Christmas trip to Bruxelles

I have always wanted to see the Brussels Christmas market so last weekend Dave and I went to stay for a few days in Brussels. We got the Eurostar straight there from London which I always enjoy using as its more scenic and greener than flying. We stayed in The Dominican Hotel which is in the centre of everything going on and was a very friendly and beautiful hotel. The Chritmas market is set in Place Sainte Catherine and is busy but not packed where you can't move or see anything. There are 250 small chalets selling everything from retro tin toys, allsorts of different foods and drink, jewellery, clothing, handmade gifts. There is also a huge ferris wheel, a gorgeous quirky carousel which has a dinosaur, submarine, hotair balloon and a few other strange great things that all had moving parts for the children to play with and an outdoor ice skating rink which we went on.

These photos are of the beautiful childrens carousel.

We came back to the market the following day to go ice skating which was loads of fun, we enjoyed ourselves so much!

I hadn't skated for about 17 year but soon got the hang of it :)

Dave tring to keep upright!

There were loads of little streets just full of great shops that we came across when we got lost but if we hadn't got lost we wouldn't have found the Grand Place. Down one of these streets before we ended up at the Grand Place we came across the most beautiful shop I have ever seen called La Cure Gourmande which is a sucrecuitier, biscuitier and chocolatier and it had this gorgeous old fashioned style which I loved.

The whole shop was like this, just full of gorgeous coloured containers filled with goodies and tins with ribbons full of soft biscuits and I could have just bought everything!

The Grand Place is the huge central square surrounded by guildhalls and the city's townhall and is so grand! The square was full of people waiting for the Les Nuits Electrabel to start which is a light show to music on the townhall and was amazing. The atmosphere there was brilliant, we ended up going back again the second night when they had a DJ playing for the lights.

The Grand Place during the day.

The Townhall. If you look closely you can see bars on the windows, thes are the light bars which light up for the light show when it got dark. There were also images and patterns projected onto the building during the light show.

This is one of the light shows I recorded.

We had a great time there and will definitely be going back in the future!