My third day in Brussels…the second time. August 6, 2009

We have seen most of the city last year by walking around…the first city we have seen walking was Genova in 2006. We did that because we wanted to spend the possible least on transportation. Then it became a pleasure and a habbit. We have seen Paris on foot (18km in the first day), Barcelona, Brussels, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Zurich…we love ending up in a deserted neighbourhood or some forgot place that usually is not discovered by tourists so we take the untaken roads and don’t listen to the gps.

2 evenings ago when we arrived we went for a beer. Last year we went to the ’2004 beers menu bar’ and tried various ones, this time we went to a small typical bar and drank typical beer (we tried the triples which were over 6% alcohol). I got a bit dizy since I am not used to alcohol anymore, like when I was a student.

Yesterday we started walking:) We didn’t want to see what we have already seen and we felt attracted towards the parks so this is what we did. We walked for just about 2 hours and staied in a park for 3 hours more. I love the feeling of staying on grass. In Romania you can sit on the grass so I have always loved the Western Europe parks for this freedom. In Zurich people were wearing swimming suits in the summer in the main park near the Zuri Lake and if it got too hot they just jumped in the water. In Frankfurt it seemed parks were the only perfect places to study and people made barbeques. I miss the botanical garden from Frankfurt…

The best symbol for freedom, from my point of view, is the sea. Not the one you see from a sandy pieceful 1km beach, where people go to be lazy, but the one you see from the rocky shores of the Mediteranean…where the waves don’t joke and the sea shows its entire joy of life, where you need to take a mountain bike or your tracking shoes to see it. That’s freedom. However, when I lived in a city with no sea, I needed to figure out another symbol for freedom and rest my eyes watching it for hours…and this is the green from the big parks, both the grass and the trees.