Journey of Life

You ask, where the heck Magny-le-Hongre it is? Well, it's actually a commune, or administrative division, under the Île-de-France region, which is the same to Paris. Then you ask again, why is so interesting that we came to this place? Well, we came here only for two reasons, shopping and excitement! Rather than shopping at Latin Quarter or  Av Des Champs-Elysees , we decided to shop at La Vallée Village,  and is located within Disneyland® Paris! To get out of the best from this trip, we spent 2 nights at Kyriad Disneyland® Resort!

We opted for Bruges and Ghent trip by bus organized by Brussels City Tour . Avail one self of the green scenery along the journey that took about an hour to reach the city center. And nearing Bruges city center, we felt in love with the calm and serene neighborhood. Upon arrival, we were guided to a medieval bell tower known as Belfry of Bruges  from the backside before proceeded to Markt. It was a public square with a neo-gothical architecture of the Provinciaal Hof. We took our sweet time enjoying the view of the Markt.

Given three days for Paris wasn't enough actually. If we were having more time, places that might be considered are Versailes or maybe extend further to Monet and Giverny. However, we would rather to visit a small country, Belgium. In the morning, I presented a technical paper at ICCCISE held at Holiday Inn Paris-Gare Montparnasse. At noon after checked-out, we took metro 4 to Gare du Nord station to catch Thalys train for Bruxelles-Midi station at 2.25 pm. The journey tooks around 1 hour and 20 minutes.

Joie de vivre is a French phrase to express a cheerful enjoyment of life and that's how our heart felt for this city. Yet, the feeling continues when we visited the majestic and iconic Louvre Museum that tell so many stories from the arts collection, to the building itself. It was initially built as a fortress at early twelfth century and then to became a palace during the reign of King Charles V in the fourteenth century. However, it turned out to be a museum during the French Revolution in late seventeenth century The building itself  is rather overwhelming that divided into three main sections, Sully, Richelieu and Denon. Wiki: The Musée du Louvre contains about 460,000 objects and displays 35,000 works of art in eight curatorial departments.  The Louvre exhibits sculptures, objects d'art, paintings, drawings, and archaeological finds.  There’s something quite special about seeing these famed creations up close and in person.

A city of romantics, art enthusiasts and museum lovers. With over 50 museums and monuments included in and around Paris, so we ought to get Paris Museum Pass and avoided the long queue especially at the Louvre. We bought the 2-days passes during our visit to Musee Rodin for 39 euros each. The closest station to the museum is Varenne of metro 13. For your info, there are 16 lines, numbered 1-14 and two 3bis and 7bis. Its about 180 metres to the museum. We stopped for breakfast before got into the Musee Rodin line.

On the second tripped to Europe continent, we chose to visit France and Belgium for a week stayed, although I feel that Paris alone deserves a week. We still keep at 3 days per city rules for each trip, even so we reserved for Ghent and Bruges during our stay at Brussels. Belgium is a small country, yet there are many places that worth visits the Flemish region or you may extend further to Amsterdam or Cologne. But hey! we tried to avoid ' 6 cities in a week'  or '10 countries in 2 weeks'  of frenetic and restless kind of travelling. Let's travel leisurely!