Brussels and Luxembourg

What an amazing trip. I knew very little about either of these cities, but they are so close to the Netherlands (i.e., Benelux) that it was a nice weekend trip.

We arrived in Brussels on Friday after a 5 hour train ride (2.5 hours from Groningen to Amsterdam, 2 hours from Amsterdam to Brussels). After successfully navigating the metro, we made it to the Grote Markt/Grand Place. I actually realized that I can read  quite a bit of Dutch when we were there because the signs are in both Dutch and French (both are official language s in Belgium), and I always looked for the signs in Dutch because I know barely five words in French. That was the hardest part of the trip...in the Netherlands, EVERYONE speaks English (85% of the population is fluent, to be exact), but that is not the case in Belgium or Luxembourg. I ended up having to mumble "Bonjour" and "Merci" a lot. Worst of all is that I thought "No parlez-vous Francais" meant "I don't speak French." It actually means "YOU don't speak French." So I told several French-speaking Belgians that they did not speak French. Fail.

But, anyway, onto the sights

The Atomium

St. Michel Church

Chocolate shop.

Grote Markt/Grand Place

Manequin Pis

Belgian Notre Dame.

Creepy carving.

Palace.

As sweet as Brussels was, I have to say that Luxembourg was even more amazing. I have literally never been anywhere so beautiful in my life. The whole city has that sort of perfect Disneyland feel to it, but it is actually a real city where people live. To make it even better, the weather that day was completely perfect, warm and sunny.

Some of the stuff we saw:

So. Beautiful.

Palace.

View from Casemates du Bock. 

Casemates du Bock. This was one of the coolest places we visited, it is the remnants of an ancient fortress built into the cliffside. It was really cool and kinda creepy...at one point we ended up in pretty much a dead end after going up and down two slippery stone spiral stair cases...

Legit spiral stair. 

WOW.

Basically, it was a sweet trip.

This past weekend I was in Amsterdam, and tomorrow I am flying to Dublin!

Randstad Trip

Last week we went on a trip to the Randstand, the Western part of the Netherlands (the part that it is actually Holland) where the major cities are.

We started off in a traditional fishing village, called Urk (pronounced like "urrrrrk" with a guttural Dutch sound I cannot produce). There are not that many "traditional" places left so it was pretty interesting (and wet....).

  

After that, we took a bit of an odd stop in a place called Biljemeer in Amsterdam. In the 60s, it was built as a utopian housing development...but by the 70s it had turned into a ghetto (in the words of the professor giving the tour). It was a bit odd for the professor to pretty much say "this is the ghetto where the poor immigrants live." Dutch people tend to be a little more blunt about these things than politically correct Americans... There was a terrible plane crash there in 1993 and we saw the monument on the site.

After leaving Amsterdam, we drove through what is called "The Green Heart," an undeveloped preserved area. The Netherlands is technically one of the most densely populated countries in the world, but the Green Heart is flat, open, and wet.... (Not too many pictures from a moving bus).

  

After that, we stopped briefly in The Hauge. It was raining so we just walked around a little bit, I definitely want to go back there some time. 

After that, we went on to our last stop, Rotterdam. We saw the famous port and the "Cube Houses." This city reminded me a little bit of New York (maybe because there aren't that many tall buildings around the Netherlands and there were here). All in all it was a nice trip (if a little bit random.).