This post will not have pictures for now. As soon as we can find reliable Wi-Fi to upload 208 photos, I'll be sure to include some.
We had a couple false starts this morning. I think we hit the snooze button 5 or 6 times before either of us considered opening our eyes. But after we cleared that hurdle, we eventually rolled out of bed to meet Chiara and Alberto (Chiarto?) for breakfast. Breakfast was included with the hotel and included a large selection of bread, cereal, fruits, juices, spreads, eggs different ways, sausages and bacon, potatoes, and just about every other breakfast food from all over the world. Plus as much coffee as I could drink, which was most welcome. I had mostly bread, cheese, and a chocolate croissant which I've been craving since we'd booked this trip. Brea had grapefruit juice, bread, cheese, some pastries, and covered everything in Speculoos. Alberto convinced us to pack some extra food for the day, just in case we got hungry between meals. We all have him a pretty hard time about it, but ate our words not too much later.
FYI: Most of the places I'm writing about have French or Flemish names that I can neither pronounce accurately, nor spell without special characters, so I'm just going to call most of them by a loose translation I come up with. Thank goodness Chiara speaks a good amount of French or we would've had a really tough time. Turns out only about 2% of the population here bothers learning English, while about 80% speak French.
After breakfast we left for our first activity, the Musical Instruments Museum. The museum turned out to be much bigger than we'd originally anticipated. We expected a single story building with a bunch of traditional instruments and a few interesting ones. It's actually a 10 story building with a 3 floors of regular gallery space, some event spaces, and a restaurant. And they didn't even have that many traditional instruments, or at least not what I consider traditional (about a hundred photos to come for this part). The only down side was that nothing came with an English translation. All the instrument descriptions and histories were written in French and one or two other languages that I couldn't guess at. So what made this place much, much better was the audio guide. It didn't tell you anything about the instruments or its history. What it did play, though, was audio of what the instrument sounds like when played. That's why we spent about twice as much time here as we'd expected.
The first floor had what I'm calling "computerized" instruments. You know those pianos that have a cylinder with holes punched in it or pins sticking out of it that trigger mechanisms in the piano that make it play a song on its own? Well that had one of those for just about every instrument. Most of them just plucked a metal prong and made a ting-ing sound, but they had organs, pianos, bells, and may favorite one had an assortment of a piano, woodwinds, trumpets, and percussion all in the same device. They also had audio production and manipulation equipment that you would use in a recording studio. Chiara, who possesses an enormous amount of knowledge about music, told us about one exhibit which, apparently, talked about Italian "Futurist" musicians. These people love technology so much that they think the revving of a car engine is more beautiful than any classical music. They try to make a variety of noises with technology to create new types of "music", and develop equipment that make noises no one has ever heard before. Thankfully this was not included in the audio guide. The museum also had two different types of Theremin, which is one more than I thought there were. The second one, the Theremin 91b, make a tone more similar to a human singing than the first. I personally think they need to work on that goal for a little while longer, but to each there own. The last thing I'll mention about the first floor was what Brea called the original CD, which was one of those "programmable" instruments with pins sticking up that make the music play, but the thing with the prongs was in disk form.
The second floor exhibited instruments from all over the world. It started out with some things I was generally familiar with like tin flutes, drums that look like they came from the Revolutionary War, and very old lutes, to things that I would never have imagined existed and couldn't begin to describe the sounds they made. They had things like hurdy-gurdys, huge Tibetan woodwinds and drums, and flutes that I'm almost 100% sure are made from a human thigh bone. Brea thinks it's not human, but I'll post the picture soon and let the doctors among you decide for yourselves. The reason I think they're human is because the thigh-flute was sitting next to the top half of two skulls that are clapped together to make a hollow sound, and I'm almost 100% certain that those, too, where human skulls. They had Mexican instruments like an Arpa (harp), marimba (xylophone), and guitarrions (guitars), including one made from a gourd which was pretty cool. There was also a Mohican "scraper" which, again, was almost certainly human bone with slits cut into it which was played by raking a stick across the slits.
There was an enormous selection of Eastern instruments, too. They had Chinese chimes and stringed instruments that I think were used for religious ceremonies that, when played over the audio guide, put us all to sleep for about a minute. Not because they were boring, but they just kind of put you into a trance. There were a bunch of Erhus, which are like violins, but with only two strings that make a much different sound from a traditional violin. There were Javanese (an ethnic group in Indonesia) instruments that had a bunch of cymbals, xylophones, gongs, and even a few puppets. There were a bunch of Japanese stringed instruments, too. I would give the real names for all these things, but I took a lot of blurry photos today and I can't read all the labels in my pictures. It's only my first blog day for the trip though. I'll get better for the second.
The next section had instruments from Africa. There were some hollowed-out logs that made a different tone depending on where you struck it, drums of different sized and shapes, stringed instruments that you played by plucking that looked very similar to an Erhu, and an instrument from Madagascar called a Valiha that was a hollowed limb wrapped in strings. I have no idea how the instrument is played, but it sounds nothing like what I expected it to.
Next came the interesting European and Russian instruments like accordions, bagpipes, flutes made out of tree bark in a spiral cone shape, ocarinas, harmonicas, and flutes with ram horns attached to the end that I called cheater shofars. There were some instruments from Eastern Europe that seemed to be played by rubbing a wet sponge repeatedly along horsehair attached to a drum. I have no idea it that's how it's actually played, because the sound it made in the audio guide was unrecognizable. The harmonicas were really interesting because they had a bunch of different kinds that I didn't know existed, like the bass harmonica. None of them sounded significantly different from the others, but when played together they sounded really interesting. The also had something called a Jew's Harp, which you play by holding a u-shaped piece of metal between your teeth and plucking at a metal prong sticking out of the other end. I have no idea why it's called that, and it sounded a little silly, but was interesting because it was/is a source of entertainment in rural areas with little to no electricity or other sourced of excitement.
There was a selection of South American instruments that seemed mostly decorative with little actual musical ability required. The main display was of a big wolf costume, the musical portion of which was a wooden mouth that the wearer would clap together. The also had noisemakers that I'm going to call gregors, even though they were called "ratchets" on the label. In this section was also decorative glass trumpets that looked very Chihuly-like, but I don't think they were.
The third floor consisted mostly of what I would call traditional instruments like violins, pianos, harpsicords, flutes, bassoons, etc., but really, really old ones. They also has less-traditional versions of the instruments. like a trombone where the bell was in the shape of a serpent and a piano with a curved keyboard. My favorite was a keyboard that operated what I can only call automatic violins. The whole thing was shaped like a harpsicord, but under the lid were 4 wheels that seemed to be made of resin resting just under a half-circle of strings sitting perpendicularly. The wheels would spin freely, and the keys would lower certain strings in the half-circles against the wheels and play it like a violin. There was no recording of it, but apparently it's a one-of-a-kind and never caught on. The last instrument was a cone of what looked like glass bowls staked into each other, laying horizontally, and attached to a peddle that would make them all spin. The player would then wet their fingers and play it like that scene with the water glasses in Miss Congeniality.
That pretty much concluded our trip to the Musical Instruments Museum. We them spent the next 5 minutes figuring out which things we were going to cut out of our schedule because we spent way longer than expected there. We decided to go straight to St. Michael and St. Gudula Cathedral. Like most cathedrals, the front was some variation on Notre Dame, and stained glass covered every wall. After snapping some selfies out front, we went inside.
Lining the walls of the inside of the cathedral were dioramas from different countries' depictions of the birth of Christ. I'd say most interesting among them were the Korean and Nigerian displays, only because they were so different from the typical scenes with culture-specific details like traditional Korean garments and homes, or a variety of jungle, forest, and water animals surrounding the manger. There was a huge pipe organ dominating the center of the space that I think my grandma would really like. There was also a kind of pulpit that I guess is typically make of metal and plaster, but this one was carved from ebony wood and depicted the Archangel Michael doing some very biblical stuff (violently). It was hard for me to not compare this cathedral to the one we saw in London, which of course outshines nearly all other cathedrals, but it was still beautiful and grand. Marble floors, gold statues and chandeliers, intricate stone carvings, etc. You get the idea.
It was about this time that we realized, sadly, that there was no time for lunch. Since all of the museums here are only open from 10am-5pm we had to rush from place to place. Fortunately we all took Alberto's advice and snacked on what we squirreled-away from breakfast. He did his best not to rub it in. I had a croissant and small chunk of bread, Alberto had his awesome-looking sandwich with cheese and salami, and Brea and Chiara had chunks of bread coated in Speculoos. We won't make this same mistake again.
The next stop was Hallepoort, or The Hal Gate. Originally, in a multiply-failed attempt to keep out invaders, people living in Brussels constructed walls. The largest evolution of this wall had one large gate along the main river running through the town, the Hallepoort. Eventually, of course, some invader got in and sacked the city. Only a few sections of the wall remain, including this gate. The gate is now a museum with pieces from throughout Brussels history. The tower had one large spiral staircase with 13 large, bronze statues lining the inside.
Once again, no English translations were provided. The first floor was just general trivia about the tower. They had some weapons and armor, the most interesting piece of which was horse armor on what, at first, looked like a model of a horse. What it actually was, however, was the skin of a horse some Belgian royal person loved, stretched over a horse-form. They didn't patch the hole in the neck made by the bullet that killed the horse. This floor also displayed shackles and chains from when the gate was used as a prison. The conditions in this prison were so bad, that it was widely recognized at the most disgusting place the in region. The prisoners were given a wooden crate to use as a toilet, they weren't allowed outside or to open windows, no one ever washed themselves, and there were dead people all over the place. In an attempt to fix this, the Brussels government issued a decree that each day, all prisoners would be given soup, two loaves of bread, and water, meat once per week, and all prisoners under the age of 7 would get milk. Brea and I couldn't find any more information about that last horrifying bit. The also had a metal brand to mark all of the prisoners so it was easier to identify repeat offenders. Originally they marked prisoners on the back, but then started marking them on the face. Living in Medieval Europe must've been Hell on Earth, and being a prisoner earned someone their own special place in Hell.
The second floor was about living in the City and day-to-day life. That had a bunch of old maps showing where the different walls were located, and how them compare to the modern streets. My favorite part of this museum was about the weights and measures. Each licensed shop keeper had a set of scales and metal cups embossed with the royal seal that were checked regularly by officials to make sure they were accurate. They were used to check for counterfeit coins, verify volumes and weights, and keep everything in the markets fair. It reminded me that, as a civilization, we really haven't evolved much, because we still a lot of what was in this museum today, just in slightly more technologically advanced ways.
The third floor was about the guilds of the city. Guilds are generally just any group of people that get together and want to bring the strength of their collective voice to the city. They're a lot like unions, in a way, except that the most important guilds in the city would be on the council which decided how the city was to be run. The most prominent guilder were the ones that helped the city rise from under the oppression of one of their more recent invaders, I can't remember which, including the archers, shooters, and chefs who took to the streets with their butcher knives during the revolution. The leaders of the guilds would prance around in a parade one per year called the Ommegang. Earning a role in that parade was every guilds dream, but it was really difficult to earn the prestige necessary to earn a spot. The shooter's guild's leader at one time was Queen Elizabeth I. To earn this spot, every year the guild would get together and put a parrot (a real one) at the top of St. Michaels and St. Gudula cathedral. The would then take turns shooting at the bird from the ground. I don't know how they got the bird to just sit there during all of this. Apparently, Queen Elizabeth took a turn and killed the bird, so they made her the leader of the guild for a year. Eventually, the damage to the cathedral from this tradition got to be extensive, and they switched to a tall stand on the ground with a bunch of colorful blocks they had to shoot off.
The fourth floor of Hallepoort was an exhibit about doll houses and how children lived in Brussels in the 18oos. Apparently, doll houses were not just toys. They were used by mothers to teach their daughters how to run a house, including which servants needed to clean which rooms, how to greet guests, how to arrange rooms, etc. There were also some games, which were clearly for children, that the four of us enjoyed playing with for a bit.
The top floor had access to the battlements and the attic. We got some really nice views of the city. The tallest building in the City is only maybe 25 stories, and the next tallest doesn't look more than 20 stories, so we could see a lot of the city from the 6th floor. There was also a small garden just outside of the gate that's probably very nice when it's not winter. They had more of those trees with perfectly horizontal branches that we can't figure out.
By this time we were all exhausted, hungry, and needed coffee, but it was 4:00 and we wanted to visit one last museum before the city shut down at 5. So we got on the subway and made our way back to the Grand Place, where we were yesterday. We went to the City History Museum because it seemed like an interesting topic, but we didn't really know what to expect. The person at the front desk told us we could see most of the place in 45 minutes, so we decided to give it a chance. We started at the top floor, which was an exhibit about Charles Baudelaire, a poet from the 1800s. He lived in Brussels for inspiration for his next pamphlet. Turned out he really, really, really hated Brussels. His observations were mainly about how the people were evil and looked like goats, the women were treated worse than dogs, which were not treated well at all, and that everyone wore glasses and monocles with clear lenses just to make themselves seem more interesting. The biggest compliment he gave the City was that it has a small-town feel, in that everyone is involved in everyone else's affairs and spread libel and slanders. But this was a guy who had a deep love of skeletons, so his observations should be taken with a large grain of salt. I have no idea why the city of Brussels though this was a good thing to have in their city history museum. The floor also had a large display of the Pissing Boy cast from the same mold as the original one in the famous fountain. They really love that statute here.
The next floor was a bunch of maps and dioramas of what the city has looked like throughout the years. It had a lot of the same maps and displays that we saw in the Hallepoort, but had more information about the different walls throughout the years. The last floor was tapestries, paintings and pottery. Honestly, the whole museum seemed disorganized and chaotic, but was entertaining anyway.
Finally, we were able to convince ourselves that we'd accomplished enough for the day and looked for food. We wanted to find a better place than we went to yesterday, so our first stop was a cafe where we got some mulled wine, which Chiara had to order because I had no idea how to pronounce what they call it here, a beer flight of Belgian beers, and a cheese plate. We sat around for about an hour enjoying the view of the square from a window. Every hour or so the Grand Place had a light show displayed against all the buildings. It was nice, except the Place became very crowded at those times and it was impossible to actually enjoy it. But it was nice from a window.
We settled on a place called ABrussels for dinner. In Brea and my opinion, Belgian food leaves a lot to be desired. I think we'll look for a non-Belgian place for dinner tomorrow night. The best part of the meal was my beer. It was brewed by Belgian monastic monks, and certified as one of the best beers in the country. It was unlike any beer I'd ever had, but I'm not sure I'd call it my favorite beer ever. It smelled like a soft pretzel, and had a sour/wheaty/malty flavor that I really enjoyed. As incredible as beer in Belgium is, it just can't measure up to American IPAs, in my opinion. But in the interest of fairness, I'll keep drinking them while I'm here until I find the best one. It'll be hard to top this monastic monk beer though. It really was amazingly good.
After dinner we said goodnight to Chiarto and they headed back to the hotel. Brea and I walked the streets for a while longer and got a waffle. I was able to convince her to split one this time, instead of making us each get our own. We got a Waffle with Chantilly cream (whipped cream) and Nutella. I don't think we've gone more than 4 hours at a time without having either Nutella or Speculoos, and that's just fine with me. We got almost 25,000 steps today, so I don't feel all that bad about it.
As I finish this, the clock is turning to 3am, and we need to wake up early to catch our train to Ghent. I'll add photos as soon as I can, but now it's time for bed!
We had a couple false starts this morning. I think we hit the snooze button 5 or 6 times before either of us considered opening our eyes. But after we cleared that hurdle, we eventually rolled out of bed to meet Chiara and Alberto (Chiarto?) for breakfast. Breakfast was included with the hotel and included a large selection of bread, cereal, fruits, juices, spreads, eggs different ways, sausages and bacon, potatoes, and just about every other breakfast food from all over the world. Plus as much coffee as I could drink, which was most welcome. I had mostly bread, cheese, and a chocolate croissant which I've been craving since we'd booked this trip. Brea had grapefruit juice, bread, cheese, some pastries, and covered everything in Speculoos. Alberto convinced us to pack some extra food for the day, just in case we got hungry between meals. We all have him a pretty hard time about it, but ate our words not too much later.
FYI: Most of the places I'm writing about have French or Flemish names that I can neither pronounce accurately, nor spell without special characters, so I'm just going to call most of them by a loose translation I come up with. Thank goodness Chiara speaks a good amount of French or we would've had a really tough time. Turns out only about 2% of the population here bothers learning English, while about 80% speak French.
After breakfast we left for our first activity, the Musical Instruments Museum. The museum turned out to be much bigger than we'd originally anticipated. We expected a single story building with a bunch of traditional instruments and a few interesting ones. It's actually a 10 story building with a 3 floors of regular gallery space, some event spaces, and a restaurant. And they didn't even have that many traditional instruments, or at least not what I consider traditional (about a hundred photos to come for this part). The only down side was that nothing came with an English translation. All the instrument descriptions and histories were written in French and one or two other languages that I couldn't guess at. So what made this place much, much better was the audio guide. It didn't tell you anything about the instruments or its history. What it did play, though, was audio of what the instrument sounds like when played. That's why we spent about twice as much time here as we'd expected.
The first floor had what I'm calling "computerized" instruments. You know those pianos that have a cylinder with holes punched in it or pins sticking out of it that trigger mechanisms in the piano that make it play a song on its own? Well that had one of those for just about every instrument. Most of them just plucked a metal prong and made a ting-ing sound, but they had organs, pianos, bells, and may favorite one had an assortment of a piano, woodwinds, trumpets, and percussion all in the same device. They also had audio production and manipulation equipment that you would use in a recording studio. Chiara, who possesses an enormous amount of knowledge about music, told us about one exhibit which, apparently, talked about Italian "Futurist" musicians. These people love technology so much that they think the revving of a car engine is more beautiful than any classical music. They try to make a variety of noises with technology to create new types of "music", and develop equipment that make noises no one has ever heard before. Thankfully this was not included in the audio guide. The museum also had two different types of Theremin, which is one more than I thought there were. The second one, the Theremin 91b, make a tone more similar to a human singing than the first. I personally think they need to work on that goal for a little while longer, but to each there own. The last thing I'll mention about the first floor was what Brea called the original CD, which was one of those "programmable" instruments with pins sticking up that make the music play, but the thing with the prongs was in disk form.
The second floor exhibited instruments from all over the world. It started out with some things I was generally familiar with like tin flutes, drums that look like they came from the Revolutionary War, and very old lutes, to things that I would never have imagined existed and couldn't begin to describe the sounds they made. They had things like hurdy-gurdys, huge Tibetan woodwinds and drums, and flutes that I'm almost 100% sure are made from a human thigh bone. Brea thinks it's not human, but I'll post the picture soon and let the doctors among you decide for yourselves. The reason I think they're human is because the thigh-flute was sitting next to the top half of two skulls that are clapped together to make a hollow sound, and I'm almost 100% certain that those, too, where human skulls. They had Mexican instruments like an Arpa (harp), marimba (xylophone), and guitarrions (guitars), including one made from a gourd which was pretty cool. There was also a Mohican "scraper" which, again, was almost certainly human bone with slits cut into it which was played by raking a stick across the slits.
There was an enormous selection of Eastern instruments, too. They had Chinese chimes and stringed instruments that I think were used for religious ceremonies that, when played over the audio guide, put us all to sleep for about a minute. Not because they were boring, but they just kind of put you into a trance. There were a bunch of Erhus, which are like violins, but with only two strings that make a much different sound from a traditional violin. There were Javanese (an ethnic group in Indonesia) instruments that had a bunch of cymbals, xylophones, gongs, and even a few puppets. There were a bunch of Japanese stringed instruments, too. I would give the real names for all these things, but I took a lot of blurry photos today and I can't read all the labels in my pictures. It's only my first blog day for the trip though. I'll get better for the second.
The next section had instruments from Africa. There were some hollowed-out logs that made a different tone depending on where you struck it, drums of different sized and shapes, stringed instruments that you played by plucking that looked very similar to an Erhu, and an instrument from Madagascar called a Valiha that was a hollowed limb wrapped in strings. I have no idea how the instrument is played, but it sounds nothing like what I expected it to.
Next came the interesting European and Russian instruments like accordions, bagpipes, flutes made out of tree bark in a spiral cone shape, ocarinas, harmonicas, and flutes with ram horns attached to the end that I called cheater shofars. There were some instruments from Eastern Europe that seemed to be played by rubbing a wet sponge repeatedly along horsehair attached to a drum. I have no idea it that's how it's actually played, because the sound it made in the audio guide was unrecognizable. The harmonicas were really interesting because they had a bunch of different kinds that I didn't know existed, like the bass harmonica. None of them sounded significantly different from the others, but when played together they sounded really interesting. The also had something called a Jew's Harp, which you play by holding a u-shaped piece of metal between your teeth and plucking at a metal prong sticking out of the other end. I have no idea why it's called that, and it sounded a little silly, but was interesting because it was/is a source of entertainment in rural areas with little to no electricity or other sourced of excitement.
There was a selection of South American instruments that seemed mostly decorative with little actual musical ability required. The main display was of a big wolf costume, the musical portion of which was a wooden mouth that the wearer would clap together. The also had noisemakers that I'm going to call gregors, even though they were called "ratchets" on the label. In this section was also decorative glass trumpets that looked very Chihuly-like, but I don't think they were.
The third floor consisted mostly of what I would call traditional instruments like violins, pianos, harpsicords, flutes, bassoons, etc., but really, really old ones. They also has less-traditional versions of the instruments. like a trombone where the bell was in the shape of a serpent and a piano with a curved keyboard. My favorite was a keyboard that operated what I can only call automatic violins. The whole thing was shaped like a harpsicord, but under the lid were 4 wheels that seemed to be made of resin resting just under a half-circle of strings sitting perpendicularly. The wheels would spin freely, and the keys would lower certain strings in the half-circles against the wheels and play it like a violin. There was no recording of it, but apparently it's a one-of-a-kind and never caught on. The last instrument was a cone of what looked like glass bowls staked into each other, laying horizontally, and attached to a peddle that would make them all spin. The player would then wet their fingers and play it like that scene with the water glasses in Miss Congeniality.
That pretty much concluded our trip to the Musical Instruments Museum. We them spent the next 5 minutes figuring out which things we were going to cut out of our schedule because we spent way longer than expected there. We decided to go straight to St. Michael and St. Gudula Cathedral. Like most cathedrals, the front was some variation on Notre Dame, and stained glass covered every wall. After snapping some selfies out front, we went inside.
Lining the walls of the inside of the cathedral were dioramas from different countries' depictions of the birth of Christ. I'd say most interesting among them were the Korean and Nigerian displays, only because they were so different from the typical scenes with culture-specific details like traditional Korean garments and homes, or a variety of jungle, forest, and water animals surrounding the manger. There was a huge pipe organ dominating the center of the space that I think my grandma would really like. There was also a kind of pulpit that I guess is typically make of metal and plaster, but this one was carved from ebony wood and depicted the Archangel Michael doing some very biblical stuff (violently). It was hard for me to not compare this cathedral to the one we saw in London, which of course outshines nearly all other cathedrals, but it was still beautiful and grand. Marble floors, gold statues and chandeliers, intricate stone carvings, etc. You get the idea.
It was about this time that we realized, sadly, that there was no time for lunch. Since all of the museums here are only open from 10am-5pm we had to rush from place to place. Fortunately we all took Alberto's advice and snacked on what we squirreled-away from breakfast. He did his best not to rub it in. I had a croissant and small chunk of bread, Alberto had his awesome-looking sandwich with cheese and salami, and Brea and Chiara had chunks of bread coated in Speculoos. We won't make this same mistake again.
The next stop was Hallepoort, or The Hal Gate. Originally, in a multiply-failed attempt to keep out invaders, people living in Brussels constructed walls. The largest evolution of this wall had one large gate along the main river running through the town, the Hallepoort. Eventually, of course, some invader got in and sacked the city. Only a few sections of the wall remain, including this gate. The gate is now a museum with pieces from throughout Brussels history. The tower had one large spiral staircase with 13 large, bronze statues lining the inside.
Once again, no English translations were provided. The first floor was just general trivia about the tower. They had some weapons and armor, the most interesting piece of which was horse armor on what, at first, looked like a model of a horse. What it actually was, however, was the skin of a horse some Belgian royal person loved, stretched over a horse-form. They didn't patch the hole in the neck made by the bullet that killed the horse. This floor also displayed shackles and chains from when the gate was used as a prison. The conditions in this prison were so bad, that it was widely recognized at the most disgusting place the in region. The prisoners were given a wooden crate to use as a toilet, they weren't allowed outside or to open windows, no one ever washed themselves, and there were dead people all over the place. In an attempt to fix this, the Brussels government issued a decree that each day, all prisoners would be given soup, two loaves of bread, and water, meat once per week, and all prisoners under the age of 7 would get milk. Brea and I couldn't find any more information about that last horrifying bit. The also had a metal brand to mark all of the prisoners so it was easier to identify repeat offenders. Originally they marked prisoners on the back, but then started marking them on the face. Living in Medieval Europe must've been Hell on Earth, and being a prisoner earned someone their own special place in Hell.
The second floor was about living in the City and day-to-day life. That had a bunch of old maps showing where the different walls were located, and how them compare to the modern streets. My favorite part of this museum was about the weights and measures. Each licensed shop keeper had a set of scales and metal cups embossed with the royal seal that were checked regularly by officials to make sure they were accurate. They were used to check for counterfeit coins, verify volumes and weights, and keep everything in the markets fair. It reminded me that, as a civilization, we really haven't evolved much, because we still a lot of what was in this museum today, just in slightly more technologically advanced ways.
The third floor was about the guilds of the city. Guilds are generally just any group of people that get together and want to bring the strength of their collective voice to the city. They're a lot like unions, in a way, except that the most important guilds in the city would be on the council which decided how the city was to be run. The most prominent guilder were the ones that helped the city rise from under the oppression of one of their more recent invaders, I can't remember which, including the archers, shooters, and chefs who took to the streets with their butcher knives during the revolution. The leaders of the guilds would prance around in a parade one per year called the Ommegang. Earning a role in that parade was every guilds dream, but it was really difficult to earn the prestige necessary to earn a spot. The shooter's guild's leader at one time was Queen Elizabeth I. To earn this spot, every year the guild would get together and put a parrot (a real one) at the top of St. Michaels and St. Gudula cathedral. The would then take turns shooting at the bird from the ground. I don't know how they got the bird to just sit there during all of this. Apparently, Queen Elizabeth took a turn and killed the bird, so they made her the leader of the guild for a year. Eventually, the damage to the cathedral from this tradition got to be extensive, and they switched to a tall stand on the ground with a bunch of colorful blocks they had to shoot off.
The fourth floor of Hallepoort was an exhibit about doll houses and how children lived in Brussels in the 18oos. Apparently, doll houses were not just toys. They were used by mothers to teach their daughters how to run a house, including which servants needed to clean which rooms, how to greet guests, how to arrange rooms, etc. There were also some games, which were clearly for children, that the four of us enjoyed playing with for a bit.
The top floor had access to the battlements and the attic. We got some really nice views of the city. The tallest building in the City is only maybe 25 stories, and the next tallest doesn't look more than 20 stories, so we could see a lot of the city from the 6th floor. There was also a small garden just outside of the gate that's probably very nice when it's not winter. They had more of those trees with perfectly horizontal branches that we can't figure out.
By this time we were all exhausted, hungry, and needed coffee, but it was 4:00 and we wanted to visit one last museum before the city shut down at 5. So we got on the subway and made our way back to the Grand Place, where we were yesterday. We went to the City History Museum because it seemed like an interesting topic, but we didn't really know what to expect. The person at the front desk told us we could see most of the place in 45 minutes, so we decided to give it a chance. We started at the top floor, which was an exhibit about Charles Baudelaire, a poet from the 1800s. He lived in Brussels for inspiration for his next pamphlet. Turned out he really, really, really hated Brussels. His observations were mainly about how the people were evil and looked like goats, the women were treated worse than dogs, which were not treated well at all, and that everyone wore glasses and monocles with clear lenses just to make themselves seem more interesting. The biggest compliment he gave the City was that it has a small-town feel, in that everyone is involved in everyone else's affairs and spread libel and slanders. But this was a guy who had a deep love of skeletons, so his observations should be taken with a large grain of salt. I have no idea why the city of Brussels though this was a good thing to have in their city history museum. The floor also had a large display of the Pissing Boy cast from the same mold as the original one in the famous fountain. They really love that statute here.
The next floor was a bunch of maps and dioramas of what the city has looked like throughout the years. It had a lot of the same maps and displays that we saw in the Hallepoort, but had more information about the different walls throughout the years. The last floor was tapestries, paintings and pottery. Honestly, the whole museum seemed disorganized and chaotic, but was entertaining anyway.
Finally, we were able to convince ourselves that we'd accomplished enough for the day and looked for food. We wanted to find a better place than we went to yesterday, so our first stop was a cafe where we got some mulled wine, which Chiara had to order because I had no idea how to pronounce what they call it here, a beer flight of Belgian beers, and a cheese plate. We sat around for about an hour enjoying the view of the square from a window. Every hour or so the Grand Place had a light show displayed against all the buildings. It was nice, except the Place became very crowded at those times and it was impossible to actually enjoy it. But it was nice from a window.
We settled on a place called ABrussels for dinner. In Brea and my opinion, Belgian food leaves a lot to be desired. I think we'll look for a non-Belgian place for dinner tomorrow night. The best part of the meal was my beer. It was brewed by Belgian monastic monks, and certified as one of the best beers in the country. It was unlike any beer I'd ever had, but I'm not sure I'd call it my favorite beer ever. It smelled like a soft pretzel, and had a sour/wheaty/malty flavor that I really enjoyed. As incredible as beer in Belgium is, it just can't measure up to American IPAs, in my opinion. But in the interest of fairness, I'll keep drinking them while I'm here until I find the best one. It'll be hard to top this monastic monk beer though. It really was amazingly good.
After dinner we said goodnight to Chiarto and they headed back to the hotel. Brea and I walked the streets for a while longer and got a waffle. I was able to convince her to split one this time, instead of making us each get our own. We got a Waffle with Chantilly cream (whipped cream) and Nutella. I don't think we've gone more than 4 hours at a time without having either Nutella or Speculoos, and that's just fine with me. We got almost 25,000 steps today, so I don't feel all that bad about it.
As I finish this, the clock is turning to 3am, and we need to wake up early to catch our train to Ghent. I'll add photos as soon as I can, but now it's time for bed!
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