Brussels – Day 1

We’ve arrived in Brussels without incident. The plane ride went smooth and we easily sorted getting the train from the airport to Central Station for a mere €2.80 a piece and and before you know it, we were checking into our hotel which is literally across the street from Central Station.

I was amused to see a coke machine in the train station featuring Manekkin Pis.

Manneken Pis Coke Machine

It’s cold here. VERY cold. High today was right around freezing. But the sun is out! I’ll take it!

Grand Place

One of our first stops was Leonidas to get some chocolate.

Leonidas Chocolate

We did a little walking around but were were pretty exhausted so went back to the hotel to take a nap.

After sleeping for a few hours we headed back out. The sun was down and we wanted to see the light show in the Grand Place. It was really something to see. Moving lights set to music.

Light show in Grand Place

I’ll post a video later.

I’ll say this, swapping lenses and shooting with a tripod in this cold is not the most fun. But I am determined.

Now it’s off to bed to sleep in earnest. More tomorrow.

Final Preparations

Man, I am going to miss this passport when it’s time to renew it in a few years. It has all my stamps in it!

Time is growing short and we’re making the final preparations to leave the country.

  • Dooley has been dropped off at Adventures In Birds. They’ll board him till we get back and we know they’ll take good care of him. Still, it breaks my heart to have to do this to poor Dooley. He’s like me, a creature of habit and prone to homesickness.
  • Called the bank to let them know I would be using my debit card overseas. In these days of aggressive fraud protection, you don’t want your money stream frozen because the bank thinks there’s something amiss.
  • Made Xerox copies of important documents. Hopefully, they’re not needed. But it’s good to have a record of your account and passport information just in case.
  • Cleared the fridge of spoilables. Don’t want to come home to post-hurricane like horror.
  • Packed and re-packed. Everything except the camera in a single backpack. Camera is in a small camera bag with a few lenses. The backpack is loaded with sundry electronic doo-hickies including chargers, socket converters, CPAP, netbook and tripod with a little room left over for a change of clothes or two.

    • In an unexpected turn of good fortune, I found my Flip Mino. It had been lost for several months. I thought it must have fallen out of my pocket while out and about and lost forever. As it happened, I was looking for something else the other day and my search lead me to look under the couch, and there was the Mino. A good omen!

    We’ll be doing a final check of all system before departure and then I am off to do my final Technology Bytes show of the year tonight. Geekradio on Xmas eve promises to be a lot of fun so tune in if you are near a radio or stream it live from kpft.org.

    I’ll be updating here during the trip as often as I can with photos, videos and commentary. If you are on twitter go ahead and follow @baldheretic as I hope to “tweet” with some frequency.

    Wish us luck!

    Soon, Brussels

    Grote Markt (Grand Place), Brussels Belgium.

    No, I did not take this photo. I grabbed it from the Winter Wonders Web site.

    We leave in a few short days and I find myself hyperventilating with anticipation. We’ve done our preliminary test packing and it looks like we’ll be able to fit most everything into our respective backpacks. This includes my recently acquired Manfrotto super deluxe tripod so I can take extended exposure shots. Travelling light and without checking luggage is HUGE in terms of piece of mind and rapid mobility.

    The overseas flight from Atlanta to Brussels is not even half full at this time. I am hoping this translates to some stretching out and maybe some sleep before we get there. If not, we know how to beat the jet-lag by now. You just have to push through that first day.

    In terms of camera gear I will, of course, have the Sony Alpha 700. My lens arsenal will consist of the the Tamron 17-50mm f/2.8 as my primary walk about with the 11-18mm for wide angle shots and the Sigma 30mm f/1.4 for evenings and other low light situations that require me to shoot handheld.

    On the fence regarding the Minolta 70-210mm and the Sony fisheye. We’ll see.

    The forecast looks good. Cold, but no precipitation.

    On the agenda for Brussels:

    Mini-Europe because I want to do some fake miniatures of a real miniature. It’s also the location of Atomium which was created for the Expo ’58 (the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair).
    The René Magritte Museum because, well MAGRITTE!
    Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences to see some whale skeletons.
    Royal Museums of Fine Arts to see ‘The Death of Marat‘ by Jacques-Louis David.
    The Belgian Comic Strip Center to see the cartoons!
    Delirium Cafe which boasts over 2,000 different beers to choose from.
    La Mort Subite for more beer.

    And as much more as we can squeeze into the time we’ll be there. We are tentatively planning a side trip to Bruges which is only an hour away by train. There’s an ice sculpting festival going on that I would like to check out.

    If we have the energy, we’ll ring in the new year at the Grand Place which I believe will have a fireworks display before heading back to The States on new year’s day.

    Travelling Digitalia

    I think I have the tech for the upcoming trip to Brussels sorted out. The G1 Android has been unlocked and I have been in communication with Belgacom and they indicate I should be able to pick up a “pay as you go” SIM card for my phone that will allow me to make voice calls and data connections over their 3G network. This will be much less expensive than paying T-Mobile roaming charges and will allow me to utilize the features of my phone like the GPS and Google Maps. Not that I have a real need, but the geek in me wants to play….

    I’ve also acquired a MSI Wind U100-420US 10-Inch Netbook. 1.6 GHz Intel Atom Processor, 1 GB RAM (upgraded to two), 120 GB Hard Drive, XP Home and a 3 Cell Battery. Built in WI-FI as well as an Ethernet port this computer should be all I need to keep up to date with my online obligations as well as allowing me to offload and process my pictures. Web cam, nice large keyboard and display and it weighs under 2.5 lbs making it something I can tuck into the pocket of my backpack for easy toting!

    For the price, this thing rocks! There are some newer models coming out at the beginning of 2009 which have more features (and cost alot more) but this is all I need. It’s snappy and easy to use and being relatively inexpensive it would hurt my feelings to lose it while abroad, but it would not be devastating.

    Shiny Euros

    We have received our travelin’ Euros for the upcoming trip. I love the colour of European money. The holograms are so pretty. It’s like play money in that it doesn’t look real, but it also evokes the passion I associate with travel. Having Euros in hand makes the whole thing more “real”, if that makes any sense.

    Of course, being the shutterbug I am, I wanted to photograph the bills as a matter of course so I played with different configurations and ended up with the above shot.

    When I had finished procressing the RAW file and went to open it in Photoshop CS3, the strangest thing happened. This message popped up saying “”This Application Does Not Support the Printing of Banknote Images”:

    In doing some research, this seems to be the same for the new American bills that were recently issued.

    What stikes me is that this is not a scan of the Euro notes. It’s a photograph and it doesn’t even include a complete, unobscured bill in the photo. Yet Photoshop recognized the content of the image and produced that warning and, presumably, will not print it in the unaltered form.

    It only let me save the oringinal file as PNG and I have not tried to print it.

    Technology is cool!

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