Brussels

Travels

February 7, 2005 07:42 PM

From the moment we saw the layout of northern France and surrounding areas we thought Brussels would be a perfect first weekend car trip outside of France. It is only a three hour drive from Paris and wasn’t a location high on our list of places to visit after we leave France. I’ve added a photoblog entry of the trip if you just want to see some of the sites and skip the blow by blow.

Chiz found some promising information online about a place called Welcome Hotel and we booked our room for Saturday night. We left that morning, filled up the ¾ empty gas tank for $50 US, and found the A-1 heading north. We immediately hit an ominous start to our trip when we couldn’t find Brussels (or Bruxelles as the French spell it) in the car GPS system. We didn’t have a map of the city and just had our printed copy of mappy.com driving directions to the hotel. We were kind of relying on the largest city in Belgium being in the car navigation system because you can enter actual street addresses and get verbal turn by turn instructions. I was still confident our printed directions would get us there. Chiz wasn’t so sure and of course she was right.

You can hopefully back me up if you have ever had to drive around France, and apparently Belgium, that street name signs are not given locations of prominence. They are usually printed out on little placards about 20 feet up on the sides of buildings at intersections and are difficult to spot and read. Compounding the problem, is the mappy.com habit of listing street names in mapping terms like N32 instead of the local name. So after MAYBE getting the first turn correct we were totally lost 20 minutes later in Brussels without a map and even dumber, without the phone number to the hotel. Smart. After about another half hour or so we stopped for directions and had a bad experience. The very first restaurant we stopped in the dude simply snipped ‘no’, turned his back, and walked away when Chiz asked him (in French) if he spoke English. This was the first blatant snub we had experienced. The next couple stops were a bit better, but again the people spoke zero English and nobody had heard of the street or the hotel. We got very discouraged when we stopped at a gas station and received the double whammy news that they don’t sell maps and that the hotel was not even in the phone book. It wasn’t helping matters that we seemed to be lost in the seedy areas of the city. Enter the Internet to save the day. We spotted an Internet café and got the phone number of the hotel, but of course the printer wasn’t working so we were still map-less. Anyway, recounting this portion of the trip is not being done with any great pride and I will finally bring it to a close by admitting embarrassingly that a hotel employee eventually had to drive out to where we were so we could follow him to the hotel. We weren’t even close.

We were openly happy we weren’t close because as we followed him through the maze that is Brussels we entered the city center and the sights were getting better and better. Welcome Hotel is a reasonably priced, very quaint 15 room hotel and the small staff is dedicated to making sure you enjoy Brussels. Each room had a city theme and we ended up in Istanbul. It was nice and comfortable but the previous guests must have bought some souvenir cheese and left it out. Thankfully once you are fully engulfed buy the fumes of molding cheese you really don’t notice it too much. Anyway, we weren’t there to sit in the hotel room and the hospitality of the staff extended beyond personal rescue missions. The concierge (who was also the bellhop, the registration guy, the breakfast waiter, and probably the maid) spent a good 15 minutes with us and the city map filling us in on the good dining spots, the requisite sightseeing, and which tourist traps to avoid. Chiz and I would end up concluding his information pretty much made our short stay in Brussels a smashing success.

The driving debacle was stinging less and less once we got walking because we couldn’t even keep our bearings on foot. City planning surely did not exist when these old cities were being built. Forget everything you learned about a city block. Spokes of streets spray out from a statue or a traffic circle but even those aren’t straight and you’ll soon hit the spokes of some other hub and that doesn’t result in any intersection I’ve seen before. At one point we literally walked in circle and had no idea how it was even possible. Anyway, once we found the Grand Place (sounds cooler if you try to soften the vowels and do the whole ‘grond plase’ thing) the good times were non-stop. We lived up to the cliché and walked wide-eyed into the open cobblestone square surrounded by huge, beautiful, gold entrusted, old buildings with tons of other tourists. I’m not embarrassed about that. It’s a cool sight and the locals are rightfully proud of these displays. The next couple days would introduce us to many more old churches, parks, government buildings, museums and statues that all seemed photo worthy (although it’s getting expensive because we haven’t got the box with our battery charger shipped over yet and are paying for alkalines that die way too fast). Check out the photoblog entry for some of the sights. I will say that many of these buildings were in desperate need of a cleaning or restoration. Almost every statue was streaked with the black of oxidation and many of the museums and churches also showed their age. I don’t know what that was all about.

Foods always a play a big role in the impression of a new location and Brussels kicked ass in this regard. I really knew nothing about Belgian cuisine other than they were supposed to have exceptional beer so I really had no expectations. The first thing I learned was that Belgium is very well known for its mussels. It isn’t my favorite shellfish back home but the hotel guide insisted we try some. Pretty much every café, bar, or restaurant did indeed feature at least one mussel dish and we stopped for lunch at a bar for a huge steaming pot full and some beer. Wow. They really are great and very different from what I was used to. One issue I have with the mussels at home is that they are too big. You get a nice mouthful of all that mussel crud when you dive into one at home. These were more like the size of clams and were fantastic. We had some of the local beer on tap and I wasn’t blown away by it. More on the beer in a second. We steered clear of the tourist trap restaurants for dinner as instructed but I could see the draw.

There were a couple brightly lit gauntlets like these where colorful restaurants lined both sides of a very narrow street and a waiter or chef was outside each of them actively recruiting customers. All were shouting about the food and a few would actually stop you in your tracks and describe the menu. We avoided eye contact because we knew we were going to one of the recommendations of our hotel guide.

It was getting dark and we had done a fair amount of walking but it was still only 6:30 and we are working hard to not be the first patrons of the night in a restaurant. So what else was there to do but to stop at a pub so I could continue my quest for the famed great beer? The barkeep spoke English without an accent and thought it was very funny when I said I wanted a Belgian beer. “You’re in Belgium”, he cracked clearly not understanding that I wanted him to recommend a good beer to me. The list of beers was very lengthy as it was in the first place, but there were just two beers on tap so I got the lager. It was just OK to me, so I ordered the other one. It was Hogaarden beer which I only knew from the big banner Piro stole from somewhere on one of his many travels. That one was downright strange and had a very strong taste of some herbs or spices. The final beer I tried came from a bottle and by that time the barkeep was very suspicious of my ordering progression and poured a little into a shot glass first to make sure I wanted it. It was easily the best of the three. Chiz was sticking to the familiar the entire time and sipping at her Guinness. I would go on to drink a tap beer at dinner and the next day at lunch without really being impressed. Not until we were on our way home did it finally dawn on me what my problem might have been. I am so used to thinking that tap beers are fresher and generally considered better than their bottled counterparts. I am now wondering if that might not be true in Belgium. Perhaps bottled beer is kind of like a fine wine there? Thinking back, most everybody was drinking bottled beer (poured into the appropriate glass of course). I think tap beer was the Bud of Belgium and I was too slow to realize it. The best beer I had over there was bottled and every restaurant had tons of bottles and very few taps. Anybody know if my bottle theory is true?

Dinner was at a place called La Villette and was a tiny two story restaurant where you were bumping elbows with your neighbor. It was clear by the crowd that we were dealing with locals but the wait staff was pretty good with English. Chiz ordered a Flemish beef stew and I got a chicken dumpling thing. I don’t mean to diminish them with the descriptions because they were awesome. But the appetizer was probably the most delicious. It was croquettes aux fromage d'Abbaye. Essentially they were lightly fried cheese balls made by monks. Again, doesn’t sound so great but they were unbelievable. A side benefit of all this was that everything was reasonably priced.

We retired not too long after dinner because we wanted to get a full day of exploring in on Sunday. We had the complimentary breakfast and then ventured out to find the flea market across town and a couple antique markets. Of all the recommendations, I would say the flea market was the only bust. Although it was a flea market so I don’t know what I expected. The antique markets were better and even though we aren’t into them I could really see somebody getting excited about the collection. It was a great sunny day and the cafes were happy to buck the ‘closed on Sunday’ rules and cater to the crowd. Outdoor seating was in full effect. We stopped at a boutique chocolate shop called Pierre Marcolini recommended by the hotel guide and got a collection of chocolate bars. Again, amazingly delicious and we delivered a couple to the hotel on our way out of town as a thank you for rescuing us and for giving us such great suggestions.

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