I’m up at 5:45 with the alarm. I get out and grab a coffee and tea, which works out as the shop opens at 6:00 on the weekdays. I like the way the shops work here. Each person is waited on individually. The person who takes your order also makes your order. There’s some fallacy in the US that having 1 person do all the drinks makes it faster, but my observation is that this isn’t the case. The single drink maker gets overwhelmed and you end up waiting more than if you just waited before you pay.
I’m back to the room by 6:05 and we’re out the door by 6:30. I will not miss this room even a little bit. I know that getting an Airbnb or whatever is a gamble. We don’t have an especially high bar, but this was lower than we expected. It was sort of 1 step above a halfway house, with the other residents of the lower floor seeming to be a random collection of people that came & went. They were nice, and were surprisingly quiet with us there. But I saw probably 12 different people in the 3-4 rooms while we were there.
We did struggle to find a place in London and this was our 3rd choice, as the first 2 were requested and either cancelled or ignored. So in the end it’s just not easy to get a place in London that fits in the zone 1 or 2 subway areas. If you go zone 3, you end up paying more for the ride which you want to avoid. So we did our best but it’s hard to tell. Also, a 5th person makes your choices in Europe really slim. I guess this will be a one-off as I am not sure we are signing up to bring 3 kids back here anytime soon. Live & learn.
We do breakfast, wait, go through security, UK then French passport control, then we sit in the waiting area for an hour or so while our train is delayed and we wait for it to show. While there, we talk to a couple from LA who were here for the Yankees/Sox series and are now on their way to Bruges. Lots of friendly people on this trip.
One again on the train I have some time to think so I reflect on where we have just left.
Reflections on London
As we train away from London it’s a good time to sit and think of what London now means to me. I came into the city with no expectations and I leave possibly more confused about the city than when I arrived. I think in the end, it may be a bit too much like NYC for my tastes, and that’s not a knock on London so much as maybe it’s a realization that NYC is probably a difficult city for many people to understand. In the end, I think that’s my issue with London. I just don’t “get” it. I’ve heard the same about NYC and it never made sense to me. Now it does. In a way, NYC is too complex and multi-dimensional for people to come in 3 days and understand what the hell is going on. London may suffer some of that, though I admit that after 3 days here, this is not enough time for me to say.
Sean and I discussed this and we’re sort of on the same page here. I think London lacks a cohesion that Paris possesses. This is hard to put into words, but there’s no thread tying the disparate pieces of the city together. For me, the down side of this city is this: Vegas is to the US as London is to the world. It’s this sort of, “Go here and spend loads of cash, see memorable things, and get 100% drunk.” As someone who no longer drinks, this All Drunk All Days culture does not appeal to me. Waking up every morning and seeing beer & wine bottles on the side of the road or in the park makes me question what the core of this city is all about. This is the side of London that makes me think of the Vegas correlation. I don’t think it’s a good thing.
At the same time I realize this is intellectually lazy, and there has to be more to it than this pithy analogy. I get that, and I get that this is my own inability to navigate & process the framework of the city. Of course, I may be too hard on myself there, as no amount of processing will allow me to understand the standing house party that is this town. When it’s 11:00 pm every single day, and there’s a crowd of 50-100 people partying in the streets, this is not a fault of the non-participant in understanding the city, especially when the crowd of drunks keeps your family awake. In that respect, London deserves every bit of the Vegas comparison I make here.
London, much like NYC, lacks a centerpiece that brings you in. As simple as it sounds, the Eiffel Tower is that centerpiece of Paris. If nothing else, you need to go there to say you went there. If you get off the plane and go to the tower, you can say you went to Paris. There’s no parallel for that in London nor NYC for that matter. I also think the reasonably priced food of Paris gave us a glue of sustenance as we navigated our days. No matter what, we could stop at a bakery and grab 2 loaves of bread then grab a few blocks of cheese and some meat for $20 and call it a meal. And it was a meal that everyone was content with. So there’s another glue that keeps the trip & city cohesive for us, for any traveler. London, doesn’t have this, and we struggled more on the food side of things in this city. It is brutally expensive, for no good reason at all.
I don’t want to say that it’s all London’s fault for my lack of understanding. I read an article from a guy who lived here that said it took him 2 years to understand the city. I can see that, and I think that the city surely has a lot to offer but it’s a bit harder to tie it all together. I’m sure we’ll be back and we’ll go see some of the things we missed this time around, like Kensington Palace and the Tate Modern. It’s also hard not to enjoy the Tower Bridge area. I think in that respect, the Tower Bridge & Tower of London would be that #1 spot to visit here. You probably shouldn’t come here without seeing them. But then The Globe was awesome. And Big Ben, Parliament…the list goes on and on, again like NYC. There’s no focal point. Maybe The Shard will provide that in time. But it doesn’t today.
I did enjoy London, and I want to go back one day. It is not as ethnically diverse as Paris, and since it’s English-speaking, there’s less of a novelty here as compared to other countries. In that regard, I think it suffered a little in this comparison. Additionally, the second we got off the train coming here, we were no longer in Paris and it was abundantly clear. As we speed away from London I don’t think to myself, “I miss it already.” I still feel that way about Paris a bit, so the lasting effect is not the same. Feel free to call it user error, as it very well may be.
As we head towards Brussels I am left to ask: What are our next steps and what are my expectations? I don’t know. Brussels is a total unknown and last night after trying to put together a loose agenda we came up with nothing concrete, and more of a walking tour-based approach to this short stay. The details will work themselves out over the course of the next 2 blog posts but on the train ride I do a little reading on the food and Belgium is apparently known for the following food items: French fries with mayo, mussels, chocolate, waffles, and beer.
That’s about it.
I do like train travel, as it’s smooth & less cramped than an airplane. Obviously you can’t cover as much ground with a train but when you have to go 400 miles it’s a pretty viable option. To fly that far would be more money, and with the 2+ hour lead time doesn’t really save time. Plus it’s smooth and you can look out the window at the countryside and wonder what’s going on out there. The day is beautiful out so it’s nice to stare out the window.
We arrive in Brussels and I see a difference in the way some people dress that I didn’t see in London, which I missed before. I think Londoners dress a lot more like Americans, and Belgians dress more like the French. I don’t know how to quantify that so I won’t. The city also feels more like German architecture which will slowly merge into an Eastern European feel as we get closer to Grand Place. Again, I cannot quantify this so I won’t try.
I found a sandwich/cheese shop online that was recommended called Tonton Garby. It’s a tiny little shop that has a line coming out the door when we get there. We get in line and it’s slow, like really slow, like painstakingly slow. I stay in line and keep expecting it to move, but it slowly goes 1-at-a-time until I’m almost there. But I’m not there. 45 minutes later I have 5 sandwiches and I’m walking out the door. While I’m not sure the family would agree, I think it was worth the wait as the sandwich was damn good and the bread was super.
The owner of the shop makes small talk with every customer, so the line moves slowly. He lets you taste the cheese and see if it works for you. If you eat in the shop he won’t take your money unless you’re happy with the sandwich. When I ask him what I should get he immediately says #8. I get the #8 and it was great. We all ate everything from the shop. So we were either all hungry or it was really good, or both. I’ll go with both.
We walk through Grand Place which is stunningly beautiful. It’s a huge courtyard with cobblestones which probably once served as some sort of main area where, I imagine, people were hung and kings were coronated. We will find out later I imagine. We have a 4:00 walking tour lined up which starts there.
I grab an espresso on the way, stopping at Comptoir Oriental des Caffes which is a place I found on a search before getting here. It’s solid, and I will likely hit it up tomorrow morning.
We get to the apartment and it is 94,663 times better than the London hostel. It’s a shame we won’t be staying here longer as it’s a great location at a reasonable price. I’m not sure Brussels has so much to offer that you need more than a few days. But if we were here for more than 1 night it would be a nice place to set-up camp.
Chaos Theory starts with the kids at right around 3:00. I guess this is about their limit, though the early wake-up doesn’t really help the situation. So of course, we leave the apartment at 3:40 to head back out to take them on a free 3 hour walking tour of the city.
Thus begins part 2 of the day. This is where Brussels starts for real.
We signed up for a 2.5 hour free walking tour from Sandemans, which is one of these tip-driven tours where you pay nothing, or something, at the end. James is our guide for the tour and starts us off by telling us to turn left and/or right and introduce ourselves. I meet a guy next to us from Basking Ridge, NJ. The tour ends up being 9 different parts, and spans almost 3 hours in the end. I will run down 1 through 9 below.
1 – We start standing in Grand Place. The main building, which is still used as the center for all things government-related, is asymmetrical. Back in the late 1600s France tried to invade Brussels with the idea of taking this down, and the only thing they failed to do was to bring down the tower on this main building. Thus, they call this the middle finger of Brussels. Other interesting buildings surround this but the one of note is where Karl Marx wrote the Communist Manifesto.
2 – We move on to Manneken Pis, which is a novelty. In the end nobody really knows why it’s there but apparently the expression “piss poor” came from Brussels. The story is that tanners used to use buckets of piss to process the hides. There may be a link there, or there may not be. Another story is that even to this day French soldiers are required to salute the statue when they come through, which is not very often.
3 – Go to Fritland for Belgian fries and get the sauce on the side. He then goes into a discussion of French fries and informs us it is our duty to correct the world and call them Belgian fries. He does this at the back of what used to be the old stock exchange building, which is going to be turned into a beer hall in the coming year.
4 – We stop in Delirium Village which is a talk about beer. Apparently there’s an oyster beer which tastes terrible. He then goes on to talk about the Trappist Monk beer which I used to enjoy a lot. It turns out that the Trappist beers are not sold for profit but all proceeds to go a charity of some sort.
5 – The last stop of the first half is at the galleries which is claimed to have influenced the Milan galleries. He talks of Belgian chocolate here and talks up Mary Chocolatier which was the first woman to be given a license to make chocolate back in the 1800s – I presume she is long dead but cannot say for sure. He then brings us us across the street for the halftime of the tour.
At the intermission we run to the Mary shop down the way and buy 10 pieces, so we get 2 each. They’re amazing. We then head back to the cafe where we are regrouping and I get an espresso and 2 glasses of water inside. The espresso was bad but I really wanted the water that went with it more than anything else.
6 – We start the second half with the Cathedral of Saint Michael, or Gudula, whichever you prefer. Apparently it has 2 names. He then talks a bit about the current king & queen.
7 – We swing by the Royal Park of Brussels, which lays before the palace that we will get to shortly. He talks a bit about language and immigration, and notes that the populace is getting more and more integrated which supports my thought that this city more closely resembles Paris than London. Estimates are that the current city is 1/3 Muslim currently, which supports his idea that it is truly attaining a multicultural status. He also mentions that this is really known as “the park” because there’s really only 1.
8 – We walk around the edge of the park to the Royal Palace of Brussels, which does look a bit like Buckingham Palace, as he mentions. The king and queen don’t actually live here, they live in another palace elsewhere. King Leopold II built it, who was the second king of Belgium. The guide then goes on to talk about the dark history of Leopold II, about how he more or less stole the Congo in a sense, then raped the country of all their diamonds, ivory, and rubber. Some estimates put the death toll of the Congolese at 10-20 million, which is frankly staggering. As the guide mentions, this is never talked about in world history today. He was referred to as the Monster King.
9 – The last stop is at the edge of the palace and he talks a bout about waffles now, pointing out that there are 2 kinds in Belgium. There’s a Brussels Waffle which is thin and crisp and is not what we know. Then there’s the Liege version which is what we are familiar with. After this brief interlude he then talks about Albert I who was the king that followed Leopold II and did many, many positive things like taking a stand against the Germans during WWI. Good stuff that I won’t bore you with here.
This marks the end of the tour and he asks that if we like him, to give him a good review on Tripadvisor, which is the second time we’ve heard this request on this trip. The other was from Big Steve in London. He then tells us where we can get a waffle that’s not a tourist trap as well as where we can get dinner. The best waffles are had in a food truck and we will seek them out tomorrow.
We walk to one of the places that he recommended but they don’t sell mussels so we walk around a bit trying to find something until we land on Publico. No mussels, but they did have some authentic Belgian food, which frankly is more or less just French in nature. Plus fries which seems to be what they add to every dish to make it “Belgian.” I get the equivalent of the beef bourguignon which I trade with D halfway through, as she got the sausage & mashed potatoes and had buyer’s remorse immediately. This is essentially the 3rd time I’ve had this dish so no big deal.
We then walk around a little looking for some of the comic strip murals before heading back to the Grand Place which was now highlighted in purple. Before going back to the apartment we find a Brussels magnet then we return and the kids start to juice their brains on their phones.
I go back out and get a quarter watermelon and some ice cream, then come back and we eat it all up. And the first part of our Brussels journey comes to an end. Tomorrow will be the second part as well as the train to Amsterdam.
Traveling Normandy 