Day 55: I-Am-sterdam to Belgium

Sunday - July 11, 2010:

Today is our last day of our weekend vacation, we are flying back to Rome. Correct. But are we flying out of Amsterdam? No, that'd be the logical, easy answer. Instead, we are making the most of our Euro-Trip and cramming as many countries into our Passport as possible. So we decided to get a train to Brussles, Belgium and fly out of there. Belgium = check!

So we wake up this morning, check out of Hotel Casa 400 and take the bus to Central Station. We wait for the train and it finally comes at 8:54. I was pretty excited about this train ride. I pictured old school train rides like you see in the movies and on tv... Well that's definitely not the case! It was more like riding an above ground subway for two hours. And to make matters more disappointing -- I didn't have any form of entertainment. No book, no iPod, no nothing. But I did have a pen and paper, so I wrote my blog for the weekend. The train was fairly uneventful -- nothing to report, sorry!

{Sleeping through the train ride}

{Emily is outttttt!}

We arrived at Brussels and got off at the correct stop (it was such a blessing that the overhead announcement came in English or else we may have gotten off at the wrong place). We got off of the train, stored our luggage in a locker and then spent a good hour trying to figure out the Brussles bus system. After much confusion, we located the bus stop for our future reference, and then bought Metro tickets. The Metro took us to Brussels Center and we got off for our brief two touristy hours in this Belgian city!!

{Belgian Chocolates!! Yumm!!!}

{And Belgian Wafflessss!!! Basically the whole reason we stopped in Brussles}

{Decisions, decisionssss}

{Look at these waffles -- strawberries, bananas, whipped cream, chocolate, nutella, ice cream... the works! Belgium does it right}

{You should be drooling right now}

{No time for pictures -- must indulge ourselves with no distractions}

{We may take pictures now that we have demolished our Belgian waffles. They lived up to my expectations (which were set pretty high)!!}

{There are basically three things to do in Brussles. One is have a Belgian waffle. Two is seeing this statue of this little boy going to the bathroom. Three is the main square. So here is number two checked off the list!}

{The people of Brussels love this statue}

{They love it -- these are chocolate statue replica of it}

{Walking the streets of Brussels -- another day in the life}

So we are walking to the main square and we see this huge crowd of people. Of course we ask what's going on and this nice French man said "Prince!!" It takes a minute to register and then we're like AHHH! So we whip out our cameras and immediately focus them on the front door of the hotel. And we wait. And wait. And wait for Prince to come out. We wait for probably 45 minutes and it the sun gets too hot to bear, so we give up. Very sad, but I'm ok with this decision!

{Prince's LIMO!}

{The focus of my camera for probably 45 minutes}

{We were the paparazzi!}

{At one point the police came and pushed us all away -- it was a very intense situation with an unruly crowd!}

{The hotel}

And then we walked to the main square and it was more beautiful than I expected!!

We wrapped up our short tourist time in Brussels and headed back onto the Metro, that took us to the bus station. Then we took an hour long bus ride to the Brussels airport. At the airport we promptly checked in and headed back to our gate. We had to wait for like 2 hours, but we spent this time in the duty free (I scored some "relatively cheap" Longchamp, and that made the whole trip worth the work}. We flew back with Ryan Air (they'reeee baaaccckkk!!) and it was fairly uneventful (I slept most of the way, so I missed all of the inflight advertisements they do). Patrizia (the cab driver we use) was waiting for us when we walked out of the Rome Ciampiano airport and we were so excited to get back to the Chigi -- it gets more and more like our home away from home each week!!

This weekend was beyond words and I am so thankful I chose to visit Amsterdam, but I have to admit -- I'm kind of excited about having a week in the Palace and not going anywhere next weekend. I need me some usual summer, lazy downtime! Bring it on summertime :)