Anneessens (my flat), Brussels
7:36 am

I took a lot of pictures last night, but jet lag finally caught up with me, so they had to wait until this morning.

My flat is five minutes from a main road, and the Bourse and McDonald's are just a 10 to 15 minute walk down that main road. When I arrived Saturday night, I took a few detours down my side of the main road just to explore, but on the other side there appeared to be some crazy festival (or rave) going on, so I just avoided that side of the road. Therefore, last night I decided as I walked home from my good old internet hot spot at McDonald's, I decided to detour a block or two on that other side of the road and just walk parallel to my main road for a few blocks. There was a spire of some sort that I could see, and I figured since I would be in Brussels for a while, it couldn't hurt to just sort of check out whatever looked interesting from afar.

It turned out that the building with a spire was in a big square, and it was really cool. It's pretty hard to capture an entire square on a little digital camera, but here was my best attempt:

(I will cheat here and use a picture that's not mine because my camera lens was just too small to capture the whole spired building:)

And finally, the buildings that were on my immediate left as I entered the square (from the left corner of the photo):



(Hopefully these aren't too small to see in detail, but it takes too long to upload larger pictures!)



Well, it wasn't until just before I went to bed and I was considering posting these last night that I discovered the big building with a spire is the town hall. Alternately called the Hotel de Ville in French or the Stadhuis in Dutch, construction on it was completed in stages throughout the 15th century, beginning in 1402.

The best part is that it turns out this square I found accidentally, apparently known as the "Grand'Place" or "Grote Markt" is apparently the "most important tourist destination" in Brussels. (It was named a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1998.) It's a good thing I randomly aimed for that spire, but I kind of wish I had gone out of my way to go there knowing what it was!