Mont des Arts gardens

Saturday
This morning we headed to the Fine Arts museum, stopping for breakfast on the way - breakfast in the hotel was too expensive! Our route took us through the Mont des Arts gardens shown in my blip, which offers a fine view over Brussels, including the spire of the Town Hall on the Grand Place. Having reached the Fine Arts museum, we discovered their weekend hours had recently changed, and they didn't open for about another 45 minutes, so we back-tracked a little way to the St. Hubert Arcades, elegant galleries, covered with round-arched glazed vaulting, and containing luxury boutiques and elegant tea shops. Returning to the museum, we had to wait in line quite a while for tickets - I guess other people besides us thought it was a good thing to do on a cold, windy and wet day! The first part of the museum was the Magritte collection, dedicated to the life and work of the Belgian surrealist René Magritte, my least favorite part. The highlights for me were the Rubens room and the works by Brueghel. We took our time looking round, since we had the audio guide, and we had some lunch in their cafe, so we ended up spending the day there. Roger popped out during the afternoon to go meet Laura from the bus station, which was fairly close by. She was unable to come with us yesterday since it was the last day of her course up in Paris, and she and the other students were celebrating in the evening, so she caught the Mega bus up this morning. When the museum closed we returned to the hotel for an hour or so to rest our feet, before returning to the centre for dinner, and to show Laura the Grand Place.