I thought the traffic yesterday was pandemonium. It was, but only cars. Today it was something else entirely, and I’m not sure what that was. The entire population of Brussels seemed to have turned out on bikes, roller blades, skateboards or foot. The motor traffic was either buses or taxis. There were street parties going on everywhere, buses and cyclists were duelling with no obvious rules. I was a nervous wreck after the first bus tour of the city.
Turns out that it was Car Free Sunday on 20 September, today! That explains a lot. We were going to take the car out of Brussels this morning to drive to Waterloo. Good thing I didn’t, probably would have wound up arrested.
Quick summary of the day’s events. Walked around Brussels first thing, had the obligatory waffles for morning tea. Please note that the photo below is not food, but representative Belgian cuisine, so doesn’t violate my ‘no photos of food’ rule.
As we wandered we noticed it was strangely quiet with not too many cars…. Couldn’t find the HOHO bus, so walked back to the apartment and looked it up on the map. Predictably, there was a stop just around the corner. Spent the next 4 hours on the bus (two separate tours), owing to the huge amount of bike and pedestrian traffic.
Visited the Manekin Pis fountain to round out the day. Every tourist shop has thousands of souvenirs modelled on this fountain. We expected something a bit grander than what we saw. The fountain is very small, the figure itself is about 600mm high. On occasions they dress it and today was one of those days.
