Brussels - Day 2

Today, we decided to 'sleep in' until 8:30am; sleep schedules in London are definitely not what they are like in New York. Jon works until 12 or 1am each day and I have to wake up at 6:54am to get to work. And coming from my family, I need my sleep!

Today, we opted to take things slowly- we always say our weeekend trips are to get a taste of the countries and cities we are visiting; if we enjoy ourselves, we'll return one day!

So today, we began the day with belgian waffles by a cute square and then enjoyed the Brussels Museum of Fine Arts and the Museum of Modern Art. We strolled through an antiques market and through an interesting local neighborhood, ate some frites from a stand to hold us over until lunch. This was all great until we realized that we were getting more off the beaten path than we wanted to be. Suddenly, we were in a mostly Arab and N. African neighborhood and needless to say, we picked up the pace and I was overjoyed when we found some familiar streets.

After that exhausting episode, we gathered our bags from the hotel and started to head to Gare Midi because we heard there was a nice market there on Sundays. On our way, we saw this interesting character in Grand-Place and Jon poked me so many times to take a picture that I actually did it (while exclaiming how beautiful the Grand Place was and how I could never have enough pictures of it):

So, we headed back to the train station, walked out to find most of the vendors in what turned out to be a not very nice market packing up for the day. Hot and hungry at this point, we stopped off at this Portoguese restaurant, which was the only one in sight.

It was a quick trip, but we had a great time! Back on the Eurostar to London...