Saint Nicholas Church in Brussels

I never imagined that I would be able to visit the beautiful country of Belgium. It isn’t really that far away for me but there is this thing about visas and the fact that I have to travel 4 hours just to get to the airport, it makes travel a little too troublesome. Anyway, our plans finally pushed through and we were walking in the streets of Brussels, the capital of Europe. My initial impressions of the city weren’t very good. The walk from the train station to our hostel wasn’t that impressive as a lot of the houses along the way were a bit run down. It wasn’t exactly a slum area but it wasn’t that pretty. We managed to find the way to the Hotel Meininger which where we will be staying for the next few days.

We dumped out stuff and asked around where we should be going. Turns out, the city center wasn’t that far from where we were so soon enough we were on our way again. At least this time, we think we know where we would be going to. The area along the way to the city center is much better. Shops are open and there were a lot more people, probably tourists. The buildings were much more refined here and it seems to be a nice place to live in the city. We knew that we were at the city center when we hit the Brussels Stock Exchange building, which was a classical building used by the now Euronext Brussels. There were noticeably more people here so we know we were on the right track. There was no need for a GPS now as it seems that people were all going to the same place.

At this point, it seems the buildings keep looking better. One building which caught my eye was the Saint Nicholas Church. It is a Catholic church and it has a modern looking facade. One would be surprised to know that the church has been there since the 12th century. Naturally, the current structure isn’t the original structure since it was razed to the ground by the French. Shape is also irregular. Apparently, there used to be a river running through Brussels, but because of pollution it was decided to just fill up the river and create streets from it. The reason for the irregularity of the church was that the church uses to sit near the river. I don’t know if it was a good decision to fill up the river but we won’t have the Brussels we see right now because of that.

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