10 June 2011 – Brussels (Friday)

Today we both woke up late and not feeling very energetic.  As a result we decided to relax this morning and consider doing something after lunch.  It is so nice to be in an apartment where we have the space and furniture to take time to relax and not have to lay on the bed to do so.

Our goal this afternoon was to visit the AutoWorld Museum in Parc du Cinquantenaire,  (French for "Park of the Fiftieth Anniversary", or Jubelpark (Dutch for "Jubilee Park").  The U-shaped complex, which dominates the park, was built for the 1880 National Exhibition commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Belgian independence.  The centrepiece triumphal arch was erected in 1905.  The setting up of the Palais du Cinquantenaire, was initiated by  King Leopold II who wished to develop a park for walks and a museum centre in the wild countryside on the former parade grounds.

What catches your attention as you walk up to the park entrance from Avenue De Tervueren is the pond with a fountain framed from behind by the triumphal arch.   Walking forward to the U-shaped complex we found the entrance to AutoWorld Museum.   Walking through the museum was very interesting since it had (according to the documents) over 400 vintage cars by manufacturers from all over the world.  What was realling interesting was to look at the cars built in Europe for which we would have never had an opportunity to see since many were never imported to North America.

An observation of mine was to see the similarities of design regardless of which country and part of the world the cars were designed.  I suspect there was some time spent checking out the competition at the development stage.  Having noted that point, there were many interesting cars that had a short history, especially the electric versions.   Regardless I am not going to comment more but instead I have lots of pictures to share.  Again I will put a few in the blog but the rest will be at the end so those who are not interested do not have to go through them all. 

I have to say that my battery on my camera has really had a workout the last couple of days.  I suspect I have taken at least 500 pictures (and no I did not keep them all) so you can imagine how much time I have spent on filtering, sorting, deleting and collage building.  By the way, I did find a 1972 NSU car but did not find a 1965 NSU Prinz which is a car I did own.  Oh well, I did find a picture on the net for those who do not know what I am talking about.

We left the museum to walk on through the park and enjoyed our walk through the park which gave us a chance to see an interesting playground for kids that looked like it had been built from ‘pickup sticks’.

From this park we continued to walk along to Parc Leopold.  Parc Léopold is a public park located within the Leopold Quarter (European Quarter) of Brussels, adjacent to the Paul-Henri Spaak building, the seat of the European Parliament.  It has a large pond which gave us a great place to continue to walk on our way over to the European Parliament building.

As we walked around the Parliament Building (did not go into it) it started to rain so we hurried on towards the metro station to head back home.  At one point it was raining so hard we simply stopped and stood under some umbrellas normally used for shade for sidewalk coffee shops.

 

We got back to the apartment without any more interesting things to report and relaxed a bit before starting dinner.