Janet's City Walk

A small group of us (by recent standards!) met at Parc Station for a lovely sunny walk around Brussels. This was a slight variation on the Christmas walk, but was broadly the same.

We set off through the parc, and stopped at the Folon statue which is a memorial to children who have disappeared. This was our first reminder that today is a national day of mourning for Belgium.

We then crossed Place Royale and took a quick look at the Musical Instrument Museum before making our way to Sablon where we toured the chocolate shops (sadly many were shaded because of the sun). Then up to Parc Egmont where we posed by the Peter Pan Statue which represents friendship between the children of Great Britain and Belgium.




We then crossed Place Louise and walked down to the Marolle area, where we visited the beautiful art nouveau social housing and wandered up and down various streets admiring the architecture and bande dessine.

Then we walked up past Place de la Chapelle and crossed over to see the cafe where Magritte used to meet his friends. Then we passed a large piece of the old city wall before descending to the Mannekin Pis: a black armband on the little statue brought us all up short again, and we couldn't bring ourselves to take a photo there today.



From there it wasn't far to La Becasse, where we met up with Sheila's group and many of us sampled the speciality beer: lambic, and we had a very friendly waiter - whose twin brother later arrived and gave us all a bit of a surprise!


This is the map of the walk - our route is marked in red ... for those of you who want to find that material shop I wouldn't let you visit, it was in rue des Capucins!