The Belgian Chronicles

After much waiting, stressing and a whole lot of working my holidays finally came around. On Sunday night I got home from work around 10 and began preparing to leave for our airport bus a few hours later. For future notice I will remember that my holiday will be a lot more enjoyable if I actually manage to get some sleep beforehand or at least if I am not packing between my many shifts at work. As I mentioned before this was not my first trip to Belgium, my boyfriend had also been before but both under different circumstances. Himself with a group of friends and I had been with the college on an educational trip that also involved a lot of beer consumption. On our previous trips neither of us had spent much time in Brussels but it seemed like as good a choice as any for our holiday.

We arrived in Brussels just after 10 and proceeded to get very lost trying to find our accommodation. It doesn't seem to matter if we are in the next town over or a few hundred miles away, myself and the boyfriend are almost guaranteed to get into some sort of disagreement about which way we should be going and neither of us is likely to concede the other might be right. This results in either us getting more lost or getting to said location with the other person refusing to acknowledge that they had in fact taken the best route. Anyway we did eventually find our apartment and left our bags until we could come back for check in. We then set off to explore and get food.

We ended up in a vegan self service restaurant called Moon Food which was lovely and it led me to be ridiculously optimistic about my food options for the rest of the holiday. We both came away with these colourful plates for a very reasonable price and I made sure to get some photos for posterity and also to show my mum I've eaten new foods. This is always an exciting prospect for a fussy eater like myself. 

The plan was to eat and then immediately be the best tourists we could and see how many wonderful things we could tick off our list on day one but instead we got a bit distracted by the striking old buildings and somehow ended up on a shopping street that had all of the usual stores plus Primark which was a bit bizarre and it was scarily busy for a Monday. I only know this because I was getting all squinty in the sunshine so I popped in hopes of getting a pair of sunglasses and left a bit traumatised. 

My boyfriend did manage to get a few nice photos of me with street art and posing beside amazing looking desserts I can't eat. Oh Belgium is not a good country to be in as a gluten intolerant vegetarian who's off sugar but more on that later.

(one of the many amazing looking Cathedrals in Brussels) 

We checked into our apartment later that afternoon and found it to be nice but a lot tinier than the photos suggested. I was a bit scared of the stairs up to the bedroom which had gaps between each step and spent our few days there walking down them like a crab. The plan was to relax, charge phones and head back out once refreshed but then we discovered the place only had tiny hand towels so we set off on a mission to find some towels. Here's something no one tells you about Brussels. The area where normal folks shop is surely hidden somewhere because we had little luck finding a supermarket, a homewares shop and few other basic things like that. We must have looked in every shop along the strip before agreeing to buy a very swanky towel in a fancy department store. Next time I visit a city for a few days I will be a super sleuth to avoid situations like this. 

That emergency sorted my boyfriend got his first waffle of the holiday and was very happy with himself indeed. If I was to sum up this holiday it would mostly be my boyfriend eating delicious food that I cannot have while I pretend not to mind. See how delighted he looks.

After I got some frites from Fritland which I can now categorically say are the best frites to be had. They are Belgian chips which when done right taste all light and fluffy and when not just taste like greasy potatoes. I would have eaten more if I had realised it was as close as I was going to get to dinner.

We did most of our exploring by accident, turning a corner to find ourselves in Grand Place or taking the wrong street only to discover Mont D'arts.

After we eliminated pretty much every restaurant we could find on the basis that they were only offering seafood, wheat based food or meat and I couldn't eat in any of them we settled on a place where my boyfriend could get pizza and I ended up explaining to a concerned chef that I could not eat pizza because he seemed quite upset that my boyfriend would not share. Extremely tired and with throbbing feet we fell into bed at an embarrassingly early hour promising that we would be more diligent tourists the next day.

Our second day in Brussels did not get off to a great start. By the time we left the apartment looking somewhat presentable I was absolutely ravenous and we went in search of a cafe called Peck 47 that I had found online because it promised sour dough bread. I settled on a cheese toastie as the only eggs on their menu were poached and I feel a bit ick at the thought of runny egg. It was a little on the pricey side but I was feeling a bit better until my stomach got all angry about me eating sour dough bread. 

we thought we had the museum thing all figured out because we got very lost the previous day (my fault) and accidentally found a load of museums and art galleries clustered in the one area so we were going to hit them all up. We stopped to admire some the more interesting Graffiti along the way

 but then our first stop of the day was the Museum de Instruments Musique or MIM.

I remember this museum from my last visit to Brussels because the exterior was so striking but unfortunately after two visits I have to say that's the best thing about the museum. Its €8 entry and you get a headset when you enter. You put this on and as you go to each stand you can hear music played by the instrument in the stand. I got bored about 5 instruments in and there were three whole floors of them. I bravely soldiered on in the name of culture until my boyfriend admitted he was also bored and skipped a whole floor of instruments to check out the gift shop and view from the top. I found it a little pricey for what was on offer so I wouldn't recommend it unless you are very passionate about musical instruments.

One Museum down, we set off to explore some more but soon realised that most of the museums and art galleries charge €8-10 entry and I am not the most enthused museum goer at the best of times so we browsed the gift shops instead and headed back into the city for refreshments. We settled on a brasserie for a drink, my boyfriend had a beer and I opted for a cappuccino and I got one absolutely destroyed in chantilly cream, presumably to counteract the very bitter tasting coffee beneath, I can see why this style of coffee has not caught on elsewhere. It had started to get chilly so we made a pit stop in Zara so my boyfriend could get a scarf and naturally I had to browse women's wear while he did that and ended up with my own giant scarf which I am already very fond of. 

We decided to visit one more museum because I was very enthused about the prospect and somehow had forgotten that museums are largely a bit disappointing for me. The museum I had chosen was the Bande Desinee or comic book museum. It took us an age to find but we eventually located it only to discover it was just around the corner from where we were staying. It was €10 entry.

 Once inside you can look at the history of comic books and the different techniques used and there examples of many well known comic books in glass cases as well as videos showing some of the techniques in action. It was interesting up to a point and probably would have been more so if we could have read the comics but they were not in English. I think I had been unjustly excited about this one but I will know better next time. We went for a drink back in town and then I led us on a wild goose chase through a bad part of town just to get a closer look at a lit up ferris wheel 

Luckily we left unharmed but more hungry. We argued some more about where to eat. I am told there are over 2000 restaurants in Brussels and we saw only a tiny fraction of them whose offerings were not promising but we really did not know where to go to find the more promising ones. We ended up in the Danish Tavern. My boyfriend ordered mussels and I went with omelette and fries. My boyfriend was very pleased with his meal but sadly I did not share his feeling of satisfaction. My omelette was a mammoth size, absolutely dripping in oil or perhaps it was from all the cheese, they surely used a full block making it and the best thing I can say about it is that it tasted wet. I didn't eat much of it and ended up getting more frites after which did not do great things for my stomach.

After dinner we accidentally found ourselves outside a bar called Bonnefooi, a quirkly pub that serves a live music venue and we found ourselves some seats upstairs by the balcony over looking the bar and stage in time for some live jazz. It was a great opportunity to listen to music and soak up the atmosphere, and I also had a sneaky read of my book.

On our third day we decided to branch out with a day trip to Antwerp.

 Its about 40 mins by train. I would suggest if you are going to Antwerp that you make sure to leave the train station by the main exit which will bring you into town. We did not and ended up walking for over an hour further and further into suburbia before asking for directions.

This did give us the opportunity to notice that cycling is a really big deal in Antwerp, seriously everyone has a bike and there are special ones you can get with full on seats to carry two to three kids around in the front of it. They must have calves of steel in these parts. Once some kind locals redirected us we found ourselves on a tram on our way to MAS, a museum we were mostly visiting because my boyfriend liked the look of the building.

Before popping inside we stopped for refreshments which was coffee for me and Belgian waffle with icecream for himself. 

Because it was the last Wednesday of the month we got into MAS for free. Really we should have been using this as a valid reason to visit as many museums or galleries as we could but we did not. 

It was a museum of history or at least I think that's the best way to classify it. The views as you ascend are spectacular and some of the exhibits were quite interesting but at a certain point I was just waiting to get to the panoramic view at the top.

By the time we returned to the ground floor I was ravenous. I had admitted defeat at breakfast time because I could not find any non wheat option so had only had a coffee and water and it was now 3pm. We ended up in Ellis Burger which was just across from the Museum and I was so excited to realise I could have several items on the menu so I ordered all of them.

See how happy I am to have food. It was all delicious and I became a much happier person having been fed. We spent the rest of our day wandering around the town square and admiring the beautiful historic buildings. 

My Boyfriend sampled beer in two different bars while we people watched and I read some of my book and I was not at all jealous when he bought something called an icecream praline from one of the fancy chocolate shops. I ran into the usual problem come dinner time so this time I got to watch my boyfriend eat pasta in a fancy restaurant while I sipped water and looked like a right weirdo. By the time we got back to our apartment we were wrecked and just wanted to relax.

We didn't do a whole lot on our last day as we had to head to the airport before lunch but we still managed to squeeze in a meal and two arguments about directions. On my second trip, Belgium has not made the best impression on me but perhaps its because I spent the most part of my holiday lost and starving. For the next one I will be better prepared both in attractions I want to see and some idea of where I am likely to eat, if not a suitcase full of emergency snacks.