Freshly Minted: Christmas Trip, Day 3

"December 15:
We woke up to a nice European breakfast at our hotel (complete with meat, cheese, rolls, and--Allison's favorite--cheese spread) and made the long trek from our hotel to the train station to figure out how to get our Eurail passes validated. It was a beautiful morning walk, though a bit chilly, and we were able to capture some beautiful pictures of the city. We took a roundabout way to the station so that we would pass the Anne Frank House on the way. Unfortunately it was fairly expensive to see, they didn't allow backpacks (of which we had two large ones), and we were hoping to catch a mid-morning train for Brussels. So we just took some pictures from the outside.

We got our Eurail passes validated and caught our first train, passing through Den Hague and the beautiful Dutch countryside on our way to Brussels. On arriving at Brussels, we spent several minutes (in excess of 10 actually) deliberating which way to go in order to get to our hotel, as our map was somewhat ambiguous. Finally, we picked a direction and set off and, as was our luck most of the trip, it was the right direction and we soon found our hostel. It was a pretty nice hostel for the price and was right near the city center. We walked around the city a bit and found it was very expensive. We also anticipated finding as much German as French spoken in Belgium, but actually French is spoken almost exclusively (sometimes people give you the evil eye before reverting to English--apparently language is a huge pride thing in Belgium). So our great German knowledge could not be utilized just yet. We wandered to the old town square (usually our favorite part of cities we visited) and perused our first Christmas market of the trip. We were peeking around for a nice place to sample some Belgian beer (which I--Luke--am quite fond of), with little luck and a few bad language experiences with snobby French speakers (though I suppose that's how non-English speakers feel when coming to the US too). Finally as we were looking at a beer list outside of one place, deciding whether to go in, one of their employees came out and welcomed us in (in English), so we took up his offer. It was a really relaxed and enjoyable environment, though it was our first exposure to the fact that most of Europe has yet to pass indoor smoking laws. It was fun to drink the Belgian beers out of their proper glasses (most have their own special glass, some even goblets). We also met a man from Costa Rica who was living and working in Brussels and had an interesting chat.

After leaving the bar, we were planning on making our way through the old town square and back to our hostel, but heard weird electronic music coming from the square, booming throughout the city really. Upon reaching the square we discovered that a beautiful church we had seen earlier in the day had been turned into an amazing and quite enrapturing light show (which had the potential to be tacky, but really was actually quite spectacular and dare I say beautiful). We joined the masses of people just staring at this light and music show. It utilized the entire facade of the church and occasionally "Merry Christmas" and "Happy New Year" would flash across the building in French, German and (believe it or not) English. We tried capturing this experience with photographs, but they really do not do it justice. So, upon our return to the states, we have a video of this that we took using Allison's camera. It is a must see, as this was truly a unique experience and one which cannot adequately be described in either words or pictures. After prying ourselves away from the church, we made our way back to the hostel for a much-needed night's sleep."