Bruxelles

In the month of December 2014 the townhall of Chionssent a letter to fifteen students between 14 and 18 years old.

They proposed us to participate in a writing competition writing an essay “Sakharov Prize”: this is a prize that the European Parliament offers every year to an important person that fights to guarantee people their rights. We decided to participate and to write about people who won this prize.

In March we knew we had won the competition and the prize was a trip to Bruxelles to visit the European Parliament for four days. We were so excited!

We left on Monday 20th April 2015; we took the plane and we left!

The first day we arrived to Leuven, a town located 20 km from Bruxelles, at four pm  and we visited this place. We saw the townhall and the church of the town. In the evening we went to a typical restaurant and we tasted the “stew made with beer,  meatballs with tomato sauce, the typical beer of Belgium and a dessert (Montblanc)”.

On the second day we took the train to Bruxelles and we visited the Parlamentrium, within which, thanks to movies, audio guides and interactive games, we learned a lot of information about the history of the European Parliament and the parliamentarians who have succeeded over the years until today, discovering what roles they cover and what they do. A civil servant explained us that the parliamentarians could speak only for three minutes each and there are four interpreters per State (600 in total for 24 different States). In the afternoon we went to the European Parliament where we met Mrs De Monte Isabella. Here she told us about the functions of the Parliament and at the end of the visit she took us to see the room where the plenary assembly takes place.

On the third day we visited the city of Bruxelles: the Grand Palace that once a year is decorated with a huge flower arrangement, Saint Michele Cathedral, the Royal Palace, the Begijnhof, the Museum of Magritte (an artist of Surrealism). On the last day we left Leveun and we returned to Bruxelles to visit the town of the comics (graffiti on the exterior walls of the houses) and the Atomium which is the symbol of Bruxelles and Belgium, realized for the Universal Exposition of 1958. The Atomium is the most popular touristic attraction of Europe; this is a steel construction of nine spheres that represents a reproduction of an iron atom enlarged 165 billion times.

At 19 o’clock we took the plane to leave Bruxelles and to return to Chions.

It was a fantastic experience!