A Weekend in Brussels

It was Elaine's birthday on Friday, so we went to Brussels for the weekend.  We've been to Belgium before, but never as far south.  Almost immediately, I was struck by the shift to French as compared to the Vlaamse-heavy north.  It was a perfect chance for Elaine to work on her French and for me to learn to embarass myself less in French, but we could still take advantage of our Dutch as well.

We stayed at the Welcome Hotel, which had a nice atmosphere, a good location, and set the right mood.  We stayed in the Silk Road suite (it was her birthday after all), and the jacuzzi was a nice way to relax after walking the soles off our shoes per the usual.


We ate a few notable meals, including frites and mossels (of course).  Our favorite meal of the trip had to be at Comocomo, a Tapas restaurant where the dishes come out on a conveyor belt as soon as they're made.  It reminded me of Frying Fish in L.A., good variety, good quality, and reasonable prices.  They have about 45 dishes on the menu, and we tried 15, I guess we'll have to try again at their Antwerp location.

We spent most of our time at three museums.  First, we spent an afternoon at the Koninklijke Musea, wandering through their ancient and modern art collections.  My favorites there had to be the statue of Father Damian (it hasn't been retitled since his canonization), Matthieu Kessels sculpture "The Deluge", and Paul Delvaux's "Crucifixion".  If you'd like to see more items from the collection, there's a large group of them on Flickr.  We also visited the comic strip museum, in a lovely Art Nouveau building, and caught a small but wildly popular Frida Kahlo exhibition at the Musee de Beaux Arts ("Bozart").

We took a few pictures while we were in Brussels, click Elaine's picture below to see the set on Flickr: