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Let’s say you want to plan a visit to a country, a city or a region. The first place you’ll go, for getting information about your target, will be websites like LonelyPlanet.com or InYourPocket.com that has touristic information to help you making the big plan for your vacation. But, after reading these web-guides you’ll definitely need an alternative source about your destination to help you with more targeted and, why not, more accurate information took by tourists themselves. One of the best sources will be the blogs. Why? Because the vacation stories written by bloggers will be more sincere, more focused and with good examples of places to visit (in many cases completed by good pictures) than any guide wrote by someone involved in the tourism business.

Now, let’s pretend that you want to visit Brussels. An interesting blog article you’ll find on Memories of Yore blog that’s about a visit of two Englishmen (actually a Romanian and an Italian that live in London for some years) in Brussels during a week-end. Also there’s an photo article on the same blog with the pictures form the same trip.

If you were to describe Brussels (and maybe Belgium?!) in couple of keywords, they would be:
1. Waffles - geez, so many waffles, everywhere, at every street corner, everyone selling them to armies of wafflo-maniacs
2. Chocolate - Belgium is the choco-land, no doubt about that. Every street has at least one chocolate shop, each of them boasting of drawing their roots from the early years of 1500 or something similar. And the chocolate is very good and cheap. Yeah yeah, i ate some, kill me now!
3. Cobble-stone - phew, this is nice, but if you have a car, or high heels, it’s a nightmare. And I remember when driving through Belgium some years back, they have cobble stone motorways too. Well, not many, but still. Phew, get a grip Belgium!
4. Beer & chips - yeap, it’s not just Britain and Germany. I expected Stela Artois to rule though, but I found they had a more popular local option called Jupiler which I haven’t seen before in the UK or anywhere else.

If you know the Romanian language you can read other opinion about the same city written from other point of view (Est-European point of view) on the HotNews website.

Orasul Bruxelles e, prin definitie, unul al contrastelor. Cosmopolit cu desavarsire, oscileaza intre lego-landul creat de belgieni si maghernitele in care isi duc traiul sutele de mii de imigranti africani. Intre Bruxellesul european si cel african nu e o distanta mai mare de doi kilometri, insa diferenta e spectaculoasa.

But, if you want to visit Vietnam instead, please take a visit to the Same Same but Different blog that has almost a documentary about a trip in Vietnam:
- Vietnam Trivia
- Countdown to Vietnam
- Vietnam - Bac Ha - Hmong Tribe Market
- Food in Vietnam
- The Hills of Sapa - Northern Vietnam
- Hill People - Cat Cat Village