I spent the first day and a half of my stay in Brussels trying to pin down a nice, fixed identity for it. Most of the other capitals I’ve been to have pretty well represented the stereotypes of the rest of the country. London was rainy, proper, and dignified. It also had lots of tea. Paris was full of couples, wine, food, and pastries. Rome was full of pizza, gelato, crazy people trying to steal purses, and Vespas.
Brussels did have the food it was supposed to have: waffles, chocolate, and fries (it’s possible they also had sprouts, but I have to say I didn’t look very hard for those). Beyond that, though, I could not figure out what image it was giving me of Belgium. Finally I figured it out—it’s giving me a conflicting message, because Belgium is a country with a lot of conflict right now. The northern, Flemish part of the country and the southern, French part of the country are not getting along so well, to put it lightly.
I finally decided that Brussels is the most comparable to Montréal. Random mix of old and new buildings? Check. Language confusion? Check. One part of the country wanting to be separate from the other part? Big check.
I took the train to Brussels and arrived in the early afternoon. I was couchsurfing for the first time—through a website, people can search for people who are willing to let them crash on a couch while they travel. I had been a bit wary of this when I heard about it (lots of friends have had great experiences, but I was pretty convinced I’d end up staying with a serial killer), but Amelia had been to Brussels just a few weeks before me, and she had stayed with the same woman. If Amelia said she was cool, I’d trust her on it, and it ended up being a great experience. Brigitte is in her 50s, and she first got interested in couchsurfing when she was looking to take a trip to Barcelona. She ended up not going, but she now hosts lots of couchsurfers who go to Brussels. She’s really interested in the environmental movement and in trying to eat organic, and she was absolutely wonderful to me while I was there.
I didn’t do much my first day there. I hadn’t been sleeping well the past few days, so I really did not have the motivation to go and explore. Instead, I helped Brigitte run some errands and I played with her grandson for a bit. Went to sleep quite early so that I could profiter from Day 2 in Brussels.
I set off the next morning for the Royal Africa Museum, which Lauren had recommended to me. One of my favorite things about traveling is getting the chance to peer a little more deeply into past (or current) interests. Maybe it’s just me, but I’m always learning about some new subject, getting fascinated with it, reading everything I can find about it, bringing it up in every conversation, and then letting it fall aside because I’ve found another new subject. My time here has already allowed me to revisit my love for impressionism (Musée d’Orsay, May 2008), ballet (Pacquita, October 2010), and several dozen places that I read about in books and always wanted to visit (I’ll do a separate post on that later). This time around, colonialism. Yay! I went through a short phase in high school and a longer phase in college where I loved reading everything I could grab about colonialism and post-colonialism. The initial interest into this stuff came from Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible which, fittingly enough, takes place in the Belgian Congo. Full circle!
Anyway, the museum was really interesting. I don’t think I’d recommend it if you don’t know French, since there were quite a few things that were in Flemish and French, but not English. That said, the newer pieces of the museum did have English translations. I liked all the anthropological sections, skipped over most of the animal stuff, had lots of fun with the colonialism stuff, and then got mad because they didn’t have any fun linguistics sections (despite mentioning throughout the museum how many linguistic studies had been done in the DRC). It was a lovely day out, and the park in front of the museum was gorgeous.
Post-museum, I headed off on a park mission. My first stop was Parc de Cinquantenaire, which was built in order to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Belgium’s independence. There’s a huge central monument at the park—supposedly the king at the time said his goal was to make Brussels a new Paris, so naturally, huge monuments were necessary. I bought myself a sandwich for lunch and since it was gorgeous out, I ate it while sitting on the lawn and admiring the monument.
Once I’d exhausted that park, I moved on to Leopold Park, which is located right next to the EU Parliament building. This park was smaller, but had a little pond, and I was sure to admire that, as well. The EU Parliament building was fun to see. It’s one of the examples of extremely modern architecture that doesn’t quite seem to match up with the rest of the city. Walked from there to the Royal Palace, which was quite impressive. There were even some handy Belgian guards in front of it to protect Belgium from…well, probably from itself. The palace was right next to the Parc de Bruxelles. I wandered that for a bit, but it was my third park of the day, so I probably didn’t appreciate it as much as I should’ve. Stopped at Cathedral after that, and ended up just staring at it for fifteen minutes. I absolutely love the contrast of white stone with a bright blue sky, and lucky for me, that was what I had. Did some more wandering, stopped at the Grand Place, which was very cool, ate some food, and then met Caitlin when she got in.
Day 3, Caitlin and I met up near the Grand Place and then walked back to the train station to pick up Lauren, who was getting in that morning. Upon fetching Lauren, we walked to a brewery that Caitlin had heard about. They make beer the very, very old fashioned way, so it was interesting to see. I was much more interested in the process than in the tasting that came with the tour (I’m not exactly a fan of beer, and no, I still don’t know why I was allowed to live in Wisconsin for four years without liking beer). We tried two types of beer—the first was a gueze lambic, and it was not what I would call pleasing to the palate. To put it lightly. Ugh. Even Caitlin and Lauren, who do not share my distaste for beer, weren’t fans. The second was a raspberry lambic, which was much better because a) you couldn’t taste the beer as much, and b) there was raspberry, which makes everything delicious. Or, in the case of beer, relatively more delicious.
We still hadn’t eaten lunch, so we set out for the Grand Place, where we had some Belgian fries and waffles. YUM. Lauren’s Rick Steves travel guide informed us that the reason Belgian fries are delicious is that they fry them twice. That is one way to guarantee deliciousness. The waffles were also incredible—Klare had warned me that I’d never be able to eat another waffle after tasting these, and she was right. There was either a lot of sugar in the batter or a sugar coating, because it all carmelized on the outside, which was yummy. AND the chocolate on top of the waffle was real chocolate—none of this lame chocolate syrup stuff. Nope, this started to solidify into real chocolate as the waffle cooled, and it was super rich. My tummy was happy.
After eating, we made our way to an Automobile museum (located right in the Parc de Cinqantenaire). I know next to nothing about cars, but I enjoyed looking at all the old cars. There were a couple names that I recognized from various books, so it was nice to be able to put an image to the name. It was also just funny to see all the crazy car designs people have come up with over the ages—we got to see the first models with bumpers, a car that was even smaller than a Smart Car (it was about a third of my height), and some cars that were ridiculously huge (they looked like tanks, and I do not know how anyone parallel parked those things).
We hopped on the metro back into town and chilled at a café for a few hours. This place had the most amazing chai tea—it was incredible. Apparently some other people agreed, since they’d stuck a note on the wall next to the register saying “BEST CHAI TEA IN EUROPE.” I’ve noticed that most travel guides don’t seem to provide good café recommendations (mostly because they don’t provide any café recommendations). This is a void that must be filled, since one of my favorite parts of traveling is sitting in cafés with my travel journal and people watching. Anyway, I’ve decided that I’ll be working on my own travel guide series that simply highlights all the best cafés in the world. This one definitely makes the cut (I’ve already started to make a list of my favorites in other cities). We then moved on to dinner at an Irish pub, then I called it quits for the night.
Thursday morning we met at the train station to head to Bruges. It’s about a half hour train ride away from Brussels, but it’s firmly in the Flemish area of Belgium—no French here. Bruges is known as the Venice of Northern Europe, presumably because of all the canals (no gondolas, sadly—just speedboats). Like Brussels, it has lots of gorgeous Gothic architecture. Unlike Brussels, Bruges does not have all the new buildings. It’s much less confused. We stopped at a lovely tea shop pretty soon after we made it to Bruges—I wanted some caffeine. This place was EXCELLENT. At first I thought €3,50 was a bit steep for tea, but it turns out the tea comes with a pile of chocolates. Naturally, I was not opposed to this, and the price suddenly seemed quite reasonable. The chocolates were also accompanied by a large heap of whipped cream, which was quite delicious. If I lived in Bruges, I would probably spend way too much time in that tea house.
Anyway (I’m going to start paraphrasing a bit since I really want to finish this post), most of Bruges consisted of looking at pretty buildings and looking at chocolate. I bought some delicious champagne truffles, along with other varieties of chocolate, took lots of pictures, did not pay money to walk past a vial with Christ’s blood in it (I decided to listen to Jesus when he said that you weren’t supposed to turn churches into marketplaces), saw a sculpture by Michelangelo (‘twas excellent), and wandered a lot. There. Bruges in two paragraphs.
Friday Lauren, Caitlin and I met up for more chai tea in the morning, and then I had to head off for my train . I was on my own to Lille and then Paris, but Lauren was on the same train to Rennes with me. Caitlin, meanwhile was on the same train as Lauren from Brussels to Paris, but then she had a different one back to Brittany. Lauren and I chilled in the Starbucks at Montparnasse while waiting for our train, and then we had a relatively painless journey back.
Apologies for both the lateness and the paraphrase in this update (my English teachers would probably want more details and less summary), but it’s already been two weeks since I got back. It needed to get done!
I don’t have any more big travels planned until the end of April. I’m probably going to spend part of next weekend in Vitré with Caitlin, and then the weekend after that I’m going to stay with some assistants in Fougères. Hope all is well in the USA.
