Brussels and Bastogne!

Ack!  Oh no!  I am getting further and further behind.  This is not good.  OK, well, first a few pictures from Brussels.  We were there for two nights.  It is the capital of the European Union (I hadn't known that before I went there) so apparently it has sort of turned into a government town.  Also the whole city is multilingual in Flemish and in French (alas, I knew neither, so that didn't help me much!  but Alice speaks French, so that was awesome and I took full advantage of it by making her order for me in restaurants and do all the talking to people, haha.  I think she was quite sick of it by the time we left).

Me in Brussels, in the Grand Square (wearing the blue shirt, in case you can't find me, haha).  The buildings behind me, along the side of the square, are old guildhalls where the town guilds used to meet back in the middle ages or maybe a little afterwards.  

Brussels is apparently famous for its chocolate...I am not a big chocolate person but I did have ice cream one night, which I felt counted.  Here I am eating it.  You might also notice the sunburn I got that day!  Next time I will put on sunscreen whether it is sunny when I leave the hostel or not...ahem....

So yeah, Brussels was cool but we were really just there in order to catch the train and bus out to the town of Bastogne for the day.  Bastogne was really central during the Battle of the Bulge in the winter of '44/'45, which is when the Germans made their last big attempt to push the Allies back towards the Atlantic and stop their movement eastwards.  Bastogne was completely surrounded for a few days--the Germans were trying to push through to Antwerp (because it's a main port, I think, and would give them a base on the Atlantic) and they just flowed right around the town as they moved east.  The main things to see there nowadays (related to the battle) are a museum and a war memorial on a hill outside of town.  

We caught the train and then the bus (it was about two hours, each way) no problem from Brussels.  The bus part of it was especially interesting because the route went all through the countryside and through the other little towns in the area and it was really scenic.  One thing that is really different here is that there seems to be more of a blur between the rural areas and the towns...like, you will be driving through what seems to be a little town, and then all of a sudden there are horses or cows in people's yards.  It's like tiny farms all close together, or very rural-feeling towns.  Kind of cool but really different from back home where you are always definitely in either the town or the countryside, and where farms are usually big enough that your neighbours are a few miles away...not next door...

Anyway!  This is a picture of the main street in Bastogne.  

When we got there we went to the war memorial first thing, because we weren't sure how long it would take us to find it/ look around there, and it was the thing we most wanted to see.  (I found out that day that the reason it was built where it was is that that hill in particular marks the closest spot that the Germans got to the actual town .)  Anyway this is a picture of me in front of the memorial:  

I'm not sure if you can tell from this picture, but it is built in the shape of a star and each of the states of the US is engraved around the top; this is because the troops that defended Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge were specifically American, and the memorial was built in 1950 as a joint project between the Americans and the Belgian people.  

There were stairs that you could climb to the top, and at the top there were several relief maps that showed the various places that were involved in the battle and which troops were deployed where.  So you could look out on the countryside and picture how it had all played out.  Here's a picture of one, it's not very good but will give you some idea.  (It made me think of a topographical relief map I made once of Saskatchewan, out of paper mache...do you remember that mom?...only of course these were nicer.)

This is looking out from the top of the memorial towards Bastogne:

After we had looked around the memorial we went to the museum that is right by it, which was AWESOME.  Joe, I was thinking of you pretty much the entire time!  It was a really good museum.  They had displays about both forces involved (the German and the American) as well as a really amazing collection of original items from the time.  Things that the soldiers would have used on a day to day basis (like toothpaste, bandages,  books that were printed especially for army use in extra-small, paperback format, clothing items, personal possessions, etc.) as well as original copies of documents related to the campaign--like the Christmas letter sent by General Patton to his troops andthe letter that Eisenhower sent to the D-Day troops after the first push onto the continent had succeeded.  There were also some Christmas cards and postcards that individual soldiers had sent home to their families that year.  Photographs weren't allowed inside the museum though so I don't have any pictures from there.  

So anyway, that was the Bastogne day.  I will write in my next post about Berlin!