Belgium = Beer, Chocolate and Frittes

  Brussels, Belgium
Sunday, October 1, 2006

Click Here to see all the photos of our time in Brussels on our Smugmug website!

As much as we enjoyed Helsinki, our flight was booked to Belgium and the beers and fries were calling our names.

We arrived by plane to Brussels and got our first experience navigating the trains and subways in the big city. It is a little intimidating, especially when the metro, buses and trains are all in the same station. But, as the guidebooks promise you, after your first two times it becomes a snap. The hostel was a little hard to find but it was still light out so we got to see the city a little while searching for it.

We had one full day in Brussels and walked everywhere, to all the major sites and churches. Our smugmug site can testify to all the churches we saw.

Belgian Beer

   We sampled beers at the hostel and holy smokes! They are right about Belgium having great beer. Sara enjoyed all the cherry and Raspberry lambics but all the others were tasty too. Julius enjoyed them all.

We did manage to find fries, though it was harder than we thought. We hit the jackpot when we turned a corner and ran into Fritland with throngs of people clamoring at the takeaway window. That is always a good sign when it is popular and the product you are looking for is in the name. The fries were delicious. Dad likes to rate his fries and we will follow and rate them a 9 out of 10.

BelgianFrites

Since then we have heard a few theories about why fries are so good. One, they are cut fresh, two, they are fried twice at two different temperatures and three, they use beef fat. Whatever they do, they are doing it right.

In Brussels we saw much more diversity than Sweden and Finland. This is not surprising because Belgium had a number of colonies, namely Zaire (Now Congo). People say that some neighborhoods could be mistaken for Kinshasa and that is no exageration. Julius fit in as well as Sara, except for the fact that he wasn't speaking French.

After Brussels and the big city life we took the train an hour away to Tourist Heaven, Bruges.