Brussels and Amsterdam

I thought this weekend was going to be really stressful with all the traveling involved to get from Rome to Brussels, then to Amsterdam and then back to Rome, but it was surprisingly a very smooth weekend. Christina, Jessie and I flew to an airport outside of Brussels, hopped on a bus and was in the city in an hour. Our hostel was about a 2 minute walk from the train station and was in this really cute square- a great location to see the main areas of Brussels. We were just a few blocks from Grand Place square where they have gorgeous old buildings with lots of gold. One of the best things we saw was Mannekin Pis- basically a statue of a little boy peeing. Legend has it that a man couldn't find his son and swore that when he found him, he would create a statue of him exactly as he found him, and apparently he was peeing. I don't know if that's true, but I hope it is because that's hilarious..



We also walked to the royal palace, the cathedral, a few parks, ate the most delicious waffle, had a beer tasting, and went to a chocolate shop all within a few hours!


WAFFLE


Royal Palace

Brussels is awesome because pretty much everything you need to see is all in one little area of the city. It was very relaxing to just wander around and go in and out of little shops. Everyone is so nice there and they all speak English. Belgium had 2 official languages- Dutch and French, most of Brussels speaks French. We met this lady who worked at the chocolate shop, and we heard her speak 4 different languages with customers while we were there, turns out she can speak 10 languages! That's amazing. Another bonus was that our room had a TV and we got to watch American shows! Italy doesn't have American programming on their basic channels...

The next morning, Saturday, we took the train to Amsterdam, about a 2:30 hour ride. We love the train so it was a nice scenic ride. Again we got really lucky and were staying close to the train station, and the best part was we stayed at a Marriot! The price for a hostel was almost the same as the hotel so why wouldn't we go classy?! The hotel was gorgeous and our room was huge with really comfy beds. Unfortunately we didn't get as lucky with the weather as we did in Brussels, it drizzled most of the day but we still explored. We walked along the canals, saw the flower market, ate pancakes and bacon-yum!!!! saw the I amsterdam structure, walked past the Anne Frank House and the Van Gogh museum (the lines were too long to go inside), learned the tram line, walked through the red light district (wow, that's all I'm going to say) all by 6:00 pm.






Giant Clog!

We were so concerned we would be pressed for time in both cities, but a day in each ended up being plenty. We went back to the hotel to relax and watch MTV on our flat screen; it was a much needed update on American trash TV. We had dinner at a really cute little Indian restaurant, wandered around a little more and went to bed. The next morning we took a 2 hour bus ride to Eidenhoven where the small airport is where the budget airlines fly out of and were back in Rome by 4:30pm. It was a really chill weekend, nothing super crazy happened and we took it easy. This coming weekend starts our 10 day spring break and it's going to be BIG! I'm going to Budapest, Vienna, Prague and LONDON!!!! Can't wait!!