Belgium - October 4 - Brussels

Off to Brussels - yes, by train - in the morning. Brussels is, like many European cities, a fascinating mixture of the new and the old - but with a definite Belgian flare. The Grand Place in the center of the Old Town area was indeed GRAND. (I didn't get a picture though...dang it.) And just a short walk from the Grand Place was the Manneken Pis - a status/fountain of a young boy...pissing. (Nancy wouldn't let me take a picture of that one.) You don't really need a picture though because you can find images of the pissing boy in souvenir shops all over Belgium. They're very proud of their pissing boy. We took a stroll through the Galeries Royales Saint-Hubert - a beautiful covered shopping arcade. I have never seen more chocolate stores under one roof in my life. We also found an art gallery there and came back at the end of the day and purchase a small painting that will end up somewhere in our Chatham home. Our next stop was one of the most interesting museums we have ever visited - the Musical Instruments Museum. For starters, they had old (and even ancient) musical instruments of all shapes and sizes from all over the world - hundreds of them, maybe even more than 1,000. And, the really cool part is that for about 250 of the instruments, they provided a device with headsets where you could enter a code and hear a snippet of a song/tune that featured that particular instrument. I didn't listen to all 250, but I listened to a bunch. Most sounded lovely...a few...not so much. For some reason, we didn't have any churches on our original plan for Brussels, so on a whim...I did a search for cathedrals in Brussels. Sure enough...St. Michael's was only a few blocks away. What awaited us was not only a beautiful cathedral, but we arrived during a symphony/choral rehearsal for Handel's Messiah and learned that they would be performing later that afternoon at 4:00 pm. I have been wanting to see Handel's Messiah with Nancy for a long time, so of course...we just said, "Yes!" We were able to score a couple of tickets for the performance that afternoon, and it was awesome! We capped off our evening with a fabulous dinner at The Lobster House before heading back to Ghent.