and is a landmark. What happened next, started with a parade led by the Brotherhood of the Pink Elephant (logo of Delirum Brewery), then the 10th annual ceremony about the statue, and inductions into the Pink Elephants, and then the miracle, the fountain was hooked up to a keg of beer, and soon it was pissing beer into cups whic were handed out to the public. Behold the Maneken Pis Miracle; the crowd rejoiced and drank some good beer from a statue older than the US.

The Grand Place, is quite grand as the name says. Amazing buildings completely surrounding a cobblestone square and hosting a concert later than night. I stopped by the impressive cathedral on the way to the Belgium Museum of Comic Arts to check out a large exhibition on Tintin, one of my favorite European comics from the 1940s-70s.

Later that night, after a very tasty dinner of mussels with pommes frites, a local specialty, there were free concerts all over town for the Brussels Summerfest 2007.

The next day, after going to the largest and randomest flea market I've ever seen, we took the train to Antwerp to go diamond shopping, see the Cathedral which was meant to have two towers and only got one, looked at some famous art by Rubens, dangled our feet over the river like the locals do, saw the park where graffiti is legal and quite colourful, and watched a street performer throw an apple 25 feet into the air and catch it in his mouth.

We took the train back to Brussels, to see some more sights, buy a Manneken Pis statue, watch a French gypsy band play their style of world music, grab some pommes frites and get on the train back to Cologne.