Europe 2002 Trip Reports Part 29 Brussels Day 2

This is the 29^th of a series of posts recalling my trip to Europe, using e-mails sent at the time.  Unlike later trips, I didn’t e-mail people everyday.  Trip reports are largely as I wrote them at the time with two exceptions: I was usually pretty rushed due to Internet fees in Europe, so I’ve cleaned up my e-mails to make them more coherent, which wasn’t a priority at the time.  Also, in some blog posts I’ll add additional thoughts with the hindsight of nine years later or to add further clarification.  I’ll use “NOW” in such cases.

This 29^th report covers my second day in Brussels and last full day in the mainland of Europe.

Walking around various parks this morn I stumbled quite by accident onto a free military museum (hey, using bad keyboard and avoiding typos!). Quite the place; not supposed to use flash photos there but sneaked a few; highlight was plane area: you could actually enter a US transport plane, plus part of another plane (front seat, the ejection seat); museum was closed for lunch so returned in an hour; I’m glad I did; I found a passage to the roof and got some great shots; I didn't even break the no flash rule there.

Also went to a E5 musical instrument museum; also no flash, and harder to be inconspicuous, so sorry no pics; nice to see though; headphones that I nearly left with by mistake played music as you approached the corresponding instrument.

[NOW: Apparently I’m not the first person to leave the museum with the headphones still on, as the security guard was laughing as he ran out to retrieve them.]

I don't think there's an easy way to get Euros converted back to Can $ so I treated myself to an E36 hardcover (in French) of my favourite comic series, Watchmen; my English. My copy is badly worn so this will let me better enjoy the art (the French hardcover is also larger); plus I'm curious to compare the English to the French and see where the meaning has changed a bit in the translation.

[NOW: I was able to convert the Euro dollar bills in Victoria but not the coins. I’ll probably tell the story of how my English language copy of Watchmen got damaged in a later blog post. The French language hardcover omits the original covers of the comics collected in the volume, which is unfortunately because they are actually the opening shot of each chapter of the story.]