Belgium Waffles

9/29/2009

Today we took the train from Paris to Brussels. Now I understand that some people in other parts of the world do not believe in showering on a daily basis or wearing hygiene products such as deodorant, but when they are putting themselves in public situations I strong believe that they should at least take other people’s noses and stomachs into consideration. On this particular train, because it was a silly French train that had to have a reserved seat and cost extra money just because it was French, we were stuck in a car with honestly the worst smelling people I have ever encountered. Now, I would just like to clarify that to win this in my book is pretty bad because I have been around people who have not showered for weeks while they have been hiking and sweating. It made Katherine’s and my skin crawl and invoked our up chuck reflex. It was intense.

After that fun little experience, I decided that I thought the French trains with all of their additional charges, over crowdedness, and smelly people are whack. Apparently Italian trains are along similar lines, but Ill just have to wait and see. For those of you who are wondering, I am writing these journal entries while I am on the trains and then copy pasting them once I get to our destination and have internet. This way I have something to do to occupy my time on the train and not have to spend time in the destination writing when I could be living. Also Katherine’s mom made a good point. Anyone in the world can follow our blogs, if I kept mine very updated they could figure out exactly where we are and that doesn’t feel too safe. So needless to say I am keeping the blogs a step behind our travels and not writing where our next destination is because it is better to be safe then sorry. Yall will just have to be patient. Pictures will also be uploaded when the blog is updated so that you can get a good feel of our most recent stop in our travels. Thanks to Spencer’s very handy computer expertise, this new program he gave me to try makes uploading photos so easy and fast, it is really no trouble at all. In addition to that, all of my photos will be backed up on the internet (same idea with my journal entries and this blog) so in case anything every were to go wrong with my technology, hopefully I will be covered.

We got into Brussels, Belgium around 12 and had to figure out how to get from the train station to our hostel via the subway. Helpful tip for traveling: Do not buy city maps before hand because they have them at the train stations that you can pick up for free, both a street map and a metro map. Maps are essential when trying to navigate a new city, although in Brussels my newly acquired navigational skills eluded me and I kept getting turned around. Luckily Katherine’s attention to detail and natural bearing were kicked into high gear and she kept us straight. Also Belgium is a bilingual nation that speaks both German and French, fyi.

So eventually we get to our hostel. I wouldn’t say our first time use of the metro in Brussels was the smoothest first time use of a metro in a new city, but it definitely was not the worst. Its always hard not to stress out because you have been traveling, you have your pack and your day pack on you, so essential everything that you have which becomes quite heavy, and you don’t really know where you are going which is an unsettling feeling. It is important to keep in mind to take deep breaths, try to get your bearings and figure things out so that you don’t move in a wrong direction and then have to backtrack.
Unfortunately our hostel in Brussels did not give off a good first impression. I was in charge of booking this hostel. I chose this particular one because it was right near the city center so that we could be in walking distance of everything and it also allowed us to have our own room for a very reasonable price. While we are over here to do the hostel experience, it is nice to have your own room so that you can sprawl your stuff out and not have to worry too much about it. Then you can also be as loud as you want when you are getting ready for bed and getting up in the morning. When I booked this hostel, I knew (from the reviews) that there was a chance we would not have a bathroom in our room and that it might be an interesting situation getting a shower. Luckily our room did come with a shower and sink, but to get to the toilet you had to either walk up or down a flight of stairs. You had to be buzzed in the main door, which sometimes took a while to be let in, so that gave a little more sense of security. It appeared that all the hostel really was was a lady renting out rooms she had, and she was a little on the bizarre side. Unlike the website said, breakfast cost 5 euro and therefore was not free and we had some issues with the free Internet at first.

Since we still had the majority of the day ahead of us, we decided to start off and find a place that had free wifi so that we could catch up on things. The place we found ended up being a MacDonald’s right down the street from our hotel. I know how American right. We were able to get all hooked up there, so we figured our the addresses of places that we wanted to see and did some other work.

Our first attraction in Brussels was the Grand Place. It really is just a big square, which I guess in the month of August they create a huge flower arrangement, the flower carpet, there. There are a bunch of ally like streets that lead to it and shops and eateries all around it and in the streets to it. It is just a fun place to walk around and really good smells waft through the streets. We wanted to see the Museum of Chocolate, because hey we are in Belgium and chocolate is a staple here. So we had to walk around for a while to find it. The museum ended up being this tiny little thing, but it offered free chocolate samples and we talked to a very nice man who was making chocolate and explained how everything is done. The museum was not that exciting, but it was cheap to get into and something cool to say you did in Brussels. Speaking of free samples, we went into a chocolate store (a random one because there are a million, in addition to a million lace stores and a million waffle stores) and I wanted to buy one caramel filled chocolate and the man behind the counter gave it to me for free. I was ecstatic! I really do appreciate nice people.

Next we wandered around to find this statue of a little boy peeing, Mannkenpis, which apparently is like a mascot of Brussels. We found him and as we walked up to him so did a group of school kids. They were so excited to see the little boy peeing. It was hilarious to watch them. Right by that statue, there was a lace store that was having a liquidation sale. Katherine ought a little lace lavender filler pillow to put in her drawers and I bought a lace table runner for when I am older and setting my own tables. I was pretty excited about the discounts and the Belgian lace.

Apparently Brussels is normally a darker, dreary, damp place. While it never rained while we were there, it sure did look gloomy a lot. A side note for everyone to knock on wood, we have had great weather so far on our trip and we really pray that it keeps up. So around 4 we decided to head back to the hotel, unpack a bit more and then figure out dinner. We decided to eat dinner at O’Rileys, which was right near our hotel. O’Rileys is a chain (we figured out) because it is the same Guinness bar that we had drinks and wanted to watch American football at in Frankfurt. One of Katherine’s friends, who had spent some time in Brussels, recommended O’Rileys as a bar, so we figured since we had already kinda looked at the menu on Frankfurt, we knew it would be pretty good. Turns out the menu was much more abbreviated from Frankfurt and very over prices, oh well.

After dinner we wanted to head over to the Delirium bar. Delirium Tremens, is my favorite beer, and I felt quite lucky that it was brewed in Belgium and there was a bar dedicated to it in Brussels that I could go to. The walk to the bar seemed a little seedy at first. You had to walk down a bunch of alleys that had restaurants on both sides. All of the restaurants seemed like they served the same things and I was a little confused on how one would choose which one to go to and how they all stayed in business (that seemed to be a common thought I had in Brussels). I guess the restaurants themselves had those thoughts so they positioned people outside their restaurant to try to hustle people walking down the street to come eat at them. It was pretty annoying, but oh well. Eventually we found the Delirium Bar and I was so excited to be there. It has a sister bar of another Belgian beer that Spencer was recommending to me and it brewed by monks, called Chimay, in the downstairs and then another sister bar across the street for Absinthe. Naturally I started off with a Tremens, which I actually think tastes better from the bottle as opposed to on tap, and then had a glass of Chimay. As Katherine and I were sitting at the bar, a guy walked up to take a picture of a Lefthand Brewery (a great brewery in Colorado) sticker someone had stuck up on the wall in the bar. This caught my attention, but unfortunately he didn’t hear my first attempt to strike up a conversation with him, which left me feeling kinda awkward. The same guy came up to us later on and asked us if we wanted to go across the street with him and his buddies to the Absinthe bar and take a shot. He explained that they were in the Air force and their plane had broken down in Germany. They drove to Brussels for some fun and right after the shot, were packing back into their van and heading back. We thought might as well because I had never taken an Absinthe show before and it was going to be free. We also couldn’t leave these nice military men hanging, really no harm. So we joined them and it turned out to be quite a fun experience. I had no idea that taking that shot requires such a process. I’m glad we did it and after the shot we exchanged email addresses and said our goodbyes. Katherine heard from him the next day and he said that he would send us some pictures of us that he took from that night. They were nice guys. We headed back across the street to the downstairs Chimay sister bar. I had one more beer. This weird Boston guy tried chatting us up, but he really wasn’t that cool and I couldn’t really tell if his accent was fake. We dipped out of their around 12 and headed back to the hostel to get some sleep before our first full day in Brussels!