Monday, March 07, 2005

Brussels Pictures Posted


Cathedral of St. Michael in Brussels

http://gallery.maybe.net/Belgium

So I got some of the pictures from Brussels (our first stop) posted over at the gallery. We only spent 1.5 days there, but even in that short amount of time we really saw a lot.

Our first day that we arrived in Belgium was spent at the Royal Military History Museum which was a pretty impressive collection of all sorts. They had a lot of weapons and cannons from early European wars all of the way up to modern warfare. I know my favorite part, and I think Shalisa's as well was the Air Hanger at the museum. They had a TON of planes ranging from WW I planes all the way up to modern day FA-16's that are flown by the Belgian air force.

After we slept for about 12 hours we headed out to see the rest of Brussels. We first visited the Cathedral of St. Michael .

If you have a high speed internet connection you need to right click this link (http://gallery.maybe.net/albums/Belgium/dscf1702.avi) and check out the movie. It is a movie of the interior of the Cathedral of St. Michael while the organ was playing, it was awesome but the movie is 14.5 MB's so it will take about a minute to download on Cable or DSL. Just right click on the link, save it to your desktop, and then double click on it once it has downloaded (you can also just click on it and wait for it to play, but it doesn't give you any status bar on how much has been downloaded... so it just starts after about a minute or 2 depending on you connection, if you download it you can tell exactly how much time is left).

After that we headed off and of course HAD to buy some Belgian chocolate. While we were wandering around eating our chocolate (and we did a lot of eating) we also saw the Manneken Pis which is a famous statue of a little boy peeing. It has become quite famous and is the unofficial symbol of Brussels. We also visited the Grand Place which is regarded by Rick Steves as one of the most impressive medeval squares in all of Europe. After visiting it, I can say it is the most impressive square I have seen in all of Europe (but I don't have quite the amount that Rick does, but it was impressive). One of the buildings on the north side of the Grand Place is the Hotel de Ville which was the Town Hall for Brussels. It was really hard to capture on camera because you couldn't get far enough away to get the whole thing in your camera.

After that we wandered around some more, we saw the Grand Palace of Brussels, the Palace of Justice and we walked through this amazing park as well. We of course have pictures of all of that as well as literally hundreds of other pictures from Brussels that we would love to share with you if you want to see them. These weren't even the best pictures of Brussels, but just a sampling of some of what we saw. I will try and tackle our first night in Paris in a little while so check back soon for the next picture update.

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