Chocolate and Waffles

This past weekend we had our first free three-day travel weekend.  My friends Colleen and Christi and I decided to go to Brussels, Belgium, for the weekend.  We left campus at 5:15 on Friday morning to take the bus to the airport for our 8:45 flight.  We were through security and waiting at the gate by 6:15.  Needless to say, I think we got there a little early :p.  After about a two hour flight, we landed at the Brussels South Charleroi Airport.  Since we had flown on RyanAir, a really cheap discount airline, we did not land in the main Brussels airport.  So we had to take a bus/shuttle into Brussels from there, and it lasted about an hour.  It dropped us of in front of the Gare de Midi train station, and being the wonderful planners that we are, we had no idea how to get from there to the hotel.  The hotel confirmation sheet said it was near the Rogier metro station.  We made our way to the metro and bought a ticket, but it took us a while to figure out which line we needed to take to get to Rogier.  Brussels has a very complex metro line with several levels of trains running.  We hopped on a train, not completely sure if it was the right one, but hoping that it was.  Luckily, it was.
However, once we got off the metro, we couldn't figure out how to get out of the station.  We wandered up and down stairs for a while, until we finally saw a sign that said Parking Garage.  So we wandered up that way.
When we came out, we had no idea how to get to the hotel.  I tried to turn on my GPS, but it could not for the life of it figure out that I had moved a couple thousand miles from where I had last used it.  So we wandered around for about half an hour trying to find our hotel.  Finally, we turn down a random road and see it.  It turns out that it is actually right in front of the real exit for the Rogier station.  So if we had gone out the real exit instead of the parking garage, our lives would have been alot easier.
After checking into our room (which was up about six flights of stairs), we meandered our way to the Grand Place, the central square of Brussels.  Once there we grabbed some Belgian waffles for lunch.  They were amazing!  Then we wandered around Brussels for the rest of the afternoon, taking pictures, going into stores, and getting free samples from chocolate shops.  We also saw the Mannekin Pis, a small statue/fountain of a little boy peeing.  Believe it or not, it is one of the most famous things in Brussels.  We had dinner at a little French cafe, where I ate one of the best omelets I have ever had.  We headed back to the hotel after dinner and crashed early.
On Saturday, we took a train in the morning to a small town called Mechelen.  It was about a twenty minute train ride.  It was a very picturesque little town and the main square was absolutely breathtaking.  When we first walked in it was filled with street vendors, but they quickly started pulling out for the afternoon siesta.  Once again, we mostly just wandered around, had lunch, bought chocolate, and visited the cathedral.
Later in the afternoon, when the main square was pretty empty, we were standing in it and talking when a group of little girls that looked like the Belgian equivalents of Girl Scouts approached us.  They asked us in English where we were from, and we said the United States.  They all got really excited then, and explained that they were playing a game (I'm guessing a scavenger hunt) and they had to find people 'from a foreign land.'  Then they made us walk over to the other side of the square with them so that they could prove to their leader that they had really found us.
One funny thing that happened a couple of times in Mechelen was that Christi was mistaken for being French. She speaks enough French to get by, and in Mechelen they speak primarily Dutch.  Christi started speaking to the waiter in French at our restaurant, and he responded in French, but apologized to her for how bad his French was (Christi had just been complaining to us that hers was terrible as well!).  Christi told him not to worry, and that his French was just fine.
We went back into Brussels for dinner, and we ate waffles :P
Sunday morning we went to Mass- which ended up being in Dutch.  We also discovered that elderly Belgians like to wander around Church during the sign of Peace and shake hands with everyone.  After that, and breakfast at the hotel, we went to the Royal Museum of Fine Arts.  They had some really beautiful and famous stuff, and also some really atrocious modern stuff.  We didn't have alot of time though, so we saw a very small amount of their collection.  And then we had waffles again.
We didn't have much time left after that, so we headed back to the shuttle stop and took that and then the plane back to Rome.  It was the end of a relatively successful first weekend of independent travel!