{"id":10158,"date":"2015-02-03T18:25:31","date_gmt":"2015-02-04T02:25:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/princessleia.com\/journal\/?p=10158"},"modified":"2015-02-03T18:25:31","modified_gmt":"2015-02-04T02:25:31","slug":"afternoon-in-brussels","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/princessleia.com\/journal\/2015\/02\/afternoon-in-brussels\/","title":{"rendered":"Afternoon in Brussels"},"content":{"rendered":"

My trip to Brussels for FOSDEM<\/a> was a short one, I have a lot of work to do at home so it was impossible for me to make the case for staying more than three days. But since I got in early Friday morning, I did have Friday afternoon to do a bit of exploring.<\/p>\n

First stop: get some mussels and frites!<\/p>\n

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For the rest of the afternoon I had planned on taking one of the tourist buses around town, but by the time I was ready to go it was 2PM and the last loop started at 2:30 that day, not giving me enough time to snag the last bus, and even if I had, where’s the fun in never getting off it? So I made my way toward Grand Place<\/a>, where there were loads of shops, drinks and museums.<\/p>\n

I decided to spend my afternoon at the Museum of the City of Brussels<\/a>, which is dedicated to the history of the city and housed at Grand Place in the former King’s Mansion (Maison du Roi).<\/p>\n

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I’m glad I went, the museum had some beautiful pieces and I enjoyed learning about some of the history of the city. They were also running a special exhibit about the German occupation around World War I, which offered some interesting and sad insight into how the Belgians handled the occupation and the suffering endured by citizens during that time. Finally, I thoroughly enjoyed the browse through the amusing array of costumes made for the famous Manneken Pis<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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The museum closed at 5PM and I made my way to visit the actual Manneken Pis fountain, located a few blocks south of the Grand Palace. It was starting to get quite chilly out and I was glad I had packed mittens. I snapped my photo of the fountain and then meandered my way back north until I found a little cafe where I got myself a nice cup of hot chocolate and warmed up while I waited for the Software Freedom Conservancy dinner at Drug Opera.<\/p>\n

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I also spent time scouring shop fronts for a Delirium Tremens stuffed toy elephant (as seen here<\/a>). I saw one through a shop window the last time I was in Brussels in 2010, but it was late at night and the shop was closed. Alas, I never did find the elephant… until after dinner when I was walking back to my hotel once again late at night and the shop was closed! Argh! May we meet again some day, dear pink elephant.<\/p>\n

In general the short length of the trip meant that I also didn’t get to enjoy many Belgian beers on my trip, quite the tragedy, but I did have to be alert for the actual conference I came to speak at and attend.<\/p>\n

More photos from my tourist adventure here: https:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/pleia2\/sets\/72157650562831526\/<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My trip to Brussels for FOSDEM was a short one, I have a lot of work to do at home so it was impossible for me to make the case for staying more than three days. But since I got in early Friday morning, I did have Friday afternoon to do a bit of exploring. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10158","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-travel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/princessleia.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10158","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/princessleia.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/princessleia.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/princessleia.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/princessleia.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10158"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/princessleia.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10158\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10167,"href":"https:\/\/princessleia.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10158\/revisions\/10167"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/princessleia.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10158"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/princessleia.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10158"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/princessleia.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10158"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}