This is in the courtyard of the Brussels Town Hall. The courtyard was completed in 1712. The oldest part of the town hall was completed in 1420. Everything here is older than anything we can touch at home.

In 1830, a provisional government was formed at the town hall during the Third French Revolution. That brought about a separation of the Southern Netherlands from the Northern Netherlands and somewhere in the unrest of that part of the 19th century Europe Belgium emerged as an independent nation.

We spent the day without big plans or timetables. We caught a train in, got a phone set up, had lunch and walked around the Grand Place, and saw the beautiful buildings there, like these next four shots:

I stood close to the center of Grand Place and shot this interactive image. Click in the picture and scroll around: left, right up and down.

Here’s a view back of the steeple in the square as we walked down a small side street looking for some place to eat dinner:

This is something like a mall. There are plenty of storefronts on the ground level. I couldn’t say what was upstairs. These were open on both sides, but that’s a closed roof, though it feels very airy, with all of those beautiful lines. It really changed the weather. Were you too warm or cold or getting rained on? Duck in here:

A basic pastoral scene on our train ride back to our friends’ place: