Belgian tour...

Wow, what a day! We all have very tired feet after walking for hours and hours today while exploring two new cities.

My mom left today and was headed for Luxembourg via Brussels, so we decided to join her on the train to Brussels and then explore the city. We walked through the city a bit, checked out the Manneken Pis (little boy statue peeing...) and had lunch in the Grand Place surrounded by beautiful old buildings. We then took advantage of our Eurail passes and hopped another train to Antwerp. We were feeling quite proud of ourselves as we quickly caught a train with only a minute to spare - until we realized it was one of those trains that stopped at every single little town between Brussels and Antwerp. Let's just say there are A LOT of towns and the train was very, very hot - which is why Chloe has her head out the window in the above photo!

Antwerp was interesting, we really enjoyed it. Right out of the central train station there were tons and tons of diamond shops as Antwerp is very famous for it's diamonds. It was hard not to stop and stare at a lot of them, and Julia was particularily taken with the store "Julia's Diamonds" - unfortunately (for her) it was closed. Phew! We walked for about an hour just looking at interesting buildings and squares and found ourselves in a great shopping district. If we hadn't been so hot and sweaty we probably could've spend some serious time in those stores! Instead we sat down in a shady, breezy square, had a refreshment and recharged our batteries. Off we went again and found a cute miniature castle which I meant to look up in a book and figure out what it was but I'm much too tired now to do it. On the back side of it (interestingly enough) was a Canadian plaque and memorial about the fall of 1944 when Canadian soldiers helped liberate the port of Antwerp which freed up the way to the Netherlands leading to the Allied victory. I'm not going to lie - it made my heart swell a little and I felt proud looking out over that port realizing the significance of the event it was commemorating. It's always nice to see the maple leaf...!

Onwards to dinner - which seemed like an easy enough task except that we weren't actually sure where we were trying to go. After walking for much longer than was probably necessary we ended up at a Spanish tapas restaurant which turned out to be great. Chloe discovered she loves chorizo and both kids tried things they hadn't had before which is always fun. We cabbed it back to the train station, grabbed an ice cream cone and (this time) got on the fast train back to Bruges. The kids feet and legs were beyond dirty - I have no idea how they got that way but after much scrubbing they are clean, in their pj's and in bed. Now my turn... Goodnight!