Well, there you go! I just summed up my Brussels experience in one sentence. We went into Brussels not having any clue of what we wanted to do there besides eat.
April 5: Sunday--We woke up and say goodbye to Andrew as we packed up all our stuff and headed towards the metro. Andrew, his friend, and Kira all suggested to use to take the bus to Brussels instead of the train. I think because it was Sunday, the bus cost 25 euro instead of 19. That was a deal to us! So we made it to the bus station, and 2.5 hours later, we were at Brussels North station.
We stayed at a friend of Alli's who wasn't going to be home until later that evening, so we didn't really know what to do with ourselves. The bus station was in kind of a boring area, so we decided to take the metro to the stop that we were supposed to go to for Jeff's house. The metro system was interesting/different in Brussels. We bought a ticket but saw that we never had to check it anywhere, so we never bought a ticket again. Hey, free is fine with me! We went over to the stop we were supposed to get off at, but then we had no clue how to get to his house anyway. After probably 30 minutes of walking around with our huge backpacks, we decided to try to make it to the center of town instead, so that we could eat some lunch, since it was already close to 4 or 5. We took the metro to the center stop, but apparently went the wrong way from the center and had no idea where to go. We just kept seeing a pretty isolated city around us and had no idea where we were. Finally, I saw someone in a USC shirt, asked if they spoke english (and it turned out they were spanish!) and he directed us to the cute-center area, which was really not far from where we were, we just happened to go in the opposite direction. So we got to the place we needed to be and walked around some more (so much walking with our backpacks) to try to find food. And then we did it: we made it to the Pitta street that we had heard about only the day before. Apparently, there is a street in Brussels purely devoted to Pitta type foods. We plopped down at the first one we could get into and had probably the best meal of our whole trip. It was just a pitta with chicken, tomatoes, cucumber, and that cucumber/garlic sauce and it was sooooo good.
From there, we hung out in the center and went around eating and drinking some more. I tried some belgian beer (Leffe, to be exact), we tried some belgian chocolates (delicious!) and then, the best of all--belgian waffles! OHHHH those waffles were so good. They were truly different than any "belgian waffle" I've had in the states. Yeah, I put that in quotations because now those are fake waffles to me. These waffles were made out of a dough instead of a batter and were so sweet (even plain, without anything on top).
Then it was time for dinner and although we had been eating all afternoon, we figured we would eat again in the center before we made it to Jeff's house. Andrew's friend recommended one of the Pitta places to eat a Dürüm Kebab, which was a little different in how they rolled it and what they put in the kebab. He also suggested Andalouse sauce (which I thought was funny because I am studying in Andalucia), which tasted pretty much like thousand island. Needless to say, part 2 of our greek-style eating was delicious!
April 6: We woke up the next morning and went to a flea market for a few hours. It was really fun and I got to bargain with so many french speaking people, even though, when it came down to it we eventually spoke in Spanish or English. This day was really purely devoted to walking around and eating and shopping since we didn't feel like doing much, so I'll keep it short. We ended up going back to the center, eating at the first pitta place (soooooo good!!!), frolicked around, got some free belgian chocolate samples, had another waffle, and saw Manneken Pis, one of Brussels' famous statues that was literally no more than 3 feet tall--kind of a let down. Here are some pictures.
Pitta Street
My Leffe beer and I
One of the many delicious pittas--this was with greek style gyro
Brussels
Manneken Pis
We took the metro back to Jeff's and hung out for a bit. We were talking about getting to the airport the next day, and Jeff said it was easy to get there. Then we checked the reservation and he saw that we were going to Charleroi airport, which he said should not even be considered a Brussels airport! Good thing we checked, because he had to call a friend to see how we could make it there. We found out that we had to take a bus from the metro station and that it was an hour away...greatttt. So that meant that we had to wake up at 4:45 the next morning--we weren't excited. We decided to grab a bite to eat, but we didn't want to take the metro to the center so we just walked down Jeff's street. We weren't finding anything and kept walking, and all of the sudden we saw a McDonald's and Pizza Hut. We saw those two restaurants in the center and thought it was weird that Brussels put the two together so frequently. We kept walking and realized that we were in the center! We couldn't believe that it was soooo close to us and we had been taking the metro the whole day (in a big loop I might add because it didn't go directly there). But now I see why it didn't go directly there because there was a huge shortcut in the middle to walk there! We laughed about that for a while, and then I convinced Alli to go back to Pitta street (yes, our 4th time there!!) but we ate at a new place and we ate different foods, but those four meals were probably some of the best on the whole trip. I already miss greek food..so sad.
Anyway, that's Brussels for you. I told you it was going to be short and filled with food. Now I have to go to sleep, but I'll write about Prague when I get back from Extremadura this weekend.
Buenas noches,
Haley
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