Last weekend, for the Puente de Andalucía, I headed to Brussels and Bruges. We arrived in Brussels Thursday evening, eager to set foot in yet another new country. We arrived at our hostel and made our way towards the main center to look for dinner. My first impression of Brussels: it is confusing. All streets have two names: one in French and one in German. Sometimes only one name is posted, sometimes none, and our map would alternate between French and German names. Especially confusing considering I speak neither German nor French. We found a restaurant with a fixed price menu and decided to get eating. Now, here’s a tip about restaurants with fixed prices: never order off the menu. Worried that our appetizer of escargot and main course of mussels wouldn’t be enough food, Rachel and I decided to both order the small side salad, figuring it couldn’t possibly be too pricey. Wrong decision. Our meal of appetizer, main course, and dessert cost 12 Euros, and we each had lovely extra charges of 8 Euros for our salads. That is 2/3 the price of our entire meal!
Feeling frustrated, and wallets considerably lighter, we headed to Delirium, a bar that came highly recommended. I could quickly understand why: the bar hosts the largest collection of beer in the world with its impressive menu of 2,004 different beers. Of these beers, over 40 are on tap, lining the long bar with shiny and glistening handles. As if this isn’t overwhelming enough, each beer comes in its own glass. The glass shapes ranged from standard long and tall to short and fat, to everything in between. Asking the bartender for recommendations, we began our night with an IPA boasting a whopping 11% alcohol. The beers in Belgium are definitely more potent and consequently stronger tasting than beers in the United States. For our second round, we decided to try the famed fruit beers that we had heard so much about. I opted for the cherry beer: dark in color and in flavor, and tasting less like cough syrup than I anticipated, it was actually delicious. Rachel tried the apple beer, which for me was a bit too sweet, tasting more like cider than beer. At this point, we made friends with the British lads sitting near us, and they started teaching us fun British drinking games such as “20 plus 1,” a game involving fluffy bunny ears, and a weird game about witches (the what?). We had a really fun night hanging out with them, and realized that this bar offered what bars in Spain lack: friendly people, a relaxed atmosphere where girls weren’t dressed to the nines, good music without the standard Spanish techno dance beat, and beer options other than Cruzcampo. Can’t we take Delirium back to Spain with us?
We had been planning on going on a tour of the European Union headquarters in Brussels the following morning, but when our alarm sounded at 8 am we had no desire to leave our beds. So missing breakfast and the one thing we really wanted to do in Brussels, we continued to sleep. We finally rolled out of bed around 11:30, had a quick breakfast, and realized we had no idea what to do in Brussels. Lacking ideas, we headed to the main square to look around. The streets in Brussels remind me of a mix between Parisian architecture with a small German town. It was certainly pretty, but unfortunately there is really not much to do. We saw the famed statue entitled “Mannekin Pis,” which depicts a little boy peeing. This statue, like many other things in Belgium, had been hyped up in my head so much that I was surprisingly excited to see this statue. To say that it was a letdown is an understatement. To me, this is probably the most overrated tourist attraction in all of Europe, just above the laughable astronomic clock in Prague. The tiny statue was barely a foot tall and so far off the ground that you could barely see it. We took an obligatory photo and left, feeling cheated out of a peeing statue. We wandered around a bit before lunch, and then headed to a Thai/Vietnamese restaurant, where we stuffed our Asian food-deprived bodies with noodles and rice.
After lunch, we met up with Rachel’s childhood friend Zach, who was nice enough to take us around the city and show us a few delicacies. We stopped at a frites cart to get Belgium’s famous fries. I opted for the garlic alioli sauce, which tasted great going down… but did not feel so good coming back up (more on that later). We also checked out a few chocolate shops and bought some delicious samples of the praline chocolate. Heading back to the hotel, my stomach started disagreeing with me. I don’t know whether it was the frites, or the alioli sauce, or the sheer enormous quantity I ate, but I was definitely not feeling a hundred. I vowed never to eat fries again (a vow that was then broken two days later in Bruges when the smell of frites overcame me). That night, I opted for a simple meal of pasta to settle my stomach and headed back to Delirium to sample some more beer. I managed to try a coconut beer, which despite the odd sound, was actually delicious. Being a Friday night, it was considerably more crowded and impossible to even find standing room, and without our British friends to pass the time with we simply weren’t feeling the crowd quite so much. That, and my stomach felt like it was going to burn a whole through my skin. So after our one drink we decided to call it an early night and head back to the hostel.
Saturday we checked out of our hostel in Brussels and were on our way to Bruges. As with the Mannekin Pis, Bruges had been hyped up in my head by people saying that it was the most beautiful city on Earth and their favorite stop in Europe. That being said, it is certainly a lovely city, but by no means is it now at the top of my list of favorite destinations. As with Brussels, there simply wasn’t much to do. As a traveler who likes to seize the day and see as much as possible, this was certainly frustrating. The weather did not help my feelings: the rain, and my umbrella inverting with every tiny gust of wind, made wandering the streets undesirable. We started off our visit at the Chocolate Museum, which provided a rather lengthy history of the origins of chocolate. My favorite part of the tour was the chocolate demonstration, where we learned in 5 languages how chocolate is made. A free sample of course was provided at the end, but I easily could have done with 10 more samples to cover the cost of admission. After the tour we ran into our British friends from Delirium – turns out they had the same itinerary as us! It certainly is a small world… or at least a small country.
Without much else to do, we headed to dinner at a lovely candlelit restaurant recommended by Lets Go. Rachel and Julia both ordered the ribs, which they said were delicious. I opted for a traditional Flemish stew. It was okay, but did not have as much flavor as I would have hoped. After dinner we hopped around a few bars, looking for a good atmosphere to match Delirium and hoping to run into our British friends again. Our first stop was a little café bar with cute tables and a long beer list. I tried the Triple d’Anvers, which quickly became my favorite beer of the trip. After our one drink, we headed to a bar called The Cellar which claimed live music and a fun atmosphere. Upon arrival, my first impression was that they took the theme a bit too seriously. The place was incredibly creepy – the only thing the dim lighting didn’t hide was the creepy clientele; people who looked as though they would hang out in cellars. Our third and fourth stops were more nightclubs than bars, so we decided to give up our search for the perfect atmosphere and just dance.
The next day we were awoken by our first day of sun! Wanting to take advantage of the good weather, we headed to the main square, which was certainly more beautiful in the sunshine. We climbed all 340 stairs of the belfry, got a view of the red rooftops of Bruges, and had a simple lunch of soups and sandwiches. In the afternoon we went to what I was most looking forward to: the brewery tour. Situated in a pretty area by the canals, the De Haalve Brewery was tucked away in a little corner of the city. Our cheeky tour guide cracked crass jokes and took us on a wild maze through the brewery and up to the roof, for our second panoramic view of the day. Heading back down, the steps were so steep that you had to climb down backwards, as if on a ladder. I certainly hope that nobody is sampling the products during production – there is no way you could make your way down the stairs after a few beers. They wisely held the tasting until the end, where we were all given a tall glass of pale ale.
Monday was perhaps the craziest day of our entire trip. We took the train from Bruges back to Brussels, and had to take a bus to the airport. The way in, we flew a reputable airline and flew into the airport that is actually in Brussels. The way out, we were flying Ryanair, and therefore had to take an hour long bus ride to this remote location. To say getting on this bus was a nightmare would be an understatement. We arrived with our tickets for the 1:00 bus to find a huge crowd of angry Spaniards huddled around the bus. Turns out the driver wasn’t letting anybody on, even though they all had tickets. He had stupidly been selling tickets to any joe shmoe that walked up to the bus, leaving no room for the people who had pre-bought tickets. The crowd was screaming in Spanish, we were screaming in English, turned to Spanish, and the driver was yelling back in French. Not a good situation. One Spaniard spoke a little French and tried communicating to the driver that we all had tickets, but the driver didn’t want to hear it, and sped off with us all standing on the curb angry. When the 1:30 bus arrived, we ran to the front and stampeded through the doors, showing our clear frustration to the confused second driver. Thank you once again, Ryanair, for ruining my day.
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