Brussels - With a Gull Wing McLaren

Saturday the 20th of May, the wind and rains would be a wicked presance alot of the day. We got up at 7am for the included breakfast, and then went back to bed as we had resigned ourselves to a late start, hoping to avoid the worst of the nastiness outside. In between rain clouds, we made our way to the main cathedral and walked around the insides. We were particularly impressed with the huge wood carved alter, and the staind glass windows. When we left, we circled outside, and then the approaching dark clouds suddenly opened up and dropped a torrent of rain that forced us to run back inside the cathedral. We waited out the worst of the rain inside, and it wasn't very long before we ventured back outside to continue our walk. Vee was leading our tour through the city using a map that our hotel provided us, and it was the "comic strip" tour where we'd see all kinds of comic strip scenes painted on the sides of buildings throughout the city. It was a great way to get us into parts of the city that we probably wouldn't have seen otherwise, and only one part was a tad sketchy. We stopped in a cafe for a late lunch and coffees, where I had a chicken and vegetable stuffed spinach crepe with salad, and Vee had an apple tart. We stopped into Newhaus, which is a famous chocolate shop established in 1857 where we picked up a few chocolates. Another stop inside the the Galeries St Hubert was a museum exhibiting a small history of Brussels with all kinds of video, pictures, posters, and objects. The terra cotta relief sculpture was absolutely amazing. We continued our walk, stopping into places whenever we felt like it, one being the Mercedes store where we gawked at a $460k Eur McLaren with gull-wings and Vee got to sit in a $100k Eur Mercedes convertible. We also ended up seeing the infamous Manneken Pis fountain, and were surprised that it was so small. As it was getting late, and we needed to warm up and rest our feet, we wound up back in the same cafe for another snack where I had a little chicken panini and Vee had a coffee ice cream shake. We went to the Marriot for the first of the 3 more jazz shows we would see, and there we watched a little trio perform a few songs before we headed across the street to a pub where another band was warming up. We waited about a half hour there, but they never played, and it turned out we were in the wrong place. We went next door, to the correct location, and managed to catch a few songs by an experimental jazz band called Spacelab. The girl singing was pretty bad, and their songs were just too dissonant for our taste, so we left during the third song and headed out to the Grand Place to see who was playing on the main stage there. Earlier in the day, we watched a blues band play a few songs there, and this time, the band performing was more of a techno-funk-jazz fusion. It wasn't interesting enough for us to want to brave the wind and cold, and we were pretty exhausted from all the walking, so we headed back to the hotel, and by the time we finally got there, it was 10:40pm. A long, eventful, fulfilling, musical day in Brussels!