Day 312 : Elle Tournent Dames Draaien Brussels International Female Film Festival! (Day 2)

Thanks to jetlag, we were up by 5am and then started the horrible wait until breakfast to open at 7am. Sharp at 7am we were at the dining room in the hotel and stuffed ourselves with the local fares of cold cuts, breads, a million varieties of cheese, coffee, tea and freshly squeezed orange juice.

Then we got ready and decided to explore the city further. Given it was a Friday, the festival was opening only in the afternoon at about 5 or so, so we had the whole morning free.

We walked again, this time to the Grand Place, the main square and chief tourist attraction (for very good reasons)  of Brussels. We had been here on our previous trip as well, but this time it was much nicer because it was off-season and there were only few tourists. We walked about the area a lot – in and around the square, some shopping places as well as the non motorable City centre, paid a visit to the Mannekin Pis (the peeing boy, who is a local legend), saw a carnival, were given oranges by the carnival folks, had Belgian waffles, had Vietnamese Pho for lunch because I wanted something hot and soupy to deal with the cold, had coffee in another place with a  grand view of the Grand Place, bumped into two beautiful churches, hear a pipe organ playing enchantingly in one, chatted a lot, took a lot of pictures and generally had a ball!

Grand Place

Local carnival

Oranges!

Waffles

Non motorable City Centre

The long walk from our hotel to Grand Place

Sights that we bumped to

Coffee with a view!

Church #1

Church #2

 After a while, we felt exhausted with the jetlag catching up, so we walked back to the hotel and decided to take a “short nap” at 4pm. Incidentally, the “short nap” ended at 1:30am when both of us work up feeling extremely hungry. But it was too late and even the Turkish place downstairs was closed. So the husband ate a bar of Snickers and given I am a bit more health conscious, I drank a glass of water and both of us forced ourselves to sleep again. I was a bit of disappointed that we “wasted the whole evening sleeping” but the husband was more optimistic. He pointed out that one thing about travelling without Madam is that we can sleep and wake up whenever it pleases us, so we should be pretty happy that this was achieved. Touche!

Thankfully I was exhausted enough to fall back asleep again, that too with the memories of a day well spent in gorgeous Brussels, so it was all very good.

188 more to go.