Brussels

Brussels was all about the food. The Moules Frites (mussels and fries) are amazing, and the chocolate is to die for! And the flavoured beers! Hmmm...

The town itself isn't very large, but the town square, known as Grand Platz, is surrounded on all sides by some rather tall and grand old buildings, all with brightly coloured flowerboxes in the windows.

Not far from Grand Platz stands one of the biggest tourist attractions, the Mannekin Pis. From the amount of fuss made about it, we were expecting a huge statue, but it turned out to be a small statue of a peeing boy, probably only about two feet tall! We also ventured out of the town centre to visit the Atomium, a huge steel structure left over from World Expo '58.

Paris

Ahhh.. the city of love. Eurostar rocks! We left London after work and arrived in Paris only 2.5 hours later. Loving the whole proximity to Europe thing over here!

It's pretty amazing to finally see the Eiffel tower with your own eyes. Personally I think it's even more spectacular in real life than in pictures. We didn't really feel like lining up for a couple of hours, so we skipped the climb to the top of the tower. Over the course of the weekend, we visited a few of the famous sights - the Arc de Triomphe, Les Champs-Elysées, the Louvre, and Notre Dame.



The Louvre is much larger than I had ever imagined. We spent an hour in there and probably only saw a very small part of the gallery, but we managed to fit in the Mona Lisa and the Venus de Milo. Even though there was a sign telling people not to take photos of the Mona Lisa, it didn't seem to stop anyone, so we tried to take our own. Unfortunately we were interrupted by a security guard who yelled "NO PHOTO" in Shane's ear, so our photo is a bit blurry...



On Sunday we decided to do a spot of shopping, but of course, as we NOW know, the shops in Paris are closed on Sunday :( Oh well... better luck next time. Instead we found our way to the Latin Quarter and spent the afternoon wandering through the narrow cobblestone streets, lined with cafés and shops.

Cornwall

Once again we jumped onto a weekend bus-tour organised by Karen, holiday organiser extraordinare :)

The drive down to Cornwall wasn't too bad (straight after work on a Friday night), but coming back, we copped the afternoon sun, and in a mini-bus without air conditioning, it wasn't nice at all!

We visited several sandy beaches, tried a few cornish pasties, walked to Lands End (the easternmost point of England), and even spotted a few pirates at Penzance :p



The highlight of the trip was the Minack Theatre, an outdoor ampitheatre, carved into the side of a cliff, overlooking the ocean! Pretty amazing stuff. It was designed and mostly built by a woman. She had a few helpers along the way but she did most of it with her own bare hands.

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