I'm Baaaack!!!

Last week, my dad and I went to Brussels to attend the Label Expo, which was from Sept. 26 to Sept. 29. Unfortunately, the only tickets available for us were from Sept. 24 to Sept. 30, so we spent a few more days there. Over the next few days, I’ll post about our trip. If you’d like to see photos from our trip, check out my Flickr collection here. For now, here’s part one:

The first day, we woke up at 3:30am to catch our flight for 6:30am. The airline's system was down, and we had to wait an hour just to get our boarding passes. After that, everything went smoothly. We had two short stopovers, one at Hong Kong, and another at London, before we reached Brussels. The trip took us around 15 hours, and it was late night when we arrived. We decided to take the train there, and got a bit lost. The tram system in Brussels is a maze of 50 trams going through all parts of Brussels, with several big stations getting most of the trams. The ingeniuity of the system is that the trams go through the regular roads, and then become the subways too. But there are so many of them, and the schedules contain a bunch of stops in French and German that most tourists would be confused, especially not knowing which stops are where. This was our problem, and we had to ask for help to get the right tram to our hotel. Luckily, the people were friendly and helpful, and spoke English.

On the second day, the expo hadn't started yet, so we thought it would be nice to take a trip to Paris to see the sights. It so happens that there was a train that headed straight to Paris, and only took an hour. We had to go to a station called Gare du Midi (Midlle Station), where most trams stopped, and they had a train station for trains going to other cities, like London, France, Amsterdam, etc. We boarded the train for Paris around 10:13am, and we arrived at around 11am. Once there, we bought all-day passes for the bus/subway, and headed out. Our first stop was the Notre Dame cathedral that was located in a small island in the middle of Paris. There were a lot of tourists there, and we were even allowed inside to take pictures and look around. After that, we had lunch at a Brasserie nearby. The food there were pretty expensive. After lunch, we walked to our next stop, which was the Louvre. Unfortunately, they were charging people to go inside, so we only took some pictures outside, then headed down towards the Jardin des Tuileries. It was a long walk from the Louvre. From there, we walked down towards the Champs D'Elysee and the Arc de Triomphe. There were so many shops and restaurants on the road heading down towards the Arc de Triomphe. It reminded me of Downtown Toronto. In fact, most of Paris was different from what I imagined. Whereas Brussels was lined with old-looking houses all over, Paris had a lot of modern-looking houses and buildings, and seemed more like Toronto or New York. Anyway, after the Arc de Triomphe, we were extremely tired from walking for three hours, and took the bus to the Eiffel Tower. Since my dad had already visited Paris before, and climbed the Eiffel Tower already, he suggested I go up by myself, and I did. They actually allowed people to climb the staircase from one of the bases of the Tower. It was a long, hard climb, and I realized how out of shape I was. By the time I got to the first level, my knees were buckling, and I was panting heavily. But the sight was spectacular, and I started taking pictures. Unfortunately, shortly after getting there, it started raining. Despite that, I continued on to the second level, which was another hard climb. I didn't have an umbrella, so the rain was pouring hard on me while I climbed. Thankfully, I didn't get sick. I got to the second floor, and the view was even nicer, except for the rain. After a while, the rain subsided, and I got to take some more pictures. Finally, when I had enough, I went down. Since they closed the staircase due to slippery steps, I took the elevator down, and met up with my dad. We took some more pictures with the Tower and headed back to the bus station. We decided to have dinner first, and strolled outside the train station where there were a lot of restaurants there. We were deciding where to eat when one of the servers from a restaurant came out and greeted us, showing us their menu and their deals of the day. Convinced, we went in and ordered our meals. We both got steaks, but the meat was too tough. They did, however, give us a lot of french fries. And I mean, a lot! By the time I finished eating them all, I was extremely full. The fries were really good, though. By this time, the guy who convinced us to go in had already invited a lot of others in, and the restaurant was packed. We paid for our meal and left to board our train back to Brussels. It was around 11pm when we got back to Gare du Midi. By now, we were more familiar with the tram system that we knew to take tram number 55 back to Verboekhoven, which is the stop where we get off, then walk a few blocks back to our hotel. All in all, it was a great experience visiting Paris. I got to practice my french, and I got to visit places that I've studied about in high school.