A Spoonful of the 13ième

The good thing about the Catholic church having had such a huge influence on European countries in days past? Religious days were made national holidays! Which means that I had Thursday off for Ascension and I will have next Monday off for Pentecost. I can live with that. It's kind of strange that they're still national holidays when of the already diminished Catholic congregation in France, even less are practicing, but the French do love their vacation time, so I guess it's not that surprising.

The first half of my day was just spent figuring out where I wanted to go for the weekend, and I decided on Brussels, but I'll admit I'm a little anxious because I'll be travelling solo and I've never been there before. Luckily I have an adventurous spirit and tend to not be crippled by getting lost. I should be fine. I spent some time in the 13th district because my friend, Agénor took us to a really nice park by his house. Since it was a holiday, the park was pretty packed, but we were still able to have a good time. We started off at this cool pond where I saw one of the performers from the restaurant Chanoinesse. He was just chilling, playing his guitar. I don't have a picture of him, but he looked a lot like the actor who plays Remus Lupin. The pond area had a really cool patio area that gave good shade.

Then we found a hobbit house. (I'm not really sure what it was). And we sat down next to it to have a nice nap.

Notice the rolled-up sleeves. It was hot!

We kept seeing people with ice cream and since it was a hot day we decided we needed to find the point of origin of the ice cream and set off to find it. Turns out, it was by this cool carousel which we wanted to ride but decided against because it seemed like it was just for kids and we're kind of cheap.

Thief!

Then we found these cool statues that were built for just about every ethnicity out of recycled materials. This was all after we considered swimming in the fountain like all the other kids, but we forgot our swimsuits. Tant pis!

Then Agenor showed us the university and they had a pretty sweet set-up but I unfortunately didn't take any pictures of that. There was also a cool theater that had a student discount that I returned to another day to watch X-Men: First Class. I was pretty impressed by the 13th district, it seemed pretty newly renovated and had a good age demographic because of the university students. I wish I had had more time to explore here!