I wake up at some point I have long since forgotten, my head in a daze from having just slept in what I presume is Mogadishu, Somalia. As great as Brussels is in the day time, it sucks at night. I had no idea it was like Mardi Gras here every night, and as a result I didn’t sleep well yet again last night. I go out in search of coffee and the streets are like a war zone. There’s garbage everywhere and there’s nothing open at this time of day. Finding coffee is near impossible before 8:00, and I wander around until I find ONE place that opens at 7:00 to get the smallest cup of cappuccino ever made. It does the trick.
I go back to the apartment and write. After I publish I set out in search of real coffee, which I get in the form of the second coffee roaster I found on paper before we got here, with is OR Coffee. This place is probably the best coffee I’ve gotten on the whole Europe trip. This shop seems to come from the mold of American coffee roasters I’ve been to in my travels in the last year plus. The feel of the place is very American, where the feel of the other place in town was very Italian. Solid coffee, well worth the wait.
Scraping up the kids at this stage is getting harder each day. They wake up half in a daze and sort of listen to directions, not really understanding what’s being said. This morning they get into the shower, one by one, until it’s time to go. None of us is sleeping enough at this point, and it takes us longer to get out each day. Today we’re out at 9:50.
We stop at I Love Churros & Waffles for breakfast and feed the family for €10, which is a testament for how reasonably priced things can be here. The guide yesterday told us to never pay more than €2 for a waffle, and this checks that box. We get them plain, as recommended, and it is excellent in this form, without the bells and whistles of chocolate sauce and whipped cream and whatnot. This is a sold start to the food orgy that would become the first part of our day.
We take a quick detour to the Tintin store to get a book for Zac and a magnet for D then we walk through Grand Place again and it is still beautiful this morning. We cross through on our way to the next stop and the main point of the morning, which is a tour at Choco Story Brussels. This is a chocolate museum we take the kids to, and turns out to be an informative journey through the history of chocolate, which is actually quite interesting and doesn’t feel overly fabricated at all. Chocolate has quite a history in going from the Aztecs to the current form today. As it turns out, back in the early days of cacao beans, they were used as money so the expression, “money does not grow on trees” was in fact untrue then. While most of the beans came from South America for a long time, today much of it comes from Africa. At the end of the audio tour we get as much free chocolate as we want to eat then we get to see a chocolate demonstration where they give us endless pralines which they’re making in front of us. This is great until it’s not, and the sweetness gets the better of me after a while.
We leave the museum and walk around looking for a few more murals and creating space for our planned lunch of Belgian fries. I’m starting to lag now, sleep deprivation taking its toll at this point. I’m not the only, one as we all seem to drag a little here, so maybe it’s the sleep or maybe it’s the crash from the praline blast. Eventually we loop back around to the place for fries that were recommended on the tour yesterday, Fritland. We get 3 orders and they’re very good. We obliterate them all. €12 for lunch, part 1.
We then go on a search for the Smurf mural, which we find, but also leads us to a trailer selling official Tour de France merchandise, which starts here on July 6th. I buy a magnet, which is our 3rd magnet in Brussels, as well as a keychain. While this may be overpriced it’s actually not absurd and how often do you to buy actual TdF merchandise on location?
We walk through some of the same areas we were in yesterday, and wind up at the waffle truck the tour guide said was the best. We buy 4 more waffles at €8 and obliterate them, now fully destroying all of our intestinal tracts. We then meander towards the train station finding more murals and walk past the Palace of Justice, which is an amazing building that’s falling into disrepair sadly, for whatever reason. From the side we’re on it looks like this was a massive construction project and it’s a shame to see it being let go like this. From this vantage point we can see the Atomium off in the distance.
We get to the train station at 3:30 and get on our train an hour later, wrapping up our time in Brussels and making our way to Amsterdam, the final leg in this crazy summer journey we’ve embarked upon. I’m now feeling absolutely shot. I get a cappuccino which is pretty good, and we sit in the station waiting for the track announcement which comes at 4:15.
Reflections on Brussels
Brussels was a short stop, but it was a very good stop. While I say had no expectations of London, that’s not entirely true because of course I know the various landmarks that exist in the city, but didn’t really know them well nor did I know what to expect of the city in general. With Brussels I knew quite literally nothing at all about it. By nothing I mean absolutely nothing at all. We looked into a few tourist spots but even as we took the train there we had no intentions, no plans, and we were pretty much just flying by the seat of our pants and seeing how it went. We ended up with a general plan and as we got off the train we marched on from the main train station towards town.
Leo asked me why we chose Brussels and in the end, I have no real idea other than the fact D had never been there, and it was close. So why not? I think people sometimes get caught up in trying to explain things that have no explanation, and in this case I think we really have no concrete explanation other than: Why not?
From the moment we walked into the Grand Place square on Monday afternoon until seeing the last mural on Tuesday afternoon, the city was nothing short of packed excellence. While there is no Eiffel Tower, Louvre, Tower Bridge, Big Ben, and so on, there’s a very firm feel to the city and it’s very concentrated, so you get a lot of value in a small space. Unlike both Paris and London, you can walk from the train station to town, and you never need to buy a subway pass. While there are some things that lie on the outskirts of the city, you don’t really need to leave the city center when you’re working in a 24 hour shot clock.
The city had a real glue that held the center of it together, and in a sense that might be the Grand Place, as everything is just packed around the edges of it. But that’s not what it was for me. In one sense, the food culture here defines your stay. The core elements are waffles, fries, chocolate, and beer. I mentioned earlier that mussels are also prevalent, but that’s not what our experience was able to bear out, so I’ll pull that one from the list. You can surf the town and get an ad hoc meal of any of these things for a reasonable price. This brings you back to the feel of Paris in this small regard. As an example, this morning our breakfast cost us €10, which is simply unheard of. Our lunch of Belgian fries was €12. So you have a very affordable food underbelly at play, which I think is a very important aspect of keeping cohesion to any trip.
Another aspect is the comic strip walls, which are a series of something like 60 different murals throughout the city that depict Belgian comic strips. They sell a little guide book that you can get for €2.50 and it will direct you through Brussels to find different murals and, by default, different corners of the city at the same time. Between the comic strip tour and the cheap local food, you can set yourself up with a very solid base in the city. On top of this we added the free walking tour which was a 3 hour endeavor for us, and it was entertaining and informative. 100% would recommend that.
Just don’t try to sleep.
In the end, pound for pound, this was probably the most successful city we visited of the 3. There was pretty much no wasted time in our stay here. But that’s not entirely fair for me to say, because of course we were time limited. We’ve also learned a bit about how to travel with these 3 children, so we’re possibly getting better at managing the kids, their energy levels, and their expectations. Add it all up, and Brussels was a great stop for us on this trip. Will we come back? Hmmm, who knows. The downside for me is that being so close to the center of town was incredibly loud, and for the 5th straight night, I slept like total garbage. Our place was very well-located, but that great location is only good when you’re awake.
I spend the first hour of the train ride writing the blog post up to this point in the day. The weather is fine but the countryside is not especially exciting at first. I feel like we’re going through this post-war German-inspired construction I mentioned yesterday, and I wonder a little bit if the country is more financially depressed than I would have guessed. It appears in some respects to be more industrial-looking than I would have thought. Not sure how to quantify that, so I will blame the exhaustion.
As we get closer to Amsterdam we see more windmills, lots of greenhouses, and solar panels in addition to lots and lots of farmland. I know land is land, but the land changes as we move from 1 city to the next.
We reach Amsterdam at 7:45, coming into the last stop on the ambitious trip that this has turned into. I want nothing more than to have a comfortable hotel room tonight, both the comfort of the bed and the temperature of the room. We get off the train and the station smells of marijuana almost immediately.
The locale is remarkably, and I mean starkly, different. We’re no longer in the old Europe of Paris or Brussels, nor are we in the modern London landscape. It’s just completely different, really cool. The buildings are different. The streets, cars, trams, sidewalks, and people – all just different. Everything seems different. Oh yeah, and there are canals. I like it.
We walk to the apartment and stop at a place on the way, Myrabelle. I get the chicken with peanut sauce which the waiter says is very typical Dutch. The taste is excellent, and it’s a much-needed meal before we get the room. Even though we read that tips are not required, the waiter is pissed I do not tip him. Oh well.
We walk home, taking turns from keeping Simon from floating away into the atmosphere. He’s in ultra rare form tonight, and needs about 36 hours sleep straight to reset himself. We get the room and end up on the 5th floor, which is the top, with a small but nice little balcony and a view out over the trees in the back of the hotel.
We watch the end of the US-England Women’s World Cup soccer match, which the US wins 2-1 putting the US into Sunday’s final. The kids are wired from this, and by the time we go to bed it’s after 11:00. They’re all a mess, and there are 2 ways you are reading this. You’ve either had kids in this 9-13 year old range, or you have not (in which case nothing has red-flagged in your head). If you’ve experienced kids in this age range, you’ve probably been reading this thinking, “My god, these kids are going to totally supernova.” Then you read the part about 11:00 and are likely thinking, “Wow, I cannot believe they survived this.”
We did not. The details of which are unimportant, other than the trigger of what caused it. A toothbrush. Again, if you haven’t experienced this, it makes no sense and that’s ok. If you have, you’re probably just shaking your head laughing at us. That’s ok, we deserve it.
In any event, welcome to Amsterdam, where the kids will be sleeping in Wednesday morning!
Traveling Normandy 