My experiences visiting the heart of the EU

Hey guys, today's Sunday!
A few weeks ago, I and some of my classmates went on a trip to Brussels, "the capital of the EU". It was a kind of class trip for the bilingual students in my school. Now, bilingual doesn't just mean being able to speak 2 languages in this sense. It's a special education path where you have some classes in English instead of German. As I am one of these students, I received the chance to go to Brussels for 4 days. This post is going to cover my experiences when visiting EU-institutions. Let's start!

Brussels is somewhat a beautiful city

Brussels is a beautiful city with lots of buildings in a renaissance-ish style. These are only partially present in some areas. It is of course a huge city with a population north of 1.2 million, so it wouldn't have enough of these buildings to cover demand.
Brussels does have some very dangerous and not so sweet corners and places though. The Hotel we stayed at used to be a brewery. It is in the poorer part of town. It definitely does not feel safe there and there's A LOT of trash.

Day 1: The Museum of European History

On the first day (mind you we had just arrived and haven't been in the hotel yet) we visited the Museum of European History. You know schools and their unhealthy obsession with museums. Something I should mention: when you visit any EU-building or institution, you have to go through a metal detector. Well, one student wasn't very smart and took a pocketknife with him...
He got caught and it was confiscated for the stay. This was a really stupid and dangerous thing to do. But he didn't receive any punishment. For the whole stay, a friend of mine and I made jokes about how we're going to get stabbed if we fall asleep since the dude was my roommate.
Anyways the museum was actually pretty interesting. There were lots of really old artifacts as well as posters and such. The museum mostly covered events from the 20th century. So it was definitely biased towards EU-topics.

Day 2: Tour and Visiting the ARD-Studio in Brussels

Now this is a topic that was basically pretty boring. First we had a tour through Brussels, showing us beautiful places and teaching us about Brussels history. Something I remember was the old stock exchange. A huge beautiful historical building. Something I definitely didn't expect.
Later during the day though, we went to a studio of the public news and reporting institutions paid for by taxpayers. This was really boring because it got too technical.

Day 3: The European Parliament and Parlamentarium

Finally we get to the interesting things. On day 3 we went to the European Parliament. Once there we first attended a presentation of a guide and then actually went to the physical room. It was huge. There were booths for translators to translate each singular speech. When we were there though, there wasn't anything going on. It was just empty. The guide had a huge bias on languages and translators. I mean that's literally all he talked about... in four different languages. But yeah it was definitely something worth visiting, even though we didn't get to talk to any politicians.
Later during the day we went to see the Parlamentarium. It is basically a huge building revolving around education about the parliament. All we did was play some kind of game where we were split into four parties: The Conservative Party, The Liberal Party, The Left Party and The Green Party.
I was part of the Conservatives (we didn't get to choose our party). We had to simulate parliament regarding two issues, drinkable and safe water and chips for monitoring people. I'll keep it short, our party managed to get through most of our ideas and ultimately kind of "won"? Welp guess I should be a politician then.

Day 4: The Royal Museum for Central Africa

On the fourth and last day, we visited the Royal Museum for Central Africa. It revolved around Belgium as a colonial power in history. I believe it was one of the coolest places we've been to. There were lots of African animals and insects as well as artifacts and instruments from Congo. I was astonished seeing the huge insects and exotic animals. We even began to dance as it had a section based on Congo music and dances with a specific room to learn African dances.

WARNING DISTURBING PICTURE

our Free Time

During our free time we used to run around town, visit shops and basically just have fun. On average we took around 20,000 steps per day. We did typical teenager stuff, play pool, go shopping, buy clothes and eat fries.

Imo Brussels is definitely worth a visit for a week. I like the city but I couldn't imagine living there myself.
a 9*/10* class trip

See y'all next time!
Byebye!