Day 3-5: Brussels, Belgium

We took an excursion to Brussels to visit Theresa’s cousin Dung. They haven’t seen each other in over 10 years. We thought it would be easy to get a train from Paris to Brussels, but it was all sold out! So our 1.5 hour train ride turned into a 4 hour bus trip instead. The Flexibus was actually really nice and comfortable. We got to see the beautiful countryside view.

Dung and her family picked us up from the bus stop and took us to the Atomium... Brussels’s Eiffel Tower! We enjoyed the Atomium, but were surprised how undeveloped the area around it was. According to Dung, there used to be a movie theatre, swimming pool with water slides, and a lot of restaurants. Now, most of the area was deserted.

You can go inside each sphere. You get a bird’s eye view of Brussels from the top sphere. The other spheres talked about the history of Brussels or just had some cool light shows. The kids enjoyed the long and very high escalator rides.

After the Atomium, we drove to the Grand Palace. It was a huge plaza which was the central square of Brussels. During certain times of the year, the entire plaza is covered with beautiful flowers.We had dinner in the square and ate the popular Brussel’s dish of mussels and fries! Our final destination before heading to Dung’s house was to find the Mannekan Pis which was a famous statue of a boy peeing. It was unimpressive. They do dress the boy for certain holidays, but he was in the flesh on our visit!

The next day was a misty rainy day. We were going to take Ariadne and Nam (Dung’s son) to the amusement park near their house, but it was closed. Summer hours didn’t start yet because the kids were still in school in Brussels. So we went to an awesome park instead. Nam and Ariadne enjoyed playing on the playground, going for a hike, and feeding the ducks in the pond. Even though Nam and Ariadne did not speak the same language, they seemed to understand each other just fine! We came back home and Dung cooked us a delicious dinner of mussels and fries as well as some Vietnamese dishes!

The next morning everyone left for work and school. Dung’s Husband dropped us off at the train station and we toured the rest of Brussels for ourselves before getting on a train to head back to Paris. We got off near Brussel Park and visited the Cinquantenaire and the government buildings. We stopped for a Liege waffle which is a Belgium waffle with sugar mixed in the batter. It was delcious and tasted like a Krispy Kreme donut!